Alan Foster - The Icerigger Trilogy

Mottled brown and black, splashed higher up with ice and snow—fourteen kilometers of vertical hell shrouded in polar ice and rock. It was magnificent, awesome, and a little bit frightening.

“Well, no hallucinations so far,” Ethan mused.

“How,” Colette snapped back, “could you tell the difference?”

Williams voice sounded behind them. “I’d very much like to land.”

Ethan turned. Eer-Meesach was there, too. “Really, Milliken, in light of the past weeks, don’t you think…”

A huge paw came down easily on his shoulder. “We did leave without properly fixing the bowsprit, friend Ethan,” said Hunnar. “Nor did the crew receive their promised chance for a rest on shore.”

“You’re not afraid the spirits and goblins will object?”

The knight didn’t smile. He gazed over the ice at the sky-rubbing cone.

“As a cub I might have been. As a younger man I’d have been uncertain. But the wizards have explained to me what it really is, a thing neither supernatural nor inherently inimical, and I am not afraid.”

They followed the jagged shore southward, searching for a place to put in. Hundreds of meters of broken, tortured rock fell in undisciplined cataracts onto the clear ice. But nowhere did it level off.

Just as they rounded the southern tip of the island-mountain, hitting into the wind again, the plutonic crust abruptly gave way to a smooth, level stone beach. Ropy lines of pahoe-hoe marched gently into the frozen sea.

They tied up half into the wind, still protected by the sheltering bulk of the volcano. Ice-anchors were used this time, set with care and precision under Ta-hoding’s experienced watch. Once again the repair crew set about their tasks—for the last time, one hoped.

Considering what they’d gone through the past weeks, though, there were none who blamed the craftsmen for an occasional over-the-shoulder glance. You couldn’t be too sure that the ground would not still deliver up yet another fiendish surprise, hey? So the carpenters and sailweavers worked a little slower, a little more observantly.

Roiling blackness. Distant night-stars of plasmoid terror. Vast spaces unmeasureable. False concepts of life and death. The living dark came, a loathsomeness of long licorice tentacles and soul-draining fangs.

It groped for him in the emptiness, reaching, twisting. He ran faster and faster on a sea of gurgling tar, an oil-sky overhead. The ocean grabbed and tugged at him. Down he looked and saw in horror that it wasn’t a sea at all. He was running on the back of an amorphous amoeba that humped and shook and laughed.

He tried to jump, but now fat greasy pseudopods held him firm. All about the nightmare, shapes flowed up and around. In the middle of each the faces of things not human chuckled and puckered at him.

Black fronds clutched tighter, enveloping, suffocating. He tried to scream and one of the inky ropes dove down his throat, choking him. They crawled over his eyes, under his ears, into his nostrils. Cilia brushed and tickled obscenely.

He couldn’t breathe. He coughed, gagged. The thing in his throat was curling into his belly, swelling, filling him with gravid blackness.

The interior of the cabin was dark, too. But it was a comforting, familiar, prosaic dark—not sticky, not malevolent, not full of nightmare shapes. Despite the cold he was sweating profusely and heaving like he’d just finished marathon.

Shaking, he reached for the lamp, then caught himself. His hand paused in mid-air, drew away slowly. No… no. It was a bad dream. Nothing more. Happens to everyone.

He put both hands on the bed, palms flat against the blankets and furs, and lay down slowly, staring at the bare outline of the ceiling. With a conscious effort he closed his eyes and breathed out, long and low. Then he hunched slowly on his side and fluffed the blanket under his head.

His last thought before falling asleep was that he hadn’t had a nightmare since childhood. He wondered about it, for a second.

Morning light bit like a mosquito. The volcano did not shine or sparkle in the false alpenglow. If anything, the black volcanic rock absorbed the light. Only at upper elevations did ice and snow work to do eye-pleasing things with the rich light.

A dark, brooding ziggurat, the mountain gave no hint of the burning core that steamed in its depths. Even the cloud-scudding black smoke was a cold coal.

There was nothing so palpable as an air of menace about the mountain, but neither was it pleasant to be near. It needed companion mountains, a sibling range around its base, before mere humans could relate to it. Alone, it was as impersonal and alien as a lost moon.

Ethan leaned on the rail and gazed at the ropy beach. He’d almost have preferred to stay on board, but there was always the thin chance that something interesting might turn up. He only stumbled once as they made their way across the ice and onto the rock. Small cause for pride.

On the frozen lava the humans had an advantage over their tran companions. The natives had to pick their way carefully on unclad feet over the nastier sections of aa and scoria.

The two wizards could have gone by themselves. However, someone had to go along to tell the two learned beings when it was time to return to the Slanderscree. Left to themselves, they would wander about the island til dark, get lost, and then there’d be a broken leg or twisted ankle and the hard work of carrying them back to the ship in the dark.

The slopes of the gigantic cone seemed to soar up and up into the opalescent blue until they merged at the artist’s vanishing point. You could tell there was a top only because of the black smoke that issued there from somewhere in the clouds.

Well, they could spend the morning picking around at the rocks in the shelter of the east slope, acquire a few specimens, and return to the ship. The rocks ought to keep Williams and Eer-Meesach occupied and out of trouble until they’d reached Arsudun.

Ethan didn’t expect any surprises—even Williams had enough sense to forgo suggesting an ascent—but he hadn’t counted on the cave.

It was well concealed by rock and low brush as he walked past the entrance. It looked no different from any other section of immolated stone. Only the early morning light shining straight into it gave any hint that it might be larger than the thousands of similar pockets which dotted the lava. He bent and peered inside.

It was large enough for a tran to walk upright in, so he called the others over.

“Fascinating,” said the schoolmaster, staring inside. Before anyone could stop him, the teacher had stepped carefully over a chunk of aa and was standing on the smooth floor of the cave.

“Get out of there, Milliken,” said September. “The whole business could come down on you any second.”

“Pish-tosh! This is a structure built by nature, not mere man, Mr. September. Once a tube like this has been formed, it will remain so until a violent upheaval cracks the set rock. My dear Eer-Meesach, you must see this!”

“What is it?” The tran wizard had knelt slowly and was staring into the hole now.

Williams’ voice floated back from some ways in. “The walls of the tube are lined with a luminescent lichen or fungi of some sort. I can see quite clearly even though I’m well away from the entrance.” There was a pause. “It appears to extend into the mountain for some distance.”

“Then by all means,” replied Eer-Meesach, scrambling over the lip of the hole, “we must explore further.”

Hunnar looked resignedly at September. “I’d as soon wait here, Sir Skua. But those two would surely lose themselves at the first pairing of passageways.”

The big man dug into a coat pocket and pulled out one of the small compasses from the survival supplies.