Scratching his head, Finderkeeper peered into the darkness to the south. Indeed, he could see a huge lake almost even with the top of the ice dam extending far to the south.
“As the spring and summer come, the ice dam begins to melt and the blocking glacier begins to retreat. At some point, the rising water begins to spill over the ice dam-a trickle at first, but quickly and fiercely erosive. Within minutes the water begins to cut through the ice dam. In less than an hour, the Dragon roars and the entire lake empties out down the valley. That’s why no one lives there. It’s not safe.”
“But where did Bodar go?”
Thrak, who had listened approvingly to Gam’s explanation, interrupted. “She’s not quite ready, but with Bodar’s help, she’ll go hy dawn.”
Indeed, in the distance, Finderkeeper could hear the methodical wet smack of Bodar’s ice pick on the top of the ice dam. If the Knights heard it, they paid it no mind. Thrak could see their flickering campfire below.
Hasterck was up at dawn. Today they would catch the Ice Nomads and the kender, and the Irda magic, whatever it was, would be his-or at least his master’s. He took care of his morning ablutions and then squatted at the stream to fill his canteen with the clear, cold water that flowed from the edge of the glacier. It must be warming slightly, he thought. The stream looked higher than he remembered from the evening before.
Suddenly there was a sharp crack, as if lightning had struck nearby. He turned to see a huge slab of ice break off the face of the ice wall several hundred yards up-valley. Though startling, it did not immediately frighten him. Their camp was far enough back that the slab would do it no harm.
What did frighten him severely an instant later was the cascade of water flowing rapidly over the scarred edge of the ice that had just calved. The glint of the crystal water rushing over the deep cobalt of the freshly exposed ice flank was beautiful, but he also knew it was deadly. He ran as fast as he could to the western cliff, yelling for Zeke and Dirk to awake and follow. He knew that they would not make it in time. He was unsure if he would. He climbed as if his life depended on it, because it did.
Bodar’s arms ached with a weariness he had never known. His hands no longer responded to his commands. They were fixed in a death grip on the handle of his axe. The freezing water dulled the pain that had fired through his hands for the first few hours, but he knew that the best he could hope for from his evening’s activities was that both his hands would turn black- frozen more solidly than the hibernating lemmings they dug up for food. As the early dawn approached, his efforts had grown more and more fevered. Finally, he had completed the narrow trench, and the water had begun to flow.
It all happened so fast after that. One moment, he had been hacking through still water of the makeshift trench in the top of the ice dam. The next moment, the water was moving swiftly through the trench, doubling its depth in seconds. Then the water seeped into unseen cracks with a gushing force that opened them ever wider. A rumble caused the trench to fork and he realized, too late, that he stood on the most unstable portion of the dam. A sharp crack and the huge V-shaped slab of ice on which he stood broke free of the dam and plummeted down the face of the ice cliff. A torrent of frigid water raced the berg.
He knew as he died that the Dragon had roared in time.
Thrak, Garn, and Finderkeeper had watched through the night, sleeping only fitfully. They worried as they saw the Commander of the Knights awake and begin to break camp. Then they, too, heard the crack of the glacier’s thunder. For a moment, they glimpsed Bodar, upright, before the ice sheeted off beneath him and the water started its tumultuous rampage.
A moment before, the tremendous lake behind the ice dam had been a placid mirror, reflecting the red and purple of the sun rising above the snow-capped spires of the eastern ridge of the valley. The wake of a water bird spread out over the calm surface and lapped gently at the top of the dam as a loon heralded daybreak in the distance. But Bodar’s trench was more than a mere slit in the ice dam, it gave the coursing water a way into a multitude of cracks and fissures in the melting glacier. The surface of the lake lurched downward and crashed into the valley below. Rumbles quickly became pops and huge, thunderous claps, as the disintegrating glacial dam shuddered and broke into giant, tumbling slabs of ice.
The tumultuous surge carved off tremendous, unstable bergs of ice and created a wall of rushing, foaming, angry water and house-sized chunks of ice that inundated the peaceful green valley at more than twice the speed of a galloping horse. Birds nesting in the valley grasses squawked as they wheeled upward, abandoning their eggs. Tremendous boulders littering the valley floor, perhaps from the aftermath of prior onslaughts, were picked up by the force of the water and tossed about like an angry child’s marbles. Cliff-sides collapsed into the torrent as the ice-slabs and rushing water eroded their underpinnings.
In less than a minute, the camp of the Knights was flung down the valley by rushing, freezing water. In two minutes, the water at the camp was a boiling, turbulent flow of fearsome waves and white-water spray. In five minutes, the wall of water hurtling down the valley was creating a roar so tremendous that they could not hear each other yelling in fear.
Everything on the valley floor was shattered and destroyed. In ten minutes, the valley was filled with water more than fifty feet deep. The edges of the spiny ridges that confined the flow were stripped clean of vegetation. The terns had fled, and outcroppings of rock were falling into the roiling, stampeding water below.
In less than twenty minutes, a lake seven miles long and more than one hundred and twenty feet deep had almost completely emptied. The ice dam was gone, leaving nothing but a stump of glacier flowing down from the western ridge, dangling precariously over the open space where the dam once held back the waters from up-valley. The Dragon had roared, and Finder-keeper now knew just a little bit of what his afflicted cousins had felt at the fall of Kendermore. The destruction was demoralizing in its speed and completeness.
The sight had been wondrous and frightening. It had saved life, and it had caused death. The rocks on which they sat, high above the devastation, had rumbled and complained. When it was over, they remained alive, each with their own thoughts on nature, sacrifice, knowledge, existence, and death. Thrak said a few words for Bodar. Garn’s eyes filled with tears, but he made no sound. Finderkeeper decided that his hair-tormentor was a pretty good guy, after all.
They heard the Knight Commander before they saw him. His incessant cursing gave him away. Somehow he had made it far enough up the western ridge to escape the worst, and he held on above the cauldron of freezing, roiling death, the adrenaline building a rage in him that mirrored the destruction of the Dragon’s roar itself. The remaining three companions knew that their adventure was not yet over and hastened up the ridge, for the chase was on again.
It was possible that they might defeat the Knight Commander in a battle. He was but one and they were three. But the long spears that Garn and Thrak carried for use against the mammoths were of little help in a close quarters battle, and Finderkeeper had naught but a dagger that he had been holding for his Uncle Both-eragain. The Knight was armored and well-weaponed with longsword and mace. Not to mention that he was enraged… really, really enraged.
There is little to say of the climb and descent that followed. The bright sun shone down on a narrow arm of the Ice Mountain Bay northwest of them as they reached the crest of the last ridge. The glacial fields that had spawned the ice dam lay west and south. They headed toward the bay as the tide turned and the water seeped away from their approach. By the time they had reached the shore many, many hours later, the tide was low and mud flats stretched from edge to edge across the finger of water.
“If we can make it across the flats before the tide turns,” sputtered a weak and weary kender, “maybe the water will cut off our truly dedicated but thoroughly exasperating pursuer.”
“No,” said Thrak. “We stand here.” He turned to Garn. “No matter what befalls, do not venture onto the flats.”
“I know, Father. I know.”
Finderkeeper was befuddled but too tired to want to run across several miles of open mudflats. Besides, he wasn’t sure how soon the tide would be turning anyhow. Drowning did not really sound like an interesting way to die. They said you just drifted off into unconsciousness, but he couldn’t figure out how they would really know that. Didn’t only dead people really know, one way or the other?
“Maybe if we just give him the magic thing,” he volunteered weakly, taking the small carved item out of the scroll case in which he had put it for safekeeping.
