Alan Foster - The Icerigger Trilogy

September looked disappointed. “Mountaintop’s better. You sure can take all the romance out of speculating young feller-me-lad.”

Ethan gave September a look which clearly said, believe what you want. He turned to go back to the ship, and fell flat on his face after taking only a few steps.

No one found it funny. For so short a journey, neither human had bothered donning his skates, but that wasn’t what had caused Ethan to fall.

Three… no, four, tiny cream-white tendrils had erupted from the ice and locked around his right ankle. Now they were stretched taut, pulling him downward. Ice began to crack in sheets around his prone form. Ethan fought for a grip on the slick surface. His hips were already vanishing beneath the surface when he managed to lock both arms around a pika-pedan stump. It broke off in his arms like rotten punk.

By then Hunnar and September had come up alongside him. Hunnar drew his sword, but September waved him away.

“For God’s sake, Skua, hurry up!” Perversely, Ethan clung to his fragment of pika-pedan, though it was no better anchored than he.

September, sighting carefully on a point just behind and slightly to Ethan’s left, depressed the stud of his beamer. There was the snake-talk sound of steam boiling away. It was followed, joined by a stench as of rotting pork. The tendrils wrapped around Ethan’s leg did not let go, but the pulling stopped.

Meantime, Hunnar had moved around to grab Ethan’s wrists. Digging his chiv sideways into the ice and using the stubby braking claw in his heel, he started to move slowly backward. Ethan came free of the hole in the ice. Attached by its tendrils to his leg, the almost-victor came out after him. It had a smoking gash in its side.

Others had heard the cries and the hiss and light of the beamer. A small mob of concerned Tran was bearing down on the three from the ship. Eer-Meesach, helped along by Williams, was among them.

Ethan, panting heavily inside his suit mask, turned on his back, sat up, and gazed in disgust and fear at the creature attached to his ankle. “What is it?”

Hunnar had his knife out and was slicing through the clinging tendrils. Ethan let out a relieved sigh when he saw that the powerful grip hadn’t torn his survival suit.

Pale white with gray blotches and spots, the thing was three meters long, not counting the tendrils. It showed four wide, plate-sized eyes, two atop the dorsal side and two on the ventral. The four tendrils were spaced evenly around the blunt end of the head. Between them, slack and open, was a circular mouth lined with triangular serrated teeth. The jaws were protruding outside the lips, showing wet and shocking pink against the whiteness of the epidermis. Ethan considered what those teeth would have done to his leg had he slid just a little farther beneath the surface.

“Tis a kossief,” Hunnar replied thoughtfully, studying the ghostly corpse. This translated very crudely to Terranglo in Ethan’s mind as an ice worm.

“They burrow just beneath the surface and wait for some unfortunate creature to stumble across their portion of ice, which they hollow out until only a thin layer remains above them.” The knight kicked at the rubbery body. “They strike upward, break through the thin ice and drag their prey down into their burrows. Then they exude water through this,” he indicated a protruding organ near the creature’s rear, “and reform the ice shell over them.”

Ethan studied the toothed worm with distaste as he massaged his leg where the beast had grabbed him. “I can see how they can cut their way through the ice, with those teeth.”

“Neatly, too,” said an admiring September. He was standing in the bow-like hollow that had been the creature’s home. His head was just barely even with the surface.

“Are there others that live beneath the surface of the ice?” Williams was examining the dead worm with as much interest as Ethan had shown disgust

“Many and various, my friend,” discoursed Eer-Meesach. “We see them little around Wannome. They are more prevalent at the other end of Sofold Isle, where the pika-pina fields grow. It is interesting to learn that they flourish also here, among the pika-pedan.”

“Can we take it back aboard?” Williams looked hopeful.

“Why of course, we must,” said the Tran wizard. Ethan said nothing. He gained some measure of satisfaction in learning that he wasn’t alone in his squeamish attitude toward the creature. The two men of learning had a hard time cajoling a pair of sailors to carry the rubbery body back onto the ship.

September had concluded his own examination of the kossief’s house. Ethan gave him a hand out and thanked him simultaneously.

“I’d feel better about acceptin’ your thanks, lad, if it’d been less of a near thing. I missed my first shot. The ice here is pretty clear, but I could see just the barest outline of a shape down there and forgot to allow for diffraction.” He glanced back at the ominous hole. “Let’s get back aboard—and let’s both watch our steps…”

It took four days to properly repair the huge runner. They were in a race with the cut-over pika-pedan, which grew in behind the icerigger to heights of six and seven meters and pressed insistently against the bottom of the raft.

Williams paced anxiously about, trying to form botanical and zoological expeditions to search out the secrets of the homogenized forest. Even Eer-Meesach had sensed enough danger to veto those suggestions. No man could tell what lurked in the depths of such dense aggregations of verdure. The horrors that were known, such as the kossief, were enough to keep a prudent man aboard his ship. No need for them to hunt up new, exciting ways to die.

The disappointed schoolteacher still found enough wild life nearby to keep him occupied. Like a child playing with a new toy, he watched fascinated as another kossief living near the first took a six-legged herbivore browsing among the dried-out stalks behind the ship. Its flat crab eyes rolled in terror as dull grinding teeth snapped futilely at the leather-tough tendrils dragging it downward.

Ethan watched also, his a fascination of a different kind. The herbivore’s scream was no less pitiable for its alienness. He had a chance to see what his own fate would have been had September not rescued him.

As soon as the kossief had sucked enough blood out of the hapless grazer to immobilize it, the burrower generated heat. Ice melted beneath them both, refroze above them, sculpted and filled by water from the anal nozzle Hunnar had pointed out. Safely protected from scavengers and nonburrowing predators by a meter and a half of rock-hard ice, the kossief settled in to enjoy its meal.

Ethan shuddered. Not a neat way to die. He made a personal promise never to venture alone where either variety of the triangular green plant grew.

On the last day the sailors sped their repairs at the news that a lookout had heard the distant, reverberant cry of a droom. Fortunately, the monster did not come near enough to be seen and the prevailing wind was away from the direction of the cry.

Small four-legged quns the size of Ethan’s hand roamed up and down nearby stalks of mature pika-pedan, burrowing and eating their way in and out of the thick trunks like mice turned loose in a king-sized cheese. They began near the crest of a stalk and munched their way downward, leaving nothing to waste. They preferred damaged or sick stalks, thus helping to preserve the vitality of the forest.

Ethan’s favorite was a thing Eer-Meesach called a meworlf. It had a sausage-shaped body from which dangled thin, jointed, two-meter-long legs. A sack ran the length of its cylindrical back. When inflated, the sack swelled to balloon size. Maneuvering on the subdued breeze within the pika-pedan, the meworlf would drift from stalk to stalk, anchoring itself with four of its ten wiry limbs to a selected trunk and using the other six to pluck away bits of plant and convey them to the small mouth. When finished feeding, the meworlf would remain bobbing lazily in the breeze or release its grasp and let the wind carry it through the forest, bouncing like a ball from one stalk to the next.