Read The Sorcerer's Vengeance: Book 4 of the Sorcerer's Path for Free Online Page A

Derran lead them out with most of the men pulling and pushing the sleds that would only get heavier as their hunting became successful. Whoever had been out here last night was gone now and had left no trace of their ever being present. Zeb started to wonder if perhaps they had not seen a willowisp. Maybe they were just all delusional.
    “Whoever or whatever was out here seems to be gone now,” Derran said, seemingly reading the captain’s current thoughts.
    “Yeah, but for how long I wonder?”
    The hunting party followed the ice-inundated river that was more ice than liquid water at the surface. In another month, possibly less, it would be frozen solid along with most of the bay. Winter set in this far north later than in the south. For some unknown reason, it seemed to lag behind by an entire season. Just as spring started in the south, winter set in up here with an unforgiving fierceness.
    Derran, Zeb, and another man who was an experienced hunter and tracker walked a hundred yards ahead of Toron and the rest of the group who had the important but thankless job of hauling the sleds. By the time they made camp that evening they boasted a brace of hares, two foxes, and four snow-white ptarmigans. The rabbits and birds would be eaten that very night, the skins scraped and prepared, and the feathers bagged.
    Zeb stepped out of the tent and approached Derran who was scouring the flat countryside with his eyes. “Any sign of our friends?”
    “No, sir, but with this damnable fog that’s no real surprise. There could be a hundred men surrounding us no more than fifty yards away, and unless one of them suddenly sneezed or broke wind we’d never even know,” the young sailor tersely replied.
    “I’ve ordered the men to build a berm around the camp before they turn in. A wall of snow is no great defense but it’s better’n nothing at all. Here they come now. Go on and give em a hand. It’ll take your mind off it for a bit.”
    Derran gave his captain a nod, grabbed a shovel from one of the sleds, and lent his muscles to the task. Zeb stared out at the thick fog that had rolled in once more as they were making camp. He had seen a lot of fog in his time, it was a regular part of a sailor’s life, but never had he been in mists this thick, cold, and dry . A fog like this should soak a man to his skin as quickly as a light rain, but this stuff acted more like a scentless smoke than any kind of precipitation.
    It was so thick now that a man could lose his way trying to return to camp from using the privy they dug just a few yards from the tents. He would have to order another privy dug, one inside the growing berm. It would not do to lose a man answering a call of nature. That was no way for a man to die. With a sigh of helplessness, Zeb grabbed a shovel and decided he would dig the privy hole himself while his men packed snow into a six-foot-tall ring surrounding their small camp.
    Several hard-eyed, blond-haired warriors lay face down in the snow not twenty yards from where the southerners piled snow around their tents in a futile attempt at making their camp more defensible. The scouts wore no metal save for the swords strapped tight to their backs beneath the white fur cloaks. They even covered their faces with a white wool wrap to hide their features as well as protect them from the freezing temperatures.
    The spies lay there, ignoring the bone-numbing cold, until the southern men finished their preparations and returned to the warmth of their tents. True dark had fallen and not until then did the scouts move away to inform their battle jarl of the men’s activities. As silent and invisible as ghosts, the large northerners stood up from their prone positions, giving their blood a moment to warm the parts of them that had gone numb before slowly moving away.
    Zeb walked up to Toron as the big minotaur stood just outside one of the tents, huge billowing puffs of steam erupting from his large bovine-like nostrils in