‘The Arapay spoke of huge beasts,’ Rhulad cut in. ‘Brown-furred and tusked – we saw the ivory—’
‘Old ivory, Rhulad,’ Fear said. ‘Found in the ice. It is likely such beasts are no more.’
‘The Arapay say otherwise.’
Theradas grunted. ‘And they live in fear of the ice wastes, Rhulad, and so have filled them with nightmare beasts and demons. It is this: we will see what we see. Are you done your repasts? We are losing daylight.’
‘Yes,’ Fear said, rising, ‘we should go on.’
Rhulad and Midik Buhn moved out to the flanks. Both wore bear furs, black and silver-collared. Their hands, within fur-lined gauntlets – Arapay gifts – were wrapped round the long spears they used as walking sticks, testing the packed snow before them with each step. Theradas moved to point, fifteen paces ahead, leaving Trull, Fear and Binadas travelling as the core group, pulling the two sleds packed with leather satchels filled with supplies.
It was said that, farther out in the wastes, there was water beneath the ice, salt-laden remnants from an inland sea, and cavernous pockets hidden beneath thin-skin mantles of snow. Treachery waited underfoot, forcing them to travel slowly.
The wind swept down upon them, biting at exposed skin, and they were forced to lean forward against its gusting, frigid blasts.
Despite the furs enshrouding him, Trull felt the shock of that sudden cold, a force mindless and indifferent, yet eager to steal. Flooding his air passages in a numbing assault. And within that current, a faint smell of death.
The Edur wrapped swaths of wool about their faces, leaving the barest of slits for their eyes. Conversations were quickly abandoned, and they walked in silence, the crunch of their fur-lined moccasins muffled and distant.
The sun’s warmth and turn of season could not win the war in this place. The snow and ice rose on the wind to glitter overhead, mockinp the sun itself with twin mirror images, leading Trull to suspect that the wind held close to the ground, whilst high overhead the suspended ice crystals hovered unmoving, inured to the passing of seasons, of years.
He tilted his head to stare upward for a moment, wondering if that glistening, near-opaque canopy above them held the frozen memories of the past, minute images locked in each crystal, bearing witness to all that had occurred below. A multitude of fates, perhaps reaching back to when there was sea, in place of the ice. Did unknown creatures ply the waters in arcane, dugout canoes all those thousands of years ago? Would they one day become these Jheck?
The Letherii spoke of Holds, that strange pantheon of elements, and among them there was the Hold of Ice. As if winter was born of sorcery, as if ice and snow were instruments of wilful destruction. Something of that notion was present in Edur legends as well. Ice plunging down to steal the land that was soaked in Tiste blood, the brutal theft of hard-won territories committed as an act of vengeance, perhaps the gelid flowering of some curse uttered in a last breath, a final defiance.
The sentiment, then – if one such existed – was of old enmity. Ice was a thief, of life, land and righteous reward. Bound in death and blood, an eternal prison. From all this, it could earn hatred.
They continued through the day, moving slowly but steadily, through jumbled fields of broken, upthrust shards of ice that in the distance seemed simply white, but when neared was revealed to possess countless shades of greens, blues and browns. They crossed flats of wind-sculpted, hard-packed snow that formed rippled patterns as smooth as sand. Strange fault lines where unseen forces had sheered the ice, pushing one side up against the other, grinding opposing paths as if the solid world beneath them jostled in wayward migration.
Towards late afternoon, a muted shout from Theradas halted them. Trull, who had been walking with his eyes on the ground before him, looked up at the muffled sound and saw that Theradas was standing before something, gesturing them forward with a fur-wrapped hand. A few moments later they reached his side.
A broad crevasse cut across their path, the span at least fifteen paces. The sheer walls of ice swept down into darkness, and from its depths rose a strange smell.
‘Salt,’ Binadas said after pulling away his face-covering. ‘Tidal pools.’
Rhulad and Midik joined them from the flanks. ‘It seems to stretch to the very horizon,’ Rhulad said.
‘The break looks recent,’ Binadas observed, crouching at the edge. ‘As if the surface is shrinking.’
