Ice Claw

6

Sentinel mountains blocked the night sky with even blacker silhouettes.

The snow sat above the eight hundred-meter line on this side of the Montagne Noire. But the close-cropped pasture and stony ground made the going hard, so Max used goat and cattle tracks that were scuffed into the slopes to wind his way higher until he found shelter from the increasingly cold wind.

Shepherds used these stone-built mountain huts when bringing in the goats and sheep for market: gathering in the scattered animals was a task that could take days. Max had walked for over three hours since Bobby had driven over the mountain’s lower pass and left him to head for higher ground. Max had barely slept in the past twenty-four hours. Fatigue had set in. He had already pushed himself this far, so it made no sense to risk a fatal mistake. Lose your footing on these steep slopes, tumble down through those rocks and serious injury was a given.

Max ate dry food from his backpack, and although there was kindling and wood in the small stone hearth, he wasn’t going to advertise his presence by lighting a fire. Neither did he climb into his lightweight sleeping bag. He wanted to be able to move quickly if trouble came out of the night.

He pulled back his sleeve to check the time, forgetting momentarily his watch had been ripped away by the dying monk. Dad, I’m sorry. I couldn’t do anything. I tried. I just couldn’t save him. A brief shiver of loneliness ran through him as thoughts of his dad flooded his mind. His father in the nursing home, his mind a netherworld-consciousness flitting between understanding and forgetfulness. He would recover, the doctors were certain, but Max feared that one day he might sit with his dad, look into his eyes and see no recognition there.

Max hid those fears, but they were a constant companion, partly responsible for his determination to carry on when others would have turned back. Zabala might have passed on a secret legacy, but Max’s dad had given him a much greater gift-his love. That, and the ability to meet a challenge and see it through.

Max fingered the pendant. It yielded no clue, but its secret had caused murder.

Nestling into the deep, warm hay, he set his mental alarm clock and listened as big white cows snuffled the grass on the mountainside. Broad leather collars supported dull-thudding bells around their necks, and the steady clonking lulled him into a deep sleep.

Max could see mountain peaks, one after the other, stretching to the distant horizon. The night wind had blown away clouds and pollution, leaving a diamond-bright sky. His polarized sunglasses helped keep the glare at bay, but he still had to shield his eyes as he peered across the white-blanketed mountains. He had walked for four hours after waking, climbing higher into the mountain, remembering where he had been previously when training.

Stepping carefully through the snow-dusted scree, he saw the stone hut he was searching for. The last time he had been here, a storm had swept in and deposited thirty centimeters of snow across his path. That was less than three weeks ago, and he’d been forced to stay sheltered for a whole day while the sun melted it enough for him to make his way down again. He had huddled in the building’s animal shelter, wishing he could have found his way inside the big hut. But a solid door had barred his way.

Now as he got closer he could see that the heavy-planked door yawned open, the push and pull of the wind creaking the old hinges. Scattered paper had been sucked out of the room by the airstream; a couple of sodden sheets lay in the entrance and others were scattered across the face of the animal shelter. A sheepskin was stretched out, curing on the sunny side of the hut, and a couple of burlap sacks were hooked on nails. What looked like a homemade crutch, a sturdy pole with a flat, well-worn piece of wood fastened to the top of it, stood propped against the wall.

Max stepped closer. His eyes scanned the surrounding valleys and mountains. On the weather side of the slope, snow clung tenuously, deep in places, drifted into half-pipe channels elsewhere. A snowboarder’s dream-a desperate man’s nightmare. Anyone less skilled than a brilliant skier or board rider would hit those sculpted walls at speed and come to grief.

But on the slope where Max now climbed there were barely a few centimeters of snow, while over the crest of this ridge the cold air current turned the Atlantic moisture into deeper falls on that flank of the mountain. It had taken hours to get here by road and foot, but he realized that a fast skier could probably reach the mountains above Mont la Croix in half an hour-forty minutes if he wasn’t racing. But the monk was an expert, and he’d been trying to escape a killer. A helter-skelter ride for his life.

