The hooded figure seated to the left of the empty chair stood up slowly and raised his right hand, revealing a deep scar that ran across his palm. He spoke in English, his voice gravelly and deep. “Herr Professor. Your Excellency. Mr. President. Welcome. The felag is nearly complete.”
He sat down and placed his left palm on the table. On his index finger was a luminous ring, a twisted band of gold with a signet, its surface impressed with a linear symbol similar to the runes on the chair behind him.
“For thirty generations now we have kept the fire of Thor burning for the return of our king,” he said. “Now the forces that would destroy us again threaten the sanctity of the felag. We will unleash all the powers at our disposal to safeguard our treasure, to find our inheritance from the king of kings.” He gestured towards the empty seat beside him. “But before the council we must complete our circle.”
A hooded figure emerged from the dark recess of the passageway behind the empty chair. In the flames of the double torch his robe seemed ablaze, glowing with the deep orange of a hearth. His hands were clasped in front of him and his face was concealed inside his hood.
“You have carried out your appointed task?”
“It has begun.”
“Come forward.”
The man stepped out beside the pillar until he was level with the axe, its shimmering blade only inches from his head. He raised his right hand to his face, pulling his hood back slightly to reveal his pallid skin and thin lips. A jagged white scar ran across his cheek from his eye socket to his chin.
“You are sworn to avenge your grandfather, our thole-companion who last occupied this chair,” the man at the table said. “The blood feud will not end until the last of our enemies are dead. You will seek to know what they know and extinguish their knowledge with them. You will exact terrible vengeance. You will honour the felag and earn your place at this table.”
The man beside the pillar drew his finger hard down the scar on his cheek, wincing slightly. He bowed towards the table, and the shadow of a smile passed across his lips. The eleven others watched as he turned to the axe. He raised his right palm to the blade and drew it down sharply, pressing hard into the steel until his blood welled out. He reached his bleeding hand down into his robe and pulled out a golden ring, identical to the one worn by the man at the head of the table, then walked forward and sat down. The others raised their hands in unison, revealing identical rings and scarred palms.
A channel of fire suddenly ignited under the table, lighting up the symbol in the centre. Around it the flames shone through the embedded glass that made up the sun-wheel, an orange light that pulsed over the hooded figures to the wall beyond, illuminating the axe blades and the empty helmets in a flickering orange glow. They had been joined by the spirits of the departed felag, the sacred fellowship, warriors called from their eternal feasting in Valhalla once again to occupy their armour in readiness for battle.
The symbol was their tree of life. Seven-branched, it would light their way until the final showdown at the end of days, when they would at last wield battle-axes shoulder to shoulder with their king.
The twelve hooded figures all reached forward until their rings touched, the blood of the one anointing the others, dripping in rivulets down their sleeves and over the symbol in the centre of the table. When their fists were all touching the figure who had spoken first spoke again.
“Hann til ragnaroks.”
Jack seemed to be waking into his worst nightmare. He first realised he was conscious when he recognised the sound of his own breathing, a rasping, sucking noise followed by the rush of exhalation from his regulator exhaust. He gradually became aware of his body, the dull ache of the six-month old gunshot wound in his side and a sharper pain in his leg. He seemed to have been in limbo for an eternity, hovering between a dream world and some kind of reality, but as he opened his eyes and saw the digital time display inside his visor he realized it had only been a few minutes. The view beyond seemed pure hallucination, a kaleidoscopic pattern drawn in tendrils of red. He shut his eyes and instantly confronted another image, one etched on his mind. The wraith-like form of a man was laid out in front of him, as if Jack were floating above his own shrouded body entombed in the ice. The image receded as he seemed to float higher above it, bringing an overwhelming, narcotic sense of relief, but something within him was fighting desperately to pull back, as if the image of his own death were his only lifeline.
