As if realizing where its doomed prey was headed, the unseen shape behind him grunted and picked up speed.
Too late. Dodging the last of the tall seracs, Blanky was into the bergy labyrinth. Here his mental map failed him — he’d only seen the miniature berg field from afar or through a telescope — and he bounced off one ice wall in the dark, fell on his arse, and was scrambling forward on all fours in the snow with the creature closing to within a few yards before Blanky regained his breath and wits.
The crevice between two carriage-sized bergs was less than three feet wide. Blanky scurried into this — still on all fours, his bare hands as unfeeling and remote as the black ice under them — just as the thing reached the crack and swept a giant forepaw in after him.
The Ice Master rejected all images of mice and cats as impossibly huge claws tossed up ice chips not ten inches from his boot soles. He stood in the narrow gap, fell, got to his feet again, and stumbled forward in near absolute blackness.
This was no good. The ice alley was too short — less than eight feet — and it had dumped Blanky into an open gap beyond it. He could already hear the thing loping and grunting its way around the block of ice to his right. He might as well be on a clear cricket pitch as try to stay here — and even the crevice, its walls more snow than ice, would be only a temporary hiding place. It was a place to wait for only a minute or so in the darkness until the thing enlarged the opening and clawed its way in. It was only a place in which to die.
The wind-sculpted little bergs he remembered from looking through his glass were… which way? To his left, he thought.
He staggered left, bounced off ice pinnacles and seracs that would do him no good, stumbled over a crevasse that dropped only two feet or so, scrambled up a low ridge of serrated ice, slid back, scrambled up again, and heard the thing hurtle around the ice block and slide to a stop not ten feet behind him.
The larger bergs began just beyond this ice boulder. The one with the hole he’d observed through the glass would be…
…these things move every day, every night of every day…
…they collapse, regrow, and reshape themselves as pressure shoves them willy-nilly…
…the thing is clawing its way up the ice slope behind him onto this flat but dead-end plateau of ice where Blanky now teeters…
Shadows. Crevices. Cracks. Dead-end alleys of ice. None large enough for him to slide into. Wait.
There was a single hole about four feet high on the face of a little upended berg on his right. The clouds parted ever so slightly and five seconds of starlight gave Blanky just enough illumination to see the irregular circle in the wall of dark ice.
He lunged forward and threw himself into it, not knowing if the ice tunnel was ten yards or ten inches deep. He didn’t fit.
The outer layers of his clothing — cold-weather slops and greatcoat — made him too bulky.
Blanky ripped at his clothing. The thing had clawed its way up the final slope and was behind him, rearing onto its hind legs. The Ice Master could not see it — he did not take time even to turn to look — but he could feel it rearing.
Without turning, the Ice Master flung his greatcoat and other layers of outer wool backward at the thing, hurling the heavy garments as quickly as he could.
There was a woof of surprise — a gust of sulfurous stench — and then the tearing noise of Blanky’s clothing being ripped apart and tossed far out into the ice maze. But the distraction had bought him five seconds or more.
Again he threw himself forward into the ice hole.
His shoulders only just fit. The toes of his boots flailed, slid, finally found grip. His knees and fingers clawed for purchase.
Blanky was only four feet into the hole when the thing reached in after him. First it tore off his right boot and part of his foot. The Ice Master felt the shocking impact of claws into his flesh and thought — hoped — that it was only his heel that had been torn away. He had no way of knowing. Gasping, fighting a sudden stab of pain that even cut through the numbness of his injured leg, he clawed and wriggled and forced himself deeper into the hole.
The ice tunnel was tightening, growing narrower.
Claws raked ice and tore down his left leg, ripping flesh exactly where Blanky had already injured himself in the fall from the rigging. He smelled his own blood and the thing must also have smelled it because it quit clawing for a second. Then it roared.
The roar was deafening in the ice tunnel. Blanky’s shoulders were jammed, he could go no farther forward, and he knew the rear half of his body was still within reach of the monster. It roared again.
Blanky’s heart and testicles froze at the sound, but it did not frighten him into immobility. Using his few seconds of reprieve, the Ice Master wriggled backward into the less-restrictive space through which he’d just crawled, forced his arms forward, and kicked and kneed ice with the last of his remaining strength, ripping clothing and skin from his shoulders and sides as he tore through an ice aperture never meant for a man of even his moderate size.
Beyond this narrowest point, the ice tunnel widened and dropped lower. Blanky let himself slide forward on his belly, the slide lubricated by his own blood. His remaining clothing was in tatters. He could feel the encroaching cold of the ice against his clenched belly muscles and tightened scrotum.
The thing roared a third time but the horrible noise seemed to be a few feet farther away.
At the last instant, just before he dropped over the edge of the tunnel into an open space, Blanky was sure that all this had been for nothing. The tunnel — most likely made by melting so many months ago — had cut through the edge of the little berg but now had dropped him outside again. Suddenly, he was lying on his back under the stars. He could smell and feel his blood soaking into fresh-fallen snow. He could also hear the thing loping around the berg, first to the left, then to the right, eager to get at him, confident, certain now that it could follow the maddening smell of the human’s blood to its prey. The Ice Master was too injured and too exhausted to crawl any farther. Let whatever was going to happen to him happen now and may a Sailor’s God fuck to Hell this fucking thing that was going to eat him. Blanky’s last prayer was that one of his bones would lodge in the thing’s throat.
It was a full minute more and half a dozen more roars — each growing in volume and frustration, each coming from another point on the dark compass of night around him — before Blanky realized that the thing couldn’t get to him.
He was lying in the open and under the stars here, but in a box of ice no larger than five feet by eight — an enclosure created by at least three of the thick bergs being jostled and tumbled together by the pressure of sea ice. One of the tilted bergs hung over him like a falling wall, but Blanky could still see the stars. He could also see starlight coming from two vertical apertures on opposite sides of his ice coffin — he could see the great mass of the predator blocking the starlight at the end of these cracks, less than fifteen feet from him — but the gaps between bergs were no more than six inches wide. The melt tunnel he’d crawled through was the only real way into this space.
The monster roared and paced for another ten minutes.
Thomas Blanky forced himself to a sitting position and set his lacerated back and shoulders against the ice. His coats and slops were gone, and his trousers, two sweaters, wool and cotton shirts, and wool undershirt were just bloody tatters, so he prepared to freeze to death.