Hal was gesturing to slow down, skidding to a halt by the wall. ‘I have lost him! There is the crossroads ahead – if he is heading into town he should take the left fork downhill, but I see nothing. Fanden tag den! If he has doubled back again …’
Jess looked wildly round, imagining a monstrous shadow slipping along the other side of the snow-capped hedgerows. Then, far ahead, she saw a moving fleck in the instant before it vanished over the curve of the hill.
‘He’s there, dammit! The bastard’s taken the back road, down by the cliff.’
‘Good – then we have a clear run down to the estuary! Come on!’
‘Okay, Hal, but be careful – this snow’s too damn soft to go speeding on!’
‘Yes. Interesting …’
And again they were sailing downhill with the wind biting at their uncovered faces, but now the flanking walls were becoming higher and more solid. A building flashed by, then another, the snow-choked forecourt of a garage with its pump lights turned off. The lightless windows frowned blankly down on the two skiers as they went bouncing and scraping by. I should be shouting something, thought Jess. Like Paul Revere. Not ‘The British are coming!’ though! One light if by land, two if by –
‘Hal!’
The figure ahead of her swept sharply around and braked. ‘What is it?’
‘The bastard headed down to the estuary – you reckon he’s after a boat?’
Hal pounded one fist into the other. They paused a second, peering through the dim orange street-lighting down to the harbour below. A dark thicket of masts stood out against the dim glow of moonlight on the water. Faint sounds came drifting up on the breeze, the lap of choppy water, the soft, regular creak and scrape of fenders as it gently lifted the moored boats.
‘Sounds quiet enough,’ muttered Hal. Suddenly Jess pointed, wordless. One of the traceried masts was moving, rocking – and then it was blotted out by a shapeless, flapping shadow. Louder creaks and scrapes cut across the silence of the snow, and a rustling, booming sound. ‘Jesus – he’s hoisting the sail! There he goes!’
With a sudden surge, as if a massive hand pushed at it, the low mast was detaching itself from the rest, gliding out into the centre of the harbour. The wind caught it, and it bellied out with a crisp thrum.
‘Come on!’ snarled Hal, and plunged crazily down the last of the slope. Jess dug in her sticks and followed more cautiously, terrified of losing control and going straight into the water. But the snow had half-cleared from the square below, and Hal found himself bouncing and scraping to a stop on the bare cobblestones. Out in the harbour, less than a hundred yards away, the boat was only just wallowing its way out to the breakwater.
‘He’s – one lousy sailor – isn’t he?’ panted Jess. Hal peered out across the dark water. The boat showed as a dim outline, with a high, sharp prow and a steep stern transom, the stubby mast rising just in front of a small wheelhouse.
‘Satans! He has taken a fishing smack! The sail is too small – it is just for steadying. No need to keep quiet now, damn him – another minute and he will start the engine.’
‘Think he knows what an engine is?’
Hal turned to stare at her. ‘Du – kaereste – barn! I could kiss you!’
‘So why not?’
‘No time! Come on!’ He had already snapped off his skis, and now he was slithering along the dockside, towards the jetties. Jess followed, trying not to run too close to the unprotected edge of the dock; even now, near high tide, there was a twenty-foot drop into cold, muddy water. Ahead of them the dig signboard loomed over the locked gate of the dig’s own jetty. Hal pounded on the watchman’s booth, but it was dark and empty. ‘Kept away by the snow, I think. Let us hope I still have my keys …’
He had, for the jetty gate and the boathouse beyond. Ignoring the dig tender, he clambered stiffly down into the newer of the two dories and peered at its fuel gauge. ‘Ah skidt! Barely enough! And there is none in the big tank here – damned snow must have stopped deliveries. Well, we shall fill up from the tank on the dam if we must. Come on, kaereste, all aboard!’
Jess, standing shakily in the bows, unlocked and opened the seaward door of the boathouse, then sat quickly down as Hal gunned the dory’s powerful diesel and sent it bouncing out into the harbour. Crouched down, she started to make her way back to him, but he waved her back. ‘We are too lightly laden! You must sit in the bows – weigh them down a little! And put this on!’