The rushing sound of his exhaust became a bubbling ferment and then a high-pitched hiss. Jack opened his eyes and saw a diagonal line running across the centre of his visor. He realised he was lying half in and half out of the water and that the view he had seen a few moments before was his headlight refracting through a slurry of brash interspersed with his own blood. The lamp now shone above water and he could see a wall of ice only inches from his face. Cautiously he turned his head to the right, angling his lamp until he could see the length of his body. He was inside a cavity about the size of a small car, the upper part an air pocket created by his exhaust. Instead of the smooth surface of the tunnel created by the ice-borer, the walls were jagged and fractured, great slabs of ice that seemed to have compacted violently together. Some of the slabs were cloudy and others nearly transparent, creating the illusion that the chamber extended off in fissures and tunnels around the white ice.
For a fleeting moment Jack’s mind wandered again and he felt cocooned and safe, as if the chamber that had opened up and protected him from the crushing impact of the ice would be his ultimate salvation. Then reality kicked in and he felt a cold dread. Somehow the ice had cracked as the berg rolled and he had been given a reprieve, but it could only be temporary. As more water was displaced by his exhaust he could feel the slurry of brash around his lower body thicken, immobilising his legs. To his horror he realised he was being frozen alive all over again, only this time there would be no quick end, but a long, lingering agony half in and half out of the air pocket, as his breathing gas gradually expended and he suffocated in his own exhaust.
A noise crackled around his head and jerked him back to life. The intercom whined and then settled to the sound of grunting and straining. It seemed unbelievable, little short of a miracle. “Jack, can you hear me?”
“Costas.” Jack’s voice sounded peculiar, oddly distant to his own ears, and then he remembered the trimix contained helium. “Where the hell are you?”
“I can see you, but you can’t see me. Try to turn over. You have to get yourself out of the water, otherwise we’ve had it for good this time.”
Costas’ voice was a reassuring measure of reality, calm despite the desperate situation. Jack marshalled all of his energy and heaved himself up on his elbows. He could swivel his torso slightly to the right and his arms were free, but his feet and lower legs were nearly frozen into the ice. It was like fighting against clinging mud, and each time he pulled he only seemed to embed himself further.
“It’s no good,” he panted. “I can barely move my legs.”
“Can you reach your cylinder pack?”
“Just.”
“Okay. Pull out that axe and lay it on the ledge beside your head.”
Jack did as he was instructed, laboriously extracting the wooden haft of the axe hand over hand from where he had slid it behind his cylinder straps. He could scarcely register what he was holding, a Varangian battle-axe from a Viking longship, a discovery that now seemed pure fantasy. By the time he had finished withdrawing the axe the surface of the slurry had frozen solid around his waist, and the moisture in his exhaust had caused a sheen of ice to form over his visor.
“I can’t see any more,” he exclaimed, trying to remain rational, to stave off panic. “The pressure’s going to build up in here now that there’s no more water to displace, and the moisture from my exhaust is freezing my upper body too. This could be over quicker than I thought.”
“Lie back and push the shaft of the axe as far as you can above your head. The ice-borer
’s embedded in the cavity, and I can see the filaments of the coil frozen in the ice below you. If we can reactivate the battery then we might be able to melt you out.”
Jack held the bit of the axe and pushed it as far as he could along a shelf of ice that angled slightly upwards above the slurry. At first he felt no resistance, but at the limit of his reach the base of the haft hit something solid.
“Okay. That’s it,” Costas said. “Now try about six inches to your left.”
Jack strained again and prodded the haft along. Suddenly he felt something depress, and a green aura became visible through the ice on his visor.
“Good. You’ve done it. The main element of the corer was crushed when things went haywire back there, but the coil is operated from a separate battery pack that looks intact. All we have to do now is wait.”
“How are you doing?” Jack spoke as he slumped back, forcing himself to think beyond his surroundings.
“Just great. Trapped in the Ice Age. Follow Jack Howard and see the world.”
“Seriously. I can’t see you.”
“At first I couldn’t work it out. If the berg had flipped we’d be hundreds of metres deep, crushed to oblivion. Then I saw the ice probe and realized. We’ve rolled a full three hundred and sixty degrees and come back upright again. Whatever force was behind this thing made the berg somersault right over on the threshold. My guess is it’s still stuck on the outer edge of the sill, but has slid down deeper than its original position. My depth gauge reads one hundred and twenty-three metres, just about the limit for our trimix gas. If the berg was floating out to sea it would have flipped again and we’d be way beyond that depth, gone for good. That could happen any time.”
