Soldiers of Ice by David Cook

still sprawled in the snow, wrapped an arm over her eyes, but still she could not block out the glare.
    Then the shape of the light changed, though not its intensity.
    The diffuse brightness that burned out all the shadows on the snow drew in on itself, tightening and crimping into a brilliant ice-blue tendril. As if leaning against the wind, it stretched and strained in an arc that yearned toward the riff—and then, with a sizzling roar, the beam lanced like some wizard’s fiery missile in an arc that carried it straight for the rift’s heart. The crackle echoed—no, was echoed, Martine realized—by four other reports. Blue-white streaks like shooting stars returning skyward rose from four other points, each rocketing to a single rendezvous point in the sky. The five radiant arcs clashed over the center of the canyon in a brilliant display of sparks. Martine squawked and rose to run, only to stumble backward, tripping over her booted feet to land sprawled in the snow.
    “Damn it, Jazrac, you could have warned me!” the Harper shouted in awe.
    Flopping around, she blinked away the dazzling lights that hung on the inside of her eyelids and looked at the canopy strung over the canyon—five burning blue beams that glowed as they hung suspended in the air. Pulsing waves of light rippled from the intensely glowing shafts, only to break like waves over the rift. The evening darkness rose and fell with each pulse, and at the moment of brightest glare, Martine could see the canyon center, only minutes before a seething pit, erupt into ever-widening waves.
    The rounded, hardening forms of the frozen waves reminded her of the iron drops that fell in gelatinous puddles from her father’s forge when she was young. She lay there absorbing the light, feeling the magical wonder of it all.
     
    64
    The Harers
     

Soldiers of Ice
    65
     
    What had Jazrac done to make those five stones, she wondered as the world crackled with the solidifying roar.
    As the pulses grew longer, a grinding bass note sundered the calm, and lightning-lit air tingled with the ozone scent of disaster. Fresh tremors, stronger than those Martine had grown accustomed to, quavered through the ice, letting loose a rolling wave of ice-rending shrieks. It was as if in that moment all the ghosts and all the lost souls ever devoured by the frozen waste howled out their torment.
    The cacophony was accompanied by deep thunder that
    shook the woman down to her toes. From the rim, fractures fingered across the snow like streaks of lightning, zigzagging little puffs of powder tracing their manic paths.
    “Damn you, Jazrac!” Martine howled, no longer amused.
    With a crack, the rim suddenly broke off and slid into the canyon, throwing up a wall of snow as the air rushed forward to fill the gap caused by the collapse. The fingering fissures raced closer toward Martine, and the ranger didn’t wait to see what danger she was in but struggled to her feet and ran.
    Behind her, the snapping, ripping cracks fanned out rapidly, lunging closer, as if trying to catch her heels in their frozen jaws. Once, twice, Martine faltered as the fierce pain in her ribs, almost forgotten since the morning, spasmed and locked her muscles and nerves in pain. Her throat no longer burned because it was too parched to breathe, too parched to spit. Fear drove her forward toward the safety of the glacier’s edge, where her only plan was to plummet blindly into the dark void beyond.
    With no More than a third of the distance crossed, the nipping fissures caught her. The fractures shot between her legs and raced ahead of her, reaching for the glacier wall. The hard ice field became a mosaic that abruptly began to shatter, each fragment tilting, reacting to the glacier’s mad rush to reclaim what the rift had stolen. The
     
    tremors that Martine vainly fled punched the ground out from under the Harper, throwing up shards around her.
    “No, by Tymora, not again!” Martine wailed as the
    ground