Sprinting across the splintering ice to save the stranger had been nothing compared to this.

  Runa tucked herself into a ball as the avalanche roared around her. By the time she realized it wasn’t going to stop, she had no way of telling which way was up. She shoved her face into her shoulder, bracing her arms to stop snow from forcing itself into her nose and mouth, and the whole weight of the mountain seemed to bear down on her, a slow, inexorable crushing.

  Heat bloomed inside her, an angry, red-raw counterpoint to the terrible joy that filled her as she rode the Cauldron before.

  She’d survived this place for twenty years. She wouldn’t let it kill her now.

  Snow melted around her. She dropped deeper into bone-chilling slush. Well, that told her which way was up. And it told her to stop boiling so hot, unless she wanted to end up at the bottom of her personal well.

  She kicked out, punching handholds and footholds in the tight-packed snow, digging up until she found something solid enough to shove away. Fresh, frigid air swept through the hole and she gulped it in as she dug to the surface.

  Another slab of packed snow fell on her, pinning her chest, one arm free, the rest of her still trapped. She snarled, grabbing for her axe to cut it away. Her hand closed on nothing. Swearing, she grabbed the second-best thing.

  Her machete was gone, too.

  Okay, well, damn. Third best it was. Her lightstick leapt to her hand as though it had been waiting for her to notice it, and she closed her fingers around the leather-wrapped grip.

  Heat built along the metal rod, gathering into a ball of light between the two crooked prongs at the end. The light grew, becoming hotter and wobblier.

  “Easy,” she muttered. This wasn’t really the situation to find out what happened when she let the wobble of heat and light get too big. When it started to pulse, that was her signal to drop it and let it cool down.

  The lightstick melted her a way out of the snow and she fought her way forwards, out of smothering solid ice-snow into smothering whirling blizzard-snow, ice melt soaking her clothes and the wind freezing it again, each step another reminder that if she wore herself out like this without finding shelter she would freeze the moment she stopped moving, no matter how hot she was burning right now.

  And there were too many steps. She’d left the sun behind again and it was full night, the darkness so thick and close that the lightstick barely made a hole in it. The blizzard raged all around, the ground a churning wave underfoot, her ability to locate herself she’d been so proud of whipped away by the wind, and all she could do was set one foot in front of the other as she made her way down the mountain.

  Eventually, the ground stopped moving.

  The blizzard didn’t.

  When she finally reached the village, she didn’t know until she walked horns-first into it.

  THUD!

  She staggered back, skull ringing, then reached out to discover what she’d walked into. A wall. Solid rock—hewn rock, great rectangular slabs of it, mortared together. Maybe. Unless her hands were too numb to tell, and her brain was telling her stories.

  She let out a single huff of laughter. It would be just her luck, to fight her way down the mountain and find herself back at the black stone fortress that had started this.

  She lifted the lightstick, squinting until she could convince herself that the rock was ordinary grey, not the sucking black of the fortress tomb.

  Grey-ish, she decided.

  More important, it was shelter. Cursed shelter, maybe, but shelter. And her fingers were numb enough that she might be making up the shape of the stones beneath them, but then she followed the wall along to what turned out to be a gate.

  The gate was shut. That was easily fixed. She shouldered it open, her body a battered battering ram, and stumbled through.

  There was no shelter behind the gate. The storm followed her, biting at any scrap of bare skin it could find, tearing at her clothes to find more to freeze.

  She pushed onwards. The wall offered slivers of shelter, but never enough. The wind was too relentless, the snow and ice a physical force beating the breath from her lungs and the heat from her limbs.

  She clenched her fists. Warmth pulsed in her veins. Not enough.

  Where the hell was she? The fortress? Or some ruined village, dragged to this place by the Cauldron’s magic?

  Another wall. She hit this one shoulder-first, while her hand was stretched out groping at nothing in front of her. She turned, exploring by touch. Mortared stone, maybe, a recess that could have been a boarded-over window, maybe—there. Solid wood. A door.

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  She put her shoulder to it, and smashed it in.

  The room beyond was pitch black. She lifted the lightstick, and it gave the shadows more shadows to hide in. Hard to tell with the roar of the storm all around, but it seemed quiet, too. Empty.

  Well, she’d know soon enough if she was wrong.

  She shoved the door back up against the frame, and stood for a moment in the shadows.

  Out of the wind, out of the snow, there was finally time to think.

  Her clients were gone. That last sight of them clinging to the campsite rose in her mind like a nightwraith. And the woman who’d been riding the ice—who was she?

  Were any of them still alive?

  She let out a breath that took the last of her strength with it.

  Whatever their fates, hers had brought her here, and theirs had left them too far away for her to reach now.

  Her fingers were so numb with cold, it took her a moment to make sure she was still even holding the stick. Oh, wait. There was light, so she must still be holding it. Hah.

  She raised it, and red light blobbed between the forked tips.

  The room was… not ruined. She took in stone walls, wooden shelves, a long table. The floor was smooth stone pavers. A brick oven was set into the far wall, empty and deep and dark.