“A reassuring thought.”
“Before we rolled. Did you see what I saw?”
“It was Halfdan. The guy whose runes are on the battle-axe. We were directly over the bier in the centre of the longship, where his body was meant to be burnt. We must be the only people alive to have seen a Viking warrior in the flesh. Fantastic.”
“Yeah, fantastic. It spooked me. Let’s hope we’re not joining him.”
“Got any plans?”
“Let’s do this step by step. The first thing is to get thawed out.”
In the lull that followed, Jack noticed the utter stillness of the berg, broken only by the noise of their breathing, in contrast to the deafening cacophony of a few minutes before as the ice sundered and cracked. Somehow the stillness accentuated the sepulchral quality of the chamber and brought home the full enormity of their situation. They were trapped deep inside an iceberg, hemmed in by a million tons of rock-hard ice, at the limit of their survivable depth and with every prospect of a fatal tumble into the abyss. Jack began to feel unnerved, and as he stared at the ice only inches from his head he began to feel the old claustrophobia nagging at the edges of his consciousness. Lurking beneath the surface was a fear that he would be gripped by panic, as had so nearly happened when Costas had kept him going in the tunnels of Atlantis six months before. He knew Costas’ banter had kept his mind focussed, that his friend knew him too well, and he forced himself to concentrate on little things, on the small steps that might eventually lead to their salvation.
“I’ve got movement,” Jack said. “I can move my feet.”
“Excellent. Try to swivel round in my direction.”
The sheen of ice on Jack’s visor was beginning to drip away, and he could now see the slurry more clearly. The coil of microfilaments from the probe was doing its work, and the surface was beginning to liquefy. He arched his back and flexed his legs, causing a stab of pain and a sudden spasm of shivering. For the first time he inspected the injury in his left thigh, the embedded spear of ice just visible through the rent in his E-suit. The ice had numbed most of the pain and staunched the bleeding, but even so the blood loss had left him dangerously vulnerable to the cold. He heaved himself sideways, pulling his legs out of the water and hauling himself as far as he could go up the shelf, then wiped his visor and looked into the jagged wall of ice that had lain behind him.
The sight that confronted him was surreal. He could see Costas, yet it was an image that defied sense. He seemed to be lying within easy reach, yet was separated by a wall of transparent ice. With each tiny movement Costas seemed to fragment into myriad shapes, refracted through numerous planes in the ice. Jack suddenly caught sight of Costas’ face, the yellow helmet at first appearing grotesquely elongated but then compressing to some semblance of normality.
“I’m about a metre from you,” Costas said. “When I recovered consciousness I was floating in a fissure. I tried to reach you, but this is how far I got. I’m as near as I can get to being frozen without actually being solid. It’s all meltwater ice, from that crevasse above the longship. It should be easier to hack through than glacier ice. How are you with an axe?”
Jack suddenly saw a ray of hope. “You know, it’s my main occupation during the off season when I disappear into the woods. When I tell everyone I’m writing. It makes me forget all this.”
“Good enough. Let’s see what you can do. If you can break through, then the water from your side should get in and do the trick. The coil won’t melt glacial ice, but it should keep this slush liquid. There’s about a six-inch air pocket around me from my exhaust.”
“Where does the rest go?”
“Fissures and cracks above me. This ice may look solid, but it’s really a mass of fallen slabs.”
Jack rolled over until he was lying face-down on the shelf. With his left hand he gripped the ledge to prevent himself from slipping into the slurry, and with his right hand he reached up and grasped the axe. He let himself go, sliding into the brash until he was kneeling on the bottom with the surface at waist level. He wrestled to remove his fins, drawing them up on their retaining straps behind his calves, then pulled the axe down with both hands and swivelled it so the bit was above him. Standing in the slurry, his tall frame bent low under the ceiling, he would have just enough room to wield the axe in short spans, though each heft would require extra effort as he struggled to maintain balance and momentum.
