Ilse Witch

The land appeared as a low dark rumpling of the horizon’s thin line and was a long time taking shape. It stretched away to either side of center for miles, sprawled like a twisted snake atop the blue-gray sea. Hours passed before they drew close enough to make out a wall of cliffs so sheer they dropped straight down into the ocean and so towering that their peaks disappeared into clouds of mist and gloom. Cracked and broken, the carcasses of trees bleached by the sun and stripped bare by the wind jutted out of the rock. White-and-black flashes against the gloom, seabirds screamed as they soared from hidden aeries to the waters below. Smaller islands led up to the cliffs like stepping-stones trod upon by time and weather, barren atolls offering little of shelter or sustenance, devoid of vegetation save for hardy sea grasses and wintry gray scrub.

Walker held up the airship when they were still miles away and sent the Wing Riders ahead for a quick look. They were back again very quickly. Shrikes inhabited the cliffs, and the Rocs could fly no nearer. Leaving Hunter Predd and Po Kelles on one of the larger atolls, Walker had Redden Alt Mer sail the Jerle Shannara right up to the landmass. A closer inspection did nothing to lessen his concerns. The cliffs formed a solid, impenetrable wall, split now and then by narrow fissures that were flooded with mist and rain and virtually impassable. As Shrikes regarded them warily from their perches, waiting to see what they would do, winds blew off the cliffs in sharp, unpredictable gusts, knocking the airship about even before it reached the wall.

Walker had them sail the coastline for a time. Caverns had been carved into the cliffs by the ocean, and clusters of rock tumbled from the heights formed odd monuments and outcroppings. Waves crashed against and retreated from the base of the cliffs, surging in and out of the caverns, washing over the rocks and debris. No passage inland revealed itself. Alt Mer refused to fly into the mist and wind that clogged the fissures; suicide, he declared, and put an end to any discussion of it. He shook his head when asked by Walker if they might fly over the mist. A thousand feet higher into thicker mist and stronger winds? Not hardly. The castaway’s map revealed that this was a peninsula warded by miles of such cliffs and that the only opening lay through pillars of ice. Big Red was inclined to believe the map.

They sailed on, continuing their search, and the look of the land never changed.

Then, late in the day, the cliffs opened abruptly into a deep, broad bay that ran back through the mist and gloom to a towering range of snowcapped mountains. Through gaps in the barren peaks, glaciers wound their way down to the water’s edge, massive chunks of ice, blue-green and jagged, a grinding jumble of frozen moraine that emptied into the bay in blocks so huge they formed small islands, some rising several hundred feet off the surface of the water. Within the bay the winds died, the seabirds huddled in their rookeries, and the ocean’s crash faded. Only the occasional crack of the ice as it split and re-formed, chunks breaking away from the larger mass to tumble down slides and ravines, disturbed the deep stillness.

The Jerle Shannara sailed through the cliffs into the bay, sliding between icebergs and rock walls, listening to the eerie sound of the shifting ice, searching the gloom for passage. The opening to the bay narrowed to a channel, then opened into a second bay and continued on. The mist thickened above them, forming a roof so dense that it shut out the sun and left the light as pale and gray as the mist. Colors washed away until ice, water, mist, and gloom were all of a piece. With the deepening of the light and the fading of color came a sense of the land’s presence that was inexplicably terrifying—a feeling of size and power, of a giant hidden somewhere in the gloom, crouched and waiting to spring. The sounds it emitted were of glaciers breaking apart and sliding into the bay, of fissures opening and closing, of mass shifting constantly from the pressure and cold. The men and women aboard the Jerle Shannara listened to it the way a traveler would listen to a storm tear at his lean-to, waiting for something to give way, to fail.

Then the channel narrowed once more, this time clogged by pillars of ice so huge they blocked the way completely, crystal towers that rose out of the bay’s liquid floor like spikes. Through gaps in the pillars Bek could see a brightening of the light and a lessening of the mist, as if the weather and geography might be different on the other side. Walker, standing close, touched his shoulder and nodded. Then he turned to Redden Alt Mer and told him to hold the airship where it was.

Hovering before the pillars of ice, clustered at the railings in silent groups, the ship’s company stood waiting. The cold air shimmered and seabirds glided in silence. Through the deep mist, the ice continued to rumble and crack, the reverberations distant and ominous.

Then abruptly the pillars began to shift, tilting in a series of thrusts and twists that mimicked the closing of jaws and the grinding of teeth. As the awestruck company watched, the icy towers came together in a series of grating collisions, smashing into each other with booming explosions, closing off the channel’s entr1y and clogging all passage through. Shards of ice catapulted through the air and into the bay’s waters, and new cracks opened along the huge towers as they collided then retreated, shifting leviathans hammering at each other in mindless fury. Waves surged and the bay boiled with the force of the furious movement.