The stove was inserted in the carcass and the opening sewn shut. Ethan, September, and Hunnar dragged it to the rail.
“Carefully go here, feller-me-lad,” September whispered as something moved in the moonlight below. “Now!”
They heaved it over the side. It struck the looming tentacle and bounced away. For a moment they were afraid the carcass would roll across the ice and be ignored.
But the shan-kossief was more sensitive than that. Noting the presence of something edible, it began to melt the ice beneath the carcass, which vanished into a puddle even as Ethan and his companions looked on. They retreated from the edge lest they follow the butchered corpse into oblivion.
No one spoke. A few looks of despair crossed faces when time passed and the ship shuddered anew.
“It didn’t work,” Ethan mumbled. “We’re going to have to think of something else.”
“I don’t understand.” Blanchard was shaking his head in puzzlement. “On a world like this a few hundred degrees should feel like thousands.”
“Not in haste.” Ta-hoding wasn’t looking at them. He was listening, listening and perhaps employing senses only someone who’d spent a lifetime sailing the ice sheet possessed. Again the Slanderscree quivered.
“Ethan is right,” said Hunnar. “It is not working.”
“Something is. Be calm, relax, and feel the ship.”
Hunnar frowned, then slumped slightly. Once more the icerigger shook. Ethan stared at one, then the other, until he couldn’t stand the silence any longer.
“Would one of you please tell me what’s going on?”
“The last few times the ship moved it was not from settling,” Ta-hoding told him without shifting his gaze from the ice beyond. “I am sure of it. I know this ship’s balance as well as I do my own, maybe more so.” As he finished, the Slanderscree was wrenched violently—but to the side, not downward.
Ethan and the others made a cautious concerted rush to the rail. No tentacles rose to the attack. A glance showed that in the subarctic night air the water which had been sucking at the port bow runner was already refreezing, the ice sheet re-forming around the duralloy. Hal Semkin, Hwang’s assistant, produced a small flashlight and played the powerful beam over the surface below. It was likewise refreezing. There were no visible weak spots for tentacles to burst through.
“Sonuvabitch,” Ethan muttered in surprise, “we did it.”
“Don’t be so quick.” Seesfar pressed close behind him, staring at the ice below. “The shan-kossief is crafty. It may simply have gone deeper and waits there for us to grow careless.”
“Not if he’s trying to get rid of that stove,” Hwang argued. “I don’t care how big the thing is. That’s all that’ll be on its lumbering mind for a while.”
“You do not know the shan-kossief,” Seesfar snapped.
“Maybe not, but I do know some biochemistry. The creatures of your world are no more different in makeup than you and I. They’re flesh and blood, even if their blood is pumped full of natural antifreeze.”
“We cannot in good conscience send workers over the side to cut us free until we are sure the shan-kossief has departed,” said Hunnar.
“You can’t.” Ethan extended a gloved hand toward Semkin. “Let me have that light.” The meteorologist obediently handed it over. “Somebody get a rope. If I run into trouble down there you can yank me clear.”
September divined his friend’s intentions. “May not be time enough to yank, feller-me-lad.”
“I don’t think it’ll matter. I think Cheela’s right. Our subsurface nemesis has gone off in search of a nice quiet place to try to throw up.” He nodded over the side. “Everything’s already refrozen. Surely if the shan-kossief was still around it wouldn’t let that happen. It would have to start all over again. We’ll fix the rope around my arms and shoulders so that if I’m grabbed I won’t slip out of my suit.”
“If it’s still down there and it does get a grip on you, it won’t matter,” September warned him. “All the Tran on this ship won’t be strong enough to pull you free.”
“Somebody’s got to make sure it’s gone. I’m lighter than you are and our thoughtful friends don’t have my experience out here. Besides, I know what a kossief is like, if not its big brother. And I don’t want to spend the night wondering about it. If it is gone and we sit around here and debate its intentions, we might give it time to come back.”
