Alan Foster - The Icerigger Trilogy

So the same act that might condemn a man to death on one world could make him hero on another.

A servant told Ethan that on awakening Williams had been visited by no less a personage than the great wizard himself. So those two were off again somewhere trading anecdotes and information.

The du Kanes were keeping to their room. As for Walther, he was allowed out under guard for exercise only.

That left him alone to explore the town and the castle.

Several days of comparative freedom from official dinners and such gave him time to examine Wannome in more depth. In many ways it resembled a host of small ancient terran walled towns. Especially those few that had been preserved as historical monuments. Ethan knew a little of them from school and the traveldees.

Personally, he’d never been able to afford a trip to the home world. Nor had the company found it fit or necessary to send him. Someday, perhaps…

But there were endless differences.

For example, there were none of the fountains that decorated so many human and thranx towns. Naturally not. Not when it would require constant heating to keep the water flowing.

Alternatively, many of the houses sported fantastic roof decorations carved in ice, often by very young cubs. The inhabitants were gruff, but friendly. By the second day they’d gotten over their fear/uncertainty and had grown positively effusive. Clearly the word had been passed that the humans were not only guests but special favorites of the Landgrave. And he who favors one favored by the Landgrave favors himself—a universal tenet, if differently expressed, he reflected.

The cubs were a total and unexpected delight, rolling, bouncing, chivaning balls of fur that surrounded him wherever he went and threatened to get all tangled up in his clumsy legs. The blatantly displayed fact that he possessed neither chiv nor dan both astounded and delighted them. No doubt they looked on him as a new variety of friendly freak, a silly goblin called up just to please and delight them.

He visualized them lying in the street, running blood, impaled on pikes, and decided that if he’d been in Hunnar’s place he would have fought for this chance to resist as soon as he’d grown old enough to articulate his position.

Or would you, my good salesman? Sure you wouldn’t have found it more expedient to buy another two or three years of safety, of good business? Eh? So certain of your conscience?

The thought bothered him and he shook it off without resolving it. Of course it was tough to get out of the habit of buying peace. But it could grow too comforting, too degrading. A dedicated pacifist, he found himself shocked at what a few days on this backward world had done to his comfortable picture of the universe. Weren’t the commercial practices of some of the great companies just as bloodthirsty and ruthless, if more discreet? Didn’t Sagyanak have his counterparts in polished boardrooms and his spirit back of major stock manipulations?

By the end of the first week he’d already grown a little bored with Wannome. Even the harbor, with its ever-shifting panorama of rafts and cargoes, was growing stale. Heart and soul he was a big-city boy. While he could trade, and trade well, on the most primitive worlds, it was the thought of mechanized comfort and sybaritic civilization awaiting his return that pushed him along. His was most definitely not the soul of an outdoorsman.

None of the captains he talked with, nor any of their crewmembers, had ever heard of Arsudun Island or Brass Monkey. Nor had they visited The-Place-Where-The-Earth’s-Blood-Burns.

It was a fine, sunny day—meaning that the temperature was within cozy distance of freezing and some tran were going without coats. And you didn’t have to lean into the wind to stay in one place. He met Colette in the hall. When she finally confessed to boredom exceeding his, he proposed that they explore some more of the island.

Hunnar took a few minutes away from his frantic preparations to provide them with instructions on how to get around. Certain sections of the island would be easier for them to see than for a tran, while others would be just the reverse.

A set of rations from their store of food, and they were off.

It was steep climbing to the saddle between the mountain tops. But from there the view, as Colette described it in one of the few complimentary adjectives Ethan had heard her use, was “magnificent.”

From here one could look up to the sharp crags on either side that formed the high points of Sofold Island. To the east you could look down across the tightly packed, steep-gabled roofs of the city, then out over the busy harbor, with its ever-moving commerce and dozens of flashing painted sails, to the great harbor walls and the endless ice beyond.

This they’d anticipated. What surprised and pleased them was the view in the other direction.

Coming eternally from the west, the wind hit them hard when they topped the last rise. Below them, a long, broad plain spread out, dotted here and there with farms and clusters of little stone buildings. Herds of vol and monkey-like hoppers were visible in distant fields. Squares of crimson laisval, the local substitute for wheat, were patches of billowing flame in the bright sunlight.

Beyond, he could make out a field of green extending as far as he could see in a great fan shape toward the horizon like the tail of some monstrous bird-of-paradise. Off to the left, kilometers across the ice, he thought he could detect another patch.

Their guide, a sprightly adolescent named Kierlo, explained what it was. “There, noble sir and madame, grows the great pika-pedan, in a field greater than several Sofolds. There the thunder-eater comes to browse.”

“I’ve heard so much about this thunder-eater,” said Ethan as they strolled along the broad path that ran along the crest, “that I’d like very much to see one close up.”

The youngster laughed. “No one goes to look at the thunder-eater close up, noble sir.”

“It’s vicious, then?”

“No sir. Not vicious. But it can be very irritable, like some k’nith.”

Ethan knew the k’nith. A small animal like a hairy rat. He found it repulsive, but it was apparently a favored pet among the cubs of Wannome. They seemed affectionate, despite their fearsome appearance, and tended to explode into frenzied squalling at the tiniest upset. The cubs found such outbursts amusing.

Clearly they were more tolerant of their pets than a human child, who would have grown disgusted with a k’nith in a day or two. The climate even made for hardier pets, he mused.

“I’d like to see the foundry,” he said suddenly. It dawned on him that they must be quite close to this major source of Wannome’s wealth and power.

“Yes, lord.” The youth turned down a narrow path that Ethan would have walked right past. Once around a bend in the rock, he could see smoke from the mountaintops once again.

The foundry itself occupied a little valley. It was small to the eye, even tiny, at first. But once they drew nearer, he could see that much of it was cut into the naked rock and built into caverns to take advantage of the heat rising from deep within the planet’s crust.

From this area of the crest he could see that several of the crags were old volcanic cones. Most were dead or dormant, but a few puffed black smoke skyward. All of the craters sloped to the west and had been invisible from the city side.

Wannomian smelting and metal-working turned out to be an odd mixture of primitive technology and some surprisingly advanced techniques. The drawing and tempering of sword blades, for example, and of spear points.

The foundry head was in Wannome conferring with the military councilors. They were met by Jaes Mulvakken, the assistant chief.