to lead the guerrillas.
He knew how the land had changed. Lakes had appeared and drained. Mountains had
sunk and valleys risen. And in many places there were new smoldering volcanoes.
He sniffed the heavy, ugly smell of sulfur that hung in the air. The wind
carried the pale yellow tint of the chemical, fouling the high Arctic, making
breathing extremely unpleasant.
Angrily he tugged his thick scarf over his mouth and pulled down his fur cap so
that only his amber eyes faced the gusting snow. The boy couldn’t have been more
than a few minutes walk from his home, he judged; these groveling mutant curs in
the wilderness never went farther than a mile from their houses. Rarely did you
hear of anyone journeying any distance. There might be a merchant, but to catch
one alone was as rare as a day without ice. They traveled in armed convoys and
there would be little to bring them this far from anything resembling
civilization.
In a tavern a hundred miles southwest, a merchant had whispered disturbing news
to Uchitel— news that the man had tried at first to sell.
“How much for word of a hunt?” he’d asked, his greasy head to one side, his
little eyes blinking with greed.
Uchitel had asked him why he should pay for such news.
“Because of who is the hunter and who is the hunted.” was the reply.
Sitting on his horse, waiting while the stragglers in the band crossed the
trackless terrain, Uchitel smiled beneath his scarf at the memory of the plump
merchant. To prompt the little man, the tall chieftan had taken his left hand in
both of his.
Squeezing.
Squeezing until the merchant whimpered and sweat burst from his temples.
Squeezing until blood came around the sides of the purpling fingernails and the
man wept to his mother’s grave for Uchitel to stop.
Squeezing until his own knuckles grew white with the effort. And the trader told
his tale in a stammering rush of tears.
And still squeezing until every finger bone was cracked and splintered, one
against the other. Then pushing the crippled man to the floor among the straw
and spilled wine and vomit.
“Much farther, Uchitel?” asked Urach, the Doctor, reining his pony alongside
Uchitel’s. Urach was the only other man in the party who could read and write.
But his nickname—it should have been Surgeon—came from his skill with knives.
“No,” Uchitel replied, annoyed at having his reverie interrupted. The fat little
trader had given him news of a hunt. News that Uchitel had found most unwelcome.
Though the sun appeared intermittently, most of the day was bleak, with flurries
of snow reducing visibility. It was bad, but they had all seen much worse.
Occasionally a freak tornado came screaming from the north. The wind would be so
strong that it would lift a man and his horse together and send them crashing to
their death a mile away. Uchitel recalled being in a township to the south when
such a storm arose. The buildings, tethered to bedrock with cables of spun
metal, held safe. But one of the group, having drunk too much wine, was caught
out in the open. The wind destroyed him, splinters of razored ice flaying the
clothes from his flesh, then the flesh from his bones.
To the left, Uchitel spotted movement, white against white. He reached for the
Kalashnikov AKM .62 mm, then saw that the bear was moving away from them in a
lumbering, unhurried gait. It could be on its own, or it could be one of a large
pack of bears whose tracks they’d spotted a day earlier.
Zmeya saw the first of the little houses, which were so flat in the snow that
they were almost invisible. “There,” he said, pointing ahead and a little to the
left.
Uchitel grinned wolfishly. Night wasn’t far off. It would be good to have
somewhere to shelter against the lethal drop in temperature. Already he could
feel the extra bite in the wind. He lowered the scarf from his nose and mouth,
his breath pluming out around him like a bridal veil. Within seconds there was
the familiar feeling of his nostril hair freezing, the moisture becoming ice.