September shook his head. “I think your common sense is frozen, like everything else on this iceball.” When Ethan started to comment September stopped him. “Spare me any more of your logic. It’s your neck. And everything above and below it.”
“That’s right,” Ethan agreed. “It’s my neck.”
The rope was secured and double-tightened. Thankfully no one wished him good luck. Not verbally, anyway. He, slipped over the rail and started down the boarding ladder cut into the icerigger’s side. When he reached bottom he took a deep breath and let himself drop the rest of the way to the ice.
The silence on the ice was total. He couldn’t hear the soft whispering of his companions up on deck. As he scanned the surface he saw that the ice sheet was broken and cracked where it had been thawed by the shan-kossief and then had refrozen in the creature’s absence. Assuming it was absent, he reminded himself.
Trying to float above the ice, Ethan made his way toward the bow. Nothing moved under the ice sheet. The few puddles he encountered were freezing underfoot. His light penetrated the ice more than a meter in places and revealed nothing.
The starboard bow runner was intact. As near as he could tell so was its portside counterpart, though it was buried two-thirds of the way into the refrozen ice. Shouldn’t take a crew of energetic, muscular Tran equipped with spears and ice picks long to chip it free, he mused. Then they would have to hack a sloping channel so it could slip free without damage when Ta-hoding gave the order to put on sail.
He leaned back, saw anxious faces and visors staring down at him. “It’s all right. We can get out of here without any trouble. The runners and braces are intact. Just going to take a little hard digging. I’m coming up.” He turned and started briskly back toward the boarding ladder. He was halfway there when the ice gave way beneath him.
The rope harness brought him up short. Somehow he hung on to the light. Now it danced crazily off smooth ice walls as he spun like a top at the end of the cable.
Nothing had reached up to grab him and pull him down, he saw as he fought to still the pounding in his chest. He’d fallen through a thin layer of ice into a sizable cavern. It dawned on him that he was dangling in the middle of the cavity the shan-kossief had occupied. He felt like bait on a line.
Bringing the light under control as his spinning slowed, he was immensely relieved to see that the cavity was empty. Peculiar undulations marred the otherwise smooth walls, reminding him of watery ripples on a smooth sandy beach. His beam revealed a huge tunnel stretching off into the distance. Residual heat trapped beneath the surface continued to melt water in a few spots. The steady, metallic drip was the only sound in the cavern besides his own breathing.
He was still slowly spinning when he picked out a large mound of white powder off to one side. At first he thought it was pulverized ice. It was a different shade of white, however, and the riblike projections which emerged from the pile were not ice crystals. He wondered if any of the crushed skeletons were Tran, but not hard enough to insist on a closer look. The cavern was too much like a catacomb.
His light lingered on the mountain of dissolved calcium as he was pulled up through the hole.
“I’m okay!” he shouted as he reemerged. A swing on the rope brought him into contact with the ship’s side and he was able to secure the grip on the boarding ladder he’d been walking toward. Still shaking, he forced himself to climb the rest of the way to the deck.
September’s anxious face was the first one he saw. “You disappeared on us, feller-me-lad. I thought you were a goner.”
“I fell through a thin spot into a big cavity. The shan-kossief’s lair, I think.” He sucked fresh air. “We’d better make sure we angle to starboard when the time comes to move. That’s a big hole down there. If you could tame one of those things, it’d be a heckuva help in building underground communities on this world.”
September glanced over the side, saw the dark pit into which Ethan had stumbled. “You might be able to train it, but I don’t think you could find anybody who’d volunteer to feed it.”
Ready hands helped Ethan slip free of the harness. “There’s a big tunnel stretching from the lair northward. That’s where it took off. You can bet if the stove doesn’t kill it, we’ll see it again.”
“We will not,” Ta-hoding assured him, “because we will no longer be here.” His breath formed a small cloud in front of him as he turned and began shouting orders. There was a noticeable reluctance on the part of the crew to comply with the captain’s directives. No one rushed to scramble over the side and test the accuracy of the human’s assessment.
