What is it?” P.J. asks, studying my face.
“Someone’s coming,” I tell her.
“Friend or foe?”
“Foe.”
She looks back at me, nods grimly, and holds up her shell sword.
I pull my scimitar handle from my pocket and will the blade to extend. The sapphire laser arcs out, and then it suddenly flares wildly. The blue flame leaps back down the handle and scorches my hands. I drop the handle and shriek in pain. A faint blue glow continues to shimmer around my fingers, and it feels like they’re still on fire.
“Jack,” P.J. shouts, “touch the ice.”
I drop to my knees and press my palms to the ice, and then slide them into a snowdrift up to my elbows. The burning lessens.
It’s the Omega Box, Gisco warns nervously. Only he has the power to do a thing like that.
We look around. Snow is sifting down through the fissure, and the ice beneath our feet is trembling. Ripping sounds come from all around us—the walls of the fissure are starting to crack apart.
I glance up nervously at the shimmering sides of the crevasse. The sunlight that filters down through the top of the fissure seems to be fading, and as the amphitheater darkens, the ice formations change color, from cheerful blues and violets to ominous purples, grays, and blacks.
I wish Kidah, my father, and Eko were here. I can’t help thinking that they were split off from us by design. Perhaps the Dark Lord and the Omega Box anticipated that we were going to slide down a moulin, and rigged it so that our group was split in two. Now that we have fallen into their trap, they will try to finish off the weaker half first.
Laughter rings out. It’s not the maniacal laughter of a crazed super-villain, nor is it the mechanical cackle of a machine that’s come to life and is trying to simulate vocal cords. Rather, it’s a hearty and very human-sounding chuckle, the belly laugh of a man who’s just enjoyed a whopping good joke.
I spot a figure standing on an ice shelf, high above us. “Hands a little too hot, Prince of Dann?” he calls down in a deep, musical voice.
I rub snow on my seared fingers as I look up at him. “Why don’t you come down here and see for yourself?” I shout.
“Yes, I will come down,” he assures me. “But someone else wants to welcome you first. I believe he’s an old friend of yours, and of your girlfriend’s, too.”
He steps back from the edge of the shelf and I lose sight of him.
The icy floor beneath us shakes so violently that P.J. and I are thrown off our feet, and Gisco lies flat.
I try to hold on to P.J. but she slides away from me. A web of cracks appears all around us, and suddenly a figure bursts upward, exploding through the ice with a tremendous shower of crystals. He somersaults high into the air before he lands on the shaking ice floor, as light and sure-footed as a spider.
I recognize his powerful build, his flowing white hair, and his glittering, black subhuman eyes. I can tell that P.J. recognizes