The Icerigger Trilogy: Icerigger, Mission to Moulokin, and The Deluge Drivers

by Alan Dean Foster

  “He doesn’t need to do even that,” September said. “Rakossa already has gained the Slanderscree. Oh, Ro-Vijar will argue that it’s rightfully his, but he’ll let Rakossa argue him out of it, in return for killing us. He’s after bigger stakes, Ro-Vijar is. Don’t forget, he’s got three modern hand beamers. They’re worth a damn sight more on this planet than two ice riggers.”

  Hunnar crawled over to the bars, stood, and kicked at them. His sharp chiv barely produced three parallel scratches in the wood. There were many, similar sets of scratches.

  “What do we do now?” Ethan couldn’t stand to watch Hunnar stubbornly, hopelessly expending his strength on the bars.

  “Young feller-me-lad, I don’t know.”

  The giant moved to a back corner. Though of considerable size, the cell floor had been well matted with pika-pina fragments. September stretched out on them, put his hands behind his head, and stared at the ceiling.

  “Fer now, I’m going to sleep.”

  “How is it,” Ethan said wonderingly, “that you can always sleep when your life’s in danger?”

  September closed his eyes, shutting out cell and companions. “Well for one thing, lad, if they chose that time to kill you, you’d never know it happened.”

  Ethan would have argued, but he was as exhausted as he was discouraged.

  The old matting proved unexpectedly comfortable.

  IX

  “WAKE UP.”

  Rolling over, Ethan opened one eye. He was lying by himself near the bars. Who could be talking to him in the middle of the night?

  “Wake up!” The voice was more insistent.

  Dried pika-pina fiber crackled like burning bugs as he got awkwardly to his knees and stared out into the dim light of the passageway. Torches illuminated cells and walkway between.

  The voice hadn’t sounded like that of the cellkeeper, a phlegmatic Tran who appeared periodically to make certain the outland daemons hadn’t burrowed free of their prison by some unknown magical means.

  But a dimly silhouetted shape was pressing against the bars close by. It was a Tran, which was expected. It was also female, which was not. Yellow cat eyes glowed by torchlight.

  “Please,” the voice said anxiously, the eyes turning briefly to glance down the corridor. “There will be a change of cellmaster before too long. We must use every minute.”

  Having decided that he was not dreaming, Ethan climbed to his feet. As he approached the bars, he finally recognized the speaker.

  That gave him his biggest shock yet.

  “But you’re Rakossa’s queen? …”

  The girl expectorated, following it with a degrading word. “He calls me his concubine. The court refers to me as royal consort. I am his chiv-stool, for he wipes his feet on me.” Her voice held more hatred and bitterness than Ethan imagined possible. Each word was soaked in vitriol, every sentence washed with venom. Yet she spoke quietly and with control.

  “I hight Teeliam Hoh, outlander. I was purchased to be less than a pet. Queen?” Fury kept her from laughing. “I am a thing he uses, plays with, like a favorite sword, yet the sword is cared for and treated better than I.”

  Ethan was looking down the corridor himself now. “You mentioned a change of cellmaster. What about the one on duty now? He’ll be coming—”

  “Nowhere,” she finished for him. “He and the other guard are dead. I cut their throats.”

  Her hands fumbled at the old metal lock which sealed the cell. Mumblings and questions sounded behind Ethan as the noises and activity woke others.

  “Then you believe us,” Ethan said excitedly, watching her hands work the heavy, ornate key. “You know Ro-Vijar for the liar he is.”

  “I do not know the Landgrave of Arsudun for anything but the trail a dung crawler leaves behind itself after a meal.”

  “If you don’t know whether he’s lying or not, then why are you doing this for us?”

  Her bared teeth shone at him. “You think I do this for you? I do it for her.” She gestured up the corridor, returned to the lock and key.

  Ethan looked in the indicated direction, made out the shape of a second figure. “Elfa.” Something clicked and then the door swung open easily. Tran in other cells were awake now, watching and murmuring tensely. Teeliam moved to free them.

