THOUGH THE TOWER had seemed sound from the outside, gray light trickled in from above. Ulrem peered up into one of these pale shafts, glimpsing sky through broken beams. All around on the floor was strewn debris. Nothing seemed unscathed by the brutality of whatever had transpired in the wide, round room of the tower’s lowest floor. Tables, shelves, and a heap of scraps only scarcely identifiable lay where they had fallen, all covered by a thin coating of snow blown in through the open door.

Ulrem’s eye was drawn to a familiar form near the center of the room: a body, its arms flung out wide, one leg at a bad angle. He slipped across the haphazard piles of broken furniture, ears pricking for any sound of movement. Kneeling beside it, Ulrem dusted away the snow.

“An animal,” he muttered. What else could have wrought such pitiless damage? The man’s face was scraped away, the chest smashed and torn open. Great hunks had been scooped out, and ragged strips of flesh were torn away in strips from arms and legs, laying bare bone beneath.

Despite the senseless devastation, the cold had preserved the bodies remarkably.

Worse. The echoes were faint here, their unheard voice suspicious. Something fell stalks this place. He glanced up into the dark heart of the tower above, but saw nothing among the shadows. He caught only the faint scent of animal, for the air was too cold and dry to catch proper scent.

Despite the light, Ulrem felt half-blind.

Grimacing, he stood. Other bodies lay among the rubble. They had the color and build of the village woman, but he did not stop to inspect them. Such a violent, ignominious death would not be lessened by his witness. He moved over them and towards the far wall, which was smashed through. The dusting on the ground was less there, more like a sheen of ice, but still he marked strange, wide-toed footprints here and there. They led him through the door, and into the deeper dark.

Ulrem paused only long enough to pull the glove from his left hand, upon which he wore the ring. It emanated an inner light, as if whichever ancient hand had wrought the metal had encased sparks of moonlight within the gold. Now, he focused on it, pushing his own will down into the metal, making it glow steadily, a trick he had learned in the caves under Ultamesh. A torch would have been brighter, and a lantern more useful yet, but it was something. It eased the darkness and illuminated the edges of things.

Through the gloom, Ulrem picked out a staircase and several doors along the walls. He heard nothing from within them. When he tried their latches, he found each of them locked fast, or frozen shut. He paused at the foot of the stair, listening up into the tower, but heard nothing save the sigh of wind through unshuttered windows. Snow blown in from above was accumulated in small banks upon the stairs, and here he saw again the strange prints.

Up he climbed on the balls of his feet like a cat pacing its prey, sword gripped firmly in both hands. At the slightest provocation, the young barbarian would have sprang into killing action. Yet, all was still, and his predatory instincts sang like a burnt nerve. He crept upwards, quiet as a mountain cat stalking up on its prey.

He paused when he heard a strange pattering, like tapping stones. It was an unexpected sound, and one that threatened to cast his memory back into his youth. He glimpsed his mother, her face so dim now he remembered her as little more than a wan shadow. She sang as she hung charms of bone and antler from the eaves of his father’s hall, much like the necklace the woman had given him. The little trinkets clicked and jingled in the soft evening winds as his father sawed at his lira by the fire. Rare it was that such memories leapt unbidden, and he wondered what bewitchment lay upon the old stones to conjure such thoughts. He had long ago learned to distrust the shadowy arts of wizards and their ilk, for their strange powers too often softened the mind.

Increasingly wary, Ulrem prowled up the last stretch of stone steps. The dead should stay buried, he decided, for their memories rested easier in the darkness. At the head of the stairs, he found a wide corridor. The wall on one side was smashed in, as if a boulder had been hurled through it. The ceiling above was broken in places, too, and light filtered down in blue shafts to lie in frigid pools on the snowy floor. No more corpses, though. No sign of any life.

Peering through the hole, he saw the source of the strange clicking. A black table was shoved against the far side, between two windows. A great stag’s skull hung above it: a mountain hart, a lord of the peaks. Its antlers were twisted boughs of rich brown, and as broad as his arm span at least. From these were strung dozens of small rocks tied into leather thongs. Ulrem brushed these with the tip of his sword, making them clack and clatter. The work was crude, as if tied by clumsy fingers. Piled on the table were an odd assortment of goods: clothes, blades in carven bone sheathes, necklaces, and more besides. Things taken from the villagers, but there was no pattern. It was a senseless heap.