He’d have plummeted down the far side of the mountain and in less than an hour appeared where Max had stopped to pick up Sayid’s misbaha. A shot, an avalanche and a desperate cry in an ancient language had brought Max to where he now stood.

Max’s skin crawled.

He turned slowly-360 degrees-letting his eyes look at the near and far distance. Someone was watching him. He could feel it. Nothing moved. A speck of black in the sky high above circled. An eagle. Was it that? Was that what made the hairs on his neck bristle? The lone raptor shrieked, its cry carried easily by the wind. The eagle’s eyes had two hundred times’ magnification when it looked down. It would see Max’s eyes staring right back. With a final twisting turn, the eagle spun away on another thermal.

Max went back to the hut, an unconfirmed warning banging through his body like a fire alarm.

And his instincts were right.

The monk’s killer was watching Max’s every move through a high-powered spotter scope from a vantage point more than a kilometer away.

Max had imagined something quite different from what he found inside the hut. For a start it was bigger than it appeared. The thick walls offered resistance to the cold and wind, and although Zabala had been a recluse, he had obviously led as comfortable a life as he could, given the confines of the building.

An overstuffed chair, bookshelves, a portable radio, oil lamps and a log-burning stove were as much as anyone living alone needed. A sturdy bed with a deep mattress and an old duvet covered by a red knitted throw took up one corner of the room, and Max felt a pang of envy. It would have been a cozy and warm safe haven. Would have been-before someone had trashed the place. Only the bed had not been upended; everything else was turned upside down. Bookshelves were trashed, books were torn and even the old woolen carpet had been pulled back, exposing a solid stone floor. Max pressed the back of his hand against the stove. It was, of course, ice cold. A cold grate is as welcoming as a grave. He couldn’t remember where he had heard that, but he wasn’t going to argue with the sentiment. He dropped his backpack and began to sift through the damage.

It looked as though a storm had wrecked the place. The chair was slashed, its stuffing pulled free. The mattress had a surgical slit down its side, and book bindings had been skinned from their pages. Curved daggers of glass remained embedded in the smashed photo frames.

Violent upheaval. Was the monk’s killer responsible, or could it have been a bear that had tortured the room? They were up here. The damaged climate meant they weren’t hibernating as they should. A hungry bear could have done this.

Max saw dark flecks splashed across the whitewashed wall, more on the edge of the mattress and bigger globules settled on the floor like dribbled paint. He brushed his fingers against them, and, like breaking the skin on cold porridge, the smudge told him it was blood.

The signs of struggle were everywhere. Zabala, who was a big man, must have connected a blow. That gave him time to escape and ski across and down the mountain. After the avalanche the killer must have come back here and made a frenzied search-for what? Max fingered the pendant. It was obvious.

He bent down, sifting through the debris. There was precious little to salvage, and nothing seemed of any intrinsic value. And nothing that gave Max any clue as to Zabala’s secret. The books were varied, and Max realized that they covered a whole range of subjects. He began sorting through them. Quantum physics, astronomy, astrology, religion, myths and legends, conservation and animal behavior. The monk had been an extremely well-read man.

A scrapbook’s pages lay scattered. Max sifted through them. There were faded newspaper cuttings about Zabala. He gathered those that weren’t torn and folded them into his pocket to be read later-something more interesting had caught his eye.

Max picked up one of the broken photo frames. He eased out the shattered glass and swore as he felt the edge cut into his finger. Damn! Small cuts seemed to bleed worse than bigger ones. His finger oozed blood; he wiped his hand on the side of the old chair. There was a small first-aid kit in his backpack, but the wound could wait. The picture held his attention.

He carefully pushed out the remaining glass and took the photo closer to the light at the window. The two men in the picture stood smiling, side by side. They wore trousers and short-sleeved shirts. The sun was shining; their eyes squinted against the glare. Each had an arm around the other’s shoulders and each held a clipboard. The bigger of the two men had bushy eyebrows, wild twisting bristles that Max had seen close up a couple of days ago. It was Zabala. He was clean-shaven and his hair was trimmed short.

