The Terror

²¹ BLANKY

Blanky tugged his right over-mitten off with his teeth, let it drop to the deck, and raised his own shotgun. Tradition was for the officers on watch not to be armed, but Captain Crozier had ended that tradition with a single order. Every man on deck was to be armed at all times. Now, with his mitten off, Blanky’s thin wool under-glove allowed his finger to crook through the trigger guard of the shotgun, but his hand immediately felt the biting cold of the wind.

It was Seaman Berry’s lantern — the port watch — whose glow had disappeared. The shotgun blast had sounded as if it had come from the left of the midship winter canvas rigging, but the Ice Master knew that wind and snow distorted sounds. Blanky could still see the glow of the starboard-side lantern, but it was bobbing and moving.

“Berry?” he shouted toward the dark port side. He could almost feel the two syllables hurled astern by the howling wind. “Handford?”

The starboard lantern glow disappeared. At the bow, Davey Leys’s lantern would have been visible beyond the midship tent on a clear night, but this was no longer a clear night.

“Handford?” Mr. Blanky began moving forward to the port side of the long tent covering, carrying his shotgun in his right hand and the lantern he’d lifted off the sternpost in his left. He had three more shotgun shells in his right greatcoat pocket, but he knew from experience how long it took to fumble them out and load them in this cold.

“Berry!” he bellowed. “Handford! Leys!” One of the dangers now was that the three men would shoot each other in the dark and storm on the tilted, icy deck, although it had sounded as if Alex Berry had already discharged his weapon. There had not been a second blast. But Blanky knew that if he moved to the port side of the frozen tent pyramid and Handford or Leys suddenly came around to investigate, the nervous men might fire at anything, even a moving lantern.

He moved forward anyway.

“Berry?” he shouted, coming within ten yards of the port watch station.

He caught a blur of movement amid the driving snow, something far too large to be Alex Berry, and then there came a crash louder than any shotgun. A second explosion. Blanky staggered back ten paces toward the stern as casks, wooden kegs, boxes, and other ship’s stores flew through the air. It took him a few seconds to realize what had happened; the permanent pyramid of frozen canvas running fore and aft along the centre of the deck had suddenly collapsed, throwing thousands of pounds of accumulated snow and ice in each direction even while flinging wide the deck stores beneath — mostly flammable pitch, caulkers’ materials, and sand to put down for traction atop the snow deliberately shoveled onto the deck — and also sending the mainmast’s lower spars, which had been rotated fore and aft more than a year ago to act as ridgepoles for the tent, crashing down onto the main hatch and ladderway.

There was no way for Blanky and the other three men on watch to get to the lower deck now, and no way that the men down there could get up to investigate the explosions on deck, not with the main spars and all that weight of canvas and snow blocking the hatch. The Ice Master knew that the men below would soon run to the forward hatch and begin unbattening its nailed-down winter seals, but that would take time.

Will we be alive when they get up here? wondered Blanky.

Moving as carefully as he could on the sand-covered packed snow of the tilted deck, Blanky made his way around the debris pile at the rear of the collapsed tent area and started down the narrow aisle on the starboard side of the heap.

A shape rose before him.

Still holding the lantern high in his left hand, Blanky lifted the shotgun, finger on the trigger, ready to fire. “Handford!” he said when he saw the pale blob of a face amid the black mass of coats and comforters. The man’s Welsh wig was in disarray. “Where’s your lantern?”

“I dropped it,” said the seaman. The man was shaking violently, his hands bare. He huddled close to Thomas Blanky as if the Ice Master were a source of heat. “I dropped it when the thing knocked the spar down. The flame went out in the snow.”

“What do you mean, ‘when the thing knocked the spar down’?” demanded Blanky. “No living thing could knock the mainmast spar down.”

“It did!” said Handford. “I heard Berry’s shotgun fire. Then he shouted something. Then his lantern went out. Then I saw something… large, something very large… leap up on the spar and that’s when everything collapsed. I tried to fire at the thing on the spar, but my shotgun misfired. I left it at the rail.”

Leap up onto the spar? thought Blanky. The swiveled main-mast spar was twelve feet above the deck. Nothing could leap onto it. With the mainmast sheathed in ice, nothing could climb to it either. Aloud, he said, “We have to find Berry.”

