“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.