22. The Howl of the Wolves

CASCADE

CHAPTER 22

They ran like hell.

Cascade had barely managed to get himself dressed. In fact, he'd still been half hard when the sabertooth ambushed them. But he wasn't hard now—just terrified. The eerie calls had begun crying out from the woods across the valley mere moments after Entin slayed the great beast. There were hundreds of voices. Maybe thousands. The howls answered one another in lockstep disharmony. Cascade knew it could only be one thing: the Wolves.

Main Cave came into view as he and Entin rounded a final bend in the trail. To his relief, most of the others had already returned to its relative safety. Curiously, a crowd had formed at the entrance instead of hiding within. As the pair approached, Cascade found himself slowing from a sprint to a jog. Finally, the sight that had attracted the crowd became visible. He gagged, then bent over double and nearly vomited.

"Oh, Sivek…" Entin whispered beside him.

Ahead, T'reer was trying in vain to cut his brother's corpse free from the bough it was swinging from. His efforts were panicked and disoriented, and Cascade could hear him sobbing even from here. He instinctively wanted to help his friend but was frozen in horror by the violence of the scene. What remained of Sivek's flayed body was suspended by a thin leather cord. On either side of him hung the gingers. Each had a dire wolf tail stuffed down their throat, and the white tips forced their mouths to remain open, even in death. All three were naked, and great swaths of their flesh had been removed with a precision that must have involved exceptional and deliberate cruelty. It was the worst thing he'd ever seen.

Entin took a deep breath. He gripped Cascade's hand and kissed him softly on the cheek.

"I'm so sorry. I love you. I need to help T'reer, though," Entin murmured.

Cascade felt him reach gently into the pocket of his leathers and remove the cutting stone. Entin hung his head, gave Cascade's hand a final squeeze, and then joined T'reer at the bodies. One by one, the pair cut them down and laid them out in front of the cave. Aiel emerged from within the crowd and sat quietly beside T'reer when they were finished, and Cascade drew whatever comfort he could from seeing her tend to him.

It was then that Harlak appeared from whatever Journey he'd been overseeing. A gaggle of despondent-looking trainees followed silently behind him. One was bleeding from a gash on his face, but the rest were merely dirty and haggard. Harlak held the decapitated head of a man Cascade didn't recognize in one hand. He passed swiftly through the crowd and approached Entin and the bodies.

"I'm surprised you're still alive, worm. And from the look of it, you've been blooded. But you won't be a man until you do this," Harlak said with a sneer.

Harlak threw the severed head to the ground, and it rolled to near where T'reer was still sobbing, its lifeless eyes staring up at the cloudless sky. Cascade watched, shocked, as Entin held his ground and stared the chieftain down.

"I've done what you asked," Entin said. "I've completed my Journey. Now, if there isn't anything else, these dead need to be buried."

He drew the fang Cascade had watched him chisel out of the sabertooth's skull and threw it on the ground in front of Harlak. Hushed murmurs raced through the onlooking crowd. No one had expected Entin to succeed, least of all Harlak, and the look of disdain on his face was clear as day. But he held his tongue and instead turned his focus to the massacred corpses.

"This is a warning. The Wolves have found us at last. We fight at dawn," Harlak declared.

The howling from out in the valley had grown less frequent, and the calls sounded more distant than they had when Cascade and Entin first heard them up on the ridge.

"Uncle, you heard those calls—they must outnumber us by many hundreds. We'll die if we go to war with them. It will be a massacre!" Cascade said at last.

His voice wasn't nearly as commanding or measured as hoped, but his words were true, and there was a reassuring murmur of agreement from the crowd.

"Silence. It's war or nothing," Harlak commanded. "Anyone who disagrees is as dead as these fools. Take them to the summit of Mount Storm and leave them for the ravens. We don't bury our dead in Mountainhome, worm. You'd know that if you were one of us."

Harlak gave the corpses a final, cold look, then withdrew into Main Cave, undoubtedly to imbibe Dream Caps and wine and whatever else he distracted himself with these days. Cascade stared murder at him while he departed, then finally joined T'reer and the others at the bodies.

With the threat of Wolves in the valley and night swiftly falling, his only thought now was to do whatever it took to stop Harlak from driving them all into oblivion. He'd heard the howls, and he knew they stood no chance against a tribe that large, even with their recruits. They would all be better off running. For the first time in his life, Cascade had something—someone—worth clinging to. Even if the ancestors cursed him for giving up on their ages-long need for vengeance, that was a burden he was willing to shoulder. And that's what he intended to do—right after he helped carry the bodies to the ravens.

T'reer had been silent on the ascent up Mount Storm. He'd insisted on carrying Sivek himself, and Cascade had sorrowfully obliged him. The weight of the red-haired man slung about his own shoulder forced him to push through his fatigue as they crested the sacred mountaintop.

It had long been his people's custom to leave their dead atop this particular mountain. The summit lacked salal and trees. Instead, an enormous flat stone rested at its rocky center. If Cascade's father had still been alive, there would have been a ceremony for those they'd lost, but it seemed Harlak had no interest in preserving such customs. Night had nearly fallen, and Cascade knew the ravens likely wouldn't begin to feed until the following morning.

"We place them there, on the stone in the center," T'reer said.

He was speaking mostly to Entin, who had carried the third body to the summit. His voice was flat and lifeless. He and Sivek were all each other had. They'd been orphaned at a young age. Cascade realized that the connection Entin and T'reer seemed to share came from their common background.

"The ravens are the messengers of the gods. We believe they deliver the spirits of the deceased to the ancestors," he explained.

The three men heaved the bodies of the dead upon the stone and arranged them in a row, with Sivek in the middle. Cascade folded each of their mangled arms across their chests and closed their eyes. The sacred stone's surface was smooth and mottled with white flecks of mica and the deep crimson stain of ancient blood.

Cascade felt a shiver he'd never experienced before as he regarded it, and he realized it was because he'd never believed in the gods before now. But he found he did believe. He believed because he had no choice. He'd lost too much to imagine that this, here and now, was all there was, as he once had. There had to be more—he felt it in his soul. Then and there, he knew he also believed Entin's story about the King of the Forest.

The gods were real.

BOOM.

The soundwave began as a dull whomp, like the inhale of a vast and monstrous beast, and then a second tectonic note roared so loud that Cascade yelped in fear. The trio instinctively cowered to the ground and pressed their hands to their ears. But the sound went on and on. It echoed throughout the valley, just as the howl of the Wolves had, bouncing from mountain to mountain until there was naught but the whistle of the wind and the awed silence of the men.

The Slumbering God had awoken.