Spellbreakers (35 page)

“Do not look at the shadows, please,” said Ljung
again. Leal nodded shakily. She apologized, and they picked up their march
again.

Before they reached the end of the crevasse there was
a creak behind them, and then a crack and then an overwhelming roar as a serac
right behind them tottered and lurched and collapsed in a fountain of
pulverized snow.

Daria, who was further down the slope, cried out in
alarm as the cloud of ice crystals engulfed her.

“Hold on! Hold on!” came Ljung’s voice from above, and
Leal dug her steel claws deeper in the ice, with her face to the slope,
breathing snow and fear. Then the snow settled. Small ice chunks clattered
around them as they fell. As the cloud settled Leal looked down, blinking. A
snow-encrusted, furious Daria shook her way free of the white layer that
covered her and made her way up banging her crampons and pick axe in the ice
with a vengeance.

“Don’t hang up there like two moonstruck spiders on a
wall!” she called. “Let’s get the heck out of this infernal place!”

Ljung nodded and started up again. High above, in the
infinitely desirable free sky, Tuula wailed her melancholic cry and pointed
north like a comet star. The fleeting shadows laughed louder and ran along the
next crevasse, darkening the ice to a murky blue-grey in which pale faces
floated like fitful lanterns. It was impossible to tell their expressions or
discern their features except for their gaping dark mouths. The mouths could be
screaming, or hooting with laughter. The demented tittering sound that followed
them was all they had to guess their mood. It was maddening.

Leal found herself hurrying her step carelessly and
forced herself to slow down and focus. A false step on the ice and she’d be as
good as dead, and probably her friends with her. She had been lucky with her
first fall, but she didn’t think this was a good place where to trust to her
luck.

They climbed up and up.

The terrain among the seracs was wildly irregular, but
on average it kept climbing. Laughter followed them. Then among the cackling
there was a vast ominous creak to their right, and Ljung flung himself against
the blue side of the left-hand serac, hammering his axe in the ice. Leal did
the same, but before she could look behind her and see if Daria had followed
suit, the world went white around them. The whole tower of ice beside them
disintegrated and went down in an almighty shower of pulverized snow.

There was no reason for it. The ice had been clear and
neat, not the rotten ice of the seracs to the south. As a timeless instant of
pure terror unfolded slowly within her, Leal realized that the
isvættir
were doing this.

When the ice settled, they were still hanging like
autumn leaves on the side of the left-hand serac. They were hanging only just,
but they were. Leal looked down to Daria. She was pale, but alive and
determined. Without a word of comment Ljung began climbing again.

They were slowly coming up to the northern edge of the
serac field. There was a gleam of golden light touching the upper regions of
the labyrinth. The sun was setting, but they were almost out. The laughter
around them had reached a perfectly hysterical pitch. More seracs fell behind
them and around them. One was almost in front of them, and they were showered
by falling ice chunks, but it was not a direct hit. They dug their axes, nails,
teeth, and crampons in, and powdered snow passed all over them without sweeping
them away.

And then they passed the last line of icy towers. They
suddenly climbed out of a last almost uninterrupted crevasse onto a vast tongue
of perfectly white, frozen snow that filled the valley from side to side. It
was the kind of ice-snow called
firn
. It looked like a river of packed
sugar. The surface gave a little underfoot and then held fast where it was
frozen hard. There were ridges, steps and crevasses, but nothing impassable.

“We did it! Good gods, we did it,” said Daria, panting
as she climbed over the ridge last, her
voice a joyful human
sound
just audible above the shrieking laughter of the demented
isvættir
.

And that was when the
viento blanco
hit them.

