The lasers began their work, with a noise like metal plates scraping together. A shout went up on Drake’s boat.
“That’s it! That’s our bit!”
Everyone on board ran to the rail. The boat keeled. The deck juddered underfoot as two small harpoons, trailing cables, fired across the water and embedded in the ice.
“Who’s first?” yelled the skipper.
Drake gave Vikram and Nils a harness and a head-torch each. “Go on,” she said. “I’ve done this before. Don’t let go unless you fancy a dunking.”
They exchanged grins. Vikram fastened the strap of the head-torch and switched it on. A pale beam illuminated the rail and the cables. Another member of the crew showed him how to hook his harness onto the cable. Vikram climbed over the rail and pitched forward.
A shove sent him swinging across the gulf. Air rushed at his face; he was flying. The head-torch picked out the wave trenches and the foam-flecked caps. His boots dipped the water. He brought his knees to his chest. The ice loomed. He stuck his feet out in front and landed with a crunch.
Nils’s boots thudded down a second later. Vikram reached over and grabbed his friend’s hand. Holding onto the cables, they clambered up the remainder of the slope, and stopped.
It was as though they had stepped onto the surface of the Moon. The ice was pitted and cracked, sheer blank slates giving way to hillocks and gaping craters. Fifty metres away, the laser beams were working their way across the sheet, a flicker of lightning marking their progress. The noise was phenomenal.
Vikram stamped on the ice. It was rock hard. Beneath the groan of the severing pack, he heard water lapping against its edges. Land must sound like this.
Others had joined them. Drake took a running leap and skidded eight metres before landing on her arse. Vikram whooped. They moved, at first cautiously, then throwing themselves around the ice. Their head-torches made peculiar shadows of the uneven surface and their own figures. They twisted to make even weirder, eldritch shapes. The ice glinted pale blue. The Moon came out from behind a cloud and turned it greenish yellow. It smelled raw and new, of the untouched and the untouchable. It had never held human imprints before.
Nils shouted. He’d found a long, sheer slope. The three of them sat in a row at the top, Vikram in front, then Drake, then Nils. They yelled a countdown.
“Three—two—one—go!”
They flew down the slope, as one, then as three, as Drake lost her grip and Vikram shot on ahead. At the bottom they curled up, toppled on their backs, helpless with laughter. The sky above was a jigsaw of cloud and stars. They regained their breaths slowly.
For as long as Vikram had known, since the beginnings of Osiris, the ice had come. Legend told of a land beneath it, a land free from storms and safe from flooding. It had a name, so rare, so precious, it was never spoken above a whisper. ’Tarctica. The southern land. It would cast off its frozen shell and one day, when all the ice had gone, the Citizens of Osiris would find a new home. So the legend went.
The laser rays continued their work. At last, with an ear splitting crack, the segment claimed by Drake’s boat broke away. A fissure yawned, then it was a chasm, then a valley of ocean. Drake’s boat was already towing away the section of ice, heading back inside the ring-net and leaving the flotilla of barges to continue their dismantling work until dawn.
The ice was moored between two towers on the outskirts of the western quarter and that night there was a carnival. Westerners came out in droves. People danced and performed theatrical charades. A band of acrobats tumbled, stood on their hands, and walked across a tightrope that had once been somebody’s clothesline and still had a pair of leggings pegged to it. Statues, crude and artistic, were sculpted out of the hillocks. Fry-boat kitchens chugged out of the city to set up shop around the edge of the ice. The vendors leaned out of their hatches, shouting their wares of squid or saufish in amicable rivalry. Other westerners arrived in tiny skiffs, hacking off blocks of ice with pickaxes and towing them back into the west.
Nils produced a bottle of raqua and the three of them wandered about the ice, passing the bottle back and forth and admiring the spectacles. They settled at the edge of a crater where a crowd had gathered around a group of musicians. In the centre, a heater was wedged into a small pit. The smell of frying saufish and kelp dispersed through the foreign scent of the ice and skinny dogs came to lap at the meltwater.