‘Perhaps summer has managed a modest alteration to these wastes,’ Fear mused. ‘We have passed sealed faults that might be the remnant scars from similar wounds in the past.’
‘How will we cross?’ Midik asked.
‘I could draw shadows from below,’ Binadas said, then shook his head, ‘but the notion makes me uneasy. If there are spirits within, they might well prove unruly. There are layers of sorcery here, woven in the snow and ice, and they do not welcome Emurlahn.’
‘Get out the ropes,’ Fear said.
‘Dusk approaches.’
‘If necessary we will camp below.’
Trull shot Fear a look. ‘What if it closes whilst we are down there?’
‘I do not think that likely,’ Fear said. ‘Besides, we will remain unseen this night, hidden as we will be in the depths. If there are indeed beasts in this land – though we’ve seen no true sign as yet – then I would rather we took every opportunity to avoid them.’
****
Wet pebbles skidded under his moccasins as Trull alighted, stepping clear of the ropes. He looked around, surprised at the faint green glow suffusing the scene. They were indeed on a seabed. Salt had rotted the ice at the edges, creating vast caverns crowded with glittering pillars. The air was cold, turgid and rank.
Off to one side Midik and Rhulad had drawn bundles of wood out from a pack and were preparing a cookfire. Binadas and Fear were reloading the sleds to keep the food satchels off the wet ground, and Theradas had set off to scout the caverns.
Trull strode to a shallow pool and crouched down at its edge. The saline water swarmed with tiny grey shrimps. Barnacles crowded the waterline.
‘The ice is dying.’
At Fear’s words behind him, Trull rose and faced his brother. ‘Why do you say that?’
‘The salt gnaws its flesh. We are at the lowest region of the ancient seabed, I believe. Where the last of the water gathered, then slowly evaporated. Those columns of salt are all that remains. If the entire basin was like this place, then the canopy of ice would have collapsed—’
‘Perhaps it does just that,’ Binadas suggested, joining them. ‘In cycles over thousands of years. Collapse, then the salt begins its work once again.’
Trull stared into the gloomy reaches. ‘I cannot believe those pillars can hold up all this ice. There must be a cycle of collapse, as Binadas has said.’ His eyes caught movement, then Theradas emerged, and Trull saw that the warrior had his sword out.
‘There is a path,’ Theradas said. ‘And a place of gathering. We are not the first to have come down here.’
Rhulad and Midik joined them. No-one spoke for a time.
Then Fear nodded and asked, ‘How recent are the signs, Theradas?’
‘Days.’
‘Binadas and Trull, go with Theradas to this place of gathering. I will remain here with the Unblooded.’
****
The path began twenty paces in from the crevasse, a trail cleared of cobbles and detritus that wound between the rough, crystalline columns of salt. Melt water dripped from the rotting ceiling in a steady downpour. Theradas led them onward another thirty paces, where the path ended at the edge of a vast roughly domed expanse devoid of pillars.
Near the centre squatted a low, misshapen altar stone. Votive offerings surrounded it – shells, mostly, among which the odd piece of carved ivory was visible. Yet Trull spared it but a momentary glance, for his gaze had been drawn to the far wall.
A sheer plane of ice a hundred paces or more across, rising in a tilted overhang – a wall in which countless b
easts had been caught in mid-stampede, frozen in full flight. Antlers projected from the ice, heads and shoulders – still solid and immobile – and forelegs lifted or stretched forward. Frost-rimed eyes dully reflected the muted blue-green light. Deeper within, the blurred shapes of hundreds more.
Stunned by the vista, Trull slowly walked closer, round the altar, half expecting at any moment to see the charging beasts burst into sudden motion, onrushing, to crush them all beneath countless hoofs.
As he neared, he saw heaped bodies near the base, beasts that had fallen out from the retreating ice, had thawed, eventually collapsing into viscid pools.