On the floor of the room were strewn books and parchment. There was no sense to their discarding, and it seemed like many of them had been stomped on, or torn to pieces. He knew then that the woman in the village had been true: the seer, Valkir, had long ago abandoned this place.

Ulrem had met men who counted themselves sorcerers, and knew they treasured their paper and inks more than their own blood.

One may read much of a man by the books he keeps, came a faint echo. He knew that much was true. Kneeling, Ulrem gathered up a handful of parchments. Each page was packed with tightly fit, spidery symbols in a language he did not know. These he stared at only briefly, ensuring that it was not merely the script he was unfamiliar with. Yet, between some of these paragraphs, or crabbed wherever space allowed, was another hand, rougher and hurried. And these words, Ulrem could read. They made little sense as he rifled through them. His breath misted as he stood huddling, the blanket pulled about his shoulders, sword in one hand and the papers in the other.

The beads on the antlers clacked a tuneless time to the breeze.

Upon one of the papers, Ulrem found something that at last made sense. Written in that brusque, coarse hand he read: Valkir has departed at last, leaving me care of his tower. When he shall return, I do not know, but he has given me range of his library. I feel like a boy among whores, suddenly too nervous to breathe! But I know the solution to my affliction lies among the old sorcerer’s secrets. I know it. I need only begin.

Ulrem threw the scrap aside, running his hands through the papers on the floor, gathering up anything that had the second man’s script on it. Though he noted the thinning light outside, some deeper part of him, the tracker, wanted to put these pieces together and make sense of what he had found. To know why he had come so far in vain.

Slowly, he found a trail. Notes scribbled along the edges of pages torn from larger manuscripts, or along the backs of scrolls, bled together. The second man, whose name he learned was Kubal, had pledged his service to Valkir to find a cure to his defect: a wasted arm that plagued him with pain and bitterness. But the old wizard had pushed the attendant to the side, given only vague hints and unfulfilled promises. Ulrem suspected these notes charted long, hard years here at the edge of the world. There was some mention of the villagers, whom the writer named the Enuk tribe, but they played little into the man’s self-absorbed scribbling.

And then the handwriting began to degenerate. The notes grew madder until they were little more than raving opines to his own genius, or diatribes against the Enuk, who stopped sending their customary tribute of food and goods up the mountain after Valkir’s departure. Furious at their denial, the madman had yet discovered something. The nature of that revelation was not clear to Ulrem, for among the last of Kubal’s writing he had been able to parse but a single line: NOW I AM THE TRUE KING OF THE ICES, VALKIR.

Ulrem stood shivering in the cold, with more questions than answers. But at least he had some sense of his own failure. He would never have found the sorcerer here. He dropped the papers, and watched them flutter to the ground. He doubted anyone would ever read them again. The secrets Valkir had left inscribed in that careful hand, and whatever his servant had glimpsed, would fade now to the true dark that lies beyond memory.

Good, he thought.

That left only the other task. The killing. He wondered where the woman was, down in the village. Had she retreated to the meager warmth of her hut, or was she standing yet by the cold shallow graves of the Enuk villagers? A thought of that empty cradle sprung unbidden, and made Ulrem grit his teeth as an animal fury rose up. The ring glowed hot upon his hand.

He whirled, catching the faintest sound from behind him, and came face to face with a monstrosity unfolding itself from a gap in the ceiling. It was massive, far larger than he, and covered head to toe in coarse white hair. Two great sapphire orbs glared back at him, sparkling with livid, intelligent fire and old hate. They were set around a flattened nose unsettlingly human. Broad lips bared back over brown fangs and it let out a steaming, stinking roar at him. He made out a single word: “GO!”

Unshaken, Ulrem said, “Where is Valikir?”

“GO!” the ape-thing snarled again.