Through the remainder of the night and the daylight that followed, Vikram almost forgot about his private mission. Sometimes, whilst they were laughing at each other’s drunken antics, he felt the pang of a missing part, because Mikkeli should have been there to complete their quartet. And then Adelaide Mystik drifted back into view, her green eyes becoming the lights from the ring-net, the gaze of the dead.
“Look out!”
They had been on the ice for twenty-four hours when Vikram saw a man at the edge of the field hurl himself to one side. A moment later, a harpoon sunk a foot deep in the patch of ice where he had been standing. A second harpoon struck the ice five metres along, then another.
Nils got unsteadily to his feet.
“Fucking hell, it’s the fucking skadi.”
They could see the boats crouched a little way from the ice field. Struck by panic, other revellers leapt to avoid the deadly spikes. Some fell into the water. Hands reached down to rescue them but some were pulled in after and washed away from the field, caught by invisible currents. In the darkness, Vikram heard their cries growing fainter and fainter.
“Come back! Come back!”
In the confusion, it was a minute before Vikram realized that they were moving away from the towers. Already a stretch of freezing water lay between the ice field and safety. Some of the revellers refused to move, or were too intoxicated to perceive the danger. They leapt and cartwheeled, hurling fire beacons into the air. Dogs barked, small bodies racing up and down the field. The skadi fired a second wave of harpoons. Beneath the yells and clinking chains and the noise of straining ice, Vikram heard something new: a deep, rhythmical thudding.
“Drake! Where’s your boat?”
“I don’t know! I can’t see it!”
The fry-boat kitchens were unhitching and pulling away. A man threw himself onto one of the roofs. He slipped and crashed into the sea with a shriek. Other than the abandoned torches subsiding on the ice, there was no light. But Vikram could hear the sea. The gap between ice field and towers was widening.
A figure lurched towards them, arms whirling overhead.
“It’s the end of the world! Swim, swim, the ghosts are coming, swim for your lives!”
Vikram turned to Nils and Drake.
“Come on, we need a boat.”
They ran towards the nearest fry-boat, whose vendor was clumsily packing away her wares, catching one another as they stumbled over abandoned bottles or melt holes. Again Vikram heard that deep, rhythmic thudding. It sounded like drums. The sound was metallic, a clanging, resonant thunder, accompanied by throaty cries.
With no warning, the sky lightened. The sea and the ice turned to shimmering gold. Instinctively all three of them dropped. Belly down, Vikram peered out across the water.
From between two towers emerged a monster of fire. Its flames shot three storeys high into the air. Smoke spewed from its core. The fug billowed before it, reaching over the ice. As it moved forward, ash rained down on the ocean.
It was a boat, and it was entirely aflame. From the prow of the thing protruded the effigy of a colossal shark fashioned from wires. The wires glowed white with the heat. Flames jetted from the gaping mouth.
“Lights of australis,” whispered Drake. “What is that?”
“Its Juraj’s gang,” said Nils softly.
The burning barge had an escort. On either side, nine rafts rode low in the water. Each platform was stacked with drums upon which their crews hammered out a relentless beat. Vikram felt each boom in the ice beneath his stomach.
“That’s not all,” he said. “It’s Juraj. What’s left of him.”
Mesmerised, they could only stare. As the blazing craft drew closer, Vikram saw that the carcass of one boat had been dragged on top of another. At its peak, the gang lord’s body was strapped to a crudely erected mast. As the flesh shrivelled and peeled away, Juraj’s skeleton emerged like a warped chrysalis, the bones black and distorted.
He had no limbs. They had been removed. In place of limbs he had crude prosthetics, longer than arms and legs could be, and spouting fire.
Tapers of flame fell upon the raft drummers. They kept beating. The rest of Juraj’s gang were dancing maniacally on the rafts as they accompanied their dead leader to his final grave. As they approached the ice field, their yowls filled the night. The drums grew louder and louder, faster and faster.
“They’re catching up,” said Nils.
Vikram swore. “They’re sending it at the skadi.”
The skadi, at last realizing their danger, began to shoot. The pyre glided forward. The rafts let out a shrilling chorus of
ai-ai-ai!
The drums pounded. Now the skadi were frantically trying to retract their harpoons. But the spears were embedded and the tow ropes were metal chains. The skadi barges were tethered to the ice field. The pyre was moving faster than they could tow.
