Retribution Falls - Chris Wooding [40]
The snow hogs were inching across the ice plain, shambling heaps of muscle and tusk and shaggy white fur. She could see a pair of predators tracking them, huge doglike things, a type of creature she didn’t recognize. They loped along hungrily, hoping for a chance at a straggler.
Here I am again, she reflected, as she scanned the landscape. A few years ago she’d been a frequent visitor to the wild, icebound northern coast, part of a scientific expedition in search of the relics of a lost civilization. It hadn’t been a conscious decision to stay away from Yortland, but it was only now that she realized she’d never been back since … well, since …
Her thoughts flickered away from the memory, but it was too late. A dreadful sensation washed over her, beginning at her nape and sweeping through her body. Her skin tightened, then relaxed; her muscles clenched and unclenched. The world flexed, just a fraction, and when it sprang back into shape, everything was different.
A strange twilight had fallen. Though it seemed darker, her vision had sharpened. It was as if she’d been looking at the world through a steamed-up pane of glass and it had suddenly been removed. Details were thrust at her eyes; edges became stark as razors.
The herd of snow hogs prickled with a faint purplish aura. Though they were several kloms away, she could count their teeth and see the pupils of their rolling eyes. She sensed the path of the faint wind chasing along the plain; she could picture its route in her mind.
There was so much she was sensing, hearing, smelling. She could hardly breathe under the assault of information. It felt as if she were being battered by an irresistible river. At any moment she’d lose her footing and be swept into oblivion.
One of the predators broke into a run. Its aura was deep crimson, and it left a slowly dispersing trail as it ran. Then she was with the predator, in the predator, its blood pumping hard, heart slamming, tongue-loll and tooth-sharp, all paws and look-see, yes yes yes that one is weak, that one, and my kin-brother alongside and wary of the sharp sharp tusks of the mother but oh oh the hunger—
Jez gulped in a breath, like a drowning woman who had just broken the surface. Reality snapped into place: the world was once again as it had always been. Snow drifted down, undisturbed by her panic. She took a step back, disoriented, wanting to be away from that edge of the plateau. The mug had fallen from her hands and lay on the ground before her. Steaming brown cocoa ate through the ice.
She began to tremble helplessly, and not from the cold. She clutched herself and looked about. The Yort was nowhere to be seen. Nobody was there. Nobody had witnessed it.
Witnessed what? she demanded of herself. What’s happening to me?
A gust of wind blew from the north, and there was a sound on the wind, something she sensed rather than heard. Voices, raised in a cacophony, calling. A terrible, desperate longing swelled in her.
She looked to the north, and it was as if she could see past the mountains, past the sea, her vision carried on bird’s wings. She rushed onward, over icebergs and waves, until there came fog and mist and a vast wall of churning gray.
She knew this place. It was the swirling cloud cap they called the Wrack, which cloaked the north pole. The frontier from which no one had ever returned. Not alive, anyway.
There was something behind the cloud. A shape, an aircraft, black and vast, looming toward her. The voices.
Come with us.
She screwed her eyes shut and staggered away with a cry, stumbling toward the Ketty Jay. Her mind rang like a struck bell, resounding with the howling, the Wrack, and the terror of what lay beyond.
THE BAR WAS EMPTY but for the crew of the Ketty Jay and the bartender. The menfolk