Spellbreakers (34 page)

They were camping in the lee of one of the enormous
boulders scattered all over the landscape like toys, almost swallowed by the
soft ground and vegetation. These boulders were often the only shelter from the
western winds, and in their haven sometimes a stunted tree or two would grow,
gnarled and half-starved but still giving some sense of cover in this endless
open landscape.

“I suggest you go through your packs while there is
light,” said Ljung. “You can leave behind your summer clothes here. By midday
tomorrow we will be on the ice. With some luck we will find our stuff again
when we come back. Also, we must say farewell to our good friend here.” He
patted the pony’s head, and the mare nickered companionably.

Daria frowned at that. Despite Kilian’s predictions
they had met nobody on the moors, and they must perforce set the pony loose, to
make her way home by herself. Leal could see that Daria was unhappy about that
prospect, and she didn’t blame her. There were predators on the moors, wolves
for
sure,
and maybe bears, lynxes, and heaven knows
what else. They had come across an elk carcass not so long ago, its gnawed
bones scattered far and wide. And nobody had forgotten the horrid deformed
wolf-like creature that Ljung had called a
hati
.

Ljung obviously guessed her thoughts. “She’ll be
better off going south on her own than coming north with us. And tying her here
to wait for our return means condemning her to be eaten by nightfall. She’s a
smart creature. I am not worried for her fate at all. Well, much less than I am
for ours, at least.”

So that was it. They set up camp, sorted through their
luggage, setting out their new outfits and equipment, and packing away the
rest. They lit a small fire at the foot of their boulder to get some hot food
in their bellies. It might easily be their last hot meal in a long while—or
forever—and in addition to their roasted fowl they lashed out some of their
tastiest provisions, smoked deer-ham with sun-dried apricots, cheese with
honey, toasted walnuts with one sip each of the Elverhjem cordial that each of
them carried in a flat silver flask. Then they laid their blankets in the
flattest and driest places they could find, set up a watch, and tried to sleep.
The pony was still close to the camp. No point setting her loose in the dark.
They would say goodbye in the morning.

****

It was just before dawn when Ljung got up from the
nook between the boulder and one of the tree’s tangled roots where he had been
sitting, watching. He had taken the first and last watch to give the girls some
more rest. He was not sleepy, just tired of waiting. He was as grateful for the
first grey gleam of day through the mist as he had seldom been in his life.

He walked quietly over to the pony. She was just a
shadow in the mist, and might have passed for half a dozen such shadows all
round, a smaller boulder to the right, a clump of bracken, a stunted gorse
bush. But this shadow moved and nickered softly and came to meet him with an
outstretched soft warm nose.

Ljung pulled a wizened little apple from his pocket
and offered it to the pony. Then he braided a long tough strand of ling in her
mane, purple with flowers, took off her halter, murmured a few words of good
luck in her small foxy ears and pushed her away southward. The pony turned to
peer at him through the mop of her mane and then took off at a trot, squelching
in the wet ground. She disappeared in a moment in the mist.

That’s done,
thought
Ljung. He could wake up the girls now, and there would be no more discussions
about the pony. With some luck she’d be back in Elverhjem within three or four
days, and the ling in her mane would let Kilian know that all had gone well at
least up to the glacier’s edge.

He prodded the sleeping figures gently and tried to
put on a cheerful voice while announcing it was time to go.

****

When Daria woke up the mist was turning from the first
pewter grey before dawn to the silvery gold of day. Ljung was standing by,
stamping their fireplace to wet ashes in the dewy spongy soil. He was fully
dressed in his silvery white snow outfit.

“Come on, sleepy heads,” he said. “We must be through
the seracs before nightfall. It’s not a great distance, but it’s not easy going
in there. Let’s move.”

Daria nodded, pulled the blanket off Leal, and stood
up stamping her feet for warmth as she changed into the first layer of elvren
clothes she had been given, pants, jacket, and gloves of quilted wool with fur
trims and feathered fringes.