  Ethan moved toward Elfa, smiling happily. He stopped a meter away, and stared. Just stared. His disbelief was too great for him to curse the reality of what he saw.

  The beautiful cat face was bruised and marred, one eye swollen almost shut. There were large patches of smooth fur missing, and places singed and blackened as if by fire. Elfa did not smile at him. In fact, her attention seemed rooted on the floor, though it was in a different place altogether. She held both arms tight around herself. The clothing she wore was simple, not what she’d been wearing when taken away from the rest of them.

  Teeliam Hoh, having given the keys to other Tran, had come to stand next to Ethan. He turned a wordless, open-mouthed gaze to her.

  “I know the inner passages of the castle,” she said, less bitterly now. “I knew one of you had been brought for questioning. Through a chink I saw how this Ro-Vijar asked questions, how nothing he said or did could be credited to a true Landgrave-protector.

  “While I could not know the truth of what he said about you, I did know that everything else he claimed should be treated as a lie, for he lives and that is an untruth of itself.” She looked away from him, at the floor, then at Elfa.

  “Rakossa was with him, watching, relishing the spectacle. After a while, he deigned to participate.” She shuddered. “I have had to endure his foul imagination for two years. Would that I could have gone mad.”

  “Why.” Ethan swallowed, tried again. “Why did you stay here? Why didn’t you try to escape him?”

  Now Teeliam found reason to laugh. “I do that several times a year, sky-outlander Ethan. Always I am caught, or bought back from those who find me. What Rakossa then does to me drives out all thoughts of escape for day-times. As will doubtless happen again after this. If I did not resist him, he would tire of me and kill me, for none can have a woman that Rakossa has had. And when I resist, he … imagines things.”

  “It won’t happen again, woman,” said a deep, angry voice. September had come up behind Ethan and was staring compassionately at Teeliam. He had already examined Elfa professionally and chose not to stare at her.

  “It does not matter. I would have done this only to anger him no matter what you do for yourselves or me, no matter what had been done to her.” She indicated Elfa, who had not moved.

  “There is another thing. I believe you would wish to have these. I stole them.” She swung the small pack from her back, brought out their beamers.

  “How long until the new cellmaster comes on duty?” Ethan clipped his own weapon back to his waist, tried to peer through sooty darkness up the corridor and stairs. Teeliam mentioned Tran time-units. “Maybe that’s long enough for us to slip up the stairways and fight our way back to the ship.”

  “Are you offworlders truly the fools Ro-Vijar claims?” Teeliam eyed him disbelievingly. “You cannot go back through the castle. There are soldiers on every level above. You could not reach the courtyard before every warrior on the island had been assembled. I do not think your magical weapons which Ro-Vijar whispered of to Rakossa would be enough to repulse a thousand or more fighters in close quarters.”

  “Gal’s got a point.” September bent his white-maned head down to her. “What you have in mind as an alternative?”

  “I will cut the face of my father into his back and he will curse his manhood,” said a voice cold enough to match the atmosphere above ground. Elfa spoke at last.

  “Surely you will.” Sir Hunnar had been standing in the shadows for an indeterminate length of time, watching Elfa. Now he moved into the light, speaking gently as he took her arm. “But not now, later. We must free ourselves first.”

  She tried to pull free of his grasp. For a moment the
green cloak and wraps she was wearing slid loosely aside. Ethan saw scars and markings he wished he had not.

  “I will remove his fur one hair at a time,” she continued, in a tone that chilled Ethan’s heart. She made no move to cover herself.

  “Yes, but later, later. I promise.” Hunnar fixed her cloak. How he kept his voice low and easy was something Ethan was never able to figure out. Now he slid an arm around her shoulders.

  With an effort, Teeliam replied to September’s question. “Faint hope lies this way.” She started down the corridor, toward the cells farthest from the stairway. Ethan and September followed. With Hunnar’s support, a glaze-eyed Elfa stumbled uncertainly in their wake.

  At the far end of the dungeon they found another doorway. It was low for a Tran, blocked up with masonry and cordoned off with braided pika-pina cable.