  “Hello?” she called, and only the storm hollered back.

  Vellugat’s broom. What was she wasting time for? There was wood by the oven. She tumbled logs into it, pausing only briefly to lay her palm on the bricks inside.

  Cold. Nobody had lit a fire here since well before the storm hit. Maybe whoever lived here had seen it coming, and gotten out in time. Or maybe—

  Maybe she should save thoughts like that for after she wasn’t freezing to death.

  She shoved the lightstick between the logs and held onto it tight. This wasn’t casting—plenty of clients had been clear about that, when her little lightstick was all that lay between them and a night shivering in the dark. Runa couldn’t weave magic the way some people could. The lightstick was just a tool.

  The blob of light at its tip wobbled and grew, red bubbling through orange and yellow to something almost blue; the metal haft began to glow a dull red. Which explained why its previous owner had wrapped all that leather around it. Runa hadn’t bothered fixing the wraps when they started to wear off—she didn’t need the protection.

  Felt kind of nice, really. Nice to be able to feel her fingers again anyway.

  She kept the stick in her hands as the logs lit. Couldn’t risk it for long—the white-blue light began to throb threateningly—but she let the dull red heat seep into her palms, bringing back sensation, loosening cold-stiffened fingers.

  As soon as the blob of light began to vibrate and pulse, she dropped the stick with a sigh. The light went out.

  And the fire in the oven was burning merrily.

  Runa sat in front of it, legs crossed, and took stock of herself. She flexed her hands and arms, wincing as every bone and muscle complained. Nothing felt broken, unlikely though that was. If there were still any gods out there, maybe one had reached down and placed a blessing on her.

  Her horns still ached from smacking headfirst into the village wall. She felt along them carefully. No breaks there, either. Still big and curvy.

  Her hair was a tangled knot over more scrapes. Her cloak was gone—she was sure she’d been wearing it when she set out. The rest of her clothes hadn’t fared much better. One of her boots was gone. When had that happened?

  She stared at her foot. One of her toes peered back at her, blue skin and a torn toenail peeking through a hole in her sodden woollen sock.

  “Damn,” she muttered.

  Her hand went to her neck, and found the thin cord of the necklace that held her guild medallion.

  She took a breath.

  Firelight flickered merrily over the stone walls.

  She took another breath.

  Another.

  And—

  “Just look at them.” She clenched her hand around the amulet through her shirt, and felt the small scrape as the other things clinked against the metal medallion. “Stop beating around the bush.”

  She glared at the fire, and before any more doubts crept in, pulled out her guide’s medallion in one smooth movement.

  Battered silver caught the firelight as it spun, but that wasn’t what she needed to look at.

  Nestling up against her medallion, Ninnius and Anklopher’s contract charms hung from the cord.

  All Cauldron guides had these charms. It was guild regulations. If someone paid you to take them out to the most dangerous place in the world, they wanted some guarantee that you weren’t going to stab them in the back the moment they found something expensive out there. The guild wizards enchanted small glass charms and split them in three: one for the client, one for the guide, one that stayed in the guildhall until the job was over and the client was safely back out of the Cauldron.

  The crystals changed colour depending on the client’s status. Yellow meant they were safe. Red meant they were injured. Black meant they were dead. And blue meant the client had touched their charm to the one back in the guildhall, and the job was complete.

  Runa gripped the two charms in a closed fist, sent up a silent prayer to wherever the gods were—hell, she’d take the liches at this point—and opened her hand.

  Yellow. Bright and shining as the sun.

  Relief kneecapped her. Anklopher and Ninnius were alive. Wherever they were. Alive and unhurt.

  There was no way of knowing whether the woman she’d left with them was safe, too, except for the fact that she’d left them together. But two out of three were definitely alive.

  All she had to do was find them.

  …With no gear, her clothes torn to rags, and one lonely boot to her name.

  She sighed, tucked the charms back under her shirt, and went to her belt.

  The sheaths for her machete and axe were empty. Her coin purse had torn loose at some point, too. Not that it had been heavy to begin with. No point carrying riches into the Cauldron.

  She searched inside the one bag that hadn’t been ripped off her belt in the avalanche. Her questing fingers found something squishy, and she pulled it out with a snort of surprise.

  The bloody camp bread.

  She remembered stuffing it in her bag just before everything went to hell. One handful of ragged dough. A snack for the adventurer on the go: a portion of flour, a portion of fat and baker’s cheat, water with the bad boiled out of it and the last of a rind of hard cheese, cut small. Plus those mysterious black bits. One of the only things she felt reasonably confident about making herself in the Cauldron, instead of the dehydrated stew packs that most clients expected.

  She scraped it out, pulled off a few of the larger bits of grit, and without thinking too much about it, stuck it in the oven.

  The fire wasn’t right. The dough would char on the outside and stay raw on the inside. But it would be hot, and food, and better than nothing.

  All around, the storm raged. Shafts of snow hissed through the gaps where she hadn’t quite fitted the door back into its frame properly, the wind whisking in with them like a knife. But the fire was bright, and warm.

  And somehow, she fell asleep.