Right.
They peered out across the space separating them from the central citadel.
Most of the chunks of wreckage seemed to have been abandoned ages before. He guessed that the ice on the blocks was as layered as a cross-cut redwood. Lights showed in a central cornplex of buildings. Somebody lived there, or something. The presence of life in the midst of this black desolation was no comfort at all.
Behind him, Eviane was wheezing. She was a little better than she had been a half-hour before, no longer paralyzed with fear, but she was still baggage.
There was movement in the ruins.
The thing that shambled through the ruins was man-shaped, but had no head. It was huge. It reminded Max of one of the Goons in an old Popeye cartoon. It stumbled through the ruins making odd sniffing sounds, poking in the shadows. It wasn’t exactly alert, but it was tenacious, consistent. It kept moving constantly.
But without a head-?
There was another movement in the plaza. A door on the far side opened, and a line of human beings trudged out. They were naked. They walked as if they were asleep.
Robin Bowles asked Kevin for his binoculars. He focused them through the snow on the line of slow marchers.
He grunted in surprise.
“What is it?” Kevin asked.
Bowles dropped back down into the snow beside him. “It looks like Mik-luk. He worked for me at the trading post.”
“Why is he walking naked in this cold?”
“Magic?” Bowles rubbed snow out of his beard. “Maybe the Cabal has some kind of spell on him. If they do, and I can get him to recognize me, it could be the break we’re looking for.”
The six of them thought for a minute. Yarnall looked doubtful. “On the other hand, it could get you very killed.”
“If I don’t go down there and try to save him, I’m betraying our friendship.” He hefted his whale rib. “I have this. Sedna wouldn’t have given ‘em to us if they wouldn’t do the job.”
“Then we all go,” Yarnall said.
Eviane would meet nobody’s eyes. She shuddered.
Bowles shook his head. “No. No need to risk everyone. The rest of the team is moving around from the other side. Someone has to be here to tell them what happened, just in case.”
“Well, then, what about two of us?” Max asked. “Me and Yarnall.”
Bowles considered it for a moment, then nodded. “All right.”
Yarnall turned to Ollie. “Trade you.” He exchanged his war club for Ollie’s rifle. He hefted it lovingly, sighted along the barrel. “That will give us one modern weapon and two traditional ones. That’s a decent spread.”
Eviane clung to Max’s arm. “Max-”
“Have you had another premonition?” He was only half-kidding.
She closed her eyes, and he saw her eyes moving under the closed lids, searching for visions. “No. No, but it comes and goes, Max. I don’t know-”
If she could play for the hidden cameras, so could he. “Listen, Eviane,” he said. Damn, he could almost hear the music swelling in the background. “A man’s gotta do what a man’s-”
His miserable attempt at humor was wasted on her. Her eyes overflowed with genuine tears, and she pulled herself against his chest and sobbed. He looked beyond her to brother Orson, who shrugged.
Max pushed her out to arm’s length. “Now hear this. You knew that all of us might die on this trip. We all understood that. I’m just playing out the hand as dealt.”
She nodded dully.
Max shucked his pack. He peeked over the wall.
The wind had died down a bit. The line of naked brown bodies was still trudging along, overseen by the one headless creature. Its long arms lashed at them, urged them one at a time into a low stone-slab building on the far side of the clearing. From that building, flush against the jagged rise of cliff, there issued forth irregular, horrifying screams.
The line moved forward again. Mik-luk was third in line at the door.
Carefully, cautiously, Yarnall, Robin Bowles, and Max moved out from their hiding places, covering each other as best they could.
(How exactly do you “cover” someone with a walrus prick? The usik wasn’t a ray gun! Max’s rising sense of the absurd would drown him if he wasn’t careful.)
Max ran a modified zig-zag pattern through the ruins. He stopped, heaving for breath. Max turned and ran his fingers over one of the blocks. Hard, cold, carved. The layers of ice prevented his fingers from actually touching the carving. He saw glyphs and pictographs portraying strangely shaped creatures, some of which looked like the result of an obscene, and surely fatal, mating of human and pachyderm.
They were oddly hypnotic. He wanted to spend more time studying them, but a whisper from across the path pulled him back to his mission.
Yarnall motioned with his war club. Bowles had moved on ahead, maneuvering to a piece of masonry within ten yards of the line of naked Eskimos.
Max was twenty yards away. From here the men and women appeared listless; they stood as if in a deep trance or drugged state. Their hair fluttered in the wind, and they stared straight ahead toward the low opening.
He could see a little into the room now. There was no door, just an arch formed by stone slabs that seemed almost haphazardly thrown about, by earthquake or tidal wave or long ages under water. Certainly, no living force could move blocks so massive…?
Deep within the recesses of the alcove, lights flickered and shapes moved. When the wind ceased howling for even a few moments, he heard screams that turned his stomach.
Bowles was right. No one could leave a friend to such ministrations, regardless of the risk.
They were heroes!
He checked both sides and joined Yarnall. Yarnall slapped him on the shoulder and, crouching, ran up to join Bowles.
Bowles was flattened out against the wall… heh. Well, the stout actor was certainly trying to flatten himself. Watching, waiting. He showed Max a sickly smile. Max read fear and hope and a touch of genuine heroism in that smile. Bowles motioned Yarnall over to the other side of the divide. Both took aim at the headless thing And it turned to face them. Max almost screamed.
It was brownish, with skin that folded over and over itself like an old overcoat, cracked and blistered, moving like sheaths of heavy leather. It had no head, but it had a face. The face was set into its belly. It was heavy and bovine, leaden-jowled, with bright little eyes the shape and size of almonds.
It was utterly evil, almost an abstraction of malevolence. Slits for eyes, and a mouth that looked like the teeth within it had chewed their way to the surface, leaving the lips raw and tattered, the incisors sharp and encrusted with red and brown filth.
It was the face of a Yeti, and it snarled at them, and opened its mouth for a scream Bowles threw his spear. It missed and clattered on the far side.
Yarnall began firing.
The first two shots seemed to have no effect at all. But the third drove the beast to its knees. The fourth knocked its bowed legs from beneath it. It flopped back onto its massive, gnarled shoulders.
Bowles motioned them back, and dashed out, and pulled one of the naked men out of the line. The others stood cowed, afraid to move, or too numb from cold…
Or something.
But the instant that Bowles grabbed Mik-luk, the Eskimo grabbed him back. His mouth opened hugely. In less than a second it had expanded to the size of a kitchen oven. He screamed like a dying wind.
Bowles’s scream was quite a lot louder as he tried to tear himself loose. Max started out from his hiding place, and saw shadows emerging from the depths of those odd, disquieting angles.
Bowles screamed, “Get back! Get back! He’s already-”
