The Riddle - Alison Croggon [133]
“This is the Ippanuk Glacier,” he said. “Probably the most dangerous thing we have to cross.”
“Glacier?” asked Maerad.
“A river of ice. It comes from the Votul, the mountains you see there.” He waved his hand to their right, where a ghostly range vanished into the hazy distance. “Well, there’s no time like now,” he said, squaring his shoulders. “We can see well, and from here I think we can pick a safe path. Ot!”
It was the first time Dharin had betrayed anything like anxiety, and Maerad looked at the glacier with doubt; if he said it was dangerous, it must be dangerous indeed. He drove the dogs slowly down the ridge and onto the glacier, bumping over the boulders and lumps of dirty ice that littered its edges. The sound of the sled changed as soon as they hit the glacier, becoming a scraping noise rather than a smooth swish through the snow. As they moved toward its center, Maerad realized that the glacier was not silent; it made strange grinding sounds, like rock on rock, and ominous creakings, and sometimes it sounded like the cry of some strange creature. With a shudder, she realized that it was a faint echo of the cries of the iriduguls, when they had attacked her and Cadvan in the Gwalhain Pass.
The ice itself varied. Sometimes it was clear as an emerald, and she could see through green depths to what she was sure was the rocky bed of the glacier, far below them, but most often it was opaque, full of flaws and cracks. It was hypnotically beautiful. Sometimes she saw strange things, like visions, emerging through the clarities: a green tree, its branches bent as if it were caught in a storm, but utterly still, or a cloud of boulders suspended as if in midair. Once she had a glimpse of a huge beast with heavy furred shoulders and long white tusks. Dharin was frowning in concentration, so she didn’t ask him if he knew what it was. It wasn’t long before she saw why he moved with such painful caution over the glacier; the dogs’ claws, sharp as they were, often slipped on the ice, and the whole was riven by deep crevasses, which could appear without warning just below their feet. They went too close for comfort to one, Dharin’s cry to halt causing a scrabbling of claws as they backed away from a chasm that Dharin had not sighted earlier, its treacherous blue-green edges opening to a bottomless darkness like a terrible mouth. The dogs liked the glacier as little as Dharin; they kept their tails low down, and every now and then one of them would whine with anxiety. The short day was nearing to a close before the dogs, their ears pricked forward with relief, came to the end of the glacier, and heaved the sled up the opposite ridge.
After the glacier, they faced nothing worse than the deep cold. Now their course was northwest again: Dharin was aiming for a point on the coast about forty leagues from the glacier, along one of the many fingers of land that thrust out into the frozen sea. The Labarok Isles were west from there.
“Do we sail to the isles, then?” asked Maerad, thinking about her previous experiences of sea travel and wondering where they could find a boat in such uninhabited country.
“No, we drive the sled over the sea,” he answered.
Maerad thought he was joking until he explained that the sea was frozen, and they would be driving across thick ice. “Maybe very thick, given this early winter,” he said. “The Labaroks are islands, to be sure, but in winter they might as well not be. The sea freezes and joins them all together, except around the Isles of Fire.”
As they moved away from the mountains, they started traveling more swiftly. In less than two weeks, through the ever-shortening days, they had traversed almost the entire expanse of the frozen northlands, and the dogs still ran as eagerly as they had on their first day out of Murask. Maerad’s respect for their toughness and loyalty had increased as her fears had vanished; sometimes she even chatted idly with Claw, whose harsh, unwavering determination stirred a sense of recognition within her own