On the day of the attempt, the Twin rose in the early hours of the morning, its wan orb growing perceptibly in the predawn sky as it sped toward the world. The White Moon rose afterwards, moving up obliquely across the Twin’s glowering face, until it looked like the second world would swallow it whole. Under the influence of both bodies, the tide went up and up, turning the ocean before the wall into a treacherous mess of frozen reefs and whirlpools sharp with fangs. Teeth of ice flashed white in the short night as slabs of frozen water were heaped in layers atop the barrier. The mountains shook and cascades of broken glacier fell from the continent, though they felt no tremors upon the ship. This was the Great Tide.
For a several hours the ship held its position as close to the ice as was safe. After a day, the Twin swung around the planet on its steep course and travelled away from their segment of the sky, to bring its army of water to other shores.
A convulsion on the surface announced the tide’s retreat. A wave as smooth as one cast into a ribbon bellied out from the land, raising the ship several feet upon its glassy surface.
The tide went out.
The ocean tilted as a mountain of water was hauled backward behind the Twin; a monstrous conquering god dragging the seas off in chains.
The Prince Alfra’s wheels churned at the water at full power; still it was dragged backwards from the wrinkled wall of ice blocking the way to the continent. The pack ice lifted up when the tide went out, colliding with a noise like metal snapping. Sheets large as counties slid backwards, sucked out into the wider sea. The wave steepened. “Full power,” said Trassan into the engine room speaking tube. “Immerse all glimmer cores.” He looked at Heffi. The Ishamalani watched the dials on his desk climb toward the red segments of the their circles.
“All reverse,” he said. The orders bell clanged tunelessly.
“All reverse,” repeated Heffi’s aide.
The ship whined with the increase in power. The pounding of the engines, often unnoticeable in the wheelhouse, became an insistent throb. Towers of white steam rolled high from the ship.
The Prince Alfra clung to its gradient as the ocean fell past the regular level of the ice and uncovered the underside.
Tolpoleznaen worked the wheel, face forward, sparing only the smallest glance for the dials at his own station. His hand twitched back and forth up the wheel, the other adjusting the rotational speed of the wheels, dextrously jinking the ship to avoid broad white ice plaques that defied logic and floated up the wave past them, hauled back after the Twin. Every one Trassan thought would hit; every one Tolpoleznaen deftly avoided.
The angle of the ship’s pitch decreased. The mountainous wave of the tide rolled away across the ocean, foreshortening the horizon.
A new world was revealed to the crew of the Prince Alfra. The wall had become an overhang. Beneath were the blue dark depths of a world under the ice.
“Take us in,” said Trassan impatiently. He looked out of the wheelhouse’s rear windows, not trusting the tide not to come rushing back unexpectedly.
“Trassan,” said Heffi. He nodded at the engine room speaking tubes. Trassan shook off his misgivings and bent to it.
“Retract glimmer core one. Power down, three quarters,” he ordered.
“Aye aye, goodfellow,” came Ollens’s reedy reply from the engine room.
The bergs and ice had been scattered all across the ocean, the pack ice in particular fragmented, and the way was clear. But new perils presented themselves. The Great Tide had piled broken laminates of ice along the wall’s rim. Some of this would stick, Trassan surmised, becoming part of the barrier. A lot slipped off in sudden, thunderous avalanches that rose high spouts of water and punched foaming circles into the sea. Their wash rocked the ship. Trassan watched the looming wall anxiously.
“Take us in, twenty degrees starboard,” said Heffi. Tolpoleznaen’s eyes had narrowed. The helmsman was deep in his art. He responded wordlessly, shifting the wheel a touch and sending the ship forward. Out on the balcony, Vols and Ardovani stood waiting. Against such a sudden, elemental force as the ice falls, Trassan doubted their magic would do much good, but their presence reassured him.
“Full ahead, Heffi, get us out of reach of these falls,” said Trassan.
“Half ahead,” said Heffi quietly. “Let’s do this softly. Noise brings down avalanches. Let us play our role, goodfellow, you do yours.”
