by David Cook
“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. What had Jazrac done to make those five stones, she wondered as the world crackled with the solidifying roar.
As the pulses grew longer, a grinding bass note sundered the calm, and lightning-lit air tingled with the ozone scent of disaster. Fresh tremors, stronger than those Martine had grown accustomed to, quavered through the ice, letting loose a rolling wave of ice-rending shrieks. It was as if in that moment all the ghosts and all the lost souls ever devoured by the frozen waste howled out their torment. The cacophony was accompanied by deep thunder that shook the woman down to her toes. From the rim, fractures fingered across the snow like streaks of lightning, zigzagging little puffs of powder tracing their manic paths.
“Damn you, Jazrac!” Martine howled, no longer amused. With a crack, the rim suddenly broke off and slid into the canyon, throwing up a wall of snow as the air rushed forward to fill the gap caused by the collapse. The fingering fissures raced closer toward Martine, and the ranger didn’t wait to see what danger she was in but struggled to her feet and ran.
Behind her, the snapping, ripping cracks fanned out rapidly, lunging closer, as if trying to catch her heels in their frozen jaws. Once, twice, Martine faltered as the fierce pain in her ribs, almost forgotten since the morning, spasmed and locked her muscles and nerves in pain. Her throat no longer burned because it was too parched to breathe, too parched to spit Fear drove her forward toward the safety of the glacier’s edge, where her only plan was to plummet blindly into the dark void beyond.
With no more than a third of the distance crossed, the nipping fissures caught her. The fractures shot between her legs and raced ahead of her, reaching for the glacier wall. The hard ice field became a mosaic that abruptly began to shatter, each fragment tilting, reacting to the glacier’s mad rush to reclaim what the rift had stolen. The tremors that Martine vainly fled punched the ground out from under the Harper, throwing up shards around her.
“No, by Tymora, not again!” Martine wailed as the ground slipped backward beneath her feet. Like a sailor washed overboard, she helplessly slid into the seething ice sea and rode down into its rough darkness. “Not twice in one day! It isn’t fair!”
And then there was the cold and the darkness.
Four
Scrabbling noises like fingernails grating on rock, teeth crunching bones, ice freezing in my veins—I hear scrabbling noises, the woman dreamed. It’s the sound of fresh earth being thrown on my grave, thumping with each shovelful. I have to scream. I have to yell and let them know I’m still alive.
But that’s so much effort.
“Dig, dig, dig,” said a little voice in singsong.
It’s not coming from my throat, the woman concluded dreamily. It’s too dry … my throat’s too dry.
“Dig, dig, dig,” said the voice again. It sounded like a peevish child. “Just because he says so. Does he dig? No-o-o. That’s why he brought me along—so he could make me dig. He gets to sulk, while I, Icy-White the Clever, I get to dig.”
“Ow!” A sharp jab pierced Martine’s numbness.
“Ow?”
The pain brought things into focus. Martine was on her side, pressed beneath a mass of ice and snow. She could vaguely see a tumbled field of ice, perhaps the base of a slide, that stood out in stark shadow from the fading blue glow that lit the night, the last light of Jazrac’s magic. The slide apparently ended in the rift floor, now hard and still. The canyon walls had fallen inward, leaving a broad bowl where the riffs jagged scar had been. Distant crashing rumbles still echoed across the snow, warning that all was not yet still.
The jab repeated, not as sharp this time but still painful. “Get … me … out of here.” The words were a great struggle. A layer of frost settled on her cheeks cracked as she spoke.
“Ice talks!” squeaked the voice. The scrabbling renewed, faster and closer. Suddenly sharp claws raked the Harper’s cheek and harshly brushed away the snow that coated her. The sting cracked the lethargy the ice was sealing about her. The Harper struggled against the enclosing tomb of ice and heaved upright, the motion accompanied by the grinding sound of cracking snow.
“Awwwk!”
“What the—” The cry escaped Martine unwillingly as she found herself faced by a creature of ice. It couldn’t have stood any taller than her thighs, though it loomed over her now as it stood on a block of ice pinning her legs. Its skin was pearly and smooth with blue-white translucence, yet cut in hard angles and sharp edges like shattered ice. The head was broad and flat, eyes gleaming under razor-edged brows.
The creature hopped back, momentarily as startled as she. “Not ice! No, no, no. This is not ice.”
The Harper tested her legs, trying to shift free. The block that pinned her legs was loose, but at the first tremor, the creature lunged forward, seizing her neck with one clawed hand. Its grip was cold and strong, its fingers clicking bonily against each other as it squeezed her throat.