“There is no way in God’s universe that I’m going over there to the port side, Mr. Blanky. You can write me up and have Bosun’s Mate Johnson give me fifty with the cat, but there’s no way in God’s universe that I’m going over there, Mr. Blanky.” Handford’s teeth were chattering so wildly that he was barely understandable.

“Calm down,” snapped Blanky. “No one’s being written up. Where’s Leys?”

From this vantage point on the starboard-watch side, Blanky should have been able to see David Leys’s lantern glowing at the bow. The bow was dark.

“His went out the same time I dropped mine,” said Handford through his clattering teeth.

“Get your shotgun.”

“I can’t go back there where…,” began Handford.

“God-damn your eyes!” roared Thomas Blanky. “If you don’t retrieve that weapon this gob-fucking minute, a flogging of fifty from the cat will be the least bugger-fucking thing you have to worry about, John Handford. Now move!”

Handford moved. Blanky followed him, never turning his back on the collapsed heap of canvas at the centre of the ship. Because of the driving snow, the lantern created a sphere of light ten feet or less across. The Ice Master kept both the lantern and the shotgun raised. His arms were very tired.

Handford was attempting to retrieve his weapon in the snow with fingers that had obviously gone numb with cold.

“Where the hell are your mittens and gloves, man?” snapped Blanky.

Handford’s teeth were chattering too wildly for him to respond.

Blanky set his own weapon down, brushed the seaman’s arms aside, and lifted the man’s shotgun. He made sure the single barrel was not blocked with snow, then broke the breech and handed the weapon back to Handford. Blanky finally had to tuck it under the other man’s arm so he could cradle it with his two frozen hands. Setting his own shotgun under his left arm where he could shift it quickly, Blanky fumbled a shell out of his greatcoat pocket, loaded Handford’s shotgun, and clicked it shut for the man. “If anything larger than Leys or me comes out of that pile,” he said, almost shouting into Handford’s ear because of the wind roar, “aim and pull that trigger if you have to use your fucking teeth to do it.”

Handford managed a nod.

“I’m going forward to find Leys and help him open the forward hatch,” said Blanky. Nothing seemed to be moving downhill toward the bow amid the dark jumble of frozen canvas, dislodged snow, broken spars, and tumbled crates.

“I can’t…,” began Handford.

“Just stay where you are,” snapped Blanky. He set the lantern down next to the terrified man. “Don’t shoot me when I come back with Leys or I swear to God my ghost will haunt you ’til you die, John Handford.”

Handford’s pale blob of a face nodded again.

Blanky started toward the bow. After a dozen steps, he was beyond the glow of the lantern but his night vision did not return. The hard particles of snow struck his face like pellets. Above him, the rising wind howled in what little rigging and shrouds they’d left in place during the endless winter. It was so dark here that Blanky had to carry the shotgun in his left hand — his still-mittened hand — while feeling along the ice-encrusted railing with his right hand. As far as he could tell, the mainmast spar here on the forward side of the mast had also collapsed.

“Leys!” he shouted.

Something very large and vaguely white in the hurtling snow lumbered out of the heap of debris and stopped him in his tracks. The Ice Master couldn’t tell if the thing was a white bear or a tattooed demon or if it was ten feet in front of him or thirty feet away in the dark, but he knew that it had completely blocked his progress toward the bow.

Then the thing reared up on its hind legs.

Blanky could see only the mass of it — he sensed the dark bulk of it mostly through the amount of blowing snow it blocked — but he knew it was huge. The tiny triangular head, if that was a head up there in the darkness, rose higher than the space where the spars had been. There seemed to be two holes punched into that pale triangle of a head — eyes? — but they were at least fourteen feet above the deck.

Impossible, thought Thomas Blanky.

It moved toward him.

Blanky shifted the shotgun to his right hand, jammed the stock against his shoulder, steadied it with his mittened left hand, and fired.

The flash and explosion of sparks from the barrel gave the Ice Master a half-second’s glimpse of the black, dead, emotionless eyes of a shark staring into him — no, not a shark’s eyes at all, he realized a second later as the retinal afterimage of the blast blinded him, but two ebony circles far more frighteningly malevolent and intelligent than even a shark’s black-circle gaze — but also the pitiless stare of a predator that sees you only as food. And these bottomless black-hole eyes were far above him, set on shoulders wider than Blanky’s arms could spread, and were coming closer as the looming shape surged forward.

