David Cook - Soldiers of Ice

Three steps and Martine reached the inner rim. There she halted, dumbfounded by the grotesque landscape below her. From the air, she had only seen how the rift spread like a starlike crack a half-mile or so in length, but now, close up, she could see the canyon bottom. The canyon floor flowed impossibly, like water—no, she decided, more like gelatin or unset custard. The surface rippled in smooth waves that still glistened with the shining hardness of ice. Where the waves broke like water against the canyon walls, the spray turned instantly rigid, hurling hail and frost into the air. The water-ice bubbled and roiled, its feathery spouts frosting the walls of the rift, small at first but gradually increasing in speed and height.

Martine suspected another jet was forming and hurriedly dug from her pouch the first of the stones Jazrac had given her. Remembering her brief instructions, she panned it about until the internal fires lit and then buried it in the snow safely back from the edge. It wouldn’t do to have the stone fall into the pit , she decided.

In another painful hour of trudging, Martine was at her second position. Stone in hand, she moved along the crest slowly until the rock began to glow in her hand. She planted it quickly. At this pace, she guessed there was barely enough daylight left to finish the task.

En route to the third point, Martine spied a movement among the ice blocks of the talus slope below. At first she dismissed it as merely a shifting in the loose boulders, until she saw another flash. She barely saw it, a blue-white form against the ice. It was small and incredibly fast, for before she could even take a step closer, it had disappeared once more. The huntress swore it had arms and legs, like some kind of little creature. Caution and curiosity warranted she track it down, but the Harper rejected the idea, since it would delay her mission. All she dared spare was a brief pause, but after a few minutes of inaction, the Harper pressed on before she froze on the spot.

It was only a piece of ice or a wayward snow eagle battered down by the wind , Martine decided as she passed the sighting point. She was too tired to ascribe it to anything else. Nonetheless, she remained watchful all the way to the next point of the seal, so much so that she almost ignored the stone when it started to glow in her hand.

With the third stone was buried at the highest tip of the fissure, the Harper began the descent along the opposite edge of the bubbling rift, swinging wide to work around the crevasse that formed the next point of the star. Eventually the crumbled crack tapered to almost nothing. After leaping the dwindling gap, the Harper blindly crisscrossed the plain, stone in hand, searching out the juncture that would make it glow. With each stone, she despaired; it took longer to find the point where all the forces balanced. Just as she was beginning to wonder if she’d missed the mark, the glittering opal lit with its internal fire. Collapsing thankfully to her knees, the Harper buried the stone. Inside, her cracked rib throbbed as fiercely as ever, but her mind was now too dulled to the pain to even notice.

The glittering orange winter sun, hanging barely over the mountain peaks on the opposite side of the glacier, reminded Martine of the need for haste. Darkness would come quickly as soon as the sun slid behind the peaks, and Martine still had one stone to place and camp to make. There was no hope of getting off the glacier today, so the Harper wanted to dig herself a shelter before darkness fell.

Her chest heaving from the long sprint, Martine reached her last goal, the southernmost tip of the fissure, only a few hundred yards from the glacier’s edge. Sweat seeped out from under her parka hood to form ridges of sour frost in her eyebrows. The cloth mask that covered most of her cheeks and mouth was heavy with ice that grew thicker with each passing minute. Cold, fumbling hands shook the last stone from the pouch. The heart of the opal sparkled weakly in the setting sun. Holding it in her cupped hands like a precious child, Martine shuffled zombielike in questing arcs, searching for the stone’s resting place. She mumbled curses against the coming nightfall, but the rising evening wind tore away every breath that escaped her lips so that she couldn’t hear her own voice. The last of the passing sunlight disappeared before the advancing mountain shadows, taking with it any pretense of warmth the light had promised. The deep-throated roars of the geysers sounded like thunder in the chilling air. High overhead, the soaring spume sparkled in the receding sunlight till the glittering crystals looked like descending stars in the darkness. The wind-whipped frost flew thicker, each flake biting with more sting.

After how much distance she did not know, the stone suddenly swelled with light. Exhausted and cold, the Harper stood dumbly watching it at first, not comprehending the meaning of the blue-white fire she cupped in her hands. Only slowly did it dawn on her that this was it, the end of her task. In moments, she would set the seal and fulfill Jazrac’s trust in her. She was sure the wizard was watching no, sensing for some ripple in the cosmic sea that marked the healing of this great wound in the earth.

“Thank the gods!” she croaked through cracked lips as she knelt and scooped out a nest for the stone with excessive care. With both her thick mittened hands, she gingerly lowered the stone onto its bed. For a moment, she paused to admire how the stone glowed and throbbed in its cradle.

“The cinder,” she muttered suddenly. “I must touch it with the cinder!” In her relief and admiration of the stone, she had almost forgotten the last step. Her fingers too rigid to work the strings on the little pouch, she tugged at the cords with her teeth until the neck was wide enough to shake the stone free. To Martine’s terror, the cinderlike stone plopped into her palm, hung there precariously, and then fell to smack against the glowing opal with a resounding crack so sharp she was convinced both had shattered. Frantically the Harper tore off her mittens and scooped at the snow to retrieve the fallen key.

Just as she wrapped her fingers about it, the glowing opal swelled with brilliant white fire. Clutching the key, Martine flung herself away from the flare, her sight dazzled. The blaze from the stone expanded outward like an immense, unshuttered lantern until the Harper, still sprawled in the snow, wrapped an arm over her eyes, but still she could not block out the glare.

Then the shape of the light changed, though not its intensity. The diffuse brightness that burned out all the shadows on the snow drew in on itself, tightening and crimping into a brilliant ice-blue tendril. As if leaning against the wind, it stretched and strained in an arc that yearned toward the rift and then, with a sizzling roar, the beam lanced like some wizard’s fiery missile in an arc that carried it straight for the rift’s heart. The crackle echoed—no, was echoed , Martine realized by four other reports. Blue-white streaks like shooting stars returning skyward rose from four other points, each rocketing to a single rendezvous point in the sky. The five radiant arcs clashed over the center of the canyon in a brilliant display of sparks. Martine squawked and rose to run, only to stumble backward, tripping over her booted feet to land sprawled in the snow.

“Damn it, Jazrac, you could have warned me!” the Harper shouted in awe.

Flopping around, she blinked away the dazzling lights that hung on the inside of her eyelids and looked at the canopy strung over the canyon five burning blue beams that glowed as they hung suspended in the air. Pulsing waves of light rippled from the intensely glowing shafts, only to break like waves over the rift. The evening darkness rose and fell with each pulse, and at the moment of brightest glare, Martine could see the canyon center, only minutes before a seething pit, erupt into ever-widening waves. The rounded, hardening forms of the frozen waves reminded her of the iron drops that fell in gelatinous puddles from her father’s forge when she was young. She lay there absorbing the light, feeling the magical wonder of it all.