The bandit still lay at the meadow's edge, arms flung wide, head twisted over to the side. Both face and head had been shaved a little less than a week before, and though the man's face was young, the beard and hair stubble were white, a common color among the Black Alketch.

No bird had torn his eyes or his belly, no fox chewed the soft parts of his face. Nothing, as far as the Icefalcon could see, had invaded the gaping flesh of the severed throat or begun to eat at the corpse. It had simply rotted where it lay.

In four hours?

He knelt beside it, pulled off his glove to touch the cheek. Liquefying flesh had already begun to drip away, showing the pale jawbone and teeth.

Plague?

Not a pleasant thought. Particularly not with Ingold a week's journey off in Gae seeking Harilomne the Heretic's books. This man had seemed healthy enough to try to rape Hethya, if that had indeed been his intent.

He pulled off the man's glove, and most of the hand's flesh came with it. The odor alone told him that all was not as it should be. The wars with the other peoples of the northern plains, the torture sacrifices by which his people periodically communicated with the Ancestors, the hunts of mammoth and dire wolf and yak, would have been enough to teach him the stench of the dead, without the Time of the Dark when corpses lay like windfall plums in the streets.

This stink was only vaguely similar, not like human flesh at all. He sat back on his heels. Birds were beginning to cry their territories before settling in for the night. A squirrel ran up a tree.

The bandits had gone.

The sun slipped behind the white horns of the glaciers that shawled Anthir, northernmost of the three peaks that guarded Sarda Pass. Blue shadow poured east to drown the Vale, though light still filled the sky. The Icefalcon rose and traced the bandit's prints back into the trees.