She made a pushing gesture. ‘Moving it along.’
‘Why?’
‘We don’t want it to catch and heap up.’
‘Why are they firing into the mud?’
‘We don’t know when the ice will arrive,’ she called back. ‘I suspect the leading edge to be thin — under the muck at first.’
After that, Jute was too hoarse to continue yelling so he merely nodded and allowed Lady Orosenn to return to studying the flow. He tried to imagine what it must be like on the shores of the Sea of Gold as all this earth and gravel and loose rock came thrusting out on to the mudflats, perhaps taking them with it. It suddenly occurred to him, horrifyingly: could the entire sea be erased? All that water heaved further south? How far away were the ships? Had they made it through the channel yet? He prayed to the gods that they had. If not, they were in for a memorable ride.
One of the crews on the springals thrust their arms skyward, shouting soundlessly, and Jute scanned the base of the rise. Pulverized white flakes came floating down from an eruption. They momentarily painted white the foaming, shifting flow, only to be sucked beneath. Cartheron was gesturing, signing to the crews, who shifted their aim. He raised an open hand and the crews waited, hands at the releases.
Why was he waiting, Jute wondered. Shouldn’t he be punishing the ice now that it had arrived? Perhaps he was waiting for the flow to thicken — no point in blasting the thinnest leading finger. Perhaps. Then he noticed that the commander’s gaze was fixed upon Lady Orosenn, who had a hand outstretched as if reaching for him.
The walls rocked then, as in a true earthquake. Or perhaps a collision. Jute turned his head to the north, terrified of what he might see. There, what he’d taken earlier for a thick wall of falling snow revealed itself to be a steep upward-sweeping wing-like slope that went on and on, perhaps for leagues, up the entire lowest shoulder of the mountains: an ungraspable immensity of ice and weight and might all bearing down upon them like a war dromond striking a water beetle. He knew it to be a plain physical manifestation of ice and rock, but he couldn’t help also feeling a palpable sense of deliberate menace and ruthless will pointed directly at him — and he the size of a flea beneath it.
Lady Orosenn snapped her hand down and Cartheron made a fist.
All four siege weapons fired.
The four cussors arced upwards, disappearing into the driving snow. Almost immediately spouts of smashed ice shot upwards, without any accompanying sound. Jute was appalled. The best we had. Like a child throwing a rock at a landslide. Cartheron signed to fire again. The four now simply kept firing and reloading, pounding that one same spot. Jute imagined that that must be where the cussors had been jammed down into cracks and crevices in the bedrock — if they hadn’t yet been plucked out.
The eruptions came almost continuously now, in a constant shooting spray of pulverized ice that arced high into the blowing snow. Jute thought the pushing lip of the ice-tongue was climbing the hump of bedrock. Soon, he imagined, it would sweep them off like dust from a tabletop.
All four crews kept pounding, and it did seem to Jute that larger chunks of broken ice now flew with each eruption. He gripped the topmost stone of the wall before him, itself many hundreds of pounds of rock, and felt the immense power of the grinding advance transmitted to his bones through the juddering of the stone. Break, damn you! he exhorted the ice. Break!
He’d seen towers brought down by one or two well-placed cussors. Entire harbour defences reduced to rubble with just a few casts. And now this man, Cartheron Crust, was pouring half the imperial arsenal of Moranth munitions into this unstoppable mountain of ice in a colossal contest of wills that would grind all else into dust.
The stones of the wall jerked towards him then, knocking his hand aside as if it were alive and flinching. Ahead, through the curls and scarves of snow, a great fountain of white was burgeoning upwards like a dome swelling over a surfacing swimmer. Enormous shards of blue-white ice now arced skywards. They blossomed outwards in all directions. A roar washed over Mantle that overcame even the valley-wide growling of the ice.
Smaller chunks fell all about him. They burst to shards against the wall. Some punched through the timbers of the catwalk. Nearby, a man fell as if mattocked, his head a shattered ruin. Jute ducked, arms over his head, and staggered down the ramp to take cover under the catwalk. Here, beneath his hand and his rump, the bedrock shook as if drummed. A deep wounded-animal sort of groan mounted into a high-pitched cracking. In his mind’s eye, he imagined the stupendous weight of the ice pulling it downslope to the east and to the west, naturally tugging in opposite directions. And so it would split — not of intent, but because the great ice-river merely wished to find the lowest level. He rose and clambered out to look. The ramp had been shaken to nothing more than a heap of dirt, and this he climbed to pull himself one-handed up on to the catwalk. The huge blocks of the wall were now misaligned and uneven in their course, and it seemed wondrous to Jute that the snow still fell as if nothing had happened. To the right and left coursed the dirty snow-blown river of ice, down to where the two arms came together again before sweeping out over the obliterated shore of the Sea of Gold.
They sat atop a scoured-clean island of naked rock.
He went to find Cartheron and spotted him collapsed against the wall, watched over by two of his crew. He was pale, squeezing his chest, his face clenched against pain. Jute knelt next to him. The roar of the creaking and groaning ice was still like a thunderstorm, and he had to yell to make himself heard. ‘Are you all right?’
The old man laughed weakly. ‘When Lady Orosenn sewed me up she told me to avoid any stress.’
‘Good thing you’re taking it easy, then.’
There was a tremor in the Malazan’s hands that he didn’t seem to notice. ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘it’s the retired life for me.’
Jute stood. ‘I’ll get Orosenn.’
The old commander was too exhausted even to respond. Jute ran, searching for the sorceress. He found her at the extreme southern end of the catwalk close to the wall’s edge overlooking the cliff. She was watching the great tongue of ice where it crept out over the Sea of Gold.
Gaining her attention, he put a hand to his mouth to shout: ‘Cartheron is in a bad way.’
She nodded. ‘I’ve done what I can for him. It’s a miracle he’s still alive.’
He gestured out towards the sea. ‘What can we do?’
‘We wait.’
‘Will it be like this for ever?’
She bestowed the familiar affectionate smile upon him once more. ‘No, Jute of Delanss. This was a ferociously rapid invocation. It will fade faster than most. Perhaps a mere hundred years.’
Oh. A mere hundred years. ‘So it is over,’ he breathed, immensely relieved.
But the sorceress shook her head, her long black hair blowing like a veil. ‘No. This was only the opening salvo. The true confrontation is taking place high above. I wish I was there to add my voice.’
‘Add your voice?’
‘Against the rekindling of an ancient war. And I do not mean the animosity of the T’lan Imass for the Jaghut. There have been far older wars, Jute of Delanss. And there are some who never forget, nor forgive.’
He not know what the sorceress meant; did not have her deeper vision of events. He only knew that a friend was in pain, so he gestured once more that they should help Cartheron and Orosenn nodded, squeezing his arm.
CHAPTER XV
They were only a short distance up the wide sinuous serpent of ice when Kyle halted. Blustering snow obscured the distance. He could just make out tall spine-like ridges of iron-grey rock that rose as barriers far to the east and west.