by Ian Irvine
‘I can’t,’ Nish said tersely, for his chest hurt more every minute, and he wondered if he might not also have broken a rib. ‘You don’t know where the flaw in the ice is –’
‘You said it was near the end of the nose.’
‘That’s a big area. Besides, you don’t know how to shift the ice.’
‘How are you going to shift it?’ said Clech.
‘With the serpent staff.’ He hoped. It had grown hot when he’d first seen the fissure in that flash of clearsight.
Aimee gave an audible gulp. Clech’s eyes flicked nervously away.
‘All right. Follow me,’ she said. ‘Clech, don’t move until Nish is spiked down, and whatever you do, don’t fall. We’d never haul your great mass of blubber up again; we’d have to cut you loose.’
The joke fell flat, for they all knew it to be true. Her eyes glistened, then she turned away abruptly and began to move along the outer curve of the nose, just before it dropped away almost sheer. The ice sheet formed a thick curved cap over the top and overhung the sides, ending in a ragged fringe of icicles, many as thick around as Nish’s thigh.
‘If we climb in underneath the ice we might find it easier,’ said Aimee.
Nish doubted it, but he wasn’t the mountaineer, so he nodded stiffly.
‘Fix on tight,’ she added. ‘I’ll swing in.’
He fixed a spike in a crack, checked it twice and said, ‘Go.’
Aimee lowered herself over the edge, between a pair of icicles, and began to swing back and forth, a spike ready in her right hand. The rope tightened on Nish’s harness, digging into his chest and groin. He could hardly bear to watch as she moved in and out between the icicles, and could not see how she would get a grip on the steep rock behind them, halfway down the side of the nose.
The rope tightened and she didn’t come out.
‘Aimee?’ he called, his voice cracking. If she fell, he would not know until her weight came onto his line.
After a long pause she said, ‘Fixed it good and tight. Come down.’
He glanced up at Clech, who nodded. ‘Ready.’
Nish looked over the edge, not liking the thought of hanging over that terrible fall again, with just a rope between himself and oblivion, especially since it could all be for nothing. What if he got to the flaw in the ice and could not unleash the fire in the serpent staff?
What if clearsight failed him again? He unclenched his jaw, which he’d clenched so tightly that his back teeth were aching, and began to go down.
Shortly he was hanging on the line, looking in underneath the ice. Aimee was standing up on a narrow ledge, holding the rope for him.
‘Swing in between the icicles,’ she called.
He swung his legs back and forth, though it did not move him inwards measurably. He swung harder, to no effect. ‘Sorry, I’m just not a mountaineer.’
‘I’ll have to pull you in,’ sighed Aimee, rolling her eyes.
She gave a great heave on the line just as Nish swung forwards, legs wide, and he tilted over and slammed, groin first, into an icicle the width of a flagpole.
‘Aaahh!’ he roared, then cut off the involuntary cry, praying that it had not been heard. Tears welled in his eyes; he doubled up as the pain rang right through him, and began to revolve on the rope.
‘Sorry,’ said Aimee, turning him the other way until the rope untwisted, then pulling him between the icicles, under the lip and onto the ledge.
Nish lay there with his knees drawn up, for the pain was so bad that he could not move. By the time it began to diminish, Clech was down and onto the ledge without incident.
‘We’ll leave that spike in place,’ said Aimee, ‘so we can get out again.’ She looked down at Nish, evidently deciding that he was all right and it was time to get her own back. A mischievous light danced in her round eyes. ‘Do you want me to check, in case you’ve broken something?’
Clech chuckled.
Why was a blow to the male groin so damned amusing? ‘No thanks,’ Nish said curtly. ‘Can we get on?’
‘It looks like an easy climb from here down to the knob of the Emperor’s Pizzle,’ said Aimee, still grinning. ‘We can follow this ledge most of the way, then step down onto a lower ledge for the last bit.’
The ledge sloped outwards, was icy and at no point was more than Nish’s foot’s length across, yet, compared to what they had done already, it would be an easy path. He could just make out the lower ledge in the drifting mist, but not where it led to.
