Ian Esslemont: Blood and Bone

‘Ice crag!’ came the panicked yell from above.

Pretty damned late! Shimmer grabbed her gear and ran for the deck. Up top she found open panic as the sailors ran about, yet the captain was calmly shouting and pointing: ‘Shanks, inspect the damage! Why aren’t the pumps sounding? Stow that cargo!’

She crossed to the slim figure of K’azz, peering over the side. ‘What happened?’

He shrugged. ‘Some sort of submerged ice mountain no one saw. Sideswiped us.’

‘Bad?’

‘We’ll see.’

Everyone took a hand at the pumps. A bucket line was organized. All the while the ship’s carpenter and his apprentices were below inspecting the damage. Finally, Shimmer was waved to where the captain, K’azz and Rutana were speaking with the carpenter, Shanks.

‘Not at sea,’ the carpenter was saying as he shivered, sodden, his lips blue.

‘No choice,’ the captain growled.

‘Something temporary, perhaps?’ K’azz suggested.

‘Land!’ came a shout from the lookout, startling everyone.

The captain scowled behind his beard. ‘Are you daft, man!’ he bellowed back. ‘There’s no land here!’

‘Ice!’

The captain and the carpenter shared a wary glance.

‘What is it?’ K’azz asked.

‘The floating ice field,’ Rutana answered after neither of the sailors responded. ‘Haunted. No one goes near it.’

‘No choice, I should think,’ K’azz said. He gave the captain a speculative look. ‘We’ll heave up and repair on the ice.’

The captain waved his dismissal. ‘This is no slim galley. We don’t have enough hands to heave up on to the ice.’

‘We have enough mages — isn’t that so, Rutana?’

The woman’s hard gaze narrowed, perhaps at the implied challenge, then she sneered her answer. ‘Of course!’

The captain ordered a narrow set of sail and they limped slowly towards the distant white line to the west. They slipped under high clouds and a snowfall began of thick huge flakes that Shimmer could almost hear hissing as they touched the wood of the ship. The captain knocked the snow from his shoulders and tangled hair as if it were some sort of contagion. Watching Shimmer’s amusement at the man’s antics, Rutana crossed to her side to explain: ‘Many name this the Curse of the Demons of Cold. The Jaghut. Somewhere within, a shard of their frozen realm, Omtose Phellack, endures. It is the cause of this. And it hates us — all who are not of their kind.’

‘Or perhaps it is we who hate all others who are not of our kind,’ K’azz observed from nearby.

The Jacuruku envoy appeared surprised by the suggestion — and she startled Shimmer by nodding even as she scowled. ‘You are right to say so.’

Once the ship came close to the edge of the vast plain of ice, a party containing the Avowed mages Gwynn and Lor-sinn, together with Rutana and Nagal, disembarked to prepare a surface for the vessel. Shimmer watched from the railing while some sort of chute was melted in the jagged shore. Then the crew fixed lines and almost everyone disembarked. With the aid of the mages and Nagal and Rutana, the Serpent was slowly eased up, stern first, on to the carved chute of gleaming ice.

That night they camped on the ice. The captain and crew jumped at every crack and rumble and shot anxious glances to the tall mounds of jumbled shelves that looked to Shimmer like a giant’s heap of carelessly piled timber. The captain had even insisted that pickets be posted, though the waste appeared devoid of all habitation. K’azz acquiesced, murmuring to Shimmer that in fact there might be carnivorous beasts about.

Shimmer agreed to the pickets, but she did not think anyone at risk, what with the Avowed present, plus the Jacuruku emissaries. That night, while doing a tour of the perimeter, she found K’azz out on the ice with Turgal. The latter still preferred heavy armour, as had been his habit. He now wore a cuirass of banded iron with mail skirting and a large shield on his back, all beaten and badly scraped. The long grip and pommel of a hand-and-a-half blade stood tall from the sheath at his side. The two stood staring off to the west across the ice field. She joined them to scan the plain, which was brilliantly lit by the Great Banner arcing high like a sickly bruise across the night sky.

After seeing no movement at all among the ink-black shadow and nauseatingly green snow, she asked, ‘What is it?’

‘Do you not sense it there?’ Turgal asked, his voice hoarse, as if from disuse.

‘Sense what?’

‘The shard our Jacuruku emissary spoke of,’ K’azz explained.

‘Shard?’

‘Omtose Phellack,’ Turgal added, his breath pluming. ‘The ice-magery of the Jaghut. Don’t you sense it there?’

‘No.’ Shimmer almost added I am no mage , but snapped her mouth shut, realizing and neither are they. How then …? Well, K’azz invoked the Vow after all. Perhaps that gave him some sort of privileged insight. But Turgal? Why should he possess such an awareness?

And yet … there were times when she sensed people nearby before seeing them; and the Jacuruku emissaries — their potency buzzed at her awareness like two distracting flies. So, perhaps she should not be surprised .

‘A danger?’ she asked.

K’azz shook his head. ‘No. It is fading. In a hundred years, who knows? All this may be gone.’

A wind sharp with cold blew particles of ice into Shimmer’s eyes and bit at her naked hands. ‘Yet to have endured for so long … Why now?’

The snow crackled beneath K’azz’s boots as he shifted his stance. ‘It seems that perhaps we live now in an age when the old is passing away.’ He cocked his head, thinking. ‘Yet does it seem this way to us merely because we are living now? Or does every age feel the same to those who live through it? Every age, after all, is an age of transition from what came before to what will follow.’

Turgal gave a soft laugh in appreciation of the point. ‘A question for the cross-eyed philosophers of Darujhistan I think, Duke.’

‘No. Let us have mercy upon them. They are cross-eyed enough.’

‘Come,’ Shimmer urged, motioning to the tents. ‘This inhuman cold grips my bones.’

K’azz eyed her, surprised. ‘You are cold?’

All the crew and the Guard lent a hand to the repairs, which were completed in less than three days. Their fourth and last night, Shimmer suddenly awoke in the utter darkness. She knew that something powerful was approaching; she did not know how she knew, but she was certain of it. In the dark she pulled on her long mail coat, belted on her whipsword, and ducked out of the tent.

Outside it was quiet but for the snow and ice particles hissing wind-driven against the hide tents. That and the stentorian snoring of a few of the sailors. And it had to be the sailors, for Shimmer saw that her fellow Avowed were awake already. Like ghosts summoned to some haunt, the figures of her companions walked silently among the tents, tying their last knots, adjusting belts, gathering to the west where they formed line — all without any given order.

She joined them next to K’azz. ‘What is it?’ she whispered, her breath steaming.

Without shifting his slit gaze from the darkened ice field he answered, ‘Not certain yet. But close.’

Shimmer signed ‘ Ready ’ to the left and right. Turgal unsheathed his massive hand-and-a-half blade and raised his shield. Amatt drew his heavy broadsword and likewise readied his wide infantryman’s shield. Cole, who fought after the two-sword style, stepped aside a way for room to slide free his twinned longswords. Lor-sinn and Gwynn took up positions behind the line.

‘Ware!’ Gwynn warned, his voice taut with anticipation.