“No, no! You belong to Icy-White now. My prize—mine and mine only,” the creature babbled, its mirror-sharp face fractured with glee. An iciclelike claw waggled through the steam of her exhalations. Abruptly the creature gave a startled squeal and snatched its hand away. “You burn, you steam!” it chirped in wonderment while licking furiously at the fi
nger Martine had just breathed on. “I’ll show you to Vreesar when he comes,” it continued craftily. “Then he’ll let me stop digging.”
Scampering like a monkey, the creature seized the Harper’s shoulder in its cold claws and dragged her from the icy debris, all the while taking care to avoid the steam of her breath. Its talons dug through her furs and drew blood beneath them, but Martine was too tired to fight back. It was all she could do to feebly kick free of the last bits of crust.
“Now, no fight from you, hot one, or Icy-White kill you and feast on your cold meat,” the creature cackled near her ear before it released her. Its breath was chilling, without a hint of warmth either in spirit or body.
The ranger didn’t answer, nor did the creature care. In springing hops, it leaped from block to block, bounding across the slide, but never far from where the Harper lay. Martine remained still, watching and gathering her strength. I’m too weak to get away yet, Martine calculated after noting the creature’s nimble speed as it crossed the treacherous tangle of the slide. She felt wary but not fearful, since the thing didn’t seem immediately intent upon killing her.
Indeed, for the moment, it seemed to have forgetten her as it scrambled over the slide, poking here, sniffing there, all the time muttering to itself. Eyeing her weird captor, the ranger tried to match the creature to all the fiends she’d ever seen or heard of. With its stunted size and shimmering skin, it looked like a malevolent sprite sculpted from ice. Its form lacked gentle curves, each joint capped by glittering little spurs. Nothing about it matched her experiences nor any of the tales she’d heard. Glacier lore was not her strong suit.
While the strange creature capered in the ghastly light of fading magic, Martine discreetly probed the snow for her gear, a search that turned up her sword and pouch but little more. Jazrac’s cinder was still there, she noted with relief, along with his dagger. She thought of staking it in the snow in hope Jazrac might be at his crystal ball at that very moment, but she couldn’t. Calling for his help now was admitting her own failure—and she still had hopes of succeeding. All she needed was a little time to get away.
“Who are you?” she called to the impish thing. The question was partially a stall and partially curiosity.
“You talk—you talk again!” Sliding and bounding, the ice sprite careened down the slope to land not far from her feet. A stream of dislodged ice and snow clattered down after it.
“Who are you?” she repeated.
“Me? Me?” The thing sprang about in glee, all the while grinning in cold, false modesty. “Hot Breath, you were captured by Icy-White the Clever, Icy-White the Quick—”
“The greatest of the …” It was a thin trick, but Martine was banking on the thing’s simpleminded vanity to finish the phrase.
“Yes, yes. The greatest of Auril’s children, the greatest of the mephits. Clever warrior I am to capture you. Vreesar will be much impressed with me.”
Auril, mephit, Vreesar … Martine seized on the three clues, even as she nodded in false awe. Auril was the Frost Maiden, goddess of cold, and supposedly worshiped by the people of the far north, not that the Harper had ever seen one of these so-called ice priests. Mephits she knew even less about—some type of elemental imp or fiend. Still, it was enough to confirm her suspicion. Shifting closer to her sword, she asked anyway.
“This isn’t your home, is it?”
The mephit stopped and looked all about, head snapping to and fro in nervous tics. “Home? Oh, no. Oh, no. This place is too warm. But Vreesar found the path and wanted to explore. Dragged me with him, he did. Made me come.”
Her guess was right; something had passed through the rift. But how many, and how dangerous were they? She needed to know if all her work to seal the rift was too late.
“Vreesar?”
“Vreesar’s mean, bosses me around, thinks he can tell Icy-White what to do, but now look who caught Hot Breath. Now Vreesar’s just—” The mephit’s gaze strayed upward, looking at something behind Martine, and as it did, the bold words in its throat choked off in a stunted gurgle. “Vreesar is very clever—and quiet,” Icy-White concluded in a squeaked whisper.
The mephit had barely spoken before Martine, her fighting senses coming back to her, scooted around to the side so she could see both the mephit and where it gazed, pressing her back against an upturned ice block.
Towering over both of them, a good two feet taller than Martine’s five-foot frame, was an overgrown version of the mephit that had captured her. The beast had the same armor-sheened skin, smoothly flowing over its body to taper off into sharp-edged flares. The icelike carapace rendered the creature insectoid, even though it stood like a man. The look was further enhanced by the fact that its frame was overly thin and elongated, yet that same thinness made menacingly powerful the hard bands of muscle that swelled like cables across its body. It was the effect one might have gotten, Martine imagined, if you pared all the soft parts away from a normal creature, leaving nothing but the hard masses behind.