With the marvellous split spikes securely embedded in the rock he felt relatively safe negotiating the upper ledge and then the lower one, until it petered out at the side of the knob. Here the mass of ice overhung so thickly that, even when Aimee swung well out from the ledge on her rope, she could not see the side.
‘It’s worse than I’d thought,’ she said, swinging back. ‘I don’t know how we’re supposed to get up on top from here. Where was the flaw in the ice sheet, Nish?’
‘It can’t have been far from here …’ I hope. ‘Keep looking. I’ll try my clearsight again.’
‘While you do, we’ll go under and check the other side.’
Clech and Aimee spiked on and made their way under the tip of the nose out of sight, leaving Nish alone on the ledge. He checked that his spikes were tight and his rope secure, and closed his eyes the better to use clearsight.
It didn’t come but he was not unduly concerned – he often had to fight to get anything out of it. He’d always supposed that was due to his clearsight being created by his father’s Profane Tears – and they would not want to help him unless he was in the most dire peril.
It was miserable here, for the overhanging ice seemed to be radiating cold down on him, while the icicles reminded him unpleasantly of the bars of his stinking cell in Mazurhize prison, where he’d spent ten agonising years, aching with grief for Irisis, fighting his father, and failing every time. The wind had picked up and began to shake the transparent tips of the icicles, fetching brittle notes out of them.
He strained until his heart pounded and he felt it skip a couple of beats, but the cursed clearsight told him nothing. A shriek echoed up from the slot, someone dying in agony. How many of his militia were left, out of the five hundred who had set out from Gendrigore in such high spirits a few weeks ago? Fifty? Forty? Thirty? At this rate they’ll all be dead by sunset, Nish thought. I gambled with their lives and lost.
The wind was hissing between the icicles now, generating a mournful humming like a hymn for the dead. The mist whipped around him, then thinned until he could see, as though through a strip of gauze, the enemy advancing steadily up the gully towards the eastern entrance. The line appeared to extend down for half a league, and they were moving with a deadly purpose. Had the pass fallen?
He could not tell, for a patch of mist clung to the slot. He strained to see through it, heart hammering, then it blew away and he made out his proud, exhausted defenders, standing in an arc behind the blocked entrance, ready to reinforce the men holding it when they fell, or became so exhausted that they could no longer wield a sword. Tears stung his eyes. He tried to count the defenders but could not complete the tally, for they kept moving. Certainly less than fifty, though.
And the enemy? Nish could tell, without counting, that there were three or four hundred on the upper track, while the blur of red uniforms extending down the gully and spreading across the lower mountainside to their encampment must contain thousands of men.
They did not matter, though. The hundreds on the upper track were sufficient to finish the job, and even if he could wipe a few dozen out with some falling ice, it would amount to no more than a punch in the nose for Klarm. The end was no longer in doubt.
I don’t suppose it ever was, Nish thought wearily. Did I ever really hope to defend the pass and hold the enemy back? Only around the camp fire on the first few days, when the wine was flowing and the Gendrigoreans were treating the affair as a great adventure, a walk in the mountains an
d then a triumphant return, unscathed.
They had never expected to see the enemy, much less fight them, for the Range of Ruin had, one way or another, beaten every army to invade their little nation in the past thousand years. Nish had hoped and prayed that it would defeat his father’s army, too, though deep down he’d known that it would not. Jal-Nish was too powerful, and too careful. He could not bear to lose, so he made sure he thought of everything that could go wrong before he set out.
Everything except Stilkeen!
Distantly Nish made out the gentle tapping of Aimee inserting her spikes into ice. Nish could tell it was her, because she did it delicately, while Clech drove his spikes home with a single forceful blow. It didn’t sound as though they would be back in a hurry and now, studying the arrangement of forces below, Nish knew the end was not far away. If he was to bloody Klarm’s nose in a last futile act of defiance, he had to act at once.
Taking the serpent staff off his back and gripping it below the head, he held it up. Again he sensed that fiery heat churning within it. His head throbbed twice and the eyes of the serpent appeared to blink, though when he looked again they were solid iron like the rest of it.
