The Barsoom Project

“The spirits say that if we head north, we’ll reach our goal.”

Kevin shrugged his bony shoulders. The air was chilly, but not quite unpleasant.

The Adventurers formed a line and began to move out, the blades on their shoe bottoms grating against the ice, keeping them stable.

Hippogryph sidled up next to Max. “Good bout yesterday, Mr. Mountain.”

Max smiled. “Yeah, I guess it was.” He looked at his former opponent. “You were really trying, weren’t you?”

“Nobody takes falls like that for fun. I should have brought a goddamn parachute.”

Max’s grin broadened, and a little tune came into his whistle. His bear paw of a hand slid over Hippogryph’s. “Thanks,” he said. “That means a lot.”

There were no signs of life. It was as though they had gone beyond the pale. Nothing but the incessantly howling winds. No birds, no plants. Just the slow crawl of the blue-pink fantasia arcing endlessly overhead.

Eviane began to feel a certain heaviness in her guts, a sourness. She looked back over her shoulder. Already the mountains were far behind them. In this strange and magical land, time and distance didn’t seem to have the same significance they did in the outside world. More of the Cabal’s doing, she would imagine.

“Are you afraid?” she asked Max.

He wore a three-day stubble of beard and frankly, she liked it. Without it there was a certain babyishness to him; he seemed soft and vulnerable. With the dark beard, he seemed dangerous. For that matter, so did Orson.

“Of course.” Max’s eyes were hooded, serious, but his voice was merry. “Only a fool wouldn’t be afraid.”

Ah, her man. He didn’t fool her for a moment. He was the bravest, handsomest-

Once again she caught a sidewise glance at those flashing eyes, peering ahead into the danger as if there was nothing in the world that could stop him. At that moment she was sure that he was right.

And she was happy that he was hers.

And Michelle, still hiding behind stern, strong Eviane, giggled like a happy child.

They had been walking for an hour before the ice began to vibrate.

It was a gentle sensation at first, and she marked it down to loose shoes, or the slipping of her ice grips on her soles, or the sound of the marchers around her. But terror was already rising along Eviane’s spine.

A few seconds later she heard it thrumming more powerfully, rhythmically, a deep ringing like a man striking a gong. She felt it more than heard it, as if she were an ant crawling along the edge of the gong, and now the terror was yammering in her frontal lobes.

“Hey-” Robin Bowles was the first of the others to comment on it.

And there it was again. This time the entire field shook. The memory of the burrowing mammoth flashed through her mind and body and held her paralyzed and mute.

Max grabbed her shoulder and yanked her back. All of the others stepped back away from the locus of vibration. The waves shivered through their feet, up their legs, rattling their brains, shaking them as if with titanic hammer blows.

“Back!” Yarnall screamed. “For God’s sake, get back!”

And the ice began to split.

The fissure line was tiny, a delicate hairline that suddenly tore apart and became something hideous. Jagged sheets of ancient frozen water cracked and jutted like a miniature mountain range. Eviane rose clumsily to her feet and scrambled backward. She grabbed Max’s hand, but lost it as he rose up five feet on an angled ice cliff. She yelped and slid down on her backside, thumping into an abutment of ice.

The environmental craziness began to spread.

The sky crackled. The aurora borealis was temporarily obscured in a swirl of storm clouds and blinding sheets of lightning. The roar of the storm, the thunder melded with the sound of the ice just a few hundred yards away as the entire shelf split. A dark and mazelike form loomed up from beneath it.

It must have been two or three kilometers across. The cry of the shattering, groaning ice was a terrible thing, rising above the wind, above the clash of lightning, filling earth and sky with a bone-jarring cacophony. The birth of a mountain range might have been like that. It overwhelmed the senses, eye and ear and sense of touch all overloaded to the point that the Adventurers couldn’t run, couldn’t hide, could do nothing but watch, mouths agape with shock.

The mist and the hail grew thick enough to turn day to twilight. The hissing of a dark ocean somewhere deep beneath the ice roared as if regurgitating the last drop of caustic from a poisoned system.

What burst into the air was impossible, and the Adventurers sprawled on the ruined ice floe gazed at it in amazement and horror.

It was a maze of sorts, like a windowless alien city carved out of some black stone. The angles of it actually hurt Eviane’s head to examine.

Max’s arms snaked around her from the side as she pressed palms against her temples. “Sweetheart,” he asked in alarm, “are you all right?”

She couldn’t speak her answer, could only press tightly into his comforting warmth.