  “It is told that in ancient times the worst offenders of the laws were put through there. A tunnel lies beyond. Where it leads to is not spoken of. But it is a place far from here.”

  “Good enough for me,” said September, approving the plan. “Why is it sealed up?”

  “Four Landgraves ago, the histories say, it was decided the punishment was too severe for even the murderers of children.”

  “Wonderful,” Ethan murmured, eying the doorway as if some inconceivable horror might at any moment burst through the stones to devour them.

  “Where does it go?” A prosaic query from the Slanderscree’s reluctant, but ever-curious Captain Ta-hoding.

  Teeliam turning, told him. “It goes down to Hell.”

  “Fine.” September smiled, “then I don’t expect we’ll be followed. At that moment he looked a bit like a daemon of the underworld himself. “Stand away.”

  After adjusting his beamer, he turned it on the sealed portal. The blue energy beam dissolved stone, cement, and pika-pina cable alike. There were mutters of awe from the Slanderscree’s sailors. They had seen the light knives of the outlanders in action before, but they hadn’t known they could burn through the unbreakable, fire-resistant pika-pina.

  Once he’d cut several horizontal lines in the barrier, September turned off the beam to conserve its charge and kicked out the remaining stones. They fell through with surprisingly little effort, though, as the old knight Balavere Longax commented, there was no reason for a really solid barricade, since no Tran would want to go through that doorway of his own free will.

  Ethan took one of the torches from its wall holder, stuck it through the opening. “It looks higher inside. There’s a tunnel, all right. It slopes downward.”

  An uncertain susurration sounded from the tightly packed crew-members. Hunnar faced them. “To stay here is to die. All who wish certain death may remain. Those who desire a chance for life, and revenge, may follow. Our human friends say there is no danger. They have not lied to us before. I do not believe they do so now.”

  Turning, he took a second torch and ducked beneath the low lintel.

  “I never said there was no danger,” Ethan told him.

  “Nor did friend September or Williams,” Hunnar replied, moving his head so as to see further down the tunnel. “I am not worried about danger ahead. Our sailors and knights will fight when they have to, but it is more dangerous to let them stew in their own imaginings.”

  The two started downward. They were quickly followed by September and Williams, Ta-hoding, Balavere, and Hunnar’s two squires. When Teeliam and Elfa went in turn, the murmuring among the crew changed from fearful to embarrassed. In twos and threes, they grabbed torches, muttered of lost hopes, and followed after.

  The tunnel was just high enough to permit an adult Tran to walk upright. Though an icepath led steadily downhill, the crew did not take advantage of it to move rapidly. They picked rather than chivaned their way downward and were quite content to follow the cautious pace of the chivless humans. Huge stone blocks formed walls and ceiling.

  Without references, time rippled—it became blurry and indistinct. “How deep do you think we’ve come?” Ethan asked Williams later.

  “Hard to say, Ethan.” The schoolteacher missed a step, caught himself, and stared meaningfully at the ceiling. “Sixty, maybe seventy meters below the castle. Maybe more. And we’ve come a fair linear distance as well.”

  Continuing to descend sharply, the tunnel showed no sign of ending. They stumbled on and on. No mysterious spirits of the underworld materialized to torment them. A breeze blew steadily at their backs, pungent with the odor of the now distant dungeon.

  Unexpectedly, the character of the tunnel changed. The roof overhead and the walls flanking them gave way from hewn stone to a material the color of creamy ceramic. Ethan touched the wall nearest, scraped at it with a gloved finger. It came away in reluctant splinters: ice.

  He could see the stones behind the layer of ice. Once again the sailors began conversing worriedly among themselves. They were a brave group, but they were walking into the nightmares of their cubhood, and it shook the most stalwart among them.

  “Nothing to be gained by going back,” said September quietly. He pulled his beamer and they continued downward.

  Several times the marchers paused to rest. Hunnar and Balavere were convinced it was safe to do so. Even if their escape had been discovered, the Poyos were unlikely to organize pursuit, convinced that the denizens of the underworld would rid them of their former prisoners. That belief was shared by the majority of the Slanderscree’s crew.

