David Drake - Godess of the Ice Realm

"Mistress?" Layson said, his voice rising between the syllables. "Why is it we're stopping here? There's no shelter!"

Nor was there. The ship coasted to a halt and overbalanced onto its right side. When the vessel lost way, the wind ripped across them. The flecks of snow that'd merely given the gusts visual presence to those inside the cocoon of Alfdan's wizardry now cut like a sandstorm.

Sharina tugged the bearskin close, but the wind lashed her legs and the rabbitskin sandals were little protection against the ice underfoot. She and the others dropped to the ground and hunched in the lee of the Queen Ship. It was slight protection but there was nothing else in this landscape.

Neal lifted Alfdan from the ship. The wizard was mumbled. Neal, bending his ear close to Alfdan's lips, frowned in incomprehension. Alfdan waved or pointed to the east.

"What he's trying to say…," Beard said in a loud, piercing tone. "Is that if you dig into the dip there in front of you, you'll find that it's a hole filled with windblown snow that you can go through in time not to freeze. It leads to a tunnel in the ice that'll shelter you for the night."

The axe laughed. "Assuming that the beetle who dug the hole doesn't come back, of course," he added. "The grubs eat the algae, as you saw-but the adults need more nourishing fare to breed."

Sharina stamped across the frozen terrain. Even with her feet numbing, she could feel the change from solid ice to the crunch of grains barely cemented by contact and the pressure of the driving wind.

"Here, start digging!" she shouted. "Neal, get them digging!"

Scoggin and Franca had come with her. They bent and chopped at the ground with their spearpoints, sending ice up to sail away on the wind in flurries. The rest of the band joined immediately, except for Neal who-holding the wizard in one arm like a half-empty grain sack-took charge.

"Moster, Dalha, and Toldus!" he said, raising his voice against the wind. "Lay your capes on the ground. The rest of you, dump the spoil on the cloth. Dalha you idiot, lay your cape on the downwind side!"

Sharina nodded approval. The band didn't have proper digging equipment, so without an expedient like the one Neal'd chosen they'd just shove the ice around in the hole rather than removing it. The men he'd told to take off their warm coverings had done so without argument. They trusted Neal to act in all their benefit.

And they trusted Sharina as well, because they were men with a desperate need to trustsome body. They hadn't lost their faith in God, exactly, but it was all too clear that She was against them.

"Wah!" Burness shouted as he and another man slid out of sight. The rest of those in the pit either scrambled out or thrust whatever they were digging with into the side to hold them steady.

"Hey, we're in a tunnel!" Burness cried, his voice a deep echo of its normal self. Those outside the pit bent over the edge to listen, while the men clinging to the sloping walls cocked their heads. "Hey, there's ahouse down here!"

"If you all plan to stand here and end your miserable lives by freezing," said Beard loudly enough for the whole band to hear him distinctly, "then I won't try to change your minds. But otherwise, don't you think it'd be a good idea to get under cover now that you're able to?"

Sharina pointed to the hole with the butt of the axe. "Franca!" she said. "Go."

The youth's jaw dropped slackly, but he jumped into the hole without hesitating. She expected him to go feet-first, but instead he dived with his arms out before him as if he were entering the water.

As soon as Franca had disappeared, the rest of the band slid or scrambled to follow him. Shouts and complaints reverberated. Sharina, Scoggin, and Neal holding the comatose wizard were the only ones who remained in the wind.

"Go!" Neal said to her. "Scoggin, you follow and I'll hand Alfdan to you through the hole, all right?"

Sharina set her bearskin on the ice and slid to the bottom of the slope. She spread her feet to either side of the opening to catch herself, then dropped through holding Beard overhead. She didn't want to open somebody up when she hit the ground.

Actually, she landed on Layson, on all fours and trying to get up. He snarled a curse, then realized who it was. "Here, mistress!" he said and whisked her out of the way before Scoggin dropped where she'd been.

The roof of the tunnel was about six feet high. The floor was stone, an ancient lava flow; it was warm beneath the skin of water trickling over it. The frozen walls shone azure and crimson in concert with the sky; instead of filtering the wizardlight, the ice seemed to amplify the glow into evil brilliance.

At the inland end of the tunnel was a house, just as Burness had said. It was a low, dome built from the rib bones of whales; feathers of baleen chinked the interstices. It must have dated from well before She came: a shelter for whalers trying out their catch on shore and perhaps wintering over if they were caught when the seas skirting the Ice Capes froze early.

"The ground's warm!" one of the men said. He must only now have noticed it. "Why's that?"

"The volcano, Bayber," Layson snapped as he helped Scoggin bring Alfdan up the tunnel. They transported the wizard with with his arms over their shoulders. His toes dragged. "There's a vein of lava under the rock here, I shouldn't wonder. What we saw up on of the mountain had to come from somewhere, right?"

"You mean we're sittingon lava?" a short, shaggy man demanded. "Hey! What if it breaks out?"

"If you had nothing worse to worry about than the volcano," said Beard in a clear, cutting tone, "then you'd live longer than I expect to be the case."

The axe chortled metallically and added, "But oh, it will be a splendid time! Thelives Beard and his mistress will drink, oh! Splendid!"

"Can't you shut him up?" Burness muttered, but it wasn't a serious complaint. Sharina recalled that he'd been with Alfdan the longest, which meant he'd seen more of the wizard's companions die than anybody else in the band. The others might pretend to themselves that Alfdan would save them, but Burness couldn't do that.

"Hush, Master Beard!" Sharina said in the crisp voice she'd have used to an affectionate drunk when she was serving drinks in her father's taproom. "You're discourteous."

The axe sniffed, but he subsided.

Several of the men had already entered the building. It was fairly large, twenty feet by ten on the long and short axes. "Hey, there were people here," Offlan said. "The ashes in the hearth still have the shape of the wood!"

"That's not wood," said Beard. "There's no wood here. They were burning bones, and of those there's no lack "

Looking at the edges of the tunnel, Sharina saw that the bottom of the ice had been chiseled out for some distance along the former shoreline. The strand would've been covered by the debris the whalers had left. The bones' fatty marrow would make them excellent fuel once they'd been chopped from the ice.

"Where'd they go, then?" Neal said. He'd followed Scoggin and Layson, nervous about leaving Alfdan in their care but unwilling to insist that they let him carry the wizard instead. "There's nowhere but the other way in the tunnel, is there?"

"There's down a beetle's belly," said Beard. "Which is where they went, all three of them, and only last night. They'd lived here ten years, ever since She came and the ice locked in their boat; and now they're gone. Mostly."

"Oh," said Sharina, glancing at something glistening in the water, half hidden where the ice had been dug out. It was a right foot, shoeless and filthy looking, severed raggedly at the ankle. "I see what you mean."

"The tunnel goes down to the water," called one of the pair of men who'd gone in the other direction without anybody telling them to. "There's a trotline out to sea on driftwood floats."