The drummers whooped.
Ai-ai-ai! Ai-ai-ai!
Almost leisurely, two crafts drifted towards one another.
Juraj’s pyre ploughed into the first skadi barge. The flames reached out. Vikram clapped his hands over his ears.
The explosion was deafening.
Debris rained on top of them. Burning embers sizzled where they hit the ice. He curled into a ball, arms protecting his head, feeling the sting as something struck his back.
Vikram was the first to recover. Ears ringing, he helped the others to their feet. Drake was bleeding. Vikram led them to the edge of the ice field, ducking the sprays of gunfire. In a matter of minutes, the sea would be swarming with skadi boats.
He saw a stray shot catch one of the fry-boat vendors still struggling to unmoor. The woman was flung backwards in a spray of blood. Bent double, they ran towards her boat.
Nils started up the motor whilst Vikram and Drake hauled the dead woman out onto the ice. There was nothing they could do for her now. As they steered away from the ice floe, he heard bolts striking the boat roof. The night blazed with fire and searchlights. The drums and the cries grew ever more frantic. The ice, gleaming yellow beneath the flames, was spotted with inert bodies.
As they pulled away from the battleground, Vikram saw something like a comet streak through the air from the rafts and explode alongside another skadi boat.
Drake was visibly shaking.
“Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit.”
They were drawing near to the first tower when dazzling white light blinded Vikram. A speeder lay directly in their path. Vikram veered the boat sharply right. The searchlight followed. He increased their speed. The light lost them momentarily, then switched off.
He could hear the drone of the smaller, higher performance motor as the speeder approached.
Grimly, Vikram began to lurch the boat in a zigzag pattern. It was large and unwieldy and he could hear its sides groan with the strain. The sea was getting choppier too. Bad news for the speeder and worse news for them. The fry-boat was not designed to be out on open water, and now they were a good half kilometre from the towers, moving further away from the fire fight.
Nils swore as he leaned out of the hatch, watching for the speeder.Shadows scooted past. He thought it was the other boat, but now it had vanished entirely. The noise of the waves masked the two motors. He could sense the other boat out there. Waiting. Listening.
“Vik, I can’t see them.” Nils whispered this time. He came to stand beside Vikram. Drake took up position at the hatch.
“Where the hell are they?” muttered Vikram.
He reduced the engine power. They were almost drifting now. So was the speeder.
Residue noise from the fire fight echoed across the water. From a distance, it looked like a strange ritual, a dance between flames on the water surface. Vikram could not tell who was winning.
“Why don’t they just open fire?” hissed Drake.
“They want prisoners,” said Vikram. “Juraj’s gang are so crazed they won’t stop until they’re all dead. The skadi need examples.”
“What are we going to do?”
“Run for it.”
Nils nodded. “It’s our best chance.”
“Hang on tight.”
He took a firm grip himself as he swung the boat back towards the city and hit full throttle. Instantly the searchlight flickered back on, some hundred metres away, and began roving the waves.
The boat lurched forward, jamming into the encroaching waves. Vikram wrested the craft first one way, then the next. Crates of kelp and fish shunted from side to side. His elbow cracked against metal, sending bolts of pain up to his temples. Spray dashed in his face. In seconds he was drenched.
“Where are they Drake?” he yelled. Drake hung precariously out of the hatch.
“Right on our tail, seventy metres,” she yelled back.
“Watch out now, you’re coming into the city.” Nils, clinging on beside him, could see a little better.
“You’ll have to direct me.”
He was steering blind now. He could only trust Nils’s directions. He sensed the first towers looming up on either side as they barrelled back into the maze of the city. A shot glanced off the roof.
“Fifty metres!” Drake shouted.
“Shit.”
Vikram began to weave. Their only chance now lay in using the towers as cover.
“Listen. You two have to get out. I’m taking this over the border.”
“You’re what?” Nils hung on as the boat lurched.
“I have to get over the border tonight. I can’t explain.”
“It’s that bloody girl, isn’t it? That Rechnov woman?”
“This is the best chance I have. All the skadi are back there, the border will be as close to unguarded as it ever is.”
“Vik—”
“Just do it, will you? They won’t follow you.”