‘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.