Diving under the ice was nerve-racking, even more than I’d imagined, and what I’d imagined wasn’t pleasant. The sub scraped the underside of the glaciers, and chunks of what Sorkin told me were free-floating ice bumped the hull with alarming regularity. Once, we came upon a pod of whales and kept pace with them while Oksana, the radar officer, played their song through her speakers.
I distracted myself from the fact that one wrong turn could bring thousands of tons of ice down on the Oktobriana, pushing us deep into the lightless depths of the Arctic sea, by learning everything I could about how she worked.
The Crimson Guard had built the boat, but she’d been modified to run on aether batteries rather than a steam furnace that meant diving for only a few hours at a time. There was German tech in the sub too, salvaged from the war—air scrubbers and depth gauges and torpedoes. Its periscope had come from a Proctor vessel Rasputina had found stranded on the Outer Banks off North Carolina and salvaged ahead of a hurricane.
The batteries were running down, but they could still power the propellers and basic life support for days at a time, creeping along under the ice at a pace that seemed to be even slower than that of the glaciers above us.
The closer we got to the Arctic Circle, the less I slept. My dreams were tangled and terrible, no longer visits to the dream figure but often just writhing, screaming black masses that exuded the same kind of cold I imagined I’d feel in outer space, a cold that froze me in place so I couldn’t run, couldn’t even scream. Nobody else was dreaming, though—Sorkin remarked to me once that he was sleeping like a baby, deep and dreamless.
I knew what was happening—the iron was creeping into me. I realized after I woke up screaming for the third day in a row that I probably had less than twenty-four hours left before I started raving like Jakob. I had to get off the boat before then. I just hoped Rasputina knew what she was doing, and that the launch she’d talked about was where she thought it was.
That afternoon I was drinking some of the sludgy black Turkish coffee the crew swilled by the quart, trying desperately to keep my thoughts in order and not fall asleep again, when the screws of the Oktobriana slowed and then stopped. Rasputina stuck her head into the mess a moment later and jerked her chin at me. “Get your cold-weather gear and come topside. We’re here.”
13
The Spine of the Earth
NOTHING COULD HAVE prepared me for the cold outside the submersible, or the strange half-night sky that confronted us, bright on the horizon but fading to velvet black at the top, much like the ever-shifting sky of my dream place. I’d thought the wind was bad back home, that the ice and snow that enveloped Lovecraft from Hallows’ Eve to spring thaw most years was as cold as anything could be, but it wasn’t.
Even wrapped in a thick coat as I was, mask strapped over the lower half of my face and fur-lined goggles over my eyes to protect them from the wind, the cold crept in through all the cracks and stole my breath. Rasputina, wearing a navy greatcoat and a similar mask and goggles, gave no indication she even noticed it, and I envied her fortitude.
It was so cold that I felt like I might shatter, drop off the top of the Oktobriana’s conning tower, and become part of the ice, forever staring at the empty sky. Beyond the boat launch the sub rested in, which was only a small hole carved into the glacier allowing ocean water to surface, I saw nothing. The whiteness was gleaming and absolute, as if we stood atop the skeleton of a great beast of incalculable size.
“That’s strange.” Rasputina gingerly held a pair of binoculars. It was so cold that any spots of moisture clung to her gloves and ripped out tiny chunks of leather. She aimed the glasses at a tiny wooden shack at the edge of the launch. It barely hung on to the ice along with a ramshackle dock.
“What’s strange?” I tried to shrink deeper into the coat and fur-lined pants and boots I’d been given, which wasn’t hard since everything was at least two sizes too large. Another kind of cold crept in, that sixth sense I was developing that said things had gone horribly wrong. I was getting it now, and I hoped I was mistaken.
“There’s no moon,” Rasputina said.
“New moon,” I said with a shrug, trying to seem unconcerned even though my heartbeat had picked up and my shivering was no longer entirely from the bone-deep cold.
Rasputina shook her head. “Half-moon. I checked the chart.”
I turned my face up and scanned the sky. More stars than I had thought existed scattered the silver-black field of the sky, turning their unearthly white light on the glacier, which glowed as if alive.
But no moon. Not even the pockmarked slice Rasputina had said should be there. Not a sliver.
“That is strange,” I agreed, because saying anything else would come across as either silly or panicked. Celestial bodies were constants. They did not change.
This was unnatural, and I wondered what had happened to make the sky so foreign here.
“I don’t like this at all,” Rasputina said, echoing my thoughts aloud.
I turned a slow circle. We were alone. I had never felt so exposed as I did at that moment, certain the great eye of something as ancient as the starlight was turned on the boat, the same something that was blotting out the moon and causing the dead, chill atmosphere that wrapped the Oktobriana.
“We’re leaving,” Rasputina said. “This launch has always been a bad spot. The captain who told me about it got his throat cut a week later. It’s a cursed place.”
“You don’t seem like you’d believe in curses,” I murmured.
“I believe in a lot of things,” Rasputina snapped. “We’re diving. Get below.” She climbed down the conning tower, the thump of her boots against the ladder amplified in the ice field until each footstep was the thump of a coffin lid.
I stayed outside for a moment longer, hearing only my own breath against my mask.
At first I found the night around me silent except for the wind, but slowly I realized it wasn’t. The launch was about the size of a soccer pitch, ridiculously small when you thrust a military submersible into it. Displaced water sluiced against the hull, and out in the night I could hear the ice cracking and knocking, over and over. It was an endless rattle, the sound of bone against bone.
Bone against bone.
My Weird tingled, and I gasped at the sharp pain against the front of my skull. I fumbled at my goggles, yanking them off, trying to get all the metal off my body to relieve the pain. As the filtered glass came away from my eyes, a thin finger of violet light unfurled in the sky above me, like pale blood in dark water. It was joined by greens, blues, yellows, dancing in concert.
I’d seen lanternreels of the aurora borealis, but these lights were nothing like that. The violet streak moved with a pattern, a purpose, with none of the randomness that indicated true northern lights. It flowed toward a point directly to the east of me, where the moon should have been.
The purple light gathered into a starburst, and it touched the very top of something growing out of the ice, the same color as the glacier and nearly invisible in the low light. Something so large that, from my vantage on the tower of the Oktobriana, it was blotting out the moon. Something that was reflecting starlight, like the ice and the sky, invisible until the aurora touched its spire.
It was ice and sky, I realized as I stared, forgetting that I was cold and ignoring the tears the wind sparked in the corners of my eyes. The aurora illuminated the massive shape by degrees, gleaming against its translucent ice walls. It was a palace, the kind you’d see in lanternreels of faraway lands or read about in forbidden fairy tales.