Blanky threw the useless shotgun at the thing — there was no time at all to reload — and leapt for the man lines.

Only four decades of experience at sea allowed the Ice Master to know, in the dark and storm and without even attempting to look, exactly where the icy man lines would be. He caught them with the crooked fingers of his mittenless right hand, flung his legs up, found the cross ropes with his flailing boots, pulled off his left mitten with his teeth, and began clambering upward while hanging almost upside down on the inside of the inward-slanting lines.

Six inches beneath his arse and legs, something cleaved the air with the power of a two-ton battering ram swinging at full extension. Blanky heard three thick vertical ropes of the man lines rip, tear… impossible!… and swing inward, almost throwing Blanky down to the deck.

He hung on. Flinging his left leg around the outside of those lines remaining taut, he found purchase on the icy rope and began climbing higher without pausing for a second. Thomas Blanky moved like the monkey he’d been as an unrated boy of twelve who thought the masts, sails, lines, and upperworks’ rigging of the three-masted warship on which he shipped had all been constructed by Her Majesty solely for his enjoyment.

He was twenty feet up now, approaching the level of the second spar — this one still set at the proper right angle to the length of the ship — when the thing below hit the base of the manline rigging again, tearing wood and dowels and pins and ice and iron blocks completely free of the railing.

The web of climbing rope swung inward toward the mainmast. Blanky knew that the impact would knock him off and send him hurtling down into the thing’s arms and jaws. Still not able to see anything more than five feet away in the blowing dark, the Ice Master leapt for the shrouds.

His freezing fingers found the spar and its lines under them at the same instant one of his flailing feet caught a foot line. This shroud-line scuttle was best done barefoot, Blanky knew, but not tonight.

He heaved himself up over the second spar, more than twenty-five feet above the deck, and clung to the icy oak with legs and arms both, the way a terrified rider would cling to the body of a horse, wildly sliding his feet along the ice-hard shroud to find more purchase on the slippery shroud lines.

Normally, even in the darkness, wind, snow, and hail, any decent sailor could scramble another sixty feet higher into the upperworks and rigging here until he reached the main-mast crosstrees, from which point he could hurl down insults at his stymied pursuer like a chimpanzee in a tall tree throwing down fruit or feces from a point of perfect safety. But there were no upperworks or high rigging on HMS Terror this December night. There was no point of perfect safety up here when fleeing from something so powerful it could smash a main spar. And there was no upperworks rigging to which a man could flee.

A year ago September, Blanky had helped Crozier and Harry Peglar, Captain of the Foretop, as they prepared Terror for her wintering-over for the second time this expedition. It was not an easy job, nor one without danger. The yards and running rigging were struck down and stored below. Then the topgallant masts and topmasts were carefully struck down — carefully because a slip with winch or block or sudden tangle of tackle could have sent the heavy masts hurtling down through the top deck, lower deck, orlop deck, and hull bottom like a massive spear piercing wicker armour. Ships had sunk from such missteps while striking down upper masts. But if they’d remained up, too many tons of ice would accumulate during the endless winter. The ice would have provided a constant barrage of missiles for the men on watch or other duty on the deck and rigging below, but the weight of it also could capsize a ship.

With only the three stumps of the lower masts remaining — a sight as ugly to a seaman as a triple-amputee human being might be to a painter of pictures — Blanky had helped supervise the loosening of all remaining shrouds and standing rigging; overly taut canvas and ropes simply could not bear the weight of so much snow and ice. Even Terror’s boats — the two large whaleboats and two smaller cutters, as well as the captain’s skiff, pinnaces, jolly boats, and dinghies, ten in all — had been taken down, inverted, lashed, covered, and stored on the ice.

Now Thomas Blanky was on the mainmast’s second-spar shrouds twenty-five feet above the deck and had only one level higher to go, and any man lines leading up to that third and last level would be more ice than rope or wood. The mainmast itself was a column of ice with an extra coating of snow on its forward curve. The ice master straddled the second spar and tried to peer down through the darkness and snow. It was pitch black below. Either Handford had extinguished the lantern Blanky had given him or it had been extinguished for him. Blanky assumed that the man was either cowering in the dark or dead; either way he would be no help. Spreadeagled over the spar shrouds, Blanky looked to his left and saw that there still was no light forward in the bow where David Leys had been on watch.

