Altar of Bones Read Online Free PDF Page A

to get Nikolai to the cave soon, or he would die. She was tired, so tired.
    Nikolai’s legs gave out beneath him and he lurched into her. She reeled, fighting desperately to keep from falling, screaming as his dead weight wrenched her arm nearly out of its socket. But somehow he got his feet back under him, and they staggered on.
    Not much farther now. Just one more step, Nikki. That’s it. Don’t fall on me. Don’t fall—
    He fell, and this time he took her with him.
    They plunged through black space, hitting deep, pillowy snow and rolling to a stop. They landed in a snowdrift, and it was so warm and soft. She wanted to lie there and rest just a little while.
    She knew that to stop was to die.
    She thrashed her legs, fighting free of the sucking snow, and realized she wasn’t on the snow-shrouded tundra anymore. She was on ice.
    They’d found the lake.

    N IKOLAI STILL LAY in the snowdrift, unmoving. She fell back onto her knees beside him. She shook him, hard. She had no breath left to shout at him, he couldn’t have heard her anyway.
    She shook him again, felt him move.
Get up, get up, get up
, she willed him, a chant in her mind. And somehow, with her half-lifting him, he got back onto his feet.
    Just one more step, Nikki. That’s it, one more step
.
    Her own steps were happening on sheer instinct now. She was as good as blind, moving through a black nightmare of wind and snow.
Just one more step, one more …
    They hit a wall of ice.
    The waterfall.

    I N SUMMER, THE runoff from melting snow and swollen streams sent a cascade of water shooting off a tall, steep bluff and into the lake below. In winter the waterfall froze solid.
    But no matter what time of year, the waterfall always hid the entrance to the cave. First, you had to know that it was possible to walk onto the narrow ledge between the waterfall and the bluff, but even then all you would see was a flat face of solid rock. Unless you were a daughter of the
toapotror
, the magic people.
    A daughter of the magic people knew that what looked like a sheerwall of rock was really two walls, overlapping each other to form a slit barely a foot wide. And if you dared to squeeze yourself into that slit, to inch your way along it, with the space growing narrower and narrower until it seemed that you’d taken one step too many, that you were stuck, trapped forever … then suddenly the slit would widen again, opening up into the entrance of a secret cavern.

    L ENA DIDN’T KNOW how she got Nikolai through the slit to the entrance of the cave, and she would never have managed it if he hadn’t battled back through the fever and found the strength to hold himself upright mostly on his own.
I’m one tough bastard
, he’d said, and she loved him for that.
    To get inside the cave, you had to climb down steep, shallow steps the magic people had carved long ago into the rock. By the time they hit bottom, Lena’s arms and legs were trembling with the effort and she didn’t know how Nikolai had done it, even with her trying to bear as much of his weight as possible. The blackness was absolute, and she had to feel around for the pitch torch she hoped would still be in its bracket on the wall.
    She found it and lit it with the tinderbox she’d stuffed deep inside the knapsack. The pitch burst into flame, lighting up the round, underground cavern.
    And there it was, where it had always been, set into the wall: an ancient altar made out of human bones.
    The altar of bones
.
    She’d started toward it, her aching muscles seeming to move on their own, when Nikolai let out a terrible groan and sagged slowly onto the floor. For a moment longer, she stared at the altar as if mesmerized, then she looked down at the man lying at her feet, and what she saw nearly stopped her heart.
    “Nikki! Oh, God, Nikki …”
    She fell to her knees beside him. How had he even managed to get himself this far? His lips were swollen and blue, his eyelashes frozen to his cheeks. His breathing