Alan Foster - The Icerigger Trilogy

Before long they began moving again. “No telling how deep we are now,” Williams muttered to himself. “Pressure appears unchanged.”

September halted abruptly, his head cocked to one side. He had his face mask open and appeared to be listening intently. The line backed up behind him.

“Hear something, feller-me-lad?” Ethan strained to pick out an unknown sound from the background noise of several hundred respirating humans and Tran.

The sound he settled on was difficult to distinguish because it sounded something like breathing itself. A faint, distant groaning and gurgling. “We can’t go back now.” He took over the lead, extending his torch ahead of him. The noise grew louder. Despite knowing better, he had to admit it sounded very much like a sleeping daemon softly snoring.

They reached a bend in the tunnel, turned it. The pathway leveled out. Ethan stopped. Anxious queries came from behind him. Turning his beamer on, he set it for the widest possible, most diffuse beam. It lit up an incredible sight.

At some unguessable time past, tremendous heat had melted out the vast cavern they gazed upon. Columns of ice did not so much support as decorate the ceiling; which was festooned with dead icicles. The roof itself was only five or six meters above their heads, but it stretched off into distances unreached by the blue glow of the beamer.

No snuffling efreet or djinn lay waiting to greet their eyes. The sound came from black water—unfrozen, liquid, free-flowing water that stretched off to merge into a black horizon with the far reaches of the ceiling. It lapped gently, echoing through the cavern, against an icy beach a few meters away. Ethan identified the subtle odor that he’d been smelling for the last several minutes: salt.

Williams’ gaze was focused on the ceiling formations. “We’ve come down through the ice sheet and emerged outside the island proper. There must be one or two hundred meters of solid ice above us.”

Terrified, childish mewings were coming from some of the crew members. A few dropped to their knees and began imploring whichever gods they believed in to take pity on them. Ethan saw resignation and the anticipation of death in several furry faces.

Even the knowledgeable, unsuperstitious Eer-Meesach was shivering with fear. It is one thing to dismiss stories and legends of fanciful places as inventions utilized by adults to frighten and compel children. It is quite another to confront them as reality.

Balavere Longax, Sofold’s greatest general, announced easily, “We shall all die.”

“Not unless we have to swim.” September’s habit of confronting danger with humor hadn’t left him. The greater the threat, the more irreverent his comments. He left the tunnel and strolled carefully across the ice to the water’s edge. “Maybe it’s hell to you, but I find the quiet and openness kind of attractive.”

To his surprise, Ethan had discovered he was also trembling. The giant’s words brought him back to normal. This was a Tran conception of Hell, not his. It was only a cold, dark place.

Holding his torch firmly he moved to join September. A glance over the frozen berm showed nothing but fluid blackness. It was as if he were staring upward at the night sky instead of down into the bowels of some primeval ocean. And like the night sky, this subterranean sea blazed with stars and nebulae of its own.

Thousands of tiny luminous creatures darted and jerked their way through the inky water. Green, hot pink, bright yellow, crimson, and cherry red—every imaginable color indentified some small blazing bit of existence. Compared to this well of magnificence, where every creature no matter how small was cloaked in gems, the atmospheric world above seemed drab and dull.

Ethan grew aware of another figure come up alongside him, but did not shift his gaze from that shimmering palette of life. “How can they live down here, Milliken, beneath the ice?”

“Perhaps there is vegetation which releases oxygen slowly, or volcanic production of gases.” The teacher shrugged. “Evidently there is enough to sustain a multitude of forms.”

“It is very beautiful.” Ethan spun. Elfa was standing behind them, peering almost shyly into the glassy blackness. She smiled hesitantly at Ethan. He couldn’t help but smile back. She was not fully recovered, but she was no longer in shock.

His gaze traveled to the glistening icicles, false stalactites, to the columns that exploded torchlight into a thousand tiny replicas of its source, none of which could match for diversity and beauty the swimming bead-shapes of the water dwellers. How lovely is Hades, he mused, when it is other than one’s own. Why, it was neither hot nor fearsome here, and there was no wind at all.

A whirlpool of luminescent life eddied ecstatically in the pale blue light of his beamer. He turned it downward, piercing the water to a depth of several meters. It was as if the beamer were a vacuum, sucking up ever more delirious dancers from the depths below.

The water erupted, sent them stumbling or falling backward.

Ethan saw a mouth. Rubies and emeralds, tormalines and topazes, ozmidines, ferrosilicate crystals mirror-bright decorated the cavern within a cavern. Stalactites and stalagmites of vitreous, transparent teeth lined the jaws. Around it was a face wide and fat like a toad’s, with a single searchlight of a mad vermilion eye above the bejeweled mouth. Black, slick flesh rippled in folds around eye and mouth, a pulpy envelope to hold organs loosely in place.

Whatever it was, it had been drawn from familiar depths by Ethan’s bright beam. Brave as they were some of the sailors fainted in place. Others forgot discipline and command in their rush to squeeze themselves back up the tunnel.

September and Williams already were firing at the apparition with beams tighter and more deadly than Ethan’s, while he strove frantically to readjust the setting on his own. Each time a blue beam touched the creature’s flesh the hallucination-made-real produced a gargantuan grunt. The humans fired as they retreated back toward the tunnel.

Mouth and eye rose roof high above the water and, hunched after them. Several more bolts struck it. The tumorous shape came down on the ice beach with a crash that echoed energetically ‘round the cavern, generating a low splintering sound. It lay still and unmoving, quartz teeth shining in the torchlight, the single round eye with its absurdly small black pupil staring blindly at them.

Screaming still sounded from up the tunnel, however, Hunnar had his sword out and was trying to force his way through the panicked mob.

“Cowards of Sofold! The daemon is dead, slain by the light knives of our friends who are half your size!” The mad rush upward slowed, ceased. Screams became anxious or uneasy murmurs. “When you are finished whimpering, you may rejoin us.” He sheathed his sword and deliberately chivaned downward at top speed, showing blatant disregard for what might await him within the cavern.

Gradually the sailors drifted after. They spread out below the tunnel mouth to gaze in delicious horror at the hellbeast resting on the ice. It was no less fearsome and not the least bit comical for having a body that was one-third head.

Displaying utter indifference to post-dying reflexes, September strode up to the creature which Eer-Meesach had already dubbed Kalankatht (which translates from the Tran roughly as “beast-which-is-all-teeth-and-no-tail”) and stuck his head into the gaping mouth. Frozen open, the upper jaw was still a meter above his hooded head.

Though two meters long on average, the transparent teeth were no thicker around than a man’s finger. There were hundreds in the chamber-sized maw. Short, delicate-looking fins projected from back and sides, while the blunt tail was flattened vertically for swimming and steering. It could not be very fast in pursuit of its prey, but it could bite at a lot of ocean.