"Let you!" Tavis exploded. "We tried to stop you. If you had followed the boy, you'd all be alive and well."
Morten frowned in confusion. "What boy?" he asked. "We never saw any boy!"
"You didn't see Avner at the mouth of the gulch? He dropped out of a tree and ran up the ravine!"
Morten shook his head. "We saw nothing but bodies and a blood trail leading up here. We were afraid the ogres had trapped you here. There was no boy."
His head reeling with the implications of what the bodyguard had just told him, Tavis stumbled back from the edge of the gulch. He spun around and found Avner slowly backing away. The boy's face was pale with fear, and tears of shame were welling in his eyes.
"You lied," Tavis said. His voice was not as angry as it was astonished and hurt. "You lied to me."
The nickering returned, a series of soft, chattering snorts somewhere above the rim of the icy crevasse. Brianna's talisman, dangling from a piece of rune-inscribed bark in Tavis's hand, slowly spun in the darkness and pointed toward the sound. The tip wavered there a moment, then whirled back in the direction it had been pointing earlier. The silver spear began to sweep back and forth, never holding its position more than a second.
"Phaw! We can't trust that amulet," Morten growled, keeping his voice low. He wore a fresh bandage around his neck, for the last few days of hard travel had sapped his recuperative powers so much that the wound on his throat had begun to fester. "We know where Brianna is. Let's just go get her."
Tavis did not answer. His eyes were fixed on the heavens, searching for the source of the strange nickering. He could see only a narrow wedge of purple starlit sky, for the scout and his rescue party were climbing through a lateral crevasse, an abyssal ice canyon that ran the entire length of the Needle Peak glacier. Gleaming blue walls loomed to both sides of them, impossibly high and so close together that any of the three giant-kin present could have touched both sides by extending his arms. In the bottom of the rift, cold, dead air hung heavy around their numb faces, while the frigid torrents of a tiny melt-water stream gushed over their frozen feet.
Despite the cold, Tavis's face was flushed with excitement. At dusk, Avner had climbed a few hundred feet up Needle Peak to survey the glacier. He had seen the ogres making camp not far above, at the base of a huge ice wall. Several brutes had been erecting an ice-block hut, and the youth had seen a smaller form, almost certainly Brianna, lying in the snow nearby. After hearing the boy's report, Tavis and his companions had decided to sneak up the lateral crevasse to rescue Brianna.
It had been shortly after they started the long journey up the glacier that the nickering began. The sound was soft and plaintive, so bushed that at times Tavis thought it might be nothing but the distant groans of flowing ice-until he looked down and saw Brianna's talisman swinging toward the sound.
Tavis turned to Basil and raised the wobbling amulet. "This happens each time we hear that snorting," the scout said. Although he did not say so, he recognized the sound as that of a horse-most likely Blizzard. "Why does the talisman spin?"
"His m-m-magic's f-f-failing," chattered Earl Dobbin. He and Avner were suffering more from the freezing cold than the three giant-kin. "What do you expect from a ch-charlatan?"
The scout ignored the comment and waited for Basil's reply. If it had been up to Tavis, the lord mayor would have returned to Hartsvale with the other earls who survived the ogre ambush, but Morten wouldn't hear of it. The burly firbolg did not trust Tavis or his companions and had agreed to work with them only if Dobbin came along to balance the odds. Even when Basil had pointed out that Dobbin's peers were all suffering from injuries and could use a healthy man's assistance on the journey back, Morten had insisted that the lord mayor come along.
Casting an angry glare at Dobbin, Basil said, "I assure you, I am no charlatan. The talisman is wavering for good reason."
A terrible thought occurred to Tavis. "Has Goboka vexed your rune?" the scout asked. Given that the shaman's warriors had failed to return from their ambush, the ogre would be a fool not to assume his pursuers would try for Brianna tonight. "Can he do that sort of thing?"
"A powerful shaman like him? Of course he can," Basil replied. The verbeeg paused, then smiled proudly. "That's why I didn't use a rune that would lead us to Brianna herself. I employed one that's designed to locate lost property. I doubt Goboka has thought of that."
"What nonsense are you babbling?" demanded Morten.
"Simply put, the talisman isn't pointing at Brianna," the verbeeg explained. "It's pointing at her belongings- in this case, her clothes and, I believe, at her horse." He cast his eyes toward the crevasse rim, where the soft nickering continued.
