The thing began dragging the entire mass of rigging up to it.
This is God-fucking wondrous awful, Thomas Blanky had time to think as the entire ton or ton and a half of ice-encrusted manrope and human being began being pulled upward as easily and surely as if a fisherman were hauling up his net after a casting.
The Ice Master did what he had planned in the last ten seconds of inward swing, sliding lower on the rigging at the same time he shifted his weight back and forward — picturing himself a boy on a rope swing — increasing his lateral arc even as the thing above pulled him higher. As fast as he clambered down while he swung, the thing hauled him an equal distance closer. He would reach the bottom of the manrope rigging about the time the creature hauled him in and still be fifty feet in the air.
But there was still enough slack that he could arc twenty feet to starboard, both hands on the vertical lines, legs straightening against the crossrigging. He closed his eyes and regained the image of a boy on a rope swing.
There was an anticipatory cough from less than twenty feet above him. Then came a strong jerk and the entire rigging rose another five or eight feet with Blanky on it.
Not knowing whether he was twenty feet above the deck now or forty-five, caring only about the timing of his outward swing, Blanky twisted the rigging around as he swung outward over the starboard darkness, kicked his boots free, and launched himself into the air.
The fall seemed interminable.
His first job was to twist again in midair so as not to land on his head or back or belly. There would be no give to the ice — less, of course, if he struck the railing or deck — but there was no longer anything he could do about that. The Ice Master knew as he fell that his life now depended upon simple Newtonian arithmetic; Thomas Blanky had become a minor problem in ballistics.
He sensed the starboard rail going past six feet from his head and only just had time to curl and ready his legs and extended arms before his lower body slammed into the slope of snow and ice that dropped away from the pressure-raised Terror like a ramp. The Ice Master had done the best dead reckoning he could on his blind outward swing, trying to place the end of his falling arc just forward of the cement-hard path of ice the men used in climbing to and from the ship, but also to place his point of impact just aft of the snowy heaps where the whaleboats were shrouded and tied down under frozen canvas and three feet of snow.
He landed on the snowy incline just forward of the ice ramp and just astern the snow-shrouded boats. The impact knocked the wind out of him. Some muscle tore or bone snapped in his left leg — Blanky had time for a prayer to whatever gods were awake this night that it was a muscle and not a bone — and then he was rolling down the long, steep slope, cursing and exclaiming as he went, kicking up his own small flurry of snow and epithets within the larger blizzard blowing around the ship.
Thirty feet beyond the ship, somewhere out on the snow-covered sea ice, Blanky rolled to a stop on his back.
He took stock as quickly as he could. His arms were unbroken, although he’d hurt his right wrist. His head seemed intact. His ribs hurt and he was having trouble taking a breath, but he thought this was probably more the result of fear and excitement than of broken ribs. But his left leg hurt like the very Devil.
Blanky knew that he had to be up and running… now… but he couldn’t obey his own command. He was completely satisfied lying there on his back, spreadeagled on the dark ice, bleeding heat into the ice beneath him and into the air above him, trying to get his breath and wits back.
Now there were definite human cries and shouts on the foredeck. Spheres of lantern light, none wider than ten feet or so, appeared near the bow, illuminating the hurtling horizontal lines of winddriven snow. Then Blanky heard the heavy thump and crash as the demon-thing slid down the mainmast to the deck. There came more men’s shouts — alarmed now, although they wouldn’t be able to see the creature clearly since it was farther astern within the tumble and jumble of broken spars, fallen rigging, and scattered casks amidships. A shotgun roared.
Aching, hurting, Thomas Blanky got to all fours on the ice. His undergloves were completely gone now. Both hands were bare. He was also bareheaded, his long greystreaked hair blowing in the wind, its queue having come unknotted during his contortions. He could not feel his fingers, face, or extremities, but everything in between was giving him one sort of pain or another.
The creature came hurtling over the starboard railing toward him, the mass of it backlit by lantern-glow, clearing the low barrier with all four huge legs in the air.
In an instant Blanky was on his feet and running out into the sea ice and serac darkness.
Only after he’d gotten fifty yards or so from the ship, slipping and falling and rising and running again, did he realize that he may well have just signed his own death warrant.
He should have stayed close to the ship. He should have run around the snow-heaped boats along the forward starboard length of the hull, clambered over the bowsprit now pressed down deep into the ice, and made for the port side, shouting to the men above for help as he did so.
No, he realized, he would have been dead before he got through the tangle of bow rigging. The thing would have caught him in ten seconds.
Why did I run in this direction?
He’d had a plan before the deliberate fall from the rigging. What the hell had it been?
Blanky could hear scraping and thudding on the sea ice behind him.
Someone, perhaps the assistant surgeon from Erebus, Goodsir, had once told him and some other seamen how fast a white bear could charge across sea ice toward its prey — twenty-five miles per hour? Yes, at least that. Blanky had never been a fast runner. And now he had to dodge seracs and ice ridges and cracks in the ice that he couldn’t see until he was a few feet from them.
That’s why I ran this way. That was the plan.
The creature was loping along behind him, dodging the same jagged seracs and pressure-ridge slabs that Blanky was clumsily slaloming around in the dark. But the Ice Master was panting and wheezing like a torn bellows, while the huge shape behind him was grunting only slightly — with amusement? anticipation? — as its forepaws thudded down onto the ice with each stride that was the equal to four or five of Blanky’s.
Blanky was in the ice field about two hundred yards from the ship now. Bouncing off an ice boulder he hadn’t seen until it was too late to dodge, taking the impact on his right shoulder and feeling that shoulder instantly go numb to join other numb parts of him, the Ice Master realized that he’d been blind as a bat the entire time he’d been running for his life. The lanterns on Terror’s deck were far, far behind him now — an impossible distance away — and he didn’t have time or reason to turn and look for them. They could give no illumination this far away from the ship, and they could only distract him from what he was doing.
What he was doing, Blanky realized, was running and dodging and swerving through his mental map of the ice fields and crevasses and small bergs that surrounded HMS Terror to the horizon. Blanky had had more than a year to stare out at this frozen sea with all its disturbances and ridges and bergs and upthrustings, and for a few months of that time he’d had the thin arctic daylight to see by. Even in winter, there were hours on watch in moonlight and starlight and in the glow of the dancing aurora when he’d studied this circle of ice around the trapped ship with an Ice Master’s professional eye.
About two hundred yards out here in the ice jumble, beyond a last pressure ridge he’d just stumbled and clambered over — he could hear the thing leaping it less than ten yards behind him — he remembered a maze of former bergy bits, small icebergs calved from their larger brethren, upended into a tiny mountain range of cottagesized ice boulders.