The Cradle of Ice (Moonfall #2)

Chapter 69

69

N YX DID NOT need the fiery map burning inside her skull to know they neared the end of the Fangs. For that last half league, the tunnel had widened, its walls flowing with bright meltwater, reflecting the skiff’s firepot. The roof arched higher, dripping heavily atop them.

The channel flowed more swiftly beneath them, requiring little effort from Neffa and Mattis. The two orksos merely floated ahead of the prow, resting in the current, letting it propel them along.

“We must be almost through,” Daal said as he held his slack reins.

Nyx glanced around the boat. Across from her, Jace clutched his Guld’guhlian ax. Graylin and Vikas shifted the hilts of their weapons closer. Shiya manned the stern, near the fish pen that held their crate of armaments.

Except for the bronze woman, everyone’s expression was a mix of wariness and trepidation—along with some relief. They had all had enough of this confounding and threatening labyrinth.

As they continued, the tide under them flushed steadily faster, worrisomely so. The meltwater above grew into a winter’s storm of pelting drops. Yet, as chilling as that icy rain was, the heat in the air grew hotter. The ever-present whiff of sulfur now stifled. The chattering of drops soon deafened. It became difficult to see farther than an outstretched arm.

Daal had pulled a small shield over his firepot to protect its flame and hovered over it, trying to peer ahead. They couldn’t risk the current tossing them down a wrong turn.

Nyx drew to Daal’s shoulder, overlaying her fiery map across the storm that lashed and propelled them. “We’re not far,” she yelled in his ear.

He nodded.

A low roaring pushed through the meltwater tempest. Nyx had no time to question its source when they were suddenly in it. The pelting storm became a pounding deluge. Nyx was knocked flat, nearly tumbling over the side, but Daal caught her, yanking her beneath him. She only knew it was him because of the fire of his skin.

Then they were through it.

The skiff sailed out of a ragged cliff face that was both ice and rock. A meltwater cataract swept across the tunnel mouth behind them. Ahead, a wide river cascaded into a huge starlit chasm that cut deep into the Urth’s crust. The moon shone far above. The crystalline rock reflected its stark shine. Elsewhere, ruddy glows and brighter molten fires dotted the darkness. It was a terrifying landscape, a volcanic ruin, a jagged scar across the Urth.

Unable to thwart the river’s current, the skiff and its soaked occupants were swept along, dragging the orksos with them. To either side, the walls looked even higher than the ice cliffs that led down into the Crèche. But they were not sheer. Fissures and cracks splintered off in countless directions. More streams flowed out of those canyons, joining the river. Other rifts glowed ruddily deep down their throats, breathing fire at them as they passed.

As the current drove them deeper into the maze of chasms and ravines, the air grew steamier, near to blistering. The sulfur burned eyes and throats. The water under them remained cold, still retaining some of its ice. They splashed their faces to cool the heat.

“We can’t go much farther,” Graylin called out.

While the urgency to protect Bashaliia still clenched Nyx’s heart, she knew Graylin was right. Still, the river had its own will. The torrent rose into swells to either side as more streams joined this one. At the edges, rocks and boulders churned with whitewater.

Daal rode at the prow, balancing deftly on his legs, reins in hand. He had cajoled and whistled Neffa and Mattis ahead of them again. He expertly used the two, either together or at cross-purposes, to keep the skiff in the smoothest stretches of water—but even those were becoming rare.

“Hold tight!” Daal called out, spotting something from his standing height.

Nyx gripped the rail and leaned out. Ahead, the river dropped down a dark raging cataract, a roil of foam and spray. It looked like a toppled and broken slope of whitewater. It roared at them, as if trying to threaten them away.

They did not heed that warning.

Daal crouched, bracing his legs, his calves bunching into hard stones. As he sized up the challenge, he reset his grips on the reins, loosening one with a flip of his wrist and tightening his fingers on the other. Nyx could nearly follow his intentions, due to some vague recollection of instinct and memory from their past communing. She found her own hands mimicking his and had to force her fingers to latch hard to the rail, relinquishing control.

