Page 176 of The Cradle of Ice
“Not too loose,” Graylin warned as he scanned ahead. “We may need to ship off quickly.”
Daal nodded and pulled back on the tethers to secure Neffa and Mattis closer. He apologized by tossing them fistfuls of small fish and a few eels from an ice storage in the pen alongside their gear. The orksos honked and exhaled their pleasure through their twin nostrils, riding their wings, knocking their horns against one another like two playful knights expelling nervous energy.
By now, Shiya had climbed a riverside boulder the size of Daal’s home. Limned against the starlight, she stared off across the breadth of the fiery Mouth. They all clawed and gripped their way to join her.
Under Nyx’s palms, the stone was unsettlingly hot to the touch. Graylin pulled her up the last vault. Together, they crossed to Shiya and flanked to either side of the bronze statue. Once the view opened, Nyx wanted to take a step away, as if that would help her escape the sight in the distance.
“We’re lucky we got off the river when we did,” Jace muttered.
Vikas turned to Daal, pressing two fingers to her chin and flicking them down in thanks for his skill, for keeping them from the danger ahead.
Nyx agreed with both of them.
Off in the distance, the river coursed another half league, then dumped into a large black lake. But its surface was not the placidly eddying pool behind them. The huge basin spun and whirled into a great threatening gyrus, rumbling its danger at them. From its center, a steamy swirl of mists climbed into the sky, matching the churn of that lake.
Nyx noted a berg of ice floating down there. It shone under the moonlight like a diamond imbedded in that black water. It spun a course several times around, sweeping faster and faster around the fierce eddy at the center—then vanished down its gullet.
“If this is the Mouth,” Jace said, “I think we’ve found its sodding Throat.”
Nyx searched beyond the ravenous monster, knowing it wasn’t this beast she had come to find.
She cast her gaze past the lake. The cracks and chasms of the Mouth spread forever outward. Some passages were shadowed, others lit by moonlight. Most glowed from the ruddy heat of hidden molten pools.
It all looked barren and lifeless.
Still, as her eyes adjusted, she spotted skeletal outcroppings, all branched and stemmed. They were pale white, like the ghosts of long-dead trees. She didn’t know if they were truly living or some sculptural mineral deposits. A few cliffs shone with lichens or molds, softly suffusing in the dark shadows.
Beyond the deathly rumble of the swirling morass, all that could be heard was the howl of high winds and a low grumble of the land. Otherwise, the Mouth remained silent, refusing to reveal its secrets.
Nyx voiced the biggest of them all. “Where are all the raash’ke?”
FOURTEEN
A MYSTERY IN BRONZE
Alle rivers flowyng forward ryse from the hedwateres bihind them. The same is true for propheci. It is but a predictioun of the future rysnge from the lessons of the past.
—A quote from Welt ry Torn, the philosopher-king from the seventeenth dynasty of Bhestya
70
WRYTH DESCENDED DOWN the stairs toward the kingdom’s war room. The cavernous chamber lay four levels beneath the castle. It was more of a bunker than a council chamber. He passed sentries at each level, heavily armed.
None tried to stop him, backing from his sweep of gray robes.
Wryth had been summoned a short time ago. Dawn was still a few bells off, but Wryth had not slept all night. He doubted he could sleep even if he tried—and not just due to the stimulant elixirs he had imbibed to sharpen his attention.
Despite the early summons, excitement thrummed through him. Prior to the king’s bidding, he had been shoulder to shoulder with Shrive Keres at the heart of the Iflelen’s great instrument. Together, they had monitored a series of messages from Skerren. Earlier in the night, Skerren had dispatched his two swyftships into the massive rift in the Ice Shield. They brutally subdued a village and the enemy’s ship. By the time Wryth had been called away, Skerren’s forces were still locking things down along the shore of that hidden sea.
Still, a major problem had presented itself. The prize they sought to capture—the bronze artifact—was not found in that village or aboard the captured ship. Skerren, who remained in his battle barge above the rift in the ice, claimed his monitoring device was registering her location much farther west, somewhere across the rift’s steamy sea. Most disconcerting, though, was that her signal kept blipping off and on, as if something were blocking or confounding the tracking of her.
To investigate this mystery, Skerren had unleashed Marshal Ghryss upon that hidden world, to interrogate and torture answers out of the enemy. The marshal was notorious for his clever tactics and coldhearted brutality. It was no wonder he so quickly quashed any resistance below. Before leaving for the Wastes, Ghryss had been slated to be the kingdom’s next liege general. Wryth had stymied that promotion by co-opting him for the hunt across the ice. The marshal had been furious at the assignment, but the king had ordered him to go.
Hopefully that anger will drive the man to pry out the location of the bronze artifact.
Still, as of yet, Wryth did not know if Ghryss had been successful. After that last message, Skerren had fallen silent. Prior to that, the updates had been coming with a fair regularity—then nothing for a long spell.
While Wryth had been waiting for more, he had received the king’s summons to the war room. It had been poor timing, but there was nothing to be done about it.
