Cold In the Light by Charles Allen Gramlich

Amid a welter of torn up slush, Krieg found the slaughtered form of a white bear. Blood dappled the snow there Krieg’s eyes narrowed but he did not hesitate.Ī few paces farther on the spatters of blood turned to gouts of gore. In time he followed them to a narrow pass squeezed between walls of bare granite. The footprints flitted onward before him. The tarn sat in a bowl cupped by mountains, and as Krieg climbed toward the rim of the bowl the snow on the ground thickened and the cold deepened. There was only one line of prints, coming from the burned ship to the shore.

They were small and slender, such as those made by a woman. Even in the dark his keen gaze identified naked footprints in the soft loam. Krieg studied the hulk, studied the bleak shore upon which it lay. The remnant lodged itself here like a splinter in the flesh of the world. Soaked with pitch, the ship had been set adrift and aflame. Perhaps his female went alive and willing at his side perhaps she was chained at his feet.

The spoils of his greatest victories were piled around him. A hero fallen in battle had been laid atop a bier on his finest warship. He lay flat on the earth for a moment, drank his fill, then rose to ghost along the shorelineĪ shadow jutting into the lake from the shore resolved itself into the fire-ruined wreck of a dragon ship. To water’s edge came Krieg, on silent boots with a battle-axe of ebon steel sheathed over his shoulder. The polished surface of the tarn shone like a black shield beneath the ringed moon.

Cold In the Light by Charles Allen Gramlich