Trassan’s jaw worked. He gave a tight nod. Heffi was right, but Trassan disliked having no control.
The ship moved toward the gaping cave under the ice. Everyone fell silent. The chopping of the wheels and the rumbling of the engines seemed dangerously loud. All eyes went to the shelf of ice high above. Water cascaded from it, running from hidden reservoirs within breached by the upheaval of the tide. Trassan was not the only man to wince when a man-tall icicle fell like a spear and exploded on the deck with a bang.
A curtain of shade cut the sea in two. On one side, the water was deep blue, on the other a mysterious green. The Prince Alfra passed through it, its paint going from dazzling to dim. For a second it was a ship made of two halves captured in different times—one asail on sunny seas, the other voyaging deep in the night. Then they were past, and into the cavernous underworld. Cold groped for them. Trassan shivered with the abrupt change in the temperature.
The Prince Alfra sailed into an alien world.
“I have seen many strange things in my years on the ocean, but this... I do not have the words,” said Heffi. Everyone looked up, mouths and eyes wide like children at a carnival. The ice had indeed become the sky. Only Tolpoleznaen stared dead ahead, lost to the rigours of his task.
A roof of ice as high and artful as any basilica to the gods arched over the Prince Alfra, carved into whorls and smooth sculpture by the actions of the ocean. Faults threading the ice were lit up by sun, turning the ice-sky into an abstract mosaic of blues and blacks divided by a tracery of eye-aching white. Pillars of the finest blue, the legacy of earlier tides, held up the mass above. They grew more numerous as they headed within, cutting the space into a labyrinth of curving walls and soaring, convoluted spaces that groaned and creaked frightfully.
“Tolpoleznaen, we are in your hands. Steady as she goes. No undue noise. No whistles!” ordered Heffi.
Immediate danger past, Vols and Ardovani came back into the wheelhouse, breath steaming in the doorway as extravagantly as the ship’s exhaust swirled upwards to embrace the blue. The Prince Alfra brought clouds to this aqueous sky for the first time.
“It is beautiful,” said Vols. “More so in the realm of Form than it was in the Will.”
“Is it stable?” asked Trassan.
“I think so,” said Vols. “Well, let me qualify—I sense no desire on the environment’s part to fall on us.”
A tocking like that of a monstrous clock knocked overhead.
“Then I hope we all get what we want,” said Heffi uneasily.
The ice spoke. Great tickings and sighs, squeaks like greatly amplified string instruments, and stranger, howling noises boomed through the caverns as the ice settled. The rumble and splash of distant collapses thoomed through the passageways, amplified to a terrifyingly immediate volume. Heffi followed the breath of the Prince Alfra up to the cavern’s high ceiling.
“There’s not enough heat in it to melt the ice. We won’t destabilise it,” said Trassan, with a confidence he had to manufacture.
The great, shimmering beauty of the under ice awed them all, striking them dumb. Frequently they would pass a feature that drew comment, causing them to forget the peril they were in. Mighty arches of ice, tunnels rippled like the skin of the desert, walls that glittered with rainbows of refracted sunlight, shallow water of dazzling blue, deep black holes under the water, and once a perfect circle in the roof that gave out to the true sky, shining with such ferocious intensity that the men shielded their gaze.
Wonder could not put the pressing, gargantuan weight of the ice from their notice completely. T
he feeling that it could, at any time, collapse and destroy them induced a queasy fear that demanded attention, and the more attention it got the greater it became. Trassan was glad then for the steely determination in Tolpoleznaen’s bearing. Every glorious sight was nothing; he cared for nothing but the correct passage, the quickest path. His eyes flicked down to examine the compass pedestal to the left of the wheel and Vols’ rough map, pinned to the station in front of him by a magnet. They were all he had to guide him through the maze, but he behaved as if the route were familiar to him as the ride up the locks of the Slot.
