Yet this time the Tran had an advantage. The masts of the Slanderscree towered above the crowns of the forest. So did the spines of the animals they feared. From the several lookout baskets, those heaving backs could be spotted in time to give the ship a chance to escape.
Perhaps the lookouts were too intent on sighting that particular danger. Perhaps they might not have been able to spot the trouble anyway.
Suddenly the ship lost forward momentum with a violent shudder. Ethan and everyone else not holding on to something was thrown to the deck. Even as his bulging form was rolling around behind the wheel, Ta-hoding was shouting commands.
Accustomed to sudden, unpredictable gusts of wind, the sailors in the rigging had actually fared better than those on deck. None had fallen, though for several minutes a couple of those in the highest spars hung from a paw or two before regaining their footing.
Tilted twenty degrees to port, bow dipping drunkenly iceward, the Slanderscree continued to lurch awkwardly forward.
Back on his feet, Ta-hoding braced chiv against ice and bellowed orders toward the deck. The stern ice anchors were released. They immediately gouged a purchase in the ice and pika-pedan stumps astern. Several seconds of screeching, teeth-scraping progress slowed the out-of-control icerigger to a crawl. She came to a full stop when the last sail was finally taken in.
Ethan, September, Hunnar, Elfa and Ta-hoding went over the side, made their way down a pika-pina ladder. Detailed inspection wasn’t necessary. Something had knocked the port bow runner badly askew. It hadn’t been torn completely away, but the duralloy rods which braced it to the ship’s hull had nearly been wrenched from their moorings. Plates and bolts were missing, and the wood they’d ripped free of was torn and full of gaping holes.
While Ta-hoding began to direct repairs, Ethan and the others retraced the path of the Slanderscree. They followed the path cut by the disabled runner, forced to walk single-file between walls of four-meter-high pika-pedan stumps, constantly slipping and sliding over gelatinous globules of rapidly freezing watery sap.
They traveled less than a couple of hundred meters before coming on the cause of the crash. Small rocky spires, showing the mark of the broken runner on them, protruded from the ice. It wasn’t any wonder the lookouts hadn’t spotted them, buried as they were in thick vegetation. They were barely two meters high, too low to rip into the hull of the ship, but high and solid enough to wreck the impinging runner. Only good luck had saved the other runners a similar fate.
Hunnar bent, indicated a whitish groove in one frozen mass of granite. “See… ’twas here the ship struck. We were fortunate the islet was no larger than this.”
“Islet!” September grunted. “Why, we’re standin’ atop a mountain, friend Hunnar. These spires go down to the bottom of this frozen ocean we’re sailing across.”
“We can’t be sure of that, Skua.” Ethan struggled to visualize, say, six or seven thousand meters of mass below their feet. “These could just be very large boulders frozen in the ice, deposited by glacial or ice action. Or maybe the ocean here is only a few meters deep. We might be traveling across a shallow sea covering an old desert. These could be rocks on a plain.”
September looked disappointed. “Mountaintop’s better. You sure can take all the romance out of speculating young feller-me-lad.”
Ethan gave September a look which clearly said, believe what you want. He turned to go back to the ship, and fell flat on his face after taking only a few steps.
No one found it funny. For so short a journey, neither human had bothered donning his skates, but that wasn’t what had caused Ethan to fall.
Three… no, four, tiny cream-white tendrils had erupted from the ice and locked around his right ankle. Now they were stretched taut, pulling him downward. Ice began to crack in sheets around his prone form. Ethan fought for a grip on the slick surface. His hips were already vanishing beneath the surface when he managed to lock both arms around a pika-pedan stump. It broke off in his arms like rotten punk.
By then Hunnar and September had come up alongside him. Hunnar drew his sword, but September waved him away.
“For God’s sake, Skua, hurry up!” Perversely, Ethan clung to his fragment of pika-pedan, though it was no better anchored than he.
September, sighting carefully on a point just behind and slightly to Ethan’s left, depressed the stud of his beamer. There was the snake-talk sound of steam boiling away. It was followed, joined by a stench as of rotting pork. The tendrils wrapped around Ethan’s leg did not let go, but the pulling stopped.
Meantime, Hunnar had moved around to grab Ethan’s wrists. Digging his chiv sideways into the ice and using the stubby braking claw in his heel, he started to move slowly backward. Ethan came free of the hole in the ice. Attached by its tendrils to his leg, the almost-victor came out after him. It had a smoking gash in its side.
Others had heard the cries and the hiss and light of the beamer. A small mob of concerned Tran was bearing down on the three from the ship. Eer-Meesach, helped along by Williams, was among them.
Ethan, panting heavily inside his suit mask, turned on his back, sat up, and gazed in disgust and fear at the creature attached to his ankle. “What is it?”
Hunnar had his knife out and was slicing through the clinging tendrils. Ethan let out a relieved sigh when he saw that the powerful grip hadn’t torn his survival suit.
Pale white with gray blotches and spots, the thing was three meters long, not counting the tendrils. It showed four wide, plate-sized eyes, two atop the dorsal side and two on the ventral. The four tendrils were spaced evenly around the blunt end of the head. Between them, slack and open, was a circular mouth lined with triangular serrated teeth. The jaws were protruding outside the lips, showing wet and shocking pink against the whiteness of the epidermis. Ethan considered what those teeth would have done to his leg had he slid just a little farther beneath the surface.
“Tis a kossief,” Hunnar replied thoughtfully, studying the ghostly corpse. This translated very crudely to Terranglo in Ethan’s mind as an ice worm.
“They burrow just beneath the surface and wait for some unfortunate creature to stumble across their portion of ice, which they hollow out until only a thin layer remains above them.” The knight kicked at the rubbery body. “They strike upward, break through the thin ice and drag their prey down into their burrows. Then they exude water through this,” he indicated a protruding organ near the creature’s rear, “and reform the ice shell over them.”
Ethan studied the toothed worm with distaste as he massaged his leg where the beast had grabbed him. “I can see how they can cut their way through the ice, with those teeth.”
“Neatly, too,” said an admiring September. He was standing in the bow-like hollow that had been the creature’s home. His head was just barely even with the surface.
“Are there others that live beneath the surface of the ice?” Williams was examining the dead worm with as much interest as Ethan had shown disgust
“Many and various, my friend,” discoursed Eer-Meesach. “We see them little around Wannome. They are more prevalent at the other end of Sofold Isle, where the pika-pina fields grow. It is interesting to learn that they flourish also here, among the pika-pedan.”
“Can we take it back aboard?” Williams looked hopeful.
“Why of course, we must,” said the Tran wizard. Ethan said nothing. He gained some measure of satisfaction in learning that he wasn’t alone in his squeamish attitude toward the creature. The two men of learning had a hard time cajoling a pair of sailors to carry the rubbery body back onto the ship.