****

Escarra called itself a mountain kingdom, but most of
its population lived, hunted, and farmed on the Llers hills. The fabulous blue
peaks of the Canigou Mountains in the west were part of the Escarran landscape,
but they were in fact a sort of no man’s land. They belonged to nobody but
themselves, but if somebody had ever claimed to own them that was the
Andalouans, however improbable that might sound. The
blue
mountains
had always been the northern border of Andalou, as good a
defense as thousand and a thousand castles. That was why the language of the
high mountains was still the Andalouan of the languid south, not the Escarran
of the Llers hills.

Leal had never seen before
a
viento blanco
, but she had heard of them, sudden
cloudless storms of murderous wind coming down from the high peaks, loaded with
pulverized frozen snow from the glaciers above. They could cancel out the whole
landscape from one moment to the next, making even the most experienced
mountaineers
lose
all sense of direction.

It is a damn good name for it, white wind, but white
death might be better still,
thought Leal,
panic stricken as she made her way into blind howling whiteness. She had no
idea where she was going. First there was a clap of thunder, then a gust of
wind,
then
the flying powdered snow engulfed her, her
senses, the whole world. There was no up or down, no horizon, no shapes,
shadows, nothing, just this gale of overwhelming whiteness.

She just hung on to the rope that connected her to
Ljung far ahead. The rope tugged and tugged. Ljung was walking determinedly in
one specific direction. Leal didn’t know how he could make his way in this
shrieking gale of windblown ice. She could hardly breathe, with her face turned
down and sideways. With one hand she still gripped her pick axe, with the other
she clutched the deep fur-lined hood of her coat over her head, to shelter her
eyes and face from the rasping sleet. She didn’t know how long they crawled
this way. Once or twice she fell to her knees and almost gave up, but the rope
tugged on. Once she felt it catching behind her as Daria fell. She pulled on
the rope, relentlessly. She didn’t know where she found the strength.
Come
on, come on, forward and forward, and forward.

The wind was piercing cold on her face, and was
searching her clothes like a thousand freezing hands. While she kept moving it
was not unbearable, but she knew that they needed to find shelter, pile up more
clothes, or they would die.

Suddenly she became aware that the wind had lessened,
or they had come into the lee of some height. Very vaguely she could make out
Ljung’s shape ahead now, his dark bow strapped to his pack, some shadows,
footprints that quickly disappeared, erased by the wind. They were not climbing
up the slope anymore, but making their way sideways along a low ridge in the
ice that gave them some small shelter from the wind. Right up against the ridge
face there was a space of comparative calm where they caught their breath for a
moment. Then Ljung beckoned to her to walk on, and he began a crawling sideways
progress along the cliff’s face. Leal was more tired than she had ever been in
her life. In this slightly less deafening wind she thought she could hear the
laughter of the
isvættir
again. She shuddered and whimpered. Cold and
exhaustion were eating away her courage by the minute. Then the rope’s tug
lessened, and for a moment she feared Ljung had fallen, or given up. She called
out, and a gloved hand closed on her arm and pulled her into an opening in the
cliff face.

She plunged into the bluish shadow with a moment of
absolute, illuminating bliss.

The relief from the noise and wind was indescribable.
After a moment Daria, following the rope, also stumbled into the opening. They
made their way inward for a few yards, and they collapsed into an exhausted
heap onto the icy ground.

It was not so much a cave as a deep, old crevasse. In
high summer melt water must have scooped the walls out drop by drop because
there was just enough
overhang
for them to have a roof
of sorts over their heads. The floor was narrow and sloped downwards towards
the middle, but there was enough fallen and frozen snow for them to sit. It was
not much, but it kept the wind out. It was not much, just the thin last
difference between life and death. Leal crawled closer to Ljung and clutched
him in an exhausted and completely unpremeditated hug.
 
He patted her hooded head once or twice and
then pushed her off.

“Come on,” he shouted, “No falling asleep yet.”