He threw her a buoyancy jacket from the stern locker, and shrugged into one himself. The dory’s flattened plastic hull hissed and bounced over the harbour wavelets, and the drone of its engine reverberated between the snowbound cliffs. In the houses near the harbour a window lit up here and there, sparks of warmth in the lifeless night. Jess felt ridiculously grateful. Looking at the rising ranks of steeply raked cottage roofs, at the stately Victorian piles that looked absurd against the natural majesty of the cliffs behind them, she thought of what this little place had so narrowly been spared – of what it might still face. If that wave of mist, those incarnate nightmares, had finally come stalking down these steep and silent streets in all their force, they would have had other noises to disturb their sleep.
The little boat passed the harbour wall and bounded out into the estuary, leaping across the choppy wavelets. The water drummed under its blunt, square-cut bows and flew up in sudden spray-plumes that drenched Jess. It made hollow, soggy slaps at the hull, and strange gurgles that her imagination turned into fountaining leaks. The combined fumes of fuel and exhaust began to play on her nerves. ‘Shouldn’t we have taken the tender?’ she yelled. ‘It’s bigger –’
‘Too slow!’ he yelled back. ‘Take us ages to catch him up!’
‘You said we were just going to follow him!’
‘We had no weapons then!’ With a piratical grin, he held up something that looked like a short brass tube, and a fistful of smaller plastic ones.
‘What the hell’s that?’
‘It launches distress flares. Just press the button at the bottom of the tube, and pang! Any sign of him?’
Jess crawled forward to hang out over the bouncing bows, and stared out into the night. She slumped back, shaking her head.
‘Fanden i helved! Even with the motor, he could not have escaped so quickly! Has he capsized the boat, perhaps? We need to find out – and our damned fuel is low, too.’ He pulled the boat hard to port, where the dam bulked black against the tag-end of the night. Reaching down into the steering pulpit he pulled up a small spotlight and clipped it to the rail. A section of jetty sprang into glistening life ahead, and as they came nearer he swept the beam up and down it. Rows of shining black fenders bobbed in the waves; there was no other boat in sight. ‘Not here, at least!’ he shouted. ‘We can climb the seawall and look from there.’
‘What if he tries to land here after us?’
Hal brought the dory into the lee of the jetty. ‘We will see him coming long before. Can you make us fast?’
Jess nodded, and swung the line with practised movements. ‘We’d better get up top PDQ. Could be he’s turnin’ back along the coast.’
The dam was an uncanny, dangerous place. Snow had gathered along the walkways, in some places frozen to a solid crust by the relentless wind, and black ice coated many of the metal stairways. They had to inch along with a firm grip on the rails, and once Hal slipped and almost toppled into the snow-filled excavation below. The pocket torch from the boat was almost useless, and every boom and flap from the tarpaulins made them jump. Jess, reminded of dark sails, kept looking back at the jetty, but the sea around was empty. They reached the base of the seawall, and began to climb very carefully up the frozen steps.
‘Kaereste, you should go first, that way I will catch you if you fall.’
‘You kidding? I weigh a hundred and fifty pounds!’
‘Det var som fanden!’
‘Huh?’
‘Never mind. Last stair –’ Hal grabbed the stanchion and swung hims
elf up, panting. Normally the climb barely quickened his breath, but now he felt drained. Jess joined him, putting an arm around his shoulders, and together they moved to the seawall and looked down. Below them, empty, half heeled over on the sandbank and bobbing gently in the eddy from the dam, lay the stolen fishing smack.
‘Satans! He cast it adrift! He landed, and he let it drift!’
‘He couldn’t have! He couldn’t have reached the far shore, not in that time –’
‘No.’ Hal’s voice was strangely calm. ‘He landed here before we did. He has been here all the time–’
Jess made a dive for the stairway, heedless of the slippery footing, but suddenly Hal thrust out an arm to bar her way. He stood an instant, staring down into the dark well below them. Then she heard it, too; the faint tortured creak of a stair under an immense weight, laid down with infinite care. She turned to Hal, saw him draw the flare-launcher from his pocket. He motioned her back, and unwillingly she retreated. For a moment she heard only his breathing as he strove to catch some movement among the shadows below. He held the launcher in both hands, at arm’s length, his thumb resting on the button. Then there was a sudden scrabble from below, and his hand stiffened. With an explosive pop and hiss, a tongue of yellow fire licked down into the dark. Light exploded up through the trapdoor and Hal swung away, throwing up an arm to shield his eyes and staggering back into Jess. In the same instant a stanchion creaked and the platform timbers leapt under a reverberating crash. Silhouetted against the eerie glare of the dying flare, the Ice King stood before them.