“Here goes.” He placed the axe blade on the ice just above water level in front of Costas’ face and took a short swing. The blade was dull but the metal still had the strength of a thousand years ago, and it was the force of impact rather than the cutting edge that mattered. As the bit struck it broke off a shard of ice and sent tiny fracture marks in a web from the point of impact, reducing his view of Costas to a meaningless mosaic. “I can just do it,” Jack panted. “Six inches less space and I wouldn’t have the momentum.”
Slowly, deliberately, he began to hack at the ice, each blow striking off another shard, and each swing sending a jolt of pain through his leg. With the additional strain of holding up the weight of his cylinder pack above water, the exertion soon started to tell, and he began to breathe his trimix at an alarming rate. He tried to ignore the digital readout inside his visor and focus on the task at hand. He was deploying a standard woodsman’s technique, cutting a wedge above and below his baseline. As each wedge deepened he struck off larger chunks from the space between, extending the hole until it was only inches from Costas and almost wide enough for him to get through.
As he lined up for the critical blow his legs suddenly buckled under him and he slipped back into the slurry, dropping the axe. He realised that he had not simply lost balance: he had been toppled by some greater force. He righted himself and saw the surface of the water shaking violently, and heard distant groans and cracks. Suddenly the water began to rise, and Jack saw a dark fissure opening in the ceiling of the chamber.
“The air pocket’s going,” he exclaimed. “It’s escaping upwards.” He heaved the axe out of the slurry and flung it against the cut one more time, but to no avail. “The hole’s already under water. I can’t get any momentum.”
He slid back against the back wall of the chamber, the axe hanging from his hand, and watched helplessly as the w
ater level rose above his visor and reached the ceiling. Less than a minute after the crack had appeared, all that was left was the tumult of bubbles cascading upwards from his own exhaust, and that quickly dissipated through the crack after each exhalation. The temperature readout on his visor had dropped to -2 degrees Celsius, below the freezing point of the water. He realized with sickening certainty that the coil would never cope with the quantity of water now filling the chamber; only the lower portion around the filaments would remain liquid.
Brash began to form in front of his eyes. He felt the water stiffen around his arms and head. It was happening again, a hellish torment he was fated to endure repeatedly, a nightmare relived. He stared wide-eyed as the ice began to encapsulate him. He began hyperventilating, as if his body were willing him to suck away his last reserve of trimix and lapse into blackness, a merciful oblivion in the face of the lingering horror that lay ahead of him.
“Your oxygen! Cut your oxygen hose!”
The voice snapped him back into reality. He instantly realised what Costas meant. He dragged his left arm through the slurry and pulled out the knife he kept in a sheath on his chest, bringing the serrated edge up against the two hoses under his helmet. For an appalling moment he forgot which was trimix and which was oxygen, the narcotic effect of nitrogen at this pressure playing tricks on his mind. His head was nearly immobile and he was unable to see down to the hoses. He shut his eyes and resolutely grasped the left hose, bringing the blade to bear just under the point where it fed into his helmet.
“What’s left in your oxygen cylinder should fill the chamber long enough to clear the hole for another couple of blows,” Costas said. “But for God’s sake don’t breathe it. Eighty per cent oxygen at this depth would mean instant death.”
Jack slashed the hose and a huge geyser of bubbles erupted into the chamber. The water rapidly lowered to chest level and he heaved himself up again, the severed hose dancing and hissing in front of him. He pulled the axe out of the brash and aimed it at the hole. With all his strength he swung against the ice, causing a large chunk to break free. He could see Costas pushing with all his might against the remaining barrier. Jack frantically pulled the floating chunk of ice aside and aimed another blow. Just then the hissing of his oxygen hose faltered, and the water level began to rise again, inexorably. He had one last chance. He lined up above the fracture line where the chunk had broken off, then relaxed completely, his eyes glued on the point of impact. He swung the axe back and brought it forward with all his might, causing a spray of brash as the blade skimmed over the rising water and slammed into the ice. Then he slumped back and began to pant uncontrollably, sending geysers of bubbles out of his exhaust as the water rose and submerged him again.
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