Blanky strained to see the thing directly below him but there was too much movement — the torn canvas flapping in the dark, kegs rolling on the tilted deck, loose crates sliding — and all he could make out was a dark mass shuffling toward the mainmast, batting aside two- and three-hundred-pound kegs of sand as if they were so many china vases.

It can’t climb the mainmast, thought Blanky. He could feel the cold of the spar through his straddling legs and chest and crotch. His fingers were beginning to freeze through the thin undergloves. Somewhere he had lost his Welsh wig and wool-scarf comforter. He strained to hear the sound of the forward hatch being unbattened and flung free, to hear shouts and to see lanterns as the rescue party came up in force, but the bow of the ship remained a silent darkness hidden by hurtling snow. Has it somehow blocked the forward hatch as well? At least it can’t climb the mainmast. Nothing that size can climb. No white bear — if it is a white bear — has experience climbing.

The thing began climbing the attenuated mainmast.

Blanky felt the vibration as it slammed claws into the wood. He heard the smack and scrape and grunting… a thick, bass grunting… as it climbed.

It climbed.

The thing had most probably reached the snapped-off stubs of the first spar just by raising its forearms over its head. Blanky strained to see in the darkness and was sure he could make out the haired and muscled mass hauling itself up headfirst, gigantic forelegs — or arms — as big as a man already flung over the first spar and clawing higher for leverage even while powerful rear legs and more claws there found support on the splintered oak of the spars.

Blanky inched out farther along the icy second spar, his arms and legs wrapped around the wind-thrummed ten-inch-round horizontal spar in a sort of frenzied lover’s embrace. There were two inches of new snow lining the bow-facing outer curve of the everthinning spar and then ice under that. He used the shroud lines for purchase when he could.

The huge thing on the mainmast had reached the level of Blanky’s spar. The Ice Master could see the bulk of it only by craning to look over his own shoulder and arse and even then could make it out only as a giant, pale absence where the subliminal vertical slash of the mainmast should be.

Something struck the spar with so much force that Blanky flew up into the air, dropping two feet back onto the spar to land hard on his balls and belly, the impact on the spar and folds of frozen shroud knocking the wind out of him. He would have fallen then if both freezing hands and his right boot hadn’t been firmly entangled in the shroud lines just below the icy underside of the spar. As it was, it felt like a horse made of cold iron had bucked him two feet into the air.

The blow came again and would have launched Blanky out into the darkness thirty feet above the deck, but he was prepared for this second smash and clung with all his might. Even ready as he was, the vibration was so forceful that Blanky slipped off and swung helplessly under the icy spar, numb fingers and kicking boot still mixed in with the shroud lines there. He managed to leverage himself back on top of the spar just as the third and most violent blow struck. The Ice Master heard the cracking, felt the solid spar begin to sag, and realized that he had only seconds before he and the spar, the shroud, the shroud lines, the ratlines, and the wildly swinging man lines all fell more than twenty-five feet to the pitched deck and tumbled debris below.

Blanky did the impossible. On the pitching, cracking, tilted and icy spar, he got to his knees, then to his feet, standing with both arms waving comically and absurdly for balance in the howling wind, boots slipping on the snow and ice, and then he hurled himself into space with arms and hands extended, seeking one of the invisible hanging ratlines that should be — might be — could be — somewhere there, allowing for the ship’s down-at-the-bow attitude, for the howling wind, for the impact of the blowing snow on the thin lines, and for the possible effects of the vibration from the thing’s ongoing shattering of the main-mast’s second level of spars.

His hands missed the single hanging line in the dark. His freezing face hit it, and as he fell, Thomas Blanky grabbed the line with both hands, slid only six feet lower along its icy length, and then began frantically to hook and haul himself up toward the third and final height of spar on the foreshortened mainmast, less than fifty feet above the deck.

The thing roared beneath him. Then came another roar as the second spar, shrouds, tackle, and lines let go and crashed to the deck. The louder of the two roars had been from the monster clinging to the mainmast.

