Irbis Chuluun's Arc

Chapter 2 of 3

The southern valley narrowed within an hour. The walls rose into jagged crags on both sides, dark stone shot through with veins of ice. Snow lay thin on the path. Irbis kept his head down against the wind and watched the ground. The storm had not yet caught him, but the air had gone still in the wrong way. Somewhere above, a rock clicked against another rock. He stopped and listened. Nothing moved. He set his hand on the chipped stone blade at his hip and walked on. He found the monk a quarter mile in. The body sat slumped against a boulder where the trail bent left. Frost had sealed the robes to the rock. The face was gray and calm, eyes half open, beard stiff with ice. One hand lay in the lap, wrapped tight around a strand of dark beads. Irbis knelt and counted them out of habit. Forty. Forty peaks climbed by a man who had died sitting down on the forty-first. The orange sash at the monk's waist was cut short. The braided knot was missing. This was the climber who had built the cairn at the fork. Irbis looked at the wound next. The monk's chest was punched through above the heart, a clean round hole the width of a fist. No blood on the snow. The cold had taken him before the bleed could finish. Irbis turned the body gently and found the exit wound in the back of the boulder, a chip of stone driven deep where something heavy had struck through and through. Not a blade. Not a claw. A horn. He stood and scanned the path ahead. Twenty paces on, the trail opened into a hollow ringed with tall crags that leaned in like teeth. Bones lay scattered across the stones. Ribs, a cracked skull, the long curve of a leg. Old kills and newer ones. In the fresh snow at the hollow's mouth, a single track pressed deep. A cloven hoof, wider than his palm. Steam still rose from a pile of droppings beside it. Irbis crouched, set two fingers on the dung, and felt warmth. Whatever had killed the monk was close, and it had heard him coming. He took the beads from the monk's hand and tied them to his own belt. Then he stepped off the path, climbed two body-lengths up the left crag, and waited. The thing came around the bend at a slow walk. Goat-shaped, taller than him at the shoulder, wool black and matted, one yellow horn lowered like a spear. It stopped at the body and snuffed the air. Irbis dropped. He landed astride its neck and drove the chipped stone blade behind the horn, into the hollow at the base of the skull. The animal buckled once and fell. He stayed on top until it stopped kicking. Then he sat in the snow beside the dead monk and the dead beast, and counted his own breath until his hands were steady enough to climb again.