Stalking Darkness

tell the others to move a bit higher and watch for your signal. Are the young men in place?”
    “They’re ready. But what if this plan of yours doesn’t work?”
    “Then we’ll need another plan.” Feeling much less assured than he sounded, Seregil went to take his own position.
    The villagers nervously watched the Plenimarans approach. The sun was higher now, and glinted back from spear points and helmets below. What first appeared only as a long, dark movement against the snow soon resolved into individual men toiling toward them.
    Whatever the Plenimarans think they We after here, they’re not taking any chances
, Seregil thought, counting over a hundred men. He glanced briefly up the slope, trying to make out the mouth of the spirit chamber tunnel and wondering again what could be worth all this.
    The Plenimarans were close enough for Seregil to make out the insignia on their breastplates before Shradin finally waved up to Retak. The headman raised his staff overhead with both hands and let out a bloodcurdling yell. Every villager joined in, bellowing and screaming at the top of their lungs. At the same moment Seregil, Shradin, and the young men of the village shoved at their piles of loosened rock and ice chunks, sending them careening down the steep slope.
    For an instant nothing happened.
    Then the first rumblings sounded along the western face as tons of snow and ice sloughed off, plunging down on the Plenimaran column.
    Seregil could see the pale ovals of upturned faces as the soldiers realized too late the trap they’d been drawn into. The neat column wavered and broke. Men foundered in the snow, throwing aside their arms as they sought some direction of escape from the implacable wave bearing down on them.
    The avalanche overtook them in seconds, carrying men likedead leaves in a flood, blotting them from sight. A great cheer went up from the Dravnians and the sound brought down a second deafening avalanche from the east wall. It crashed down the valley to lap over the first with a roar of finality that echoed for minutes between the stark, sun-gilded peaks.
    Shradin pounded Seregil joyfully on the back. “Didn’t I say it would fall just so?” he shouted. “No one could have survived that!”
    Seregil took a last wondering look down at the massive slide, then waved for Turik. “It’s time I completed my work. This evil must be removed from your valley so no others will come seeking it.”
    Amazingly, the tunnel opening was still clear, though drifts were piled thickly around the spot. With the women singing victory songs behind him, Seregil once again made his way down the slick, cramped passage. The noises in his head and the tingling in his skin were as bad as before, but this time he ignored them, knowing what he had to do.
    “Here we are again,” he whispered, reaching the chamber. Refusing to consider the various ramifications of being wrong about the nature of the magic, he hugged the box against his side and said loudly,
“Argucth chthon hrig.”
    An eerie silence fell over the chamber. Then he heard a soft tinkling sound that reminded him of embers cooling on a hearth. Tiny flashes like miniature lightning flickered across the rock face at the far end of the chamber.
    Seregil took a step back, then dove for the mouth of the tunnel as the stone exploded.
    Jagged shards flew up the tunnel, hissing like arrows as they scored the back of his thick coat and trousers. Others ricocheted and spattered in a brief, deadly storm around the tiny chamber.
    It was over in an instant. Seregil lay with his arms over his head a moment longer, then cautiously held up the lightstone and looked back.
    An opening had been blasted in the far wall, revealing a dark space beyond.
    Drawing his sword, Seregil approached and looked into the second chamber. It was roughly the size of his sitting room at the Cockerel, and at the back of it a glistening slab of ice caughtthe glow of his lightstone, reflecting it across a tangle of withered corpses that covered the floor.
    The constant cold beneath the glacial ice had drawn the moisture from the bodies over uncounted years, leaving them dark and shrunken, lips withered into grimaces, eyes dried away like raisins, hands gnarled to talons.
    Seregil sank to his knees, cold sweat running down his chest beneath his coat. Even in their mummified state, he could see that their chests had been split open, the ribs pulled wide. Only a few months earlier his friend and