Tiny black flies rose in clouds from the decaying flesh and hide, swarmed towards Trull as if determined to defend their feast. He halted, waved his hands until they dispersed and began winging back to the rotting carcasses. The beasts – caribou – had been running on snow, a packed layer knee-deep above the seabed. He could still see the panic in their eyes – and there, smeared behind an arm’s length of ice, the head and shoulders of an enormous wolf, silver-haired and amber-eyed, running alongside a caribou, shoulder to shoulder. The wolf’s head was raised, jaws open, close to the victim’s neck. Canines as long as Trull’s thumb gleamed beneath peeled-back lips.
Nature’s drama, life unheeding of the cataclysm that rushed upon it from behind – or above. The brutal hand of a god as indifferent as the beasts themselves.
Binadas came to his side. ‘This was born of a warren,’ he said.
Trull nodded. Sorcery. Nothing else made sense. ‘A god.’
‘Perhaps, but not necessarily so, brother. Some forces need only be unleashed. A natural momentum then burgeons.’
‘The Hold of Ice,’ Trull said. ‘Such as the Letherii describe in their faith.’
‘The Hand of the Watcher,’ Binadas said, ‘who waited until the war was done before striding forward to unleash his power.’
Trull had thought himself more knowledgeable than most Edur warriors regarding the old legends of their people. With Binadas’s words echoing in his head, however, he felt woefully ignorant. ‘Where have they gone?’ he asked. ‘Those powers of old? Why do we dwell as if… as if alone?’
His brother shrugged, ever reluctant to surrender his reserve, his mindful silence. ‘We remain alone,’ he finally said, ‘to preserve the sanctity of our past.’
Trull considered this, his gaze travelling over the tableau before him, those dark, murky lives that could not out-run their doom, then said, ‘Our cherished truths are vulnerable.’
‘To challenge, yes.’
‘And the salt gnaws at the ice beneath us, until our world grows perilously thin beneath our feet.’
‘Until what was frozen… thaws.’
Trull took a step closer to the one of the charging caribou. ‘What thaws in turn collapses and falls to the ground. And rots, Binadas. The past is covered in flies.’
His brother walked towards the altar, and said, ‘The ones who kneel before this shrine were here only a few days ago.’
‘They did not come the way we did.’
‘No doubt there are other paths into this underworld.’
Trull glanced over at Theradas, only now recalling his presence. The warrior stood at the threshold, his breath pluming in the air.
‘We should return to the others,’ Binadas said. ‘We have far to walk tomorrow.’
****
The night passed, damp, cold, the melt water ceaselessly whispering. Each Edur stood watch in turn, wrapped in furs and weapons at the ready. But there was nothing to see in the dull, faintly luminescent light. Ice, water and stone, death, hungry motion and impermeable bones, a blind triumvirate ruling a gelid realm.
Just before dawn the company rose, ate a quick meal, then Rhulad clambered up the ropes, trusting to the spikes driven into the ice far overhead, about two-thirds of the way, where the fissure narrowed in one place sufficient to permit a cross-over to the north wall. Beyond that point, Rhulad began hammering new spikes into the ice. Splinters and shards rained down on the waiters below for a time, then there came a distant shout from Rhulad. Midik went to the ropes and began climbing, while Trull and Fear bound the food packs to braided leather lines. The sleds would be pulled up last.
‘Today,’ Binadas said, ‘we will have to be careful. They will know we were here, that we found their shrine.’
Trull glanced over. ‘But we did not desecrate it.’
‘Perhaps our presence alone was sufficient outrage, brother.’
The sun was above the horizon by the time the Edur warriors were assembled on the other side of the crevasse, the sleds loaded and ready. The sky was clear and there was no wind, yet the air was bitter cold. The sun’s fiery ball was flanked on either side by smaller versions – sharper and brighter than last time, as if in the course of the night just past the world above them had completed its transformation from the one they knew to something strange and forbidding, inimical to life.
Theradas in the lead once more, they set out.
Ice crunching underfoot, the hiss and clatter of the antler-rimmed sled runners, and a hissing sound both close and distant, as if silence had itself grown audible, a sound that Trull finally understood was the rush of his own blood, woven in and around the rhythm of his breath, the drum of his heart. The glare burned his eyes. His lungs stung with every rush of air.
The Edur did not belong in this landscape. The Hold of Ice. Feared by the Letherii. Stealer of life – why has Hannan Mosag sent us here?