The creature’s head was triangular, tapering at the chin into a beard of icicles that grew out of its flesh. The barbed ridge of its brow was crusted with more of the same, veiling the deep pits of its eyes. A mouth, small and precise, set below two narrow slots that were its nose, gaped eagerly, revealing a formidable line of spinelike teeth.
“What iz thiz?” the creature buzzed in one rapid breath. It stared at Martine, pivoting its head on a virtually nonexistent neck. “What have you found?”
“Vreesar, I captured it,” the mephit boasted with a prattling squeal. The ice-bred imp sprang forward to show off its conquest, staying just out of Martine’s reach. “It breathes smoke and steam, hot enough to burn me, but I captured it.” With those words, the mephit danced about in triumph, waggling its long claws overhead. “I captured the Hot Breath! Me!”
“Simpleton! It iz a human!” The creature’s buzzing snarl rang through the cold air like the scrape of a cutler’s grindstone. With a fluid stretch that defied its angular legs, the creature stepped off the slope to place itself before the Harper, twisting its head this way and that as it eyed her. “The little one found you?”
Martine nodded slowly, doing her best to meet the creature’s gaze. Her previous confidence was fading fast. It was one thing to be the bold prisoner of a small, silly mephit, but the smooth power—and evil—of this creature raised the stakes dangerously. You should have tried to contact Jazrac, a small part of her whispered. Martine doubted her strength or speed could ever hope to match this creature’s.
“Did you do thiz, human?” The creature leered straight at her with its frosty face till its icy breath, colder than the glacial winds, burned her skin.
Martine bit the inside of her lip. Silence was her only plan, even though she had no idea how the creature might react.
Perhaps it found the answer in her eyes, or perhaps it saw her determination, for the fiend drew back. “Do you see what haz happened, human?” The creature turned its gaze to the tangled floor of the rift, shifting and wavering in the last light of enchantment. The sapphire-colored fire was gone from the sky, although it still seemed to tinge the color of the stars as they washed the glacier in weak light.
“You have trapped me!” the beast shrieked, its voice ringing from the sides of the bowl. A hundred fiends seemed to stand among the distant ruins, echoing back its words. “You have closed my door!”
In a blur, it sprang over Martine, straddling her. Clawed hands pressed against her parka. Its hoary face hung over her, thin lips pulled back in the menace of a smile. “What did you do?”
“Nothing.” It was a desperate surge of bravado. She tensed her body for the strike.
“Liez,” it hummed, pressing its claws against her harder. “You and your friendz did it. You will tell me how to reopen the path.”
Friends? she wondered.
“No.” It was only her determination not to fail in her mission that gave her defiance voice.
“No?” the bea
st shrieked. “You defy Vreesar, one of the great elementalz? My brotherz waiting to come will not be halted by your little trickz. I will learn how to reopen the gate.” In its rage, the creature raised up one taloned hand to strike. Martine, ready for her last desperate act, closed a hand around the hilt of her sword. I will not die easily, she told herself fiercely.
“Vreesar, the Hot Breath is my prisoner! Mine!” screeched the mephit from its perch up the slope. “You cannot kill it!” In frustrated rage, the imp pelted the larger creature with fistfuls of ice.
“Cursed mephit!” the fiend roared, batting away the missiles. With its claws finally removed from her ribs, Martine took advantage of the distraction to jerk loose her ice-encased sword. Before she’d gotten the blade free, the shadow-cloaked elemental seized his little tormentor and whirled back on the Harper, swinging the mephit about by its scrawny neck. The dark fiend, lit by the last flashes of blue, trembled and twitched as its vile passions warred within it. The mephit writhed helplessly in the great creature’s strangling grasp.
The monster’s head tipped left, then right. Finally stopping, the gaunt monster looked curiously at the mephit, now nearly limp. Evil light glistened in the ice-bearded eyes, and with a callous gesture, the gelugon hurled the mephit at Martine’s feet.
The little ice imp flopped feebly on the ground, gasping for air, and Martine seized the opportunity to scramble backward, putting more distance between her and her captors.
“Icy-White, I forgot your great might to have captured so powerful a human,” Vreesar mocked as it crouched down spiderlike before the mephit, looking beyond it to Martine. “Waz foolish, yez, to think thiz human waz strong enough to close the gap. There must be otherz who did thiz—and I will find them. Keep your prize, Mephit. Make it tell you of the otherz.”
