Free Zadayi Red by Caleb Fox Page A

chance to go home?
    He stepped onto the back of this human being he liked and flexed his claws into her. Anything, anything to get her to try.
    Across the river two warriors jumped into the water up to their knees and dashed back out. All the men looked at eachother. “Let’s go. It’s almost dark!” yelled Inaj. He shooed the dogs into the water. Then the whole gang jumped in and waded forward.
    CR-R-ACK!
    Su-Li jumped. That sounds like thunder. He looked around and saw geysers of water shooting up at the bottom of the ice-fall. The entire upper half of it was gone.
    CR-R-ACK!
    The lower half avalanched into the river. The ice looked like mountain goats running off a cliff.
    Inaj and his men looked around and gawked at each other. Su-Li could almost see them wondering, could almost hear them asking each other what those world-shattering noises were.
    They were standing in the middle, the deepest part, when the first ice blocks hit them.
    Some ice was the size of pebbles, some as big as fists. Other pieces afloat were the size of human heads. A few bergs were as huge as the canopies of oak trees.
    Ice floated downstream like a herd of sheep, bunched up, bumping. It knitted into a force as unstoppable as a landslide.
    Inaj realized at the last instant what was bearing down on him. He screamed at the others and hauled himself onto a block bigger than he was.
    It flipped and dunked him.
    He fought his way back to the surface, got his feet under himself, and was clobbered again.
    Underwater he lost sense of direction for a moment and was sure he was going to die. When a drifting piece of ice slammed him against the bottom, he figured out where to plant his feet.
    Coming up for the second time, he sucked in half a world of breath and looked desperately upstream. A berg as big as a hillock was bearing down on him.
    He launched himself into the air, pricked the ice with his knife, and clung like a spider.
    The berg rocked, crunched, and ground against other pieces of icefall. Panicky, Inaj scrambled to a better position on the top and used his knife tip as a flimsy anchor. He looked back at his sons and the others and got an impression of an arm here, a head there, but could identify no one. Imperiously, his chariot swept him downstream.

 

    13
     
    I naj crept along the bank on his side of the river, the near side, through the darkness, crawling over and around and through downed trees, boulders, and eddies. He kept going. Moving kept him warmer than sleeping. He cursed with every step.
    He found his sons and two others shivering around a fire on the riverbank. Apparently two were missing, and all the pack dogs were gone. Faces were glum. They’d lost all their food, all their gear, half their weapons, and a third of their man strength.
    “Get whatever sleep you can,” he muttered. Like the others he stretched out close to the fire. All night he flip-flopped back and forth, like he was on a spit, broiling one side and freezing the other. He woke up feeling like he’d been hunted down, cut up, and roasted.
    “Let’s find them,” he ordered. He crossed the river—easy now that an ill fate wasn’t striking at him—and started searching downstream.
    The Galayi code was fixed. Warriors never left the bodies of their comrades to be mutilated by enemies or desecrated by wild animals. They buried them respectfully and moved on.
    As Inaj found nothing and nothing and nothing, not eventhe corpse of a dog, he turned grim. He told himself that his fellow soldiers were cursed with the fate his daughter had barely escaped. Under his breath he wailed his apologies to his two comrades for this unforgivable sin, sending them naked, empty-handed, even mutilated into the Darkening Land.
    Late in the afternoon the four survivors gathered back at the fire. No one had seen any sign of the missing men. They were drowned or crushed by the ice.
    “Maybe they are with Those Who Live in Flowing Waters,” said Wilu.
    Inaj kept himself from