He was an appalling vision. No semblance of majesty clung to him now; he was nothing more than monstrous, a lumbering nightmare with one arm that hung by skin and bone as ragged and splintered as his remaining ornaments. He no longer stood upright, but hunched to one side, bringing his left arm up and forward, the long, blackened fingers crooked into a diabolical clutching gesture, shadowing his lowered head. The gold fillet hung awry, unnoticed, meaningless now. He was a ruined thing – a king in exile, dispossessed. So much they saw in the split second before the King swung sideways, towards the massive fuel tank. His left arm hooked around it, and the whole hundred-gallon structure ripped free of its mountings, swung upwards, and hurtled towards them. Jess flung Hal aside and the tank glanced off her shoulder, knocking her spinning, smashed the railing behind them and toppled into the sea. Hal stumbled, and Jess crashed on her back an inch from the platform’s edge. The flare tube rolled and skittered past her. Then the King was on them.
His huge foot cracked the boards by Jess’s head, but he ignored her, closing with Hal as he had on the altarstone. His weight was his weapon as he bore down on his enemy, thrusting him back against the shattered railing – and the swollen left hand thrust out and pressed flat over Hal’s face and upper chest, bending him backwards, trying to snap his spine. Hal’s neck was grinding agony, his head buzzed, his chest laboured for breath under that unyielding weight. His tortured eyes could see only the huge shaggy head of the King against the turbulent sky, the shadow of something that not even time had wholly destroyed. And then the moon crept out from the clouds, shone full on the Ice King’s face, and Hal met the gaze of the draugar. He screamed aloud. There was terror in that face – but no terror he had ever dreamed of.
The features were ruined, bloated, and this close the signs of decay were clear beneath the tautened skin; it was a shattered corpse-face, and the stench of it was choking. But it lived, it moved, it had expression, a stretching snarl of effort. And one part of it was most of all alive, and there the terror dwelt. The eyes he stared into were as blue as his own, clear, unstained, ordinary – human. And tormented. The gaze that fell on him was keen, intelligent, almost sad, for all the writhing mask around it. You peered into the depths of a hellish dungeon, beyond help or hope, and saw there an ordinary face – and worst of all, your own. For Hal it was like looking into a distorting mirror; beneath those puffy mounds of flesh and muscle lay features that had once been very like his own, the same hawklike Scandinavian cast. Viking looked at Viking – and Hal, in the crazy detachment of pain, found himself wondering about an intelligent, even intellectual man born in brutal times, turning to the darker side of a dark faith as his only means of survival, the only power he could gain to live his own life …
The cruel irony of it sickened him to the heart. What right had he to a better fate? What might he not have done, in the other’s place? We have met the enemy, and he is ourself …
‘Yes,’ said the Ice King, and his voice was as cold and remote as his name, the wind calling bleakly over grinding ice-floes, the harsh yearning of a seabird through a chilly waste. ‘That is our secret, you and I …’
‘Hal!’ screamed Jess, fighting to stand up. ‘Don’t listen! Remember the sagas – Grettir – he lost his courage –’
Then the cold eyes turned on her, and she shrank down from the terror of them. In that instant Hal could act, do all that was left him. In another minute he would be dead, and then Jess, themselves night-stalking horrors perhaps, suffering minds imprisoned in tombs of flesh. What had the Queen’s eyes looked like? With all his strength he kicked out, throwing his weight and force the same way as the King’s, backward against the rail.
And over.
Off balance, still clutching Hal, the King toppled forward like a falling cliff, and the two linked bodies whirled out into the air and were gone. Jess, struggling to get up, yelled with horror and threw herself forward. Her arms clawed at empty air, and staring down she saw the spinning forms strike the water with a resounding splash and fountain of water. It settled, and an iridescent, oily rainbow sheen spread out over the surface. Something black bobbed into sight, but it was only the tip of the sunken fuel-drum. She sank back. Something knocked against her knee, and she clutched it violently. It was the flare-gun.