Eventually, two soldiers braver than their comrades cautiously made their way down. Using picks they started hacking at the ice which imprisoned the Slanderscree’s port bow runner. When nothing materialized to grab them, they were joined by two dozen of their fellows. Picks rose and fell with increasing confidence.
Meanwhile Suaxus-dal-Jagger and a trio of Hunnar’s bravest soldiers lowered themselves into the shan-kossief’s lair to stand guard before the tunnel. At least those working on the exposed surface would have time to flee if the monster returned.
The pit was not reoccupied. “Busy trying to salve the worst case of heartburn it’s ever had” was how Blanchard described the shan-kossief’s situation. If it could survive the heat, the creature would pass the stove much as it had passed the bones of its prey. Then hunger would drive it again.
That was the hypothesis put forth by Moware. No one planned on staying in the area to check its validity. As soon as the runners had been freed and paths for them sliced through the ice, they brought the excavators aboard and the ice anchors in.
Wind filled the icerigger’s sails. Wood groaned. The great ship began to move forward. Shuddering and scraping the ice, the Slanderscree emerged from its temporary imprisonment. Moments later it was standing even with the surface of the frozen ocean.
Soldiers and sailors cheered, then returned to their tasks. Despite the fact that many of them had been chipping ice all night, no one rested until they had traveled a reassuring distance from the shan-kossief’s cavern. A safe number of satch away, someone remembered the unfortunate night watch and the ship paused long enough to hold a brief, somber double ceremony. The wind would have to be satisfied with words alone since there were no bodies to return to the ice.
There had been some tension between the more experienced sailors from Sofold and the newcomers who’d joined the expedition at Poyolavomaar. The confrontation with the shan-kossief had taken care of that. Of the two night-watchers who’d been lost, one had been a citizen of Wannome, the other of Poyo. Tragedy was a powerful unifier.
A few guttorbyn, aerial carnivores resembling furry flying dragons, swooped down on the ship in hopes of picking off an isolated meal. Each time, they were met by alerted, armed Tran who would drive them off, shrieking their disappointment. After the shan-kossief, the guttorbyn seemed almost comical, with their long, narrow mouths and outraged cries. By the time they reached the equatorial ice pressure ridge which the Tran called the Bent Ocean, the crew had become blasé about danger.
The ridge was a much more serious if less life-threatening obstacle to their progress than any carnivore, however. Forty thousand years ago that line was where the previous warm cycle had ended. Pack ice from the north had run into pack ice advancing from the south. The two ice sheets had crunched together and pushed up and out, forming a solid wall of blocks and slabs that girdled Tran-ky-ky at its equator.
Ta-hoding barked at his helmsman and the icerigger slowly swung eastward. They sailed parallel to the ridge with the wind behind them, searching for a break the crew could enlarge to create a passage.
During their previous journey to Moulokin, far to the west, they had found such a pass. After enlarging it with picks and axes, they’d used the power of a rifs storm to force the ship the rest of the way through. It was not a technique anyone wished to employ again since it could just as easily result in the destruction of the icerigger as in its safe passage to the southern ice sheet.
Days passed without sighting anything more encouraging than slight variations in the height of the ridge. Ethan and his companions grew discouraged.
“Surely,” Cheela Hwang said to him, “there has to be a place where the ice has collapsed under its own weight, or been cracked by continuing pressure, or has melted enough for us to make a passage?”
“Not necessarily. Any change we’ve observed has been organically induced, as by that shan-kossief thing.” Zima Snyek, their resident glaciologist, was the butt of jokes among the Tran since he spent as much time working with the ice as a kossief. “We know the ridge circles the whole planet. It’s conceivable it might do so without interruption.”
“We haven’t the time or the resources for a circumnavigation.” Hwang was studying a small electronic map. “We’ve already sailed too far to the east. We shouldn’t continue much farther this way.” She glanced up at Ethan. “You told me you broke through the ridge once before.”