But the ice wasn’t. The light brightened a little and he saw that, some distance beyond the end of the ledge, the overarching dome of ice had a flaw in it. It was visible as a faint blue line curving across the base. Was that the fissure he’d seen from below, with clearsight? He could not tell from here; he had to get closer.
‘Clech!’ he yelled. ‘Aimee, I think I’ve found it.’
No reply. He called again, but did not expect an answer, for they must be on the other side of the nose by now and his voice would not be heard over the wind.
There wasn’t time to go after them – the slot could be taken in minutes and, once it had been, the pass was lost and their efforts up here would be wasted.
The serpent staff was even hotter now, almost burning him. Was it trying to tell him something? It had to be and, acting on intuition, Nish poked the ice at the end of the ledge with the tail. Ssssss. The ice liquefied, revealing that the ledge continued on.
Anxious about the time, he unfastened his rope, left it hanging from the spike and stepped out, his boots taking a comforting grip on the rough surface. He prodded ahead and again, with a faint hiss, the ice turned to water, revealing the ledge beneath.
Nish wasn’t consciously doing anything with the Art – he had no gift for it – so it had to be the staff. To test it he reached behind him and prodded a wart of ice sticking out from the side. Nothing happened, yet whenever he touched the ice ahead it liquefied.
How did the staff know where he needed to go? Was it still linked to the caduceus, or to Stilkeen? Surely it must be. Because he was doing what Stilkeen wanted?
Afraid that he was, Nish grounded the staff for a moment, then continued, knowing that he had no choice. The ice grew ever thicker above him, the curved flaw brighter, but how was he to dislodge the ice from beneath and survive? Or was he meant to die in the attempt?
He looked back but there was no sign of Clech or Aimee. He prodded the rock ahead; this time nothing happened. Had he used up the power of the staff already? Surely not – it belonged to an immortal being.
He reached towards the curving flaw in the ice and it melted and flowed before he had touched it. The staff was definitely leading him, but where? How could it know, anyway? And then he had a really unpleasant thought. What if Stilkeen could see out of the serpent’s eyes?
He shuddered and almost threw the staff away, thinking that he held a live iron snake. Or did its master maintain a presence within it? He started to turn the head of the staff towards him, then stopped hastily. If Stilkeen was looking out through those eyes, Nish definitely did not want to look into them.
With no other choice, he followed the path which the staff was melting, up through the base of the ice just before that curving fissure. Now, with each probe of the serpent’s tail, the ice above him turned to water and gushed down on his head and shoulders.
Nish had to keep wiping his face before the water refroze. Shaking from the cold, he dragged himself up the slick-walled meltwater cavity by digging a spike into the ice. His clothes crackled with every movement and shed tiles of ice below him. His boots filled with water but Nish dared not stop to empty them. There wasn’t time.
He squelched up and up, feeling the water turning to a churned-up mush in his boots; he had to stamp harder to keep the blood circulating. He had climbed several spans up into the ice sheet, following a path coiled like a corkscrew, and with every step it grew darker.
What would happen if he reached the flaw – indeed, in such gloom, how would he know he had? What if he broke through it? If the ice at the tip of the nose began to slide, with him inside, there would be no way out. Stilkeen’s revenge?
And yet, one quick death was much the same as another and there was no point dwelling on it. He continued corkscrewing up and shortly realised that it was lighter above him than below – he must be near the top of the ice sheet. Quick, now! Nish thrust up the tip of the staff as hard as he could and, with a hiss like water spilled on a hotplate, broke through.
He scrambled up onto the top of the ice and found that the rising knob at the end of the great nose was not far below him, like the wall of a dam holding back the monumental mass of ice.
He scuttled down the slippery surface, over a narrow, deep crevasse a couple of spans from the end of the ice sheet, and thence onto the solid, secure rock of the knob. Behind him, the crevasse in the ice went down for spans; it had to be the flaw he’d seen from below.