“Should I put on the rest, too?” she asked to Ljung
regarding the thicker, outer fur layers.

“Nope.
It will
be warm work to climb up through the seracs. The rest we’ll need at night, or
if the weather changes.” He made a gesture as if to ward off the evil eye.
Daria packed her clothes and blanket on top of her provisions. It made for a
depressingly huge pack. That was when she looked about her to see the pony, and
realized she had gone. She gave a reproachful glance to Ljung, but he was
gazing north in the mist.

Daria said nothing.

They shoved their remaining luggage, panniers, and
pack-saddle deep under a prickly gorse bush and they set out northward.

They walked for perhaps three hours before the mist
began clearing, and two more hours before the glacier appeared in front of
them, a solid whiteness that did not recede as they walked, like the fog did.
By the time they reached the snow line the mist had lifted entirely, and the
glacier was revealed to them in all its majesty.

“This is madness,” said Daria in an awed whisper as
they looked upon the labyrinth.

There was a snowy slope in front of them, old snow
molten and frozen again many times. From under the lip of the snow-field
thousands of dripping icicles fed the countless brooks that crisscrossed the
moors. From under they could see for a little way the underside of the melting
snow field. It was pale sapphire, a color of unthinkable beauty, and completely
alien to the warm tones of the moor.

On top of the slope, where the glacier proper began,
was a city of ice.

At least that was how it appeared to Daria. Square
blocks of ice, each as high and wide as the towers of the barbican of Castel
Argell filled the space between the mountain peaks that watched the pass into
Dalarna in rank after the rank.

“Is this really the only way?” asked Leal.

Ljung shrugged. “They say you can go all the way round
the mountains and find your way to the center of the Ice Waste from the west.
It is a long path though, and you’d hardly get there before winter closes in,
in which case you’ll stay there, forever. From the south, this is the only
route, which is why it is so heavily guarded, I suppose.”

“Guarded? Who could possibly live here? It looks
utterly desolate.”

Ljung nodded. “It does. But we are not alone. Watch
your step. After the snow field, you’ll want to get your crampons on and take
out your ice axes. We will also use this rope.
Leal in the
middle.
I’ll go first.
Daria at the rear.
Now
you listen. There are things in the seracs. If we are very, very lucky they
will not bother us, but if we are not ... they may play some nasty tricks. Do
not be scared, but mind your business and
keep walking
. The sooner we
are out on the north side of the labyrinth, the better.”

“Can’t we go round the seracs?” asked Daria.
“Between the seracs and the rock face?”

Ljung shook his head. “The glacier does not really
reach to the rock. There is a huge deep crevasse between the rock and the ice.
They say that in winter it will fill with snow and you can walk over it, but in
summer it’s impassable.”

So they set out. The snow field was steep, deep and
crusty, but they went up on a zig-zag route, and in the soft soled snow boots
the elvers had given them they made light work of it. At its upper edge the
snow’s crust was pitted and broken by blocks of ice of all sizes that had
fallen on it. Seracs that had collapsed in the summer heat, and shattered,
ruining everything below. Daria prayed fervently to whatever god might listen
that no such thing would happen today. The seracs looked old and pockmarked,
nothing like the pure white and blue ice she had expected. They were white and
grey, with some greenish tinges here and there. Still the changeful elvren
garments already melted in their background wonderfully.

There were narrow pathways of a sort among the seracs,
paved with snow and fragments of ice fallen from above, but it didn’t look like
anything walked on these paths.

“Who or what lives here, Ljung?” asked Leal while she
fastened her crampons as she had been taught to do. “You told us not to sleep
nearby, and to be careful, but it really looks uninhabited.”

“You’ll see soon enough, I fear. There are nasty
creatures in the seracs. They infest this place, and wander out of it at night,
sometimes.”

