The First Locked Room
Eric Brown
Gudrun led the hunters back to the clearing in the shadow of the cliff face.
He shrugged the small deer from his shoulder and dropped it before the fire, then looked around at his people. The men, women, and children stared at the carcass in dismal silence, wondering how so little meat might fill so many bellies.
He crossed the clearing to the cliff face and pulled aside the animal skin covering the entrance of the god-man’s cave.
Skarn hunkered in the shadows, grinding pigment in a gourd with a chunk of stone. Gudrun stared in awe, as always, at the old man’s paintings covering the walls: huge mammoth and a herd of bison galloped through grassland, and the images stirred something in his hunter’s heart.
The god-man looked up, his wild eyes peering from a tangle of hair the color of ash. With a crimson-stained finger he pointed to a boulder across the cave.
“Sit,” he said.
. . .