Then there was another splash, a violent turmoil in the water that went on and on. A shape broke surface for an instant, a flash of light skin, and then vanished again as a darker shadow surged underneath. Suddenly, Jess realised what was happening. Both adversaries had survived – perhaps the King had broken Hal’s fall – and were still fighting. But the King would be too heavy to swim, perhaps unable to get a proper grip –
Then a larger, darker head and shoulders rose up in the sea, and behind it a fearful thrashing. The King was walking up the sandbar, to shallows where he could fight – and he was towing Hal with him.
Jess staggered up on shaky legs, poised for the long dive. But before she could make a move, Hal’s body twisted violently, his head broke surface and screamed up to her.
‘No! Don’t risk it! Only way – flare – fire the flare–’
For an instant, no longer than a heartbeat, Jess stared appalled at the oily water. Then she held out the tube, shut her eyes and pressed the trigger.
On the slope above the town two skiers, careering madly along a trail of huge footprints, came skidding to a halt. Far out in the estuary a great scarlet light sprang and beat on their faces an instant, a low sullen boom shattered the pre-dawn silence. Then the light sank back, and the dam stood out starkly in a spreading ring of flames, dancing on the wavecrests.
‘Bloody ’ell!’ said Neville.
‘The harbour!’ yelled Ridley, and boosted himself violently away down the slope. But a minute later he was slithering all over the place, losing speed as his skis sank into the softening surface. Behind him Neville was already kicking his feet free. They began to run across the snow, but a few minutes later they were splashing through lumpy slush. And then, as they reached the crossroads at the edge of town and saw the patrol car come surging down the cliff road towards them, they found they were standing on immensely wet, extremely muddy green grass …
Jess never knew how she had made her way back down to the landing stage – a primitive instinct for self-preservation, perhaps, although the strong seawall was blocking off the flames from the dam itself. But the sea beyond was an inferno in which nothing could live, a
rippling pool of flame. Numbly she turned her back on it, stumbled down towards the jetty. But she made no effort to get into the boat. She just stood staring at the reflections in the black water beneath, as dark and formless as her thoughts. After so much, to have endured so much, escaped so much, and to lose it all in the last mad gamble …
The sense of loss, the ache, was a vast emptiness inside her. Jess thought of herself as an intellectual, a realist. She had never considered the world as fair or unfair, any more than she could call a storm evil or sunlight kind. But if conscious powers of evil like the King existed – if there were other, deeper shadows behind him – then why didn’t they have their reflections, their opposite numbers? Hal had found some help somewhere – but in the end what good had it done him? It was their own strength, human strength, that had brought down the menace – and at a terrible price. Too great a price. There were no powers of good, or if there were they were too weak to hold the balance fair against the shadows. And either way, what use were they? What use was anything, anything at all? The conscious thoughts were the merest echo of the bitterness and despair beneath.
She hardly heard the sound beneath her; she looked down almost unconsciously – and then recoiled, gasping, at the sight of the dark hand. Glistening with water, it clawed for a grip on the slippery metal flooring, clutched at anything, seemed to be falling back. Then, just as it made a last desperate grab at the air, Jess fell on her knees, clutched it, caught at the arm and pulled. There was a splash, a scrabbling on the slippery fender beneath and Hal came flopping and sputtering up onto the jetty. Jess fell sobbing on his neck – and then froze as she saw what had happened to his face.
Down the left side, from forehead to mouth, ran a great seared patch, blackened and blistered, crossing the eye. Darkness hid the socket.
‘It is okay,’ said a feeble voice, a croak. The other eye was open, conscious, looking up at her. ‘Does not even hurt much … shock, probably. He was trying to drown me, Jess; he had got me right under just at the moment you fired. Then he let go – I only came up for an instant … got this … then enough breath to swim free, underwater. An eye for wisdom – Odin’s bargain. Not a bad trade-off … don’t think there’s anything else serious …’
The Ice King Page 27