This ratline was a simple rope which usually hung about eight yards out from the mainmast. It was meant for descending quickly from the crosstrees or upper spars, not for climbing. But Blanky climbed it. Despite the fact that the line was ice-covered and blowing in the snow and despite the fact that Thomas Blanky could no longer feel the fingers on his right hand, he climbed the ratline like a fourteenyearold midshipman larking in the upperworks with the other ship’s boys after supper on a tropical evening.

He couldn’t pull himself onto the top spar — it was simply too coated with ice — but he found the shroud lines there and shifted from the ratline to the loosened, folded shroud beneath the spar. Ice broke away and hurtled to the deck below. Blanky imagined — or hoped — that he heard a tearing and banging forward, as if Crozier and the crewmen were hacking their way out of the forward battened hatch with axes.

Clinging like a spider to the frozen shrouds, Blanky looked down and to his left. Either the driving snow had let up or his night vision had improved, or both. He could see the mass of the monster. It was climbing steadily to his third and final spar level. The shape was so big on the main-mast that Blanky thought it looked like a large cat climbing a very thin tree trunk. Except, of course, thought Blanky, it looked nothing at all like a cat save for the fact that it was climbing by slamming claws deep into ice and royal oak and iron bands that a mid-weight cannonball could not have penetrated.

Blanky continued edging outward along the shroud, dislodging ice as he went and causing the frozen shroud lines and canvas to creak like overly starched muslin.

The giant shape behind him had reached the level of the third spar. Blanky felt the spar and shrouds vibrate and then sag as a portion of that massive weight on the mast was shifted to the spars on either side. Imagining the thing’s huge forelegs thrown over the spars, imagining a paw the size of his chest freeing itself to slam into the thinner spar up here, Blanky crawled and crabbed faster, almost forty feet out from the mast now, already beyond the edge of the deck fifty feet below. A seaman falling from this far out on the spar or shrouds when working the sails would fall into the sea. If Blanky fell, it would be onto the ice more than sixty feet below.

Something snagged Blanky’s face and shoulders — a net, a spiderweb, he was trapped — and for a second he came close to screaming. Then he realized what it was — the man lines, the threaded squares of primary climbing rope from the railing to the second crosstrees, re-rigged for winter to the top of the stump of the mainmast so that work parties could dislodge ice up here. This was the starboard manline rigging that had been, impossibly, smashed free of its multiple moorings along the rail and deck by two blows of the thing’s giant claws. Thick enough with ice now that the squares of interlaced rope acted like small sails, the loosened man lines had blown far out to the starboard side of the ship.

Once again, Blanky acted before allowing himself time to think about the action. To think about this next move, sixty feet and more above the ice, was to decide not to do it.

He threw himself from the crackling shrouds onto the swinging manline rigging.

As he’d known it would, his sudden weight swung the lines back toward the mainmast. He passed within a foot of the huge, hairy mass at the T of spars. It was too dark to see much more than the terrible general shape of it, but a triangular head as large as Thomas Blanky’s torso whipped around on a neck too long and serpentine to be of this world and there was a loud SNAP as teeth longer than Blanky’s frozen fingers clamped shut on the air he’d just swung through. The Ice Master inhaled the breath of the thing — a carnivore and predator’s hot rottenmeat exhalation, not the fishy stink Blanky had noticed coming from the open maws of the polar bears they’d shot and skinned on the ice. This was the hot stench of decaying human flesh mixed with sulfur, as warm as the blast from a steam boiler’s open hearth.

At that instant Thomas Blanky realized that the seamen whom he’d silently cursed as being superstitious fools had been right; this thing from the ice was as much demon or god as it was animal flesh and white fur. It was a force to be appeased or worshipped or simply fled.

He’d half-expected the manrope rigging swinging below him to become stuck in the stub of the spars down there, or to snag in the portside spar or shrouds as he swung past the centreline — then all the creature had to do was reel him in like a big fish in a net — but the momentum of his weight and twisting swung him out fifteen feet or more past and to the port side of the mainmast.

Now the manline rigging was preparing to swing him back into the huge left forearm that he could see extending through the blowing snow and darkness.

