He stared into the snow, where the horizon should have been, but he was not looking at what his eyes were seeing. He was listening to a voice that spoke deep within him. It did not use words, or even images, like in a dream. It was more a feeling that pulsed from his core, a flame that had been kindled in his soul as he slept one night, perhaps. He did not know exactly when it had first come to him, or what it might have been, but he accepted it now as an ally. It was not simply the voice of his will to survive. It was like a living thing within him, an alter ego that played the role of guardian angel by giving him the strength he needed to live. Alien or human, it did not matter. It was with him.
Esah-Zhurah was somewhere close by, the voice seemed to say. And Reza believed. He knew it was true. It must be.
As he drew on that source of inner strength, a rush of adrenaline suddenly surged into his system. Taking the furs from his face, he cupped his hands to his mouth.
“Esah-Zhurah!” he shouted as loud as he could, his diaphragm ramming air into his throat like a turbine, stretching the last syllable until his lungs had no more to give.
Without the tiniest trace of an echo, the wall of snow around him consumed her name.
Closing his eyes, he listened.
Esah-Zhurah was just about to dismount and set up the shelter when she heard something above the howling of the falling snow. It sounded like a faintly audible note that might have been a voice coming from her left. It grew for a moment into a steady tone that suddenly ended.
“Reza?” she whispered. “Reza!” she shouted, “Where are you?”
Nothing.
“I did not imagine it,” she said aloud, sitting ramrod straight in her saddle, as if her body could act as an antenna to gain some additional clarity should the note be repeated.
Beneath her, the magthep threw its head from side to side, growing restless for no reason Esah-Zhurah could fathom. It mewled quietly, stomping its feet, waiting for Esah-Zhurah to make up her mind.
There! The sound came again, and she was sure it was her name being called, and was not simply a wishful hallucination.
“Reza!” she shouted with all her strength. “Over here!”
Her heart thundering with relief, she wheeled her magthep around and began to gallop in the direction of his voice, thanking the Empress that Reza somehow had found her, and that perhaps all would yet be well.
He was about to call out to her again when he heard a thunderous boom. Goliath suddenly sprawled forward, catapulting Reza over the beast’s twisting neck. Reza’s arms and legs flailed like a doll’s as he spun through the air, his mouth gaping open in horrified surprise.
In the moment he was airborne, surprise gave way to terror as he saw a jagged black chasm yawning beneath him where only snow had been before. Freezing water lapped hungrily at the serrated edges of the broken ice, and welcomed Reza with a frigid embrace that stole the scream from his lips as he plunged into the river.
The sound hit her like a shot from a rifle, echoing through the air and reverberating through the ground at her feet.
“What is that?” she whispered, peering in the direction from which she had heard Reza’s voice.
She could see nothing. Her ears, however, had no difficulty in picking out sounds she recognized instantly: a magthep’s terrified squeals mixed with the sound of splashing water.
The river! she realized. We have been traveling along the river. And Reza and Goliath must have fallen through…
“No!” she cried, kicking her magthep in the ribs and sending the beast racing as fast as she could toward the frenzied thrashings. “Reza, hang on!” she shouted into the wind. “Hang on!”
Suddenly, as if someone had whipped a curtain aside, Esah-Zhurah found herself plunging toward the gaping black fissure in the ice where Goliath had broken through. The great magthep was now pawing and kicking desperately at the edge, his tiny forearms grappling pitifully at the icy wall that rose nearly a meter above him.
As she watched, more ice tumbled down into the black waters. The layer that had covered the river was treacherously thin and hollow between the surface of the water and the bottom of the ice. The magthep screamed in terror, his rear legs and tail thrashing as he sought to escape.
“Reza!” she shouted over the magthep’s braying. Her eyes scanned the water, hoping to spot him alive among the drifting chunks of ice, or – better by far – somewhere near the edge, out of danger. She would have taken her magthep closer, but she was already dangerously near the snaking web of cracks that spiraled outward from where Goliath lay struggling.
Leaping from her mount, she moved as close as she dared to the crumbling edge. “Reza!” she called again, her voice cracking with the effort.
“Esah-Zhurah,” came a hoarse cry, barely more than a whisper it seemed, from somewhere in the water, “here.”
Desperately, Esah-Zhurah searched the water for him, edging ever closer as she sought to pierce the undulating shroud of darkening snow.
Without warning, there was another tremendous boom from the ice, and her magthep plunged into the frigid water. Esah-Zhurah was flung clear by a huge chunk of ice that catapulted her into the air like a springboard. Rolling to her feet in the snow, she turned to find Goliath finally struggling to safety, having at last gotten a grip with his rear feet on stable ice. The beast shook himself mightily, flinging away the water that had not yet frozen to his fur. Retreating a short way from the fissure, he turned to bray at his companion cow, now struggling for its life. Lacking Goliath’s enormous strength, the smaller animal was doomed.
“Call again!” Esah-Zhurah shouted, “I cannot see you!”
“Here,” came the voice, weaker this time.
Her eyes were drawn to two black streaks across a large chunk of ice. They suddenly resolved into Reza’s arms, the claws of his gauntlets thrust into the ice. Just before the snow obliterated the scene, she saw his head lolling just above the water.
“I see you!” she shouted. “Do not let go! Do you hear me?” she cried. “Hang on!”
She turned to Goliath, the problem of how to retrieve Reza without killing herself consuming her thoughts. Since the day in the grotto, she had learned from Reza how to swim, but she had never tried anything like this, nor had she ever been in water this cold.
“You are going to have to help me, Goliath,” she said, grabbing some rope from where it was lashed to the saddle. She shook the ice and snow from it, the fibers crackling as she began to unwind the sturdy hemp. She tied one end through one of the stirrups on Reza’s saddle, then dropped the rest to the ground. Bracing herself against the cold, she ripped off her metal chest armor. She would have taken off the rest, but there was no time.
She took up the rope and stood on the thinnest ice that would still support her weight. She knew now that her destiny had arrived. This was the source of her dark dreams, the nightmares that had plagued her since she was young. This was the dark water that would steal her breath away, that would still her heart, that would take her life. She might have laughed at the sudden memory of her fear of the waters of the grotto that night, as Reza struggled valiantly to convince her that lying in a genoth’s belly was indeed worse than diving beneath a waterfall. “Have faith,” she told herself softly, gritting her teeth. “Be strong.”