Will we be alive when they get up here? wondered Blanky.
Moving as carefully as he could on the sand-covered packed snow of the tilted deck, Blanky made his way around the debris pile at the rear of the collapsed tent area and started down the narrow aisle on the starboard side of the heap.
A shape rose before him.
Still holding the lantern high in his left hand, Blanky lifted the shotgun, finger on the trigger, ready to fire. “Handford!” he said when he saw the pale blob of a face amid the black mass of coats and comforters. The man’s Welsh wig was in disarray. “Where’s your lantern?”
“I dropped it,” said the seaman. The man was shaking violently, his hands bare. He huddled close to Thomas Blanky as if the Ice Master were a source of heat. “I dropped it when the thing knocked the spar down. The flame went out in the snow.”
“What do you mean, ‘when the thing knocked the spar down’?” demanded Blanky. “No living thing could knock the mainmast spar down.”
“It did!” said Handford. “I heard Berry’s shotgun fire. Then he shouted something. Then his lantern went out. Then I saw something… large, something very large… leap up on the spar and that’s when everything collapsed. I tried to fire at the thing on the spar, but my shotgun misfired. I left it at the rail.”
Leap up onto the spar? thought Blanky. The swiveled main-mast spar was twelve feet above the deck. Nothing could leap onto it. With the mainmast sheathed in ice, nothing could climb to it either. Aloud, he said, “We have to find Berry.”
“There is no way in God’s universe that I’m going over there to the port side, Mr. Blanky. You can write me up and have Bosun’s Mate Johnson give me fifty with the cat, but there’s no way in God’s universe that I’m going over there, Mr. Blanky.” Handford’s teeth were chattering so wildly that he was barely understandable.
“Calm down,” snapped Blanky. “No one’s being written up. Where’s Leys?”
From this vantage point on the starboard-watch side, Blanky should have been able to see David Leys’s lantern glowing at the bow. The bow was dark.
“His went out the same time I dropped mine,” said Handford through his clattering teeth.
“Get your shotgun.”
“I can’t go back there where…,” began Handford.
“God-damn your eyes!” roared Thomas Blanky. “If you don’t retrieve that weapon this gob-fucking minute, a flogging of fifty from the cat will be the least bugger-fucking thing you have to worry about, John Handford. Now move!”
Handford moved. Blanky followed him, never turning his back on the collapsed heap of canvas at the centre of the ship. Because of the driving snow, the lantern created a sphere of light ten feet or less across. The Ice Master kept both the lantern and the shotgun raised. His arms were very tired.
Handford was attempting to retrieve his weapon in the snow with fingers that had obviously gone numb with cold.
“Where the hell are your mittens and gloves, man?” snapped Blanky.
Handford’s teeth were chattering too wildly for him to respond.
Blanky set his own weapon down, brushed the seaman’s arms aside, and lifted the man’s shotgun. He made sure the single barrel was not blocked with snow, then broke the breech and handed the weapon back to Handford. Blanky finally had to tuck it under the other man’s arm so he could cradle it with his two frozen hands. Setting his own shotgun under his left arm where he could shift it quickly, Blanky fumbled a shell out of his greatcoat pocket, loaded Handford’s shotgun, and clicked it shut for the man. “If anything larger than Leys or me comes out of that pile,” he said, almost shouting into Handford’s ear because of the wind roar, “aim and pull that trigger if you have to use your fucking teeth to do it.”
Handford managed a nod.
“I’m going forward to find Leys and help him open the forward hatch,” said Blanky. Nothing seemed to be moving downhill toward the bow amid the dark jumble of frozen canvas, dislodged snow, broken spars, and tumbled crates.
“I can’t…,” began Handford.
“Just stay where you are,” snapped Blanky. He set the lantern down next to the terrified man. “Don’t shoot me when I come back with Leys or I swear to God my ghost will haunt you ’til you die, John Handford.”
Handford’s pale blob of a face nodded again.
Blanky started toward the bow. After a dozen steps, he was beyond the glow of the lantern but his night vision did not return. The hard particles of snow struck his face like pellets. Above him, the rising wind howled in what little rigging and shrouds they’d left in place during the endless winter. It was so dark here that Blanky had to carry the shotgun in his left hand — his still-mittened hand — while feeling along the ice-encrusted railing with his right hand. As far as he could tell, the mainmast spar here on the forward side of the mast had also collapsed.
“Leys!” he shouted.
Something very large and vaguely white in the hurtling snow lumbered out of the heap of debris and stopped him in his tracks. The Ice Master couldn’t tell if the thing was a white bear or a tattooed demon or if it was ten feet in front of him or thirty feet away in the dark, but he knew that it had completely blocked his progress toward the bow.
Then the thing reared up on its hind legs.
Blanky could see only the mass of it — he sensed the dark bulk of it mostly through the amount of blowing snow it blocked — but he knew it was huge. The tiny triangular head, if that was a head up there in the darkness, rose higher than the space where the spars had been. There seemed to be two holes punched into that pale triangle of a head — eyes? — but they were at least fourteen feet above the deck.
Impossible, thought Thomas Blanky.
It moved toward him.
Blanky shifted the shotgun to his right hand, jammed the stock against his shoulder, steadied it with his mittened left hand, and fired.
The flash and explosion of sparks from the barrel gave the Ice Master a half-second’s glimpse of the black, dead, emotionless eyes of a shark staring into him — no, not a shark’s eyes at all, he realized a second later as the retinal afterimage of the blast blinded him, but two ebony circles far more frighteningly malevolent and intelligent than even a shark’s black-circle gaze — but also the pitiless stare of a predator that sees you only as food. And these bottomless black-hole eyes were far above him, set on shoulders wider than Blanky’s arms could spread, and were coming closer as the looming shape surged forward.
Blanky threw the useless shotgun at the thing — there was no time at all to reload — and leapt for the man lines.
Only four decades of experience at sea allowed the Ice Master to know, in the dark and storm and without even attempting to look, exactly where the icy man lines would be. He caught them with the crooked fingers of his mittenless right hand, flung his legs up, found the cross ropes with his flailing boots, pulled off his left mitten with his teeth, and began clambering upward while hanging almost upside down on the inside of the inward-slanting lines.
Six inches beneath his arse and legs, something cleaved the air with the power of a two-ton battering ram swinging at full extension. Blanky heard three thick vertical ropes of the man lines rip, tear… impossible!… and swing inward, almost throwing Blanky down to the deck.
He hung on. Flinging his left leg around the outside of those lines remaining taut, he found purchase on the icy rope and began climbing higher without pausing for a second. Thomas Blanky moved like the monkey he’d been as an unrated boy of twelve who thought the masts, sails, lines, and upperworks’ rigging of the three-masted warship on which he shipped had all been constructed by Her Majesty solely for his enjoyment.