“All in all, I’d say that you have had an excellent night.” Charlene cocked an inquisitive eye, perhaps hoping for details.
Eviane hugged Max’s arm. Max looked up at the clouds and whistled tunelessly.
Snow Goose slide-stepped across the icy ground. Like the rest of them, she had fastened a pad of Velcro-like hooking blades to her shoes. They increased the traction wonderfully. She came close to Eviane. “All right,” she said. “Which way do we go?”
Eviane closed her eyes. In the darkness, shimmering like a heat mirage, was the city. The ruins. She raised a hand and pointed toward the horizon. Snow Goose touched her arm lightly, correcting it a few degrees.
“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.
The city’s skyline was jagged with crystal spires too thin to support themselves, that should have vibrated and shattered in the wind, and spans between towers that twisted like facets of a gem, viewed through the center of that perfect stone: the angles were there, the angles could be perceived, but not understood. They didn’t make any sense.
Max and Orson helped each other down from one of the higher shelves; and looked at it in astonishment. “Like something out of an Escher painting,” Max muttered.
Orson, for once, just shook his head, then looked around for the skinny redhead. “Kevin? What have we got here?”
Kevin sighed. “Mythologically, I haven’t the foggiest fuck of a notion. Effects-wise, I think it’s a modified three-dimensional holographic binary decomposition of a Mandelbrot set.”
“Kevin?” Orson said.
“Yeah?”
“Get a life, would you?”
The other Adventurers had collected around them by now, gazing up at the impossible reality. “What is this?” Yarnall whispered. “Anybody read about anything like this in Eskimo lore?”
There was no direct answer, but Kevin looked at the vast crystal forest of buildings and shook his head slowly. “Damned if it doesn’t remind me of something, but I can’t remember what.”
“Eskimos…” Orson said. “But does it specifically have to be Eskimo mythology, or could it include mythology about Eskimos?”
Trianna pulled her collar tighter. “Why? What’s the difference?”
“I remember something from Lovecraft about a tribe of degenerate Eskimos who worshiped… worshiped… I’m sorry. It just won’t come.”
Cautiously, they began to move forward.
The ground, although uneven, had better traction here. The maze was only about three hundred meters away. The avenues between the blocks were slick with ocean damp, freezing dry, a glare of ice forming over everything even as they watched.
Frankish Oliver was the first to step onto the new ground. He tested it with one foot, then looked back at them, and nodded his head in a sickly approval. “Let’s do it,” he said, thumping his war club against the ground. He might have been trying to convince himself that the street wouldn’t collapse under him.
Max leaned close to Eviane. “This is weird,” he whispered. “Long time ago I saw a movie. Made in about