He’s got this.

Then they hit the rapids, and her confidence fled with the first hard leap and turn of the skiff. She lost one grip, clutched harder with the other, then regained a hold with both. They were tossed, rocked, thrust up, then down. At one point, the portside lifted so high that Jace hung above her, casting a terrified look down at her—then his side dropped away again. Several gasping breaths later, they were shot out of the torrent and across flat black water again.

Daal glanced back, likely making sure they were all still in the boat. He wore a huge grin, as if he were ready to do it again.

Graylin sat straighter, his face ashen. “Get us to shore!”

Nyx nodded in rare agreement with the knight.

“Now!” Shiya intoned from the stern, but there was no fear in her voice, only urgent command.

Nyx glanced back. The bronze woman stood at the stern. Her gaze, though, was cast far ahead. Nyx turned to look in that direction. All she saw was the tortured run of the river, churning back and forth through a broken fiery tumble of canyons, rifts, and defiles.

With the roar of the cataracts fading behind them, a new rumble grew, coming from ahead. It was heard less with the ears than with the gut. It grew quickly louder, filling all the gorges ahead of them.

Daal heeded both Shiya’s warning and the ominous timbre of that rumble. He whistled and nickered his two orksos toward an eddying pool along the right riverbank. The current tried to thwart him, but he mastered its riptide and plunged them into that calmer bay.

Once there, he drove them into a hard turn, sliding the skiff sideways up the shore’s slope of rock. He beached them there and loosened his orksos’ tethers to give them greater range of movement in the pool, but they were still safely tied to the skiff.

“Not too loose,” Graylin warned as he scanned ahead. “We may need to ship off quickly.”

Daal nodded and pulled back on the tethers to secure Neffa and Mattis closer. He apologized by tossing them fistfuls of small fish and a few eels from an ice storage in the pen alongside their gear. The orksos honked and exhaled their pleasure through their twin nostrils, riding their wings, knocking their horns against one another like two playful knights expelling nervous energy.

By now, Shiya had climbed a riverside boulder the size of Daal’s home. Limned against the starlight, she stared off across the breadth of the fiery Mouth. They all clawed and gripped their way to join her.

Under Nyx’s palms, the stone was unsettlingly hot to the touch. Graylin pulled her up the last vault. Together, they crossed to Shiya and flanked to either side of the bronze statue. Once the view opened, Nyx wanted to take a step away, as if that would help her escape the sight in the distance.

“We’re lucky we got off the river when we did,” Jace muttered.

Vikas turned to Daal, pressing two fingers to her chin and flicking them down in thanks for his skill, for keeping them from the danger ahead.

Nyx agreed with both of them.

Off in the distance, the river coursed another half league, then dumped into a large black lake. But its surface was not the placidly eddying pool behind them. The huge basin spun and whirled into a great threatening gyrus, rumbling its danger at them. From its center, a steamy swirl of mists climbed into the sky, matching the churn of that lake.

Nyx noted a berg of ice floating down there. It shone under the moonlight like a diamond imbedded in that black water. It spun a course several times around, sweeping faster and faster around the fierce eddy at the center—then vanished down its gullet.

“If this is the Mouth,” Jace said, “I think we’ve found its sodding Throat.”

Nyx searched beyond the ravenous monster, knowing it wasn’t this beast she had come to find.

She cast her gaze past the lake. The cracks and chasms of the Mouth spread forever outward. Some passages were shadowed, others lit by moonlight. Most glowed from the ruddy heat of hidden molten pools.

It all looked barren and lifeless.

Still, as her eyes adjusted, she spotted skeletal outcroppings, all branched and stemmed. They were pale white, like the ghosts of long-dead trees. She didn’t know if they were truly living or some sculptural mineral deposits. A few cliffs shone with lichens or molds, softly suffusing in the dark shadows.

Beyond the deathly rumble of the swirling morass, all that could be heard was the howl of high winds and a low grumble of the land. Otherwise, the Mouth remained silent, refusing to reveal its secrets.

Nyx voiced the biggest of them all. “Where are all the raash’ke?”