Midnight tides

Then Fear nodded and asked, ‘How recent are the signs, Theradas?’

‘Days.’

‘Binadas and Trull, go with Theradas to this place of gathering. I will remain here with the Unblooded.’

The path began twenty paces in from the crevasse, a trail cleared of cobbles and detritus that wound between the rough, crystalline columns of salt. Melt water dripped from the rotting ceiling in a steady downpour. Theradas led them onward another thirty paces, where the path ended at the edge of a vast roughly domed expanse devoid of pillars.

Near the centre squatted a low, misshapen altar stone. Votive offerings surrounded it – shells, mostly, among which the odd piece of carved ivory was visible. Yet Trull spared it but a momentary glance, for his gaze had been drawn to the far wall.

A sheer plane of ice a hundred paces or more across, rising in a tilted overhang – a wall in which countless beasts had been caught in mid-stampede, frozen in full flight. Antlers projected from the ice, heads and shoulders – still solid and immobile – and forelegs lifted or stretched forward. Frost-rimed eyes dully reflected the muted blue-green light. Deeper within, the blurred shapes of hundreds more.

Stunned by the vista, Trull slowly walked closer, round the altar, half expecting at any moment to see the charging beasts burst into sudden motion, onrushing, to crush them all beneath countless hoofs.

As he neared, he saw heaped bodies near the base, beasts that had fallen out from the retreating ice, had thawed, eventually collapsing into viscid pools.

Tiny black flies rose in clouds from the decaying flesh and hide, swarmed towards Trull as if determined to defend their feast. He halted, waved his hands until they dispersed and began winging back to the rotting carcasses. The beasts – caribou – had been running on snow, a packed layer knee-deep above the seabed. He could still see the panic in their eyes – and there, smeared behind an arm’s length of ice, the head and shoulders of an enormous wolf, silver-haired and amber-eyed, running alongside a caribou, shoulder to shoulder. The wolf’s head was raised, jaws open, close to the victim’s neck. Canines as long as Trull’s thumb gleamed beneath peeled-back lips.

Nature’s drama, life unheeding of the cataclysm that rushed upon it from behind – or above. The brutal hand of a god as indifferent as the beasts themselves.

Binadas came to his side. ‘This was born of a warren,’ he said.

Trull nodded. Sorcery. Nothing else made sense. ‘A god.’

‘Perhaps, but not necessarily so, brother. Some forces need only be unleashed. A natural momentum then burgeons.’

‘The Hold of Ice,’ Trull said. ‘Such as the Letherii describe in their faith.’

‘The Hand of the Watcher,’ Binadas said, ‘who waited until the war was done before striding forward to unleash his power.’

Trull had thought himself more knowledgeable than most Edur warriors regarding the old legends of their people. With Binadas’s words echoing in his head, however, he felt woefully ignorant. ‘Where have they gone?’ he asked. ‘Those powers of old? Why do we dwell as if… as if alone?’

His brother shrugged, ever reluctant to surrender his reserve, his mindful silence. ‘We remain alone,’ he finally said, ‘to preserve the sanctity of our past.’

Trull considered this, his gaze travelling over the tableau before him, those dark, murky lives that could not out-run their doom, then said, ‘Our cherished truths are vulnerable.’

‘To challenge, yes.’

‘And the salt gnaws at the ice beneath us, until our world grows perilously thin beneath our feet.’

‘Until what was frozen… thaws.’

Trull took a step closer to the one of the charging caribou. ‘What thaws in turn collapses and falls to the ground. And rots, Binadas. The past is covered in flies.’

His brother walked towards the altar, and said, ‘The ones who kneel before this shrine were here only a few days ago.’

‘They did not come the way we did.’

‘No doubt there are other paths into this underworld.’

Trull glanced over at Theradas, only now recalling his presence. The warrior stood at the threshold, his breath pluming in the air.

‘We should return to the others,’ Binadas said. ‘We have far to walk tomorrow.’

The night passed, damp, cold, the melt water ceaselessly whispering. Each Edur stood watch in turn, wrapped in furs and weapons at the ready. But there was nothing to see in the dull, faintly luminescent light. Ice, water and stone, death, hungry motion and impermeable bones, a blind triumvirate ruling a gelid realm.