howling of the falling snow. It sounded like a faintly audible note that might have been a voice coming from her left. It grew for a moment into a steady tone that suddenly ended.
“Reza?” she whispered. “Reza!” she shouted, “Where are you?”
Nothing.
“I did not imagine it,” she said aloud, sitting ramrod straight in her saddle, as if her body could act as an antenna to gain some additional clarity should the note be repeated.
Beneath her, the magthep threw its head from side to side, growing restless for no reason Esah-Zhurah could fathom. It mewled quietly, stomping its feet, waiting for Esah-Zhurah to make up her mind.
“Reza!” she shouted with all her strength. “Over here!”
Her heart thundering with relief, she wheeled her magthep around and began to gallop in the direction of his voice, thanking the Empress that Reza somehow had found her, and that perhaps all would yet be well.
He was about to call out to her again when he heard a thunderous boom. Goliath suddenly sprawled forward, catapulting Reza over the beast’s twisting neck. Reza’s arms and legs flailed like a doll’s as he spun through the air, his mouth gaping open in horrified surprise.
In the moment he was airborne, surprise gave way to terror as he saw a jagged black chasm yawning beneath him where only snow had been before. Freezing water lapped hungrily at the serrated edges of the broken ice, and welcomed Reza with a frigid embrace that stole the scream from his lips as he plunged into the river.
The sound hit her like a shot from a rifle, echoing through the air and reverberating through the ground at her feet.
“What is that?” she whispered, peering in the direction from which she had heard Reza’s voice.
She could see nothing. Her ears, however, had no difficulty in picking out sounds she recognized instantly: a magthep’s terrified squeals mixed with the sound of splashing water.
“No!” she cried, kicking her magthep in the ribs and sending the beast racing as fast as she could toward the frenzied thrashings. “Reza, hang on!” she shouted into the wind. “Hang on!”
Suddenly, as if someone had whipped a curtain aside, Esah-Zhurah found herself plunging toward the gaping black fissure in the ice where Goliath had broken through. The great magthep was now pawing and kicking desperately at the edge, his tiny forearms grappling pitifully at the icy wall that rose nearly a meter above him.
As she watched, more ice tumbled down into the black waters. The layer that had covered the river was treacherously thin and hollow between the surface of the water and the bottom of the ice. The magthep screamed in terror, his rear legs and tail thrashing as he sought to escape.
“Reza!” she shouted over the magthep’s braying. Her eyes scanned the water, hoping to spot him alive among the drifting chunks of ice, or – better by far – somewhere near the edge, out of danger. She would have taken her magthep closer, but she was already dangerously near the snaking web of cracks that spiraled outward from where Goliath lay struggling.
Leaping from her mount, she moved as close as she dared to the crumbling edge. “Reza!” she called again, her voice cracking with the effort.
“Esah-Zhurah,” came a hoarse cry, barely more than a whisper it seemed, from somewhere in the water, “here.”
Desperately, Esah-Zhurah searched the water for him, edging ever closer as she sought to pierce the undulating shroud of darkening snow.
Without warning, there was another tremendous boom from the ice, and her magthep plunged into the frigid water. Esah-Zhurah was flung clear by a huge chunk of ice that catapulted her into the air like a springboard. Rolling to her feet in the snow, she turned to find Goliath finally struggling to safety, having at last gotten a grip with his rear feet on stable ice. The beast shook himself mightily, flinging away the water that had not yet frozen to his fur. Retreating a short way from the fissure, he turned to bray at his companion cow, now struggling for its life. Lacking Goliath’s enormous strength, the smaller animal was doomed.
“Call again!” Esah-Zhurah shouted, “I cannot see you!”
“Here,” came the voice, weaker this time.
Her eyes were drawn to two black streaks across a large chunk of ice. They suddenly resolved into Reza’s arms, the claws of his gauntlets thrust into the ice. Just before the snow obliterated the scene, she saw his head lolling just above the water.
“I see you!” she shouted. “
She turned to Goliath, the problem of how to retrieve Reza without killing herself consuming her thoughts. Since the day in the grotto, she had learned from Reza how to swim, but she had never tried anything like this, nor had she ever been in water this cold.
“You are going to have to help me, Goliath,” she said, grabbing some rope from where it was lashed to the saddle. She shook the ice and snow from it, the fibers crackling as she began to unwind the sturdy hemp. She tied one end through one of the stirrups on Reza’s saddle, then dropped the rest to the ground. Bracing herself against the cold, she ripped off her metal chest armor. She would have taken off the rest, but there was no time.
She took up the rope and stood on the thinnest ice that would still support her weight. She knew now that her destiny had arrived. This was the source of her dark dreams, the nightmares that had plagued her since she was young. This was the dark water that would steal her breath away, that would still her heart, that would take her life. She might have laughed at the sudden memory of her fear of the waters of the grotto that night, as Reza struggled valiantly to convince her that lying in a genoth’s belly was indeed worse than diving beneath a waterfall. “Have faith,” she told herself softly, gritting her teeth. “Be strong.”
Gripping the free end of the rope in one hand, she ran toward the water, praying that her body would be able to stand the shock. She leaped into the air just as the ice gave way beneath her and dived head first into the water, arms outstretched, with the rope trailing away behind her like a harpoon’s lanyard.
Her thoughts and her breath were ripped away as she hit the water, the cold stabbing into her body like an icy sword. She was sure her heart stopped for just an instant. But then, almost reluctantly, it began to beat again, counting down the few minutes she had before the cold would claim her. She began to swim toward the small berg to which Reza had anchored himself. From land, it seemed like it could only be a dozen meters. But now, in the freezing water, every stroke seemed like a league. She could feel the cold sucking the life from her, the water a much more insidious opponent than the air above. Her heart thundered as it tried to keep warm blood flowing from her weakening core to the straining muscles in her legs and arms.
Without warning, she felt herself jerked up short. Only after a moment of confused turning in the water did she realize what had happened: the rope was not long enough! Hesitating for a precious moment, she finally let it go and kicked away, leaving it behind to sink into the darkness. She had been depending on Goliath’s brute strength to get them out, but now she was on her own.
She turned her head just in time to see Reza slip beneath the surface. His hand trailed limply behind him like a periscope until that, too, vanished beneath the roiling water.
“No!” she screamed, kicking madly toward where he had gone down. Frantically, she swam to where she had last seen him clinging to the ice. She dived below the surface and swam in a circle for as long as she could, finally coming up for a gasp of air. She could see nothing, feel nothing in the murk below. How was she to find him in the black water? Which direction was the current flowing? She dived back down, searching with her hands. But all that her numbed nerves reported was the deathly cold water. She swam back to the surface again, her hopes for finding him dying with the light of the sun.
“Please,” she prayed to her Empress through her violently chattering teeth, “please let me find him. Do not let it end this way. Please.”
Then there came an odd tingling sensation, as if a frail