The man who stood with him was more gaunt, his sallow complexion almost noticeable in the monochrome photograph. His eyes had a sunken look. He had his head tilted back slightly-he was laughing. It was a moment of shared joy about something. Friendship. The photograph was a medium close-up. The two men filled much of the frame, but Max could see that the picture had been taken in front of an archway; a narrow one, like an entrance to an old building. The Gothic arch’s apex was cut off above the men’s heads and the background was out of focus, but just to the left of the picture a shape curved down from what looked like steps. It was low to the ground, its outline irregular. Jagged. Two sections gaped open, half hidden by the gaunt man. It was a statue of a crocodile.

It had to be the abbey! This was where Zabala and the other man had worked.

A scream severed his concentration.

Max turned and ran for the door. A shadow filtered the sunlight. Another shriek. It wasn’t human. Max barreled out of the doorway into the glare. With barely seconds to react, he saw the eagle swoop out of the sun a few meters away. Its glaring eyes fixed on his. The talons aimed at his face and neck. Acting on pure instinct, Max yanked the sheepskin from the wall, pulled it across his arm and presented it to the raptor.

The eagle came in at speed. Max wouldn’t be able to stand the impact. But then it heaved those mighty wings into a braking stall and the curved weapons dug satisfyingly into the sheepskin.

It flapped once again, settling, finding its balance. Max couldn’t bear the weight on his arm. The crutch. Of course. That was what Zabala used it for. Max grabbed it and rested the back of his arm on the support.

The bird seemed content. Suddenly the thumping in Max’s chest and his racing pulse were due to excitement rather than fear. To have a king of the skies resting on his arm, its head turning, its eyes, ever alert, meeting his own, this must have been how rulers of long-lost empires felt. Standing above the rest of the world, a breeze teasing eagle feathers, a sense of power surged through Max. He laughed. The bird stared in a seemingly disapproving way. It opened its beak, its head swiveled and it shrieked again.

If the bird had come onto his arm so easily, it meant it had done the same with the monk. Max looked around. On the weather side of the animal shelter was what appeared to be a stone-built storage area for bins, bunkerlike, with heavily planked lids, as sturdy as the hut’s front door and covered in frozen snow.

You weren’t likely to get a bin collection up here. So what was being kept there? Max staggered under the eagle’s weight, propped his arm up again and, with his free hand, heaved off one of the lids.

It was a perfect outside larder. Cuts of sheep were laid out on racks; dead mountain hares, some gutted, others not, none of them skinned, hung from nails. Jars of fruit and tins of food were stored lower down, and to one side were haunches of what looked like goat and deer. This area was less ordered. Almost as if whatever had died or been killed was hacked into pieces and dumped here-probably carrion gathered from the rocky gullies-as Max had seen no sign of any weapon in the hut.

Citeaux, the nurse had told him. The place of wild animals. That was why the eagle came. Zabala must have fed him when food was scarce on the ground. Max took one of the hares and presented it to the eagle. The curved beak snatched it. Max ducked as the wings unfolded and beat the air. Transferring the hare from beak to talon, the eagle flapped lazily away, glided another thirty meters, then settled on a rocky outcrop to enjoy its meal.

Max rubbed the strain out of his arm and looked around. He wasn’t sure about raptors, but animals were creatures of habit. They would hunt and sleep when their body clock told them to. The eagle wouldn’t be the only creature that was in close proximity. He scanned the snowfields and broken ground that staggered the mountainside. Just wait. See if anything moves. Be patient. Stay still. There. A smudge of movement. Max cupped his hands each side of his eyes, creating tunnel vision, blocking out extraneous light and focusing his attention.

A couple hundred meters away, a huge brown bear, its dark coat smudged with pale, almost blond fur, stood to its full height, which Max reckoned must have been almost three meters. It dropped down onto all fours, scraped away at the snow and nuzzled the ground. The bear had used the boulders as cover, moving closer, making sure that the place it visited was safe. This human scent was different from the usual, staler smell. Now it searched for food.

