"Baxter, Stephen - Huddle" - читать интересную книгу автора (Baxter Stephen)

No-Sun tapped at the center of his picture. "And what will we find here?"

"I don't know."

They rested awhile, and moved on.

The glacier began to descend so rapidly they had some trouble keeping their
feet. The ice here, under tension, was cracked, and there were many ravines.

At last they came to a kind of cliff, hundreds of times taller than Night-Dawn.
The glacier was tumbling gracefully into the ice plain, great blocks of it
carving away. This ice sheet was much wider than the pool they had left behind,
so wide, in fact, it lapped to left and right as far as they could see and all
the way to the far mountains. Ice lay on the surface in great broken sheets, but
clear water, blue-black, was visible in the gaps.

It was -- together they found the word, deep in their engineered memories -- it
was a sea.

"Perhaps this is a circular sea," One-Tusk said, excited. "Perhaps it fills up
the ring between the mountains."

"Perhaps."

They clambered down the glacier, caution and eagerness warring in Night-Dawn's
heart.

There was a shallow beach here, of shattered stone. The beach was littered with
droppings, black and white streaks, and half-eaten krill.

In his short life, Night-Dawn had seen no creatures save fish, krill, algae and
humans. But this beach did not bear the mark of humans like themselves. He
struggled to imagine what might live here.

Without hesitation, One-Tusk ran to a slab of pack ice, loosely anchored. With a
yell he dropped off the end into the water.

No-Sun fluffed up her fur. "I don't like it here --"

Bubbles were coming out of the water, where One-Tusk had dived.

Night-Dawn rushed to the edge of the water.

One-Tusk surfaced, screaming, in a flurry of foam. Half his scalp was torn away,
exposing pink raw flesh, the white of bone.

An immense shape loomed out of the water after him: Night-Dawn glimpsed a pink
mouth, peg-like teeth, a dangling wattle, small black eyes. The huge mouth
closed around One-Tusk's neck.