The music began then.

Irving saw the bobbing of both heads – creature’s and Esquimaux’s – but it took him half a minute before he realized that the orgiastic bass hootings and erotic bagpipe-flute notes were emanating from… the woman.

The monstrous thing looming as large as the ice boulders beside it, white bear or demon, was blowing down into her open mouth, playing her vocal cords as if her human throat were a reed instrument. The trills and low notes and bass resonances came louder, faster, more urgently – he saw Lady Silence raise her head and bend her neck one way while the serpentine-necked, triangular-headed bear-thing above her bent its head and neck in the opposite direction, the two looking like nothing so much as lovers straining to plunge deeper while seeking to find the best and deepest angle for a passionate open-mouthed kiss.

The musical notes pounded faster and faster – Irving was sure that the rhythm must be heard on the ship now, must be giving every man on the ship as powerful and permanent an erection as he was suffering at this second – and then suddenly, without warning, the noise cut off with the suddenness of the climax of wild lovemaking.

The thing’s head reared up and back. The white neck bobbed and coiled.

Lady Silence’s arms dropped to her naked sides as if she was too exhausted or transported to hold them out any longer. Her head lolled forward over her moon-silvered breasts.

It will devour her now, thought Irving through all the insulating layers of numbness and disbelief at what he had just seen. It will rend and eat her now.

It did not. For a second the bobbing white mass was gone, shuffled swiftly away on all fours through the blue Stonehenge of ice pillars, and then it was back, bowing its head low before Lady Silence, dropping something onto the ice in front of her. Irving could hear the noise of something organic hitting the ice and the smack had a familiar ring to it, but right now nothing was in context – Irving could make sense of nothing he saw or heard.

The white thing ambled away again; Irving could feel the impact of its huge feet through the solid sea ice. In a minute it was back, dropping something else in front of the Esquimaux girl. Then a third time.

And then it was simply gone… blended back into the darkness. The young woman was kneeling alone in the ice clearing with only the low heap of dark shapes in front of her.

She remained that way for another minute. Irving thought of his distant Irish cousin’s popish church again and the old parishioners who stayed praying in their pews after the service had finished. Then she got to her feet, quickly slipping her bare feet into fur boots and pulling on her fur pants and parka.

Lieutenant Irving realized that he was shaking wildly. At least part of that was from the cold, he knew. He’d be lucky if he had enough warmth in him and strength in his legs to get back to the ship alive. He had no idea how the girl had survived her nakedness.

Silence swept up the objects the thing had dropped in front of her and was now carrying them carefully in her fur-parka arms, the way a woman would carry one or more infants still suckling at her breast. She seemed to be heading back to the ship, crossing the clearing to a point between the Stonehenge seracs about ten degrees to his left.

Suddenly she stopped, her hooded head turning in his direction, and although he could not see her black eyes, he could feel her gaze boring into him. Still on all fours, he realized that he was in full sight in the bright moonlight, three feet away from the concealment of any serac. In his absolute need to get a better view, he had forgotten to stay hidden.

For a long moment neither of them moved. Irving could not breathe. He waited for her motion, a slapping of ice perhaps, and then for the quick return of the thing from the ice. Her protector. Her avenger. His destroyer.

Her hooded gaze moved away and she walked on, disappearing between the ice pillars on the southeast side of the circle.

Irving waited another several minutes, still shaking as if from ague, and then he struggled to his feet. His body was frozen through, its only sensation coming from his now detumescing, burning erection and from his uncontrollable shaking, but instead of staggering toward the ship after the girl, he moved forward to where she had knelt in the moonlight.

There was blood on the ice. The stains were black in the bright blue moonlight. Lieutenant Irving knelt, tugged off his mitten and underglove, set some of the spreading stain to his finger, and tasted it. It was blood, but he did not think it was human blood.

The thing had brought her raw, warm, freshly killed meat. Some sort of flesh. The blood tasted coppery to Irving, the way his own blood or any human blood would, but he assumed that freshly killed animals also had such coppery-tasting blood. But what animal and from where? The men of the Franklin Expedition had seen no land animals for more than a year.

Blood freezes in a few fast minutes. This thing had killed its gift to Lady Silence only minutes ago, even as Irving had been stumbling around out here in the ice maze trying to find her.

Backing away from the black stain in the moonlit snow the way he might back away from a pagan stone altar where some innocent victim had just been sacrificed, Irving concentrated first on trying to breathe normally – the air was ripping at his lungs as he gasped – and then on urging his frozen legs and numbed mind to get him back to the ship.

He would not try going in through the ice tunnel and loose plank to the cable locker. He would hail the starboard lookout before he got in shotgun range and walk up the ice ramp like a man, answering no questions until he spoke to the captain.

Would he tell the captain about this?

Irving had no idea. He didn’t even know if the thing on the ice – which must still be nearby – would let him return to the ship. He didn’t know if he had the warmth and energy remaining for the long walk.

He only knew that he would never be the same again.

Irving turned to the southeast and reentered the forest of ice.

Hickey had decided that the tall, skinny lieutenant – Irving – had to die and that today was the day to do it.

The diminutive caulker’s mate had nothing personal against the naive young toff, other than his poor timing in the hold more than a month earlier, but that was enough to swing the scales against Irving.

Work and watch schedules kept Hickey from his task. Twice he had rotated onto watch duties when Irving was officer on deck, but Magnus Manson had not been on duty abovedecks either time. Hickey would plan the timing and method of the deed, but he needed Magnus for the execution. It was not that Cornelius Hickey was afraid of killing a man; he’d cut a man’s throat before he was old enough to go into a whorehouse without a sponsor. No, it was simply the means and method that this murder called for, which required his idiot disciple and arse-fuck buddy on this expedition, Magnus Manson.

Now all the conditions were perfect. It was a Friday morning work party – although “morning” meant little when it was as dark out as midnight – with more than thirty men out on the ice repairing and improving the torch-cairns between Terror and Erebus. Nine musket-armed Marines were, in theory, providing security for the work parties, but in truth the line of working men was spread out for almost a mile, with only five men or fewer under the command of each officer. The three officers here on the east half of the dark cairn trail were from Terror – Lieutenants Little, Hodgson, and Irving – and Hickey had helped sort the work parties so that he and Magnus were working on the farthest cairns under Irving.