Max watched the bulk rise up again. That bear could move at a hell of a rate. Odds were it’d be on Max like a swarm of wild bees on honey if it decided to charge. Just how hungry was it? The bears usually stored up fruit and berries for their winter hibernation, but with climate change, nature’s cycle was all over the place. Spring flowers were out on the lower slopes already, so maybe he’d have eaten farther down. The brown bear was a protected species, but that didn’t stop farmers from shooting them if they thought their sheep were threatened. Max watched as the bear sashayed towards him. Its shoulders rolled in a swaggering display of muscle. It stopped every few meters to sniff the air.

Perhaps it was the bear that had smashed up the hut. If Brother Zabala had been feeding animals, then they still expected him to be here. It was more like a nature preserve than a monk’s retreat.

Fifty meters away the bear stopped, stood on its hind legs and roared. Max froze. It didn’t seem like a friendly greeting. OK. Don’t run or do anything stupid. And don’t look it in the eye. Humans often got in the way of wild creatures and failed to understand animals’ aggressive behavior towards them. It was simple. You’re in their way and on their patch. The bear moved closer still, its head swaying like a radar scan picking up Max’s movements and smell.

Time to go. But something held him. A moment of instant recognition that stopped him from backing slowly away. The breeze had shifted. The bear’s warm, musty smell wafted downwind to Max. Damp fur like a wet dog and a rich earthy tang like fallen leaves in a forest. The smell immediately conjured the image he’d experienced in the avalanche. The sense of being. And of feeling a powerful strength he knew he did not have as a boy. As if he had been a bear.

Now, mesmerized by the towering bulk and trapped by his memory, Max broke the golden rule. He locked eyes with one of the most dangerous creatures in the world. He saw the incisors as its snout pulled back, saliva dripping, eyes glaring. If it was a challenge this puny creature wanted, then the bear would oblige with all its fury. Max heard the thud of its weight as it dropped onto all fours-and charged.

Bears can run as fast as a horse, their awesome strength can rip a car apart if they’re searching for food-and they are not inclined to listen to reason.

Max made an instant decision. He knew he couldn’t outrun or fight the bear, but he could offer it an alternative to ripping him apart. Max’s vision blurred as he dived to the ground. The bear grunted and roared as it sped towards him. Five meters, three … another stride and it would have him. Max would be under its paws in seconds. Twisting onto his back, he kicked both legs against the bunker’s wooden doors that held the food store.

Wood splintered. One gate came free of its hinges. Max spun away. The bear’s power was on him. Think hedgehog! a voice in his brain shouted at him. Roll tight, don’t resist.

It took enormous willpower, but Max did as the voice instructed. The bear’s paws rolled him, its slobbering jaws and rancid breath snuffled into his chest, but Max kept his arms tightly locked across his face and body and his knees tucked up. Someone kicked him hard; at least, that was how it felt-the bear had cuffed him, like a plaything-and he was lifted off the ground by the force of the blow.

Max was not going to survive this assault.

Risking a peek through his arms, he saw that the bear had knocked him a couple of meters away, and for some unknown reason hesitated in following through on the attack. Its head lifted; it sniffed the air and then gazed back to Max. The next few seconds were vital for Max’s survival. He couldn’t make the safety of the hut, and the bear hadn’t gone for the alternative offering of food from behind the storage bins’ shattered door, which was now five long strides away.

There was one chance.

Max stood up, faced the monster and yelled as loudly as he could. The yell became a roar, thunder coming from his belly, booming in his chest, which bellowed like a foghorn out of his mouth.

The startled bear stopped dead in its tracks.

Max lunged for the storage bunker. One, two, three paces … four …

The bear hurled itself forward, maddened by its escaping prey.

Five!

