But Web halted beside us, pick in hand. A sharp motion of his hand halted Swift beside him. Quietly he observed to Burrich, ‘Later will not wait forever, for either of you. A time will come when both of you will have to explain yourselves to this lad.’ Yet his words were not a rebuke, and I almost thought that a small smile played across his face when he spoke to us. He bowed to Burrich and went on, ‘Forgive me if I offend. I know that your sight is failing you, but your shoulders and back still look strong. If your son guided you, you could be most useful helping to pull the sleds full of ice chunks away from the work site. Would you help us, Burrich?’
I thought Burrich would refuse. I knew he still wished to avoid Web and all he stood for. But the request had been made courteously, and it was a way in which Burrich could be genuinely helpful. I could guess how it chafed him to stand by a trapped animal while others laboured to free him. Web’s offer was also putting Swift right at Burrich’s side, under his paternal authority. I saw Burrich make a difficult compromise. He spoke, not to Web, but to Swift, saying, ‘Guide me to the sled, lad, and let’s put our backs into it.’ I was left standing alone as Swift and Burrich, father and son, departed to do Web’s bidding. I watched them take up the hauling lines alongside Civil and Cockle. They leaned into their work, and despite Burrich’s bad leg, his brawn was much the greatest there. The laden sled moved steadily up the ramp and out of the pit. It had been neatly done, that throwing together of them, and I think Burrich welcomed it as much as Swift did not. Did Web try to mend the rift between them, even as he sought to mellow Burrich’s attitude toward the Wit?
I was still pondering the permutations of that when the final blast went off.
I now believe that the little kettle I had carelessly left burning when I retreated from the dragon’s head had continued to burn. Did it eventually ignite the hides it rested upon, spreading fire to the oil flask and to the powder container? Or had the flask of oil spilled when the earlier, smaller blasts overset it on the hides near the powder and kettle? I have spent far too much time wondering about such useless questions.
It was a larger charge of powder, intended to kill. The explosion from it burst the icy roof of the tunnel up into the air at the same time that it blew loose chunks of ice out of the tunnel’s mouth and into the pit where we all worked. Men and ice were flung in the slamming concussion of that blast. I myself was thrown across the excavation. In the wake of that blast, ice sharper than arrows rained down and pierced some of us. I felt the falling chunks, but all was white before me. I thought I had been blinded as well as deafened. Then the fine ice mist began to settle, revealing a soundless chaos. I saw Web stumbling past me, his hands clasped over his ears. I saw Eagle crumpled in a broken heap under immense chunks of ice. I saw men screaming but did not hear them. I wondered if I would ever hear anything ever again.
I lifted my eyes and saw Chade and Dutiful looking down in horror. They had not been in the pit, and an instant later I realized that the men dragging out the sleds would also have escaped the worst effects of the blast. But just as I found my feet and decided that none of my bones were broken, a second trembling shook me. The ground beneath me shifted, pieces of ice heaving beneath my feet, and new cracks gaped wide and then suddenly gave way. Black flesh heaved to the top through broken fragments of ice.
Free!
It was the most coherent thought I had received from Icefyre, and it was more a sensation of triumph than a word.
His immense black head lifted on a serpentine neck. His wings, half opened, served him as additional limbs as he levered his way up out of the clinging ice. The sight of his long trapped body woke pity in me, even in the midst of my horror at what had befallen my fellows. His flesh barely coated his bones, and his scaled skin was tattered and sagging like badly-sewn garments. When he opened his wings, there were rents and gaps in them, a fine cloak snagged by brambles.
He wallowed up from the ice, pausing several times to roar and struggle to free a leg and then a wingtip. He was heedless of the men who lay dazed about him, but that did not reassure me, for his sudden great hunger radiated like heat from him. For the first time, I knew on an instinctive level that I was prey to this far larger predator. My words to him would have no more effect on his thoughts than the wild frenzy of a rabbit had on a wolf’s thoughts. Nighteyes and I had never tried to speak to our meals while they were alive; neither would this creature. ‘Fool, what have you turned loose on this world?’ I groaned.
The dragon gave another lurching heave and emerged more fully from the tumbled ice. His size only became more impressive as he did so. As Icefyre gained footholds on the shifting wreckage of his tomb, he drew his tail up and out of the ice. It just kept coming, impossibly long, until it lay around him on the broken surface like a whip’s curled lash. He threw back his head suddenly and let out a wild cry that began as a deep roar and then climbed until it was beyond reach of my hearing. It was my first perception of sound since the blast, and it seemed a new sense to me as the creature’s trumpeting shook the lungs inside my body.
Then I saw his nostrils flare, and his wedged head dipped down toward Eagle’s body. Even though the man was dead, what was about to befall him appalled me. Icefyre nosed the body, dislodging it from the ice boulders that had crushed it. He lipped it carefully, and then lifted Eagle up and shook the remaining ice fragments from him, like Nighteyes worrying dead leaves from a fish. The dragon ate like a gull, tossing the meat that had been a man up into the air and opening his maw wide so that the falling body was halfway down his gullet before he gulped. Then Eagle was no more than a lump sliding down that long throat.
The wolf in me was non-judgmental: a dead man might as well be meat as anything else, and the dragon had done no more than eat carrion. I myself had done it in times of great hunger, and had been glad to steal a share of a bear’s kill while the owner slept off his gluttony. But Eagle had been a man and a leader of men, someone who had eaten beside me and met my eyes over a fireside. It upset my order in the world that he could suddenly be no more than food for this creature we had wakened.
In that instant, I dimly grasped the immense scale on which our actions had reordered the world. This was no dragon of stone, imbued with the souls of heroes, awakened to save us. This was a huge creature of flesh, with appetites and drives and the will to sate them for the sake of his own survival, with no regard for what it might cost us humans.