Theradas halted and turned about. ‘Wolf tracks,’ he said, ‘heavy enough to break through the crust of snow.’
They reached him, stopped the sleds. Trull drew the harness from his aching shoulders.
The tracks cut across their route, heading west. They were huge.
‘These belong to a creature such as the one we saw in the ice last night,’ Binadas said. ‘What do they hunt? We’ve seen nothing.’
Fear grunted, then said, ‘That does not mean much, brother. We are not quiet travellers, with these sleds.’
‘Even so,’ Binadas replied, ‘herds leave sign. We should have come upon something, by now.’
They resumed the journey.
Shortly past midday Fear called a halt for another meal. The plain of ice stretched out flat and featureless on all sides.
‘There’s nothing to worry about out here,’ Rhulad said, sitting on one of the sleds. ‘We can see anyone coming… or anything, for that matter. Tell us, Fear, how much farther will we go? Where is this gift that Hannan Mosag wants us to find?’
‘Another day to the north,’ Fear replied.
‘If it is indeed a gift,’ Trull asked, ‘who is offering it?’
‘I do not know.’
No-one spoke for a time.
Trull studied the hard-packed snow at his feet, his unease deepening. Something ominous hung in the still, frigid air. Their solitude suddenly seemed threatening, absence a promise of unknown danger. Yet he was among blood kin, among Hiroth warriors. Thus.
Still, why does this gift stink of death?
****
Another night. The tents were raised, a meal cooked, then the watches were set. Trull’s was first. He walked the perimeter of their camp, spear in hand, in a continuous circuit in order to keep awake. The food in his stomach made him drowsy, and the sheer emptiness of the ice wastes seemed to project a force that dulled concentration. Overhead the sky was alive with strange, shifting hues that rose and fell in disconnected patterns. He had seen such things before, in the deepest winter in Hiroth lands, but never as sharp, never as flush, voicing a strange hissing song as of broken glass crunching underfoot.
When it was time, he awoke Theradas. The warrior emerged from his tent and rose, adjusting his fur cloak until it wrapped him tightly, then drawing his sword. He glared at the lively night sky, but said nothing.
Trull crawled into the tent. The air within was damp. Ice had formed on the tent walls, etching maps of unknown worlds on the st
retched, waxy fabric. From outside came the steady footsteps of Theradas as he walked his rounds. The sound followed Trull into sleep.
Disjointed dreams followed. He saw Mayen, naked in the forest, settling down atop a man, then writhing with hungry lust. He stumbled closer, ever seeking to see that man’s face, to discover who it was – and instead he found himself lost, the forest unreadable, unrecognizable, a sensation he had never experienced before, and it left him terrified. Trembling on his knees in the wet loam, while from somewhere beyond he could hear her cries of pleasure, bestial and rhythmic.
And desire rose within him. Not for Mayen, but for what she had found, in her wild release, closing down into the moment, into the present, future and past without meaning. A moment unmindful of consequences. His hunger became a pain within him, lodged like a broken knife-tip in his chest, cutting with each ragged breath, and in his dream he cried out, as if answering Mayen’s own voice, and he heard her laugh with recognition. A laugh inviting him to join her world.
Mayen, his brother’s betrothed. A detached part of his mind remained cool and objective, almost sardonic in its self-regard. Understanding the nature of this web, this sideways envy and his own burgeoning appetites.
Edur males were slow to such things. It was the reason betrothal and marriage followed at least a decade – often two – of full adulthood Edur women arrived at their womanly hungers far earlier in their lives It was whispered, among the men, that they often made use of the Letherii slaves, but Trull doubted the truth of that. It seemed inconceivable.
The detached self was amused by that, as if derisive of Trull’s own naiveté.
He awoke chilled, weak with doubts and confusion, and lay for a time in the pale half-light that preceded dawn, watching his breath plume in the close air of the tent.
Something gnawed at him, but it was a long time before he realized what it was. No footsteps.
Trull scrambled from the tent, stumbling on the snow and ice, and straightened.
It was Rhulad’s watch. Near the dead fire, the hunched, bundled form of his brother, seated with hooded head bowed.
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