Blanky twisted, threw his weight forward toward the bow, felt the clumsy torn rigging follow his inertia, and then he was swinging both legs free, flailing and kicking for the third-level spar on this side.

His left boot found it as he swung above it. The lug soles slipped on ice and the boot went past, but when the man line swung back toward the stern, both boots found the ice-coated spar and he pushed with all the energy in his legs.

The tangled web of man line swung back past the main-mast, but now in a curving arc toward the stern. Blanky’s legs were hanging free, still kicking against empty air fifty feet above the ruined tent and stores below, and he arched his back in close to the ropes as he swung toward the main-mast and the thing waiting for him there.

Claws sliced the air not five inches from his back. Even in his terror, Blanky marveled — he knew that the arc of his kick had put almost ten feet of air between him and the mainmast as he swung past. The thing must have sunk the claws of its right paw — or hand, or talon, or Devil’s nails — into the mast itself while hanging almost free and swinging six feet or more of massive left arm at him.

But it had missed.

It would not miss again when Blanky swung back to the centre.

Blanky grabbed the edge of the manline rigging and slid down it as quickly he would a free line or ratline, his numbed fingers tearing against the cross ropes, each impact threatening to throw him off the rigging and out into darkness.

The man line had reached the apogee of its outer arc, somewhere beyond the starboard railing, and was starting to swing back.

Still too high, thought Blanky as the tangle of rope rigging above him swung back to the mainmast.

The creature easily caught the rigging as it reached the midline of the ship, but Blanky was twenty feet below that level now, using his frozen hands on the crossropes to scramble lower.

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.

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.

The thing was not leaving. It paced round and round the threeberg box like some restless carnivore in one of London’s trendy new zoological gardens. But it was Blanky who was in a cage.

He knew that even if the thing miraculously left, he had neither energy nor will to crawl out through the narrow tunnel. And if he could somehow make his way through the tunnel, he still might as well be on the moon — the moon which was now coming out from behind the roiling clouds and illuminating the bergs round about in a soft explosion of blue glow. And even if he miraculously crawled out of the bergy field, the three hundred yards to the ship was an impossible distance. He could no longer feel his body or move his legs.

Blanky settled his cold behind and bare feet deeper into the snow — the accumulation was greater here where the wind did not reach — and wondered if his fellow Terrors would ever find him. Why should they even look? He was just another of their party who had been carried off by the thing on the ice. At least his disappearance would not require the captain to haul another corpse — or part of a corpse wastefully wrapped in good ship’s sailcloth — down to the Dead Room.

There came more roars and noises from the far end of the cracks and tunnel, but Blanky ignored them. “Fuck you and the sow or devil who spawned you,” mumbled the Ice Master through numb, frozen lips. Perhaps he did not speak at all. He realized that freezing to death — even while bleeding to death, although some of the blood from his various wounds and lacerations already seemed to have frozen — was not painful at all. In truth, it was peaceful… quite restful. A wonderful way to…

Blanky realized that there was light coming through the cracks and tunnel. The thing was using torches and lanterns to fool him into coming out. But he wouldn’t fall for that old ruse. He would stay silent until the light went away, until he slipped that last small bit into soft, eternal sleep. He would not give the thing the satisfaction of hearing him speak now after their long, silent duel.

“God-damn it, Mr. Blanky!” boomed Captain Crozier’s bass bellow down the ice tunnel. “If you’re in there, answer, Goddamn it, or we’ll just leave you there.”

Blanky blinked. Or rather, he tried to blink. His lashes and eyelids were frozen. Was this some other ruse and stratagem of the demonthing?

“Here,” he croaked. And again, aloud this time, “Here!”

A minute later, the head and shoulders of the caulker’s mate, Cornelius Hickey, one of the smallest men on Terror, poked easily through the hole. He was carrying a lantern. Blanky thought dully that it was like watching a gimlet-faced gnome being born.

In the end, all four surgeons had a go at him.

Blanky came in and out of his pleasant fog from time to time to see how things were progressing. Sometimes it was his own ship’s surgeons working on him — Peddie and McDonald — and sometimes it was Erebus’s sawbones, Stanley and Goodsir. Sometimes it was just one of the four cutting or sawing or packing or stitching away. Blanky had the urge to tell Goodsir that polar white bears could run much faster than twenty-five miles per hour when they put their mind to it. But then again — had it been a polar white bear? Blanky did not think so. Polar white bears were creatures of this earth, and this thing had come from somewhere else. Ice Master Thomas Blanky had no doubt of that.