He nodded, gestured stemward. “On our journey to Moulokin. It was a do-or-die situation. Break through or get torn to shreds by a rifs.”
“Why don’t we just retrace that route and utilize the existing passage?”
Milliken Williams had been listening, as was his preference, but now spoke up. “First because it’s a long ways to the west. Second because we could easily miss it and sail on by, and lastly because we barely slipped through the first time. Between the weather and subsurface movements, the gap may already have been at least partially filled in. If that’s the case, we’ll never find it. We’d be a lot better off if we could find a suitable way through right here. You’re talking about spending weeks searching for a break that might be undetectable.” He shrugged. “You’re right about one thing, though: If we don’t find something soon, we won’t have any choice but to go back.”
It was Ta-hoding who brought the search to a halt. Like most of them he’d spent endless hours scanning the unbroken barrier paralleling them off to starboard, the wind ruffling his mane and the fur on shoulders and neck. He was very patient, Ta-hoding was, but he, too, had his limits. The day came when he requested a conference.
“It is time to decide how we intend to make our way southward from this region. We cannot sail around the world only to meet ourselves in the same places we have already visited.”
“There is no other way.” Hunnar was as frustrated as any of them. “We have already determined that.”
First Mate Monslawic nodded. “Still we must find one. Let us think hard on this matter as we continue as we have for another day or two. If by then we have not found a place to make a passage, we must turn about and retrace our course. Better to sail all the way back toward Moulokin to search for a way through we know exists than to continue endlessly on an unprofitable heading.” Clearly the Slanderscree’s first mate had given their situation much thought.
“We cannot go back,” Ta-hoding informed him. “We must cross the Bent Ocean within the next couple of days.”
“Why the hurry?” September wanted to know.
By way of reply Ta-hoding pointed toward the bow. Ethan joined the others in staring forward. A few scattered clouds marred the otherwise pristine horizon. Not rain clouds, of course. It never rained on Tran-ky-ky. Most of the planet’s moisture lay permanently frozen on its surface. Even snow was rare, though more common in the planet’s warmer regions. Clouds were seldom seen, even here near the equator.
Ethan wondered what Ta-hoding was pointing at. As it developed it wa
s something visible only to an experienced sailor.
“For the past several days the winds have been erratic,” he told them. Ethan knew the winds of Tran-ky-ky blew with extraordinary consistency from west to east. “That is a strange formation but not an unknown one.” Then he was talking about the clouds, Ethan mused. “Also it is the season.”
“Season for what?” Williams asked.
“Comes soon a rifs. Not today, not tomorrow, but soon. Out of the east. Usually they come from north or south. This comes out of the east. It will be very bad.”
That went without saying, Ethan knew as he stared at the innocuous-looking puffs of cumulus. It meant a complete reversal of normal wind patterns. The atmospheric disturbance required to accomplish that would have to verge on the demonic. Yet Ta-hoding sounded so sure.
“What’s a ‘rifs’?” Jacalan asked.
Hwang let her colleague Semkin explain. “A local superthunderstorm. Several thunderstorm cells cluster in the same area. They start feeding off each other, the way a firestorm feeds on its own heat. On Tran-ky-ky very little actual moisture’s involved. That only seems to make the storm worse.” He was gazing thoughtfully at the clouds.
“I’ve never actually experienced one, of course. None of us have. They’re nearly nonexistent away from the equatorial regions. But Cheela and I have studied them via satellite reconnaissance. The thunderhead crowns will boil up tens of thousands of meters until they scrape the limits of the upper atmosphere. There’s lightning, lots of lightning, and surface winds approaching hundreds of kilometers an hour. Not good kite-flying weather. Any animal with any sense immediately goes to ground to try and wait it out.”
There was silence as his colleagues absorbed the implications, which were obvious even to non-Tran and non-sailors. You couldn’t tack into a three-hundred kph wind, nor could you safely anchor yourself anywhere on the barren ice sheet. The only reasonable chance of safety lay in a protected harbor. There were no harbors of any kind out on the naked ice.