Max barreled into the dead carcasses. Sheep, goat and deer torsos, haunches and heads. Some were frozen more than others, and the offal stank. No sooner had he squirmed into the charnel house than the bear plunged after him. The low stone structure restricted its power, allowing only a front paw and its head to get into the shattered doorway. Max kicked back, pushing himself farther out of reach. But then his back thumped into the wall. The bunker was only a meter and a half deep; another big push and the bear could winkle him out, hooking a claw into his head as if it were a ripe plum.

The bear’s head burrowed into the carcasses and yielded to the instinctive temptation. Dragging out a haunch of deer, it gripped the meat in its jaws and sauntered away-its anger expended, the urgent need for food satisfied.

Max waited a few moments, making sure the bear had retreated back to the distant rocks. He crawled out of the storage bunker, stretched the tension from his muscles and checked himself over. The bear had done little more than play with him. A slash of claw marks had caught across the back of his jacket, releasing feathers, which caught the breeze like dandelion seeds. Max felt the back of his head; his hand came away dabbed with blood. His clothes smelled, and the stench seemed to have penetrated his skin and hair.

The bear attack could have left Max totally helpless up here. A shattered leg, a broken back and he’d have lain out on this mountaintop only hours away from death. Eagle, wolf, vulture and storm would have stripped him to the bone. He’d been lucky.

Brother Zabala had been a wild man of the mountains all right; his survival skills kept him alive all the way up here, but he’d also forged a bond with these wild animals. You had to be tough and intelligent to live here and achieve that.

His mountain wilderness must have presented dangers every day, but it had been a more lethal intruder who caused his death. The violence of a human killer was more frightening than the basic instincts of a wild animal.

Now that Max had found the monk’s sanctuary and seen the photograph, the man was even more of a mystery. Perhaps becoming a recluse was not a simple, straightforward choice. A well-educated man, Zabala had chosen to hide away and keep his secret with him.

And he had passed that secret on to Max-Lucifer and the pendant.

Well, Max had come this far. He had discovered who the monk was, where and how he lived, all of which had given him more information about the man. He looked across the peaks. The snow would come in by morning. The long, soft line of precipitation-filled clouds on the horizon would push in from the sea, be squeezed by the cold mountain air and dump snow from here down to the lower slopes. Max could survive on what food was stored here, but he might be snowbound for days. Survival-induced adrenaline seeped away, leaving a deep-seated tiredness. He needed to push himself now, because otherwise it would be easy to light a fire, find a corner of the hut and sleep for a very long time. Max had to get himself together, clean up and make his way to the coast.

Sometimes you do things because you choose to and at other times you do them because, no matter how unpleasant they are, you know they’ve got to be done. If Max made his way down through the villages looking and smelling as he did, he would draw attention to himself, and suspicious villagers might warn the local gendarmerie.

No good thinking about it, then; that would just make matters worse. It was time.

Max stripped off his clothes, leaving on his boots, socks and boxers-the ones with the man-in-the-moon’s face. The cold air bit like a thousand ants but soon turned into a punishing contradiction of cold heat when he scooped handfuls of snow and scrubbed it over his body. He yelped, then laughed. This was crazy, but it would scrub off the dried blood and invigorate his aching limbs.

“Yeaeeeow!” he yelled across the empty mountains. He “shampooed” his hair with snow, feeling the back of his head carefully. There was no wound. The sticky blood had been from one of the dead animals. He gasped as his flushed skin puckered into goose bumps; the wind had veered and swept up from the snowfields, adding an extra chill factor.

Max was pretty pleased with himself. He’d found Zabala’s mountain retreat and learned more about who Zabala was, discovered a photographic clue to what might be the mysterious abbey-and he’d brought a wild eagle off the wing and survived a bear attack.

He threw back his head and howled like a wolf, then did a jig in the snow, arms flailing, feet stamping. Max Gordon! The only boy on top of the world!

He bared his teeth and made strange, imbecilic sounds, just to make himself happy. And it was then, as he bent down to pick up his clothes, that he saw the shadow.

He jackknifed upright.

Standing watching him was Sophie Fauvre.