Something powerful is drawing Ward back to Devil's Island. Something he thought he had forgotten. He must evade vicious lighthouse keeper George Jaggles in order to rescue it, but Jaggles will soon be the least of his worries. Because an assassin is...
"Blink," the sailor said disinterestedly, and loped off with a coil of rope over his shoulder.
The clouds on the horizon glowed with a fierce white light. The ice sheet, not yet visible over the horizon was reflecting sunlight up at the bottoms of the clouds. Nick knew of this phenomenon, but it was the first time he had seen it. He knew that this ice sheet covered the northern portion of the globe. That in places it was over a hundred furls thick.
The first iceberg had appeared days ago. Nick had mistaken it at first for a ship. The captain had given it a wide berth as it sailed slowly south. Then came another, and another, and the horizon was soon crowded with them. The temperature fell rapidly, and when they stopped at a desolate trading post Nick bought furs. The furs stank, but they were warm.
It had been two months since they had departed from Devils Island. Nick had spent the first two weeks of the voyage in his cabin, horribly seasick, his weight peeling away. When he recovered he was as wiry as a monkey, and as they headed into warmer latitudes he took to going about the ship barefoot, and his skin grew brown and leathery. He grew a beard.
They passed through a chain of islands, stopping at a place called Malac. Here lived such an abundance and variety of life that Nick was dumbstruck. He recognised almost none of the birds and animals that he saw. The people were strange to him too: brown and quick and clever and funny and generous, their language lightning fast and bubbling with humour. It was stiflingly hot and humid. They stayed only long enough to pick up a shipment of spices. The ship was already loaded with bales of wool, which would be traded with the northerners for items the captain and crew wouldn't discuss – probably contraband – but spices were prized by the northerners, and attracted high prices. Whether the company that owned the ship knew about the additional cargo, Nick didn't know. He took care not to ask too many questions.
Leaving the friendly islands behind them, they sailed west through a great hot equatorial sea. Strange creatures cut through the waves here: disc-shaped fish as large as wagons that lay upon the surface absorbing the sun; small winged fish that flew through the air of a sudden, sometimes landing in the ship itself; horned black devils that glided up from the depths to observe the ship and its inhabitants, their great wings sculling gently through the water. Nick saw bullet-shaped creatures the length of men, that glided ominously past, the black fins on their backs cutting the water like prows; the sailors threw bloody fish carcasses to them, which they tore apart with their savage mouths. The crew spoke in whispers of ships that had gone down in this ocean, the survivors clinging to the wreckage and being picked off one by one by these horrors.
There had been a great storm that had almost sent them to the bottom, and they had limped to the mainland in the north, laying off for a few weeks to repair the ship and replenish supplies, as well as crew: seven men had been lost overboard in the storm. The new sailors who took up with them were strange to Nick. They ate with their hands, and went about their work barechested and barefooted, wearing only a piece of brightly-coloured cloth around the waists and one around the head. The sailors from Bareheep were full of theories about what lay under those head-wrappings, it being the way of seafaring men to entertain each other with tales.
Nick was fascinated by the newcomers, and spent much of the ensuing voyage in their company. They spoke his language in addition to their own, though in a stilted and often comical manner. They came from a land far to the north of the port. In its highlands, they claimed, stood a mountain range of such height that it was scarcely believeable. Nick had trained a monoscope on the northern horizon, but saw no evidence of these titanic heights, and when he consulted his maps he realised they were too far away to be seen. North of this mountain range, according to his maps, lay a blank, uncharted region. He asked the newcomers about this place. They told him that in a past age it had been visited by some great calamity, and was now a desolate wasteland, devoid of trees and littered with craters, in which the very rocks had been sheared away and melted. Nothing lived there, but around its edge dwelt things that may once have been people. They were sentient, capable of a rude form of communication, and with some human features like eyes and mouths. No two were alike. What had happened to their ancestors nobody knew; in the things' mythology it was tied up with the event that had created the wasteland. Only one of these sailors, an older man, had seen this place and its inhabitants with his own eyes, but he was also the least inclined to talk about it.
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