Alan Foster - The Icerigger Trilogy

Fortunately, the thunder-eaters had poor vision and poor hearing. They had no need for these faculties, having nothing to be alert against. The beast slid past, its blunt tail-end vanishing in quest of body and skull, without taking any notice of the Slanderscree or its anxiously silent crew.

It was gone, though they could still hear it eating its endless meal as it moved steadily off to the west.

Difficult as it was to be objective when confronted with so over-poweringly grand an example of nature’s diversity, Ethan estimated its length at somewhere between seventy and eighty meters. A mature specimen, but from what he’d been told, not an exceptionally large one. He’d seen bigger himself. He doubted this one weighed more than two hundred fifty tons.

They should have waited another half hour, to be safe, before getting under way, but the sailors were growing restless. Fear that the thunder-eater would perhaps change its path (they were notoriously unpredictable in their habits) and charge down upon them poisoned the sailors’ blood with fear. Finally, even the patient Ta-hoding could stand the waiting no longer.

“All sail on, snap to the windwhips!”

The ice anchors had long since been hauled in. Ponderously, but with far more grace than the thunder-eater, the Slanderscree began to move forward. Ship’s bones groaned as the five duralloy runners broke clear their slight accumulations of drifted snow and ice.

The grinding of the runners became a slick abrasive noise as the huge ship picked up speed. Two, four, ten, fifteen kilometers an hour. Twenty. Thirty and a familiar whisking zing rose from where duralloy lacerated ice. They were nearing the end of the brief clearing the crew had bought from the forest.

“Hard a’port! Sparmen swing-ho!”

Both helmsmen strained at the massive wooden wheel. Inefficient muscle worked where hydraulics would better have served. A nerve-scraping screel came from the fifth runner, the steering runner, as it slowly turned. Sailors aloft fought to adjust sail and trim adjustable spar lines.

And steadily, with unexpected sharpness, the Slanderscree hove to port.

Both helmsmen struggled to hold the wheel steady as their feet left the deck. September threw his mass on the port side of the wheel and Ta-hoding added his. With four bodies straining, the runner stayed turned and the ship continued to come around even as her speed increased.

Then Ta-hoding and September could let go. The feet of the starboard side helmsman touched wood again as the extreme angle of turn was relaxed. They were racing down a broad avenue of clear ice cut by the stavanzer.

On command the two helmsmen let go the wheel, to allow the ship to settle on her own forward heading. With the westwind directly behind them now, there was no worry of swerving violently from the trail. The wheel turned freely to a halt, spinning fast enough to crush a man’s skull. The helmsmen resumed their positions, tested the wheel and found it handled easily once more.

At sixty kilometers an hour they rushed down the slough. Pika-pedan pulp stained the ice below the runners, and the unbroken growth paralleling them became a green blur on both sides of the ship. With the wind behind them, muffled by the surrounding forest, they seemed to fly below the surface instead of above it, submerged in emerald silence.

The quiet made audible to the relaxing crew the horrified shriek of the foremast lookout.

Ethan looked forward, ignorant of the loss of precious seconds. One, no two gigantic black pits like the mouths of caves were coming toward them, completely blocking the trail. As they raced nearer, a mysterious whisper became a fearful murmuring, then a tornado of roaring and bellowing that shook his teeth inside his head.

Ta-hoding desperately shouted instructions to the mates and the men in the rigging, trying at the same time to direct his helmsmen.

Again the steering runner turned, terror lending the Tran at its spokes a strength normal minds and bodies never possess. Again it dug and chewed at the ice. The Slanderscree angled to the south, slamming into the forest with a deck-sloshing spray of shattered stalks and sap. But now the ship was moving so fast the forest offered no real impediment. Pika-pedan trunks vanished on all sides as the weighty bulk of the icerigger slashed through.

They were off the occupied trail.

And several gray curves showed above the crest of the forest like islands in a pea-green sea.

“Turn!” Ethan found himself pounding the railing and yelling till his throat hurt. “ Turn !”

There were commands, but the experienced sailors knew the chance they had to take and the action to make it happen. Everyone on the deck and in the rigging rushed as fast as he or she was able to the starboard side of the ship.

With the steering runner hard over until its bolts creaked, the sails properly trimmed, and all movable mass shifted to one side, the Slanderscree ’s portside runners lifted with infinite slowness from the surface of the ice ocean.

A few centimeters, a half meter, two meters. A few sailors wrestled their way back to portside. The ship held, heeling dangerously far over on its right side, balancing now on two runners. The duralloy would hold, but what about the iron and steel bolts and wooden braces holding the runners to the ship? All sailors aloft held on for their lives. If they fell overboard now, into the forest, they knew they could expect no rescue.

Ethan saw wood and sky as he looked toward the left side of the ship. A voluminous black gullet like an empty place in space loomed over the far railing. There was the sound of an intimate thunder, and suction tore at him, then was gone. Two tusks, each thicker than the Slanderscree ’s mainmast, caught the sun and sent it tumbling into his mask, temporarily blinding him.

“By the Servants of the Dark One, she’ll go over!” someone howled.

The tusks came down, fourteen meters of solid ivory, tons of beauty in the mouth of a demon.

But by that time the ship had already shot past. Ethan leaned over the railing to look back, saw the tusks strike ice and send ten-kilo splinters flying. A tiny wild eye, set back of that monstrous maw, rolled dully at him and he fancied he could see through it and into a ridiculously small brain.

Dimly, he was aware of mates shouting orders. Spars were realigned, sails trimmed. Slowly the ship settled back to an even keel. A dull thrrrump sounded, like a titanic belch, as the port-side runners smashed back onto the ice. A wooden brace somewhere below deck cracked audibly, but both runners held.

Everyone had expected the impact, held on through the violent jarring. No one was shaken over the side.

“Too close,” Hunnar muttered as he mounted the helmdeck. The knight was panting steadily, Ethan noticed. As for himself, he was sweating heavily despite the survival-suit’s compensators. Thermotropic material can adjust only so fast.

Ethan moved carefully down to the main cabin. Anything still intact in the galley and capable of being heated would taste good just now.

He encountered Eer-Meesach at the doorway. They entered together.

“’Twas a herd guide we first encountered, not a solitaire or rogue.” The wizard, for once, did not appear excited by an interesting encounter. “In a herd, the stavanzer will proceed and eat in parallel line. We ran back along the guide’s trail, right into their line, and barely did we miss the end guards.”

Ethan saw too clearly in his mind’s eye the final bottomless gullet they’d just avoided. It was probably only his fevered imagination, distorted in his memory by fear and terror, but the last stavanzer had looked big enough to swallow the entire ship and use the mainmast for a toothpick.