Blanky settled his cold behind and bare feet deeper into the snow – the accumulation was greater here where the wind did not reach – and wondered if his fellow Terrors would ever find him. Why should they even look? He was just another of their party who had been carried off by the thing on the ice. At least his disappearance would not require the captain to haul another corpse – or part of a corpse wastefully wrapped in good ship’s sailcloth – down to the Dead Room.

There came more roars and noises from the far end of the cracks and tunnel, but Blanky ignored them. “Fuck you and the sow or devil who spawned you,” mumbled the Ice Master through numb, frozen lips. Perhaps he did not speak at all. He realized that freezing to death – even while bleeding to death, although some of the blood from his various wounds and lacerations already seemed to have frozen – was not painful at all. In truth, it was peaceful… quite restful. A wonderful way to…

Blanky realized that there was light coming through the cracks and tunnel. The thing was using torches and lanterns to fool him into coming out. But he wouldn’t fall for that old ruse. He would stay silent until the light went away, until he sli pped that last small bit into soft, eternal sleep. He would not give the thing the satisfaction of hearing him speak now after their long, silent duel.

“God-damn it, Mr. Blanky!” boomed Captain Crozier’s bass bellow down the ice tunnel. “If you’re in there, answer, God-damn it, or we’ll just leave you there.”

Blanky blinked. Or rather, he tried to blink. His lashes and eyelids were frozen. Was this some other ruse and stratagem of the demonthing?

“Here,” he croaked. And again, aloud this time, “Here!”

A minute later, the head and shoulders of the caulker’s mate, Cornelius Hickey, one of the smallest men on Terror, poked easily through the hole. He was carrying a lantern. Blanky thought dully that it was like watching a gimlet-faced gnome being born.

In the end, all four surgeons had a go at him.

Blanky came in and out of his pleasant fog from time to time to see how things were progressing. Sometimes it was his own ship’s surgeons working on him – Peddie and McDonald – and sometimes it was Erebus’s sawbones, Stanley and Goodsir. Sometimes it was just one of the four cutting or sawing or packing or stitching away. Blanky had the urge to tell Goodsir that polar white bears could run much faster than twenty-five miles per hour when they put their mind to it. But then again – had it been a polar white bear? Blanky did not think so. Polar white bears were creatures of this earth, and this thing had come from somewhere else. Ice Master Thomas Blanky had no doubt of that.

In the end, the butcher’s bill was not so bad. Not bad at all, really.

John Handford, it turned out, had not been touched. After Blanky had left him with the lantern, the man on starboard watch had doused this light and fled the ship, running around to the port side to hide while the creature was climbing up to get to the Ice Master.

Alexander Berry, whom Blanky had presumed dead, had been found under the fallen canvas and scattered kegs right where he’d been standing port watch when the thing had first appeared there and then shattered the fore and aft ridgepole spar. Berry had hit his head seriously enough to have no memory of anything that happened that night, but Crozier told Blanky that they’d found the man’s shotgun and it had been fired. The Ice Master also had fired his, of course, from point-blank range at a shape that was looming over him like a pub wall, but there had been no trace of the thing’s blood anywhere on the deck at either site.

Crozier asked Blanky how this could be – how could two men fire shotguns at an animal at point-blank range and draw no blood? – but the Ice Master ventured no opinion. Inside, of course, he knew.

Davey Leys was also alive and unharmed. The forty-year-old on bow watch must have seen and heard much – including quite possibly the thing on the ice’s first appearance on deck – but Leys was not talking about it. Once again David Leys could only stare silently. He was taken first to Terror’s sick bay, but since all of the surgeons needed that bloodstained space to work on Blanky, Leys was transported by litter to Erebus’s more spacious sick quarters. There Leys lay, according to the Ice Master’s talkative visitors, once again staring unblinkingly at the overhead beams.

Blanky himself had not come through unscathed. The thing had clawed off half of his right foot at the heel, but McDonald and Goodsir had cut and cauterized what was left and assured the Ice Master that – with the help of the carpenter or ship’s armourer – they would rig a leather or wood prosthesis held on by straps so that he could walk again.

His left leg had taken the worst of the creature’s abuse – flesh raked away to the bone in several places and then the long leg bone itself striated with claws – and Dr. Peddie later confessed that all four of the surgeons had been sure they would have to amputate it at the knee. But slowness of infection and gangrene in a wound was one of the few blessings of the arctic, and after resetting the bone itself and receiving more than four hundred stitches, Blanky’s leg – although twisted and wildly scarred and lacking entire tracts of muscle here and there – was healing slowly. “Your grandkids will love them scars,” said James Reid when the other Ice Master made a courtesy call.

The cold had also taken its toll. Blanky managed to keep all of his toes – he would need them for balance on the ruined foot, the surgeons told him – but had lost all fingers save for his thumb on his right hand and the two smallest fingers and his thumb on his left hand. Goodsir, who evidently knew something about such things, assured him that someday he would be able to write and eat gracefully with just the remaining adjoining two fingers on his left hand, and be able to button his trousers and shirts again with those two fingers and the thumb on his right hand.

Thomas Blanky did not give a good gob fart about buttoning his trousers and shirts. Not yet. He was alive. The thing on the ice had done its best to make him otherwise, but he was still alive. He could taste food, chat with his mates, drink his daily gill of rum – already his bandaged hands were capable of holding his pewter mug – and read a book if someone propped it up for him. He was determined to read The Vicar of Wakefield before he shuffled off what was left of his mortal coil.

Blanky was alive and he planned to stay that way for as long as he could. In the meantime, he was strangely happy. He was looking forward to getting back to his own cubicle aft – between Third Lieutenant Irving’s and Jopson’s,the captain’s steward’s, equally tiny berths – and that would happen any day now, whenever the surgeons were absolutely sure they were done snipping and stitching and sniffing at his wounds.

In the meantime, Thomas Blanky was happy. Lying on his sick bay bunk late at night, the men grousing and whispering and farting and laughing in the darkened berthing space just a few feet beyond the partition, hearing Mr. Diggle growl out his commands at his lackeys as the cook baked biscuits deep into the night, Thomas Blanky listened to the grind and growl of the sea ice as it tried to crush HMS Terror and allowed it to put him to sleep as surely as would a lullaby from his long-sainted mother’s lips.