But would the staff unbind the ice below the crevasse and make it fall? He crawled to the tip of the knob and peered over, careful not to make a silhouette against the sky.
His militia still held the slot, but bands of the enemy were hauling up scaling ladders made from slender tree trunks, which they must have carried for leagues, since there were no trees within sight. Nish could not imagine how the enemy would stand their ladders against the barricades on the steep ground on either side of the slot, but with enough men they could hold them in place by hand. Why didn’t the militia shoot them?
None of Nish’s archers were firing; they must have used all their arrows. Gloom settled over him – the pass must fall within minutes. Aimee and Clech weren’t visible from the left side or the right, nor did they answer his calls. He presumed they were still on the other side of the nose, looking for a way up.
After emptying out his boots and wringing the water from his socks, he tried to decide what to do. He could not wait, for hundreds of the enemy had massed far below him in the broad, shallow bowl where he had almost fallen in the assault on the slot. The instant the scaling ladders were up, they would rush the slot and burst through by sheer weight of numbers.
‘Clech, Aimee!’ he called, as loudly as he dared. Still there was no reply.
Nish paced back and forth on the centre of the knob. If he freed the ice at the end and they happened to be climbing it, they would die. But if he waited much longer, the pass, the battle and the war would be lost.
Besides, the ice could take a while to get going, and in the unlikely event that Clech and Aimee were on the small wedge at the end, they should have time to scramble back to safer ground. At least, he hoped so.
He had to act now. He went back to the crevasse, which ran across the ice for three or four spans. Ice must fall every summer, he thought, although that was still some months off. Yes, that must be how the bowl had formed below him, the successive impacts of thousands of years of ice smashing the surface to dust and grit.
‘Here goes,’ Nish muttered, and raised the staff.
Again the serpent’s eyes glittered, but this time a pearly drop appeared at the tip of each fang. He shook the drops off before they landed on his wrist and they fell into the crevasse.
He checked the fangs, which thankfully were clear of any more venom, and was lowering the tail of the staff into
the crevasse, hoping it was the right thing to do, when he made out an echoing, satisfied ssss. The ice let out a mournful groan, and the whole ridge shuddered.
‘Nish?’ came Aimee’s voice from way below him, echoing hollowly up the hole he’d melted in the ice.
‘Up on the centre of the knob,’ he said in a low but carrying tone.
‘What have you done?’ She sounded afraid.
‘Nothing yet, but I’m about to. Are you spiked on?’
The ice gave a deeper groan.
‘No, we’re coming up your tunnel.’
Nish had a sudden vision of coming disaster, and nearly choked. ‘Go back to the ledge and spike on, quick! Keep your heads down and hang on tight.’
He heard her speaking to Clech, then their scrambling footsteps. Was she going down or coming up? Either way he could do nothing to help her for, with a crack, crack, crack, the crevasse lengthened to left and right, breaking the tight weld of ice to rock, then widening and deepening until he could see down three spans, five, now all the way down.
Way down there, something as pearly as snake venom shimmered, ssss. With a deeper groan, the last ice-weld tore and the wedge of ice below the crevasse cracked in the middle and began to slide to left and right.
‘Aimee?’ Nish shouted over the noise. ‘Run!’
There was no reply. She would not have heard him over the grinding and crackling. The whole out-jutting nose seemed to be shaking now, its knobbly tip shuddering so hard than he fell to his knees. Icicles were falling from the fringes of the ice sheet. He scrambled down towards the steeply sloping tip of the nose, heedless of the danger, and looked to left and right, but Aimee and Clech were still concealed by overhanging ice.
The troops gathered in the bowl were staring up – he could make out the ovals of their upturned faces. Could they see him? There was no point in concealment now – indeed, they should know that the coming ice fall was no accident, but the deliberate action of their enemy. And so should his militia, who needed all the help they could get.
Finding a secure place to stand on the tip of the quivering knob, he stood up straight and waved his arms. The enemy troops cried out, and pointed. Someone aimed a crossbow up at him, but Nish gave him the finger; being an expert with that weapon, he knew that he was out of range.