  Before long they began moving again. “No telling how deep we are now,” Williams muttered to himself. “Pressure appears unchanged.”

  September halted abruptly, his head cocked to one side. He had his face mask open and appeared to be listening intently. The line backed up behind him.

  “Hear something, feller-me-lad?” Ethan strained to pick out an unknown sound from the background noise of several hundred respirating humans and Tran.

  The sound he settled on was difficult to distinguish because it sounded something like breathing itself. A faint, distant groaning and gurgling. “We can’t go back now.” He took over the lead, extending his torch ahead of him. The noise grew louder. Despite knowing better, he had to admit it sounded very much like a sleeping daemon softly snoring.

  They reached a bend in the tunnel, turned it. The pathway leveled out. Ethan stopped. Anxious queries came from behind him. Turning his beamer on, he set it for the widest possible, most diffuse beam. It lit up an incredible sight.

  At some unguessable time past, tremendous heat had melted out the vast cavern they gazed upon. Columns of ice did not so much support as decorate the ceiling; which was festooned with dead icicles. The roof itself was only five or six meters above their heads, but it stretched off into distances unreached by the blue glow of the beamer.

  No snuffling efreet or djinn lay waiting to greet their eyes. The sound came from black water—unfrozen, liquid, free-flowing water that stretched off to merge into a black horizon with the far reaches of the ceiling. It lapped gently, echoing through the cavern, against an icy beach a few meters away. Ethan identified the subtle odor that he’d been smelling for the last several minutes: salt.

  Williams’ gaze was focused on the ceiling formations. “We’ve come down through the ice sheet and emerged outside the island proper. There must be one or two hundred meters of solid ice above us.”

  Terrified, childish mewings were coming from some of the crew members. A few dropped to their knees and began imploring whichever gods they believed in to take pity on them. Ethan saw resignation and the anticipation of death in several furry faces.

  Even the knowledgeable, unsuperstitious Eer-Meesach was shivering with fear. It is one thing to dismiss stories and legends of fanciful places as inventions utilized by adults to frighten and compel children. It is quite another to confront them as reality.

  Balavere Longax, Sofold’s greatest general, announced easily, “We shall all die.”

  “Not unless we have to swim.” September’s habit of confron
ting danger with humor hadn’t left him. The greater the threat, the more irreverent his comments. He left the tunnel and strolled carefully across the ice to the water’s edge. “Maybe it’s hell to you, but I find the quiet and openness kind of attractive.”

  To his surprise, Ethan had discovered he was also trembling. The giant’s words brought him back to normal. This was a Tran conception of Hell, not his. It was only a cold, dark place.

  Holding his torch firmly he moved to join September. A glance over the frozen berm showed nothing but fluid blackness. It was as if he were staring upward at the night sky instead of down into the bowels of some primeval ocean. And like the night sky, this subterranean sea blazed with stars and nebulae of its own.

  Thousands of tiny luminous creatures darted and jerked their way through the inky water. Green, hot pink, bright yellow, crimson, and cherry red—every imaginable color indentified some small blazing bit of existence. Compared to this well of magnificence, where every creature no matter how small was cloaked in gems, the atmospheric world above seemed drab and dull.

  Ethan grew aware of another figure come up alongside him, but did not shift his gaze from that shimmering palette of life. “How can they live down here, Milliken, beneath the ice?”

  “Perhaps there is vegetation which releases oxygen slowly, or volcanic production of gases.” The teacher shrugged. “Evidently there is enough to sustain a multitude of forms.”

  “It is very beautiful.” Ethan spun. Elfa was standing behind them, peering almost shyly into the glassy blackness. She smiled hesitantly at Ethan. He couldn’t help but smile back. She was not fully recovered, but she was no longer in shock.

  His gaze traveled to the glistening icicles, false stalactites, to the columns that exploded torchlight into a thousand tiny replicas of its source, none of which could match for diversity and beauty the swimming bead-shapes of the water dwellers. How lovely is Hades, he mused, when it is other than one’s own. Why, it was neither hot nor fearsome here, and there was no wind at all.