Read Chapter 26: The Trap

The passage widened without warning, the pressure ridges falling away on either side like the jaws of some great beast finally releasing its grip. Harlow stood at the bow, one hand on the rail, and watched the ice open into something he had not allowed himself to hope for—open water, dark and breathing, a bay perhaps two miles across ringed by towering cliffs of blue-white glacier.

For a moment, no one spoke. Then the crew erupted.

“Open water!” Calloway shouted from the crow’s nest, his voice cracking with relief. “Jesus, lads—open water!”

Men poured up from below, stamping onto the deck to see it for themselves. Even the wounded dragged themselves to the rail. Harlow let them have their moment. Let them drink it in. They had earned it—the gunpowder, the cold water, the night watches on the pumps. For eight days they had clawed through that narrow hell, and now here was the sea, open and waiting.

But Harlow did not cheer. He stood apart, watching the compass in his hand. Mercer’s compass. The needle was steady. It had been steady for days, pointing always toward the smoke, toward the promise of rescue. Now it still pointed forward—northeast, across the bay, directly at the glacier wall that formed the bay’s far side.

The ice came down from the heights in a sheer face perhaps two hundred feet tall, fractured and blue, its surface streaked with centuries of pressure. No cove. No beach. No break in that enormous wall.

“Mr. Harlow.” Cummings had come up beside him, quiet as a cat. He did not look at the bay. He looked at the compass. “It points at the ice.”

“I can see that.”

“What do you intend to do about it?”

Harlow closed his hand around the brass casing. “We’ll take a party ashore. Survey the face.”

“And if there’s nothing there?”

“Then we’ll find another way.” He said it firmly, but he did not feel it. The ship groaned beneath them, the pumps still clanking below, and he could feel in his bones how tired she was. How tired they all were.

Ashore was worse. The glacier wall was not merely steep—it was a cathedral of frozen violence, its face riven with crevasses and shattered pressure ridges, its surface scattered with debris that had fallen from above. Harlow led a party of six across the bay ice: Morris, two of the stronger seamen, and the navigator, old Whitfield, whose eyes were going but whose memory for charts was still sharp.

They walked the length of the face for nearly a mile. Every crevasse that promised passage narrowed to nothing. Every shadow that suggested a cave proved to be no more than two feet deep. The smoke—the smoke that had driven them for weeks—was nowhere to be seen now. The sky above the glacier was clear and empty.

“This is wrong,” Whitfield said, leaning on his staff. He had stopped to catch his breath, and his voice rattled in his thin chest. “The bearing was true. We followed it true.”

“Maybe the wind shifted the smoke,” Morris offered.

“For two weeks?” Whitfield shook his head. “That smoke came from somewhere. It came from here.”

Harlow turned in a slow circle, studying the face again. The glacier was not uniform. Along the base, where the ice met the bay, there were places where the surface had lifted and cracked, pushed up by the pressure of its own weight. Most were no more than fissures. But one—

He walked toward it. A fracture perhaps ten feet wide at its mouth, narrowing as it went back, its floor sloping downward into darkness. The blue of the ice deepened to black. He raised his lantern, and the light died against the gloom before it could show him the back wall.

“Morris. Come here.”

Morris came, axe in hand, and stood beside him at the mouth of the fissure. “What is it?”

“I want to see how deep it goes.”

They went in single file, Harlow first with the lantern, Morris behind him, then Whitfield and the two seamen. The fissure twisted and narrowed, and for a moment Harlow thought it would pinch shut entirely. Then it opened.

They stepped into a natural chamber perhaps forty feet across, its ceiling lost in darkness, its floor a confusion of fallen ice blocks. The air was cold but still—no wind. And at the far end of the chamber, a second opening, larger than the first, almost perfectly arched.

Harlow crossed to it and stepped through.

The passage beyond was not natural. The walls were rough, but the floor was smooth, worn flat as though by the passage of many feet. And along the left wall, at regular intervals, there were marks in the ice—black soot smears, old and faint, but unmistakable.

Lantern marks. Someone had been here before them.

Whitfield came up beside him, breathing hard. He saw the marks and went very still.

“Mercer.”

Harlow did not answer. He walked deeper into the passage, the lantern held high, following the floor’s gentle downward slope. The air grew colder, then warmer—which made no sense, not here, not in a glacier. But he felt it: a change in the air, a shift in the pressure against his ears.

The passage opened again, and Harlow stopped.

Before him lay a natural harbor, open and dark, maybe a quarter mile across, ringed by sheer walls of ice that rose into darkness. And the water—the water was not frozen. It moved, gently, lapping against a low beach of black sand.

Behind him, Morris let out a sound that was half laugh, half sob. “An open pool. Inside the ice.”

“Not a pool,” Whitfield whispered. His voice shook. “A sea lane. The glacier has hollowed itself out—the water runs beneath the ice, all the way to the open sea. This is how they came through. This is how Mercer—”

“Mercer is dead.” Harlow said it automatically. Said it the way he had said it a hundred times.

Whitfield pointed at the far shore of the harbor. Harlow followed his gaze.

There was a tent there. A proper expedition tent, canvas and poles, its door lashed shut. Beside it, a pile of provisions crated and stacked. A cooking pot hung from a tripod. And beyond it, carved into the ice wall itself, a channel wide enough for a ship, leading northeast into darkness.

Harlow walked toward the tent, his boots crunching on the black sand. The camp was recent. The fire pit was cold but clean; the snow around it had not yet recrystallized. He pulled the tent flap open.

Inside, a man lay wrapped in furs, his face turned away. Harlow stepped closer. The man was alive—his breath fogged the cold air—but his skin was gray, his lips cracked. His hand lay outside the furs, pale and still.

And on the ground beside him, propped against his bedroll, was a brass compass.

Harlow looked at his own hand. At the compass he carried. The casing was identical. The needle trembled in the same direction.

He knew who the man was before he turned him over.

Mercer opened his eyes.

“Harlow,” he said, his voice a dry rasp. “You took your time.”