Even in the relative quiet of their shelter the shout
was just audible over the wind, but it was a welcome, unbelievably human sound
in the overwhelming madness of the raging elements outside. They shrugged off
their packs, untied their crampons,
took
out their
warmest clothes and all their blankets. Ljung strung his bow before wearing his
thickest gloves and mittens. They ate some of their sweetest food, dried fruit
and cakes of crushed nuts with honey, and washed all down with some molten snow
and a good swig of cordial. Leal felt almost awake again after the food, but in
fact she was at the very extremity of physical fatigue. They piled their packs
in the entrance of the crevasse to form a further wall, and huddled into their
coats, hoods, scarves and gloves, close together for comfort and heat, with all
their blankets around them.

They settled down in what comfort they could find.
They could only wait the storm out.

There were times in the night when Leal could not say
if she was awake or dreaming. The storm roared on and on, but couched in the
howling darkness there were also fell voices in the wind, and mad laughter. The
laughter was terrifying. Leal felt that all the malice of the ice sang out in
that tittering, cackling, hooting, and crowing. The shadows in the seracs were
indeed the very spirits of the killing ice. What other sort of people could be
out on a night like this,
laughing
?

Even so, despite the noise and fear she definitely
fell asleep at times. Once she woke up to find that her two companions were
talking.

“Will Tuula survive this?” asked Daria.

“On a wind like this, she must be halfway to Elverhjem
by now,” said Ljung. Leal could not tell if he was really convinced of it or if
he was trying to reassure them, and himself. She thought of Kilian’s brave pony
out there on the moors, but perhaps the weather was not so extreme down there.
She prayed so.

She thanked her luck that she had not come up here
alone, after all. She thanked her luck for the comfort of her friends’ bodies,
warm beside hers. She thanked her luck for their good clothes and their thick
quilted blankets lined with fur. In her nest of pelts, tangled in her friends’
embrace she was not cold. Even the fell laughter was not so important, after a
while.

She fell asleep again.

Chapter
Seventeen

The morning came with silence.

Daria had never imagined such an inveterate ferocity
of sound, nor that
a human being could
endure it for
so long without going crazy. There had been times in the night when the wind
howled on and on, and the laughter echoed all around them, when she thought she
could not bear it any more. She kept having the impulse of getting up and running
out of their shelter, screaming at the cackling shadows. The small part of her
mind that retained a grip on sanity knew that it would be certain death, by
cold, by a fatal fall, or by something worse. She knew that it was what the
isvættir
wanted her to do. Go out and fall to her death in a deep crevasse. So she
pressed her hood on her ears and endured. Besides, getting up meant shrugging
free of so many layers of limbs and blankets that it was just too much work. So
she suffered in silence, not something she had ever been very good at.

The reward came in the morning when the howl abated,
first a slight check in the wind, as if the glacier had taken a slight breath
in before the next shriek. Then the gale became fitful, more like a series of
enormous prolonged gusts. Then there were spaces of something like quiet, and
finally, as the world grew grey with the dawn, the wind quieted almost
entirely. When the sun rose, a white-gold beam peeked in the crack of their ice
roof, turning it to a glowing turquoise green. Daria moved, slowly, toe by toe,
finger by finger. She freed one arm and touched her nose and ears through the
layers of wool and fur that completely cocooned her, leaving barely a slit for
her eyes. She was well. No frostbite anywhere. She lowered the frozen edge of
her scarf and took a breath of clean air. She had never breathed anything so
pure, nor so cold. She breathed again, and then she called softly. Ljung was
awake in an instant. Leal took a moment longer.

“Hush,” said Ljung in the quietest whisper.

They stayed put and quiet for such a long time that
Daria had to dig her nose in her scarf again so as not to have it frozen off.
Then Ljung slowly disentangled himself from the blankets and padded softly to
the mouth of the crevasse. He looked out for a long time, and listened to the
breeze and to the ice, putting his scarved ear to the walls and floor of the
crevasse. Daria easily guessed what he was listening for. Fell laughter in the
ice. Bet there was no such sound. When he turned back he gestured to them to
pack their blankets, put on crampons and move out quietly. They did so.