As Tavis considered Basil's absence, a growing knot of concern formed in his stomach. Nevertheless, he gathered Avner's bundle and rose to his feet, then started across the glacier. Whatever the verbeeg's fate, they could not help him anyway.
The scout quickly realized that he and his companions would never escape by trying to outrun the ogres. To survive, they had to make their pursuers slow down-and he knew just the place to do it. He angled up toward the great ice wall that had stopped the ogres in the first place.
"Are you trying to get us killed?" Brianna demanded. Her eyes were fixed on the sheer ice cliff ahead, which loomed like a bank of clouds rolling down from the valley above. "We'll be trapped. We can't scale that wall!"
"I don't intend to. I'm just trying to get us into that ice fall." The scout pointed to the base of the ice wall, where the glacier tumbled down a hundred paces of steep slope in a jumbled heap of mansion-sized blocks and jagged spires. "If we can't escape the ogres in there, we aren't going to."
Tavis continued up the glacier. When he reached the bottom of the ice fall, he pulled Bear Driller off his shoulder and glanced back to check on the ogres. They were still out of range, but wouldn't be for long. The scout turned uphill and began to climb, probing the snow ahead with the tip of his bow.
"Follow my trail exactly," Tavis said, panting from the exertion of running through snow. "Ice falls have lots of crevasses."
The scout was counting on that. Ice, like water, flowed faster on steep slopes, which caused more crevasses to open. These rifts were smaller than those on gentler grades, and therefore were more easily concealed beneath thick layers of snow. With any luck, the scout had more experience than his pursuers at negotiating such mazes of hidden danger, so the ogres would be forced to follow in his footsteps in a snakelike column- at least until he decided it was time for them to scatter.
Within a few steps, Tavis began to see long, faint shadows ahead. He twined his way around each of these areas, for the differences in color marked sagging surfaces where the snowpack hung suspended over the unseen maws of hidden crevasses. Often, the scout stopped running long enough to push Bear Driller into the snow ahead. Usually, the tip struck a solid surface of ice, but every now and then the bow would sink as though he had plunged it into water. When that happened, the scout would retrace his path a few steps down the mountain, then carefully probe his way around the end of the concealed chasm until he could resume the climb.
Soon they reached a thicket of seracs, looming ice spires that had fallen off the ice wall and imbedded themselves among the crevasses. The seracs resembled nothing so much as a city of craggy blue towers, unkempt and jagged, inclining in every direction and at impossible angles. Some minarets lay almost upon their sides, with no more distance than a human's height between their peaks and the glacier surface. Other towers stood bolt upright, as straight and proud as any steeple in Castle Hartwick.
Tavis led his company a few steps into the seracs, then paused to look back down the slope. The ogres had reached the base of the ice fall, and the first warriors were already rushing up the trail he had blazed through the crevasse-field. Although they were easily within Bear Driller's range, the scout did not take Avner off his shoulder to reach for his arrows. Goboka had been wise enough to hang back, with his own archers at his side, and let his warriors lead the charge.
"We're running out of room," Morten growled. "Shoot!"
"Not yet," Tavis said. "It's better to wait until there are more of them behind us."
The scout turned and began to thread his way through the seracs. When the small company reached the base of the ice wall, Tavis and Morten deposited their burdens behind a fallen serac, then the two firbolgs and Brianna retraced their steps to a small clearing that afforded a relatively unobstructed view down the glacier. The first ogre was just entering the serac thicket, and behind him came a long winding file of his fellows. They were all following Tavis's trail, which, now that it could be seen from above, often seemed to pass unnecessarily close to dozens of crevasses, both hidden and open to plain sight. Only Goboka and his archers had not yet entered the ice fall. They still stood well out of range, watching the others climb until they saw what was going to happen.
Tavis took a handful of arrows from his quiver and stuck them in the snow at his side. "Now it's time to shoot," he said.