In the end, the butcher’s bill was not so bad. Not bad at all, really.

John Handford, it turned out, had not been touched. After Blanky had left him with the lantern, the man on starboard watch had doused this light and fled the ship, running around to the port side to hide while the creature was climbing up to get to the Ice Master.

Alexander Berry, whom Blanky had presumed dead, had been found under the fallen canvas and scattered kegs right where he’d been standing port watch when the thing had first appeared there and then shattered the fore and aft ridgepole spar. Berry had hit his head seriously enough to have no memory of anything that happened that night, but Crozier told Blanky that they’d found the man’s shotgun and it had been fired. The Ice Master also had fired his, of course, from point-blank range at a shape that was looming over him like a pub wall, but there had been no trace of the thing’s blood anywhere on the deck at either site.

Crozier asked Blanky how this could be — how could two men fire shotguns at an animal at point-blank range and draw no blood? — but the Ice Master ventured no opinion. Inside, of course, he knew.

Davey Leys was also alive and unharmed. The forty-year-old on bow watch must have seen and heard much — including quite possibly the thing on the ice’s first appearance on deck — but Leys was not talking about it. Once again David Leys could only stare silently. He was taken first to Terror’s sick bay, but since all of the surgeons needed that bloodstained space to work on Blanky, Leys was transported by litter to Erebus’s more spacious sick quarters. There Leys lay, according to the Ice Master’s talkative visitors, once again staring unblinkingly at the overhead beams.

Blanky himself had not come through unscathed. The thing had clawed off half of his right foot at the heel, but McDonald and Goodsir had cut and cauterized what was left and assured the Ice Master that — with the help of the carpenter or ship’s armourer — they would rig a leather or wood prosthesis held on by straps so that he could walk again.

His left leg had taken the worst of the creature’s abuse — flesh raked away to the bone in several places and then the long leg bone itself striated with claws — and Dr. Peddie later confessed that all four of the surgeons had been sure they would have to amputate it at the knee. But slowness of infection and gangrene in a wound was one of the few blessings of the arctic, and after resetting the bone itself and receiving more than four hundred stitches, Blanky’s leg — although twisted and wildly scarred and lacking entire tracts of muscle here and there — was healing slowly. “Your grandkids will love them scars,” said James Reid when the other Ice Master made a courtesy call.

The cold had also taken its toll. Blanky managed to keep all of his toes — he would need them for balance on the ruined foot, the surgeons told him — but had lost all fingers save for his thumb on his right hand and the two smallest fingers and his thumb on his left hand. Goodsir, who evidently knew something about such things, assured him that someday he would be able to write and eat gracefully with just the remaining adjoining two fingers on his left hand, and be able to button his trousers and shirts again with those two fingers and the thumb on his right hand.

Thomas Blanky did not give a good gob fart about buttoning his trousers and shirts. Not yet. He was alive. The thing on the ice had done its best to make him otherwise, but he was still alive. He could taste food, chat with his mates, drink his daily gill of rum — already his bandaged hands were capable of holding his pewter mug — and read a book if someone propped it up for him. He was determined to read The Vicar of Wakefield before he shuffled off what was left of his mortal coil.

Blanky was alive and he planned to stay that way for as long as he could. In the meantime, he was strangely happy. He was looking forward to getting back to his own cubicle aft — between Third Lieutenant Irving’s and Jopson’s, the captain’s steward’s, equally tiny berths — and that would happen any day now, whenever the surgeons were absolutely sure they were done snipping and stitching and sniffing at his wounds.

In the meantime, Thomas Blanky was happy. Lying on his sick bay bunk late at night, the men grousing and whispering and farting and laughing in the darkened berthing space just a few feet beyond the partition, hearing Mr. Diggle growl out his commands at his lackeys as the cook baked biscuits deep into the night, Thomas Blanky listened to the grind and growl of the sea ice as it tried to crush HMS Terror and allowed it to put him to sleep as surely as would a lullaby from his long-sainted mother’s lips.