They entered into a tunnel that bored deep into the ice. The glorious blue faded from cerulean, to azure, to the colour of twilight sky, and thence to that of night. Trassan ordered the prow and wheelhouse glimmer lamps activated by Ardovani. The magister went out, and brought the lamps’ magic to life, and white beams stabbed out from the ship.
“Careful, Tol,” said Trassan nervously, “the walls are getting narrow.”
“Do not tell me my business, Ushamali,” said Tolpoleznaen. It was his only utterance during the passage under the ice.
At his gentle command, the ship twitched port, then starboard. The quiet rasp of contact was increased by nerves and the tunnel’s acoustic properties to the proportions of disaster.
“Watch out!” gasped Trassan.
Tolpoleznaen ignored him, and spun the wheel. The ship shuddered, a terrific squealing vibrated down its length as metal pressed into ice as hard as stone.
“Give me more power,” said Tolpoleznaen.
“Full ahead,” said Heffi.
“Are you sure?” said Trassan.
“Leave us to our business!” said Heffi. “Full ahead!”
The ship huffed and shuddered. White clouds of steam, the sparks of dying glimmer in them clearly visible in the dark, filled the tunnel. The squeal returned, and became a groan, though of metal stressed by ice or vice versa it was impossible to tell. The middle mast scratched against the ceiling, rigging twanging like the strings of a guitar.
Suddenly, the Prince Alfra lurched forward. The steam whirled upward, and they were out of the tunnel in a cave of stupendous size.
“I see rock!” called the lookout. “Land ho!”
The ice there was so thick there was little light. Above, untold millions of tons of water made solid rucked up into a hollow mountain range, and they were far beneath it.
“This is it,” said Vols breathily. “This is the place by the cleft mountain.”
Trassan hurried out. He grabbed the handles of the wheelhouse searchlight from Ardovani and panned it around. The dim black line at the far side of the cave became clearly defined, a band of rock between water and ice. The water there was mirror still, until the Prince Alfra approached, sending wavelets to caress the granite.
“Take us to one hundred yards out!” said Trassan back into the wheelhouse.
“Which way?” said Heffi. Tolpoleznaen still wore his mask of fierce concentration.
“Vols?” asked Heffi.
“To the left. That way,” pointed the mage. “That was where my vision was blocked.”
“Tolpoleznaen, hard a port,” said Heffi.
“Aye aye, captain.”
The wheels span counter to one another, turning the ship on the spot. Their slapping of the water echoed around the cave like applause.
Trassan played the light along the walls, looking for a hint as to the entry to the Morfaan docks. He saw nothing, and began to doubt the truth of the ghost’s account. How could they build a dock here? He expected something like the Slot, but saw no locks or passage.
For long seconds Trassan felt the touch of failure, then they rounded a promontory and his heart leapt.
Before them were the docks of the Morfaan.
Two giant heads rose from the sea, mouths wide, the lower jaws under water so they peered out from the sea like swimmers. Between them a square canal had been carved into the rock, shearing through the mountain’s roots and up all the way to the sky. The faces were confrontational, a warning against entry.
Trassan knocked on the window and pointed forward. Heffi nodded, saying something inaudible to Trassan outside. The ringing of the order bell penetrated the glass. The ship turned, the chuff of the engines and wheels chopping water dominating the cavern.
Cautiously the ship nosed its way toward the canyon.
The passage was lined with glass-like material. “It is like the pass at the Glass Fort,” commented Ardovani. “Have you ever been?”
“No,” said Trassan.
“I did the once, quite remarkable, but I believe this trumps it. I have my own theories as to how the Morfaan made their building glass. Perhaps we will discover the truth of it here?”
The heads loomed bigger. A trick of perspective had made them seem smaller than they actually were, and they grew to a staggering size as they approached. The ship lined itself up with the canyon. Black water stirred inside, wavelets white with crescents of light. The top of the slot was four hundred feet above. A crust of snow had formed over it, for the most part it glowed blue, too thick to permit the sun, but it was holed in many places, and from there shafts of light streamed down, reflected off the walls, then shattered on the water.