Ljung paid out a long stout line, and each of them
fastened a loop of it around their middle with a knot and a toggle, as Leif had
shown them back in Elverhjem. It had all looked like a game there, but here, it
felt like an altogether more serious business.

Then they set out, steering north as well as they
could.

****

It was hard to stick to any given direction walking in
the shadow on the seracs. Leal could very quickly see why it was called a
labyrinth. The steep paths between the sheer ice walls were treacherous, with
ice and snow giving way suddenly under their feet sometimes, or an apparently
promising path dwindling to a fissure too narrow to be negotiated by even the
slimmest traveler, so that they needed to retrace their steps and change route.

As soon as they walked some way into the serac field,
the color of the ice changed. These seracs, freshly broken from the flowing ice
that came down the valley, looked clearer and cleaner. The labyrinth was the
cracking and ever renovating front of the glacier, and the closest they got to
the core of the glacier the fresher were the seracs. They were like enormous
towers, topped by jagged merlons of snow, and crenelated by countless icicles
that hung in thousands wherever a little ledge in the side of the ice face
caused any dripping in warmer weather. They were fantastically beautiful, and
equally deadly.

Deep in the serac field, the light had changed to a
diffuse bluish grey. No sun penetrated this deep, at the bottom of the icy
towers. There was just a perpetual cold blue dusk of shadows and reflections.
Without a clear bearing on the sun and with all the turns they had to take,
Leal was not at all sure where the north was any more. Perhaps even Ljung would
have been lost if it had not been for Tuula that circled and circled high
overhead, sometimes swooping right between the ice walls, ever pointing in one
direction.

She soon lost any notion of time, not just direction.
It was hard work walking on the treacherous paths, digging her crampons in the
ice with a hard stomp at every step, step after step after step, often needing
the help of her pick axe to clamber up steep slippery slopes, and all with a
big pack on her back.

She might never have made it if the walking of the
last couple of weeks had not trained her somewhat to make her way on foot for
ten or twelve hours a day.

Because she was getting so tired, and losing all sense
of space and time she did not immediately trust her senses when the first face
moved in the ice. She gasped, startled, and nearly lost her balance, but she
shook her head, and walked doggedly on.
I am seeing things, is
all.
I am so tired, so tired
.

But then there was another and another, and then Daria
behind her gave a muffled scream.

Something or someone
did
live in the seracs.
There were fleeting glimpses of people that came and went like shadows, peering
at them through curtains of icicles, rippling just under the surface of the
ice. If one tried to stare hard at them, they always melted away in the
irregularities and reflections on the ice’s surface, just to show up again
after an instant in a different place, where one could only glimpse them with
the corner of one’s eye.

“What are these things?” she asked in a trembling
voice.

“We call them
isvættir,”
said Ljung softly.
“Spirits of the ice.
They cannot come out of it, but
they defend it,” said Ljung. “Ignore them. Keep walking. The light is fading
already. Let’s go.”

The shapes in the ice became more and more numerous as
they advanced, as if they reveled in the cold fresh ice nearest the core of the
glacier. They flowed from serac to serac, keeping pace with them without
effort. After a while Leal thought she could hear whispers, murmurs, clicking
sounds, hints of suppressed laughter. Every time a clump of thicker shadows
formed at the edge of her vision she could not help turning quickly to stare at
it in alarm. Every time the clump dissolved and the tittering shadows
disappeared.

After a while, tired as she was, she lost concentration
and stumbled. It could have been a bad fall, but for the rope that secured her
to Ljung farther up the slope. For a sickening moment she hung by her middle,
then she found a scrape of footing with one crampon and then she slammed the
other foot and her pick axe deep in the ice and came to a solid halt with her
heart in her throat. Under her Daria’s white face looked up at her in alarm.
There were crystals of broken ice in her hair. There was an unmistakable,
shrill, gurgling laughter ringing and echoing between the ice walls of the
narrow steep crevasse they were climbing.