“Did you kill the Enuk?” Ulrem demanded. It loomed up over him, its broad chest twice as wide as his own shoulders. When it saw the man was unfazed, it howled and snatched at him, trying to close its thick, leathery fingers around his throat.

Acting on pure instinct, Ulrem brought his sword up in a defensive chop, but the creature’s thick fur blunted the blow. It raised a huge arm and batted him aside. Ulrem crashed against the wall and fell onto the table. It buckled under his weight, throwing him to the floor along with the heaped remains of the villager’s goods. Above him, the beads clattered from the impact.

The huge ape was upon him in an instant, clawing with iron-muscled fingers. It dragged him out into the middle of the room. One of his hands found a chunk of stone, and he seized it with all the force in his being. Ulrem smashed it down onto the beast’s hand, just above the thumb. It raged and he scrambled backwards until he felt the hilt of his sword. He snatched it up and put distance between himself and the creature, which squatted inspecting its hand closely. Its white fur was a coarse mat over its entire body, except its face and chest, where the skin was pale and scrawled all over with old scars. And, he saw, its left arm was shriveled and useless. That arm was black and shriveled, the fingers twisted into horrid, lifeless claws. It shook, but the beast seemed not to notice.

Despite the withered arm, he knew it was far stronger than he was, and fast besides. Its enormous bulk blocked the door, and presently it turned those murderous blue eyes towards him. He felt, more than saw, the subtle shift as they noticed the ring on his hand. The gold light glimmered in its greedy orbs.

The strong endure, murmured the echoes of the ring into his mind, goading him. It liked being trapped even less than he did. He grit his teeth and tried to shut them out.

Ulrem scooped up another stone and flung it at the creature. It batted it aside with its huge hand, growling, but he was already letting fly with another broken brick, and another. One of these struck the side of the creature’s head, and its bright blue eyes went narrow with rage. Great legs bunched beneath it, and it hurled itself at him.

Ulrem grinned and thrust with his sword, driving the point deep into the creature’s gut. It screamed at him, gnashing with its foul fangs, and struck at him with its good arm. The impact nearly knocked him senseless. He lost his grip on his sword and was driven to the ground. The ring screamed up into his mind, but cloudy as his head was, he could not make any more sense of them than he could the room that rocked back and forth around him. It was all he could do to get to his knees.

He vomited hot bile. Bright pain lanced up his side, and his right arm was sluggish. The ring was hot on his finger, and he knew that given time, it would knit bone and flesh far faster than a normal man. But not fast enough. Not without drawing too deeply of its power. And he knew what lay at the end of that, and the exhaustion would leave him dead on Aemir’s shoulder. The wind sawed and howled through the windows, grieving what were surely the last moments of his life.

No, some rational part of him thought. That was not the wind.

The white ape seized Ulrem from behind, tearing the blanket from him and lifted him by his neck. He felt the power in that massive hand, far beyond human. His feet dangled above the ground. Weakly, head swimming, black spots filling his eyes, Ulrem raked at its great paw. It was useless, futile. He was but a man before this thing, this lord of the peak. The stag skull on the wall stood silent witness, and in his dazed state, it seemed like the tip of each antler glowed with motes of dancing starfire. Desperate instinct drove him. Ulrem’s seized at the antler, and by the grace of the light felt his frigid fingers close around the smooth, bony growth. He snapped it free with a snarl of fury, and plunged the tip into the great white beast’s eye. It screamed, outraged, and slammed him against the wall, crushing the breath out of him. Dust and snow drifted down through gaps in the floor above.

The ape could have killed him. He knew it. And yet a dim mind lurked behind its remaining blue eye, which flashed in the pale light streaming through the windows. Bright blood poured down the other cheek, but it seemed to have pushed agony aside. Its ragged lips split slowly in a wicked grin. It pulled Ulrem’s face close to its own. Its heaving, shuddering breath was rancid, hot, and wet.

“Dogs stay outside,” it snarled in a voice so low the words were nearly incomprehensible. Then the beast threw Ulrem from the window.

He caught a flash of granite sky, and then bright white snow, and another glimpse of the sky. Then he knew no more.