The Prince Alfra moved ahead.
Lights flared in the eyes of the statues. A moment later, Vols stepped out from the wheelhouse and joined Trassan and Ardovani.
“What is happening?” said Trassan. “Are we in danger?”
“I do not know, goodfellow,” said Vols. “But it would be better if you returned inside. The iron will provide a modicum of protection against magic.”
Reluctantly, Trassan agreed. The three of them went back inside. Fuggy air embraced them tightly. Condensation streaked the windows.
“Any ideas yet, goodmage?” said Heffi.
“None, I’m afraid,” he said. “I sense no building of power that might directly harm us, but... Gnk.” Vols went rigid. He blinked rapidly. “I... I... oh dear.”
Anger slammed into the navigation watch, staggering them all. Between the stone heads a living face materialised. Spun from golden light alive with glimmer spark, huge and wrathful in countenance. A cacophony of a hundred languages poured from its lips. Vols became pale, several of the men gripped at their ears and shouted. Nothing could be heard but a crowd of dead voices. Until, one by one, they fell silent, leaving a single, strong voice they could all understand.
“Go back, go back!” it intoned in Karsarin, although the lips of the head spoke another tongue, and moved out of time with the words. “This place is forbidden. Return whence you came, or suffer the wrath of the masters. Go back, go back.”
Trassan gritted his teeth. “Keep going Heffi!”
The ship approached the head. Through the translucent planes of its alien face, they saw the canyon walls, and the canyon slot. They were coming alive with shooting sparks of glimmer blue energy that shot along the walls, changing directions at hard right angles.
“Go back!”
A second flood of anger assailed them, filling their minds with images of terrible fates. Trassan saw Kressind Manse ablaze, his siblings dead, the world in smoke and fire and his dreams smashed before him. The vision imposed itself upon his sight, but through it he saw the wheelhouse, each man troubled by private hells. All except Tolpoleznaen. He stared forward, jaw clenched so hard the veins on his forehead stood proud. “The One guides me. I rise to the challenge of the One. I will not fail the One,” he was saying, lips moving over grinding teeth, his face turning purple with the effort.
“Go back, go back, or all you cherish shall be laid waste.”
The ship passed into the face. The visions brought pain. Trassan doubled over, the world was a shadowplay behind the fires consuming his family. Dimly, he perceived one of the Ishamalani grab at Tolpoleznaen’s arm, wild-eyed and brandishing a knife. The helmsman pulled out a small ironlock squeezer pistol from his sash and shot him dead without looking aside from their
course.
“The One the One the One,” he said, with fanatical determination.
“Go back!” it roared.
The visions ceased. Trassan blinked afterimages away. Vols Iapetus stood on the balcony forward of the wheelhouse, raised hands shining within a nimbus of light that reached out and touched the Morfaan image. The face wavered, its voice cracked and fell silent. Glimmerlight raced madly around inside, and the face faded, and disappeared with a flash. The ship passed through the space it had occupied.
Trassan got to his feet. Others stood shakily. The corpse of the Ishamalani sailor lay on the floor, his blood collecting in the corner of the wheelhouse.
“The One, the One, the One,” chanted Tolpoleznaen under his breath. The lights in the glass walls went out in threes and fours until they were gone.
Trassan looked at Heffi. The captain raised his eyebrows.
Outside, Vols leaned on the railing, breathing hard. Ardovani went to his aid.
The snowy crust blocking the canyon top parted into white drapings, revealing a river of sky. A bright line marked the canyon’s end, the restricted view giving little clue to their final destination.
The Prince Alfra steamed on, wheels and screw turning, the crew silent, many tearful, others sunk into a despondency that was slow to lift. Soon they approached the exit to the canyon. Beyond it Trassan saw four tiers of what could only be docks, stepped into the side of a giant bowl so that, similarly to the docks in Karsa, they might be used at various heights of the tide, only the Morfaan docks were made of unmarked black glass, free of rubbish or debris, pristine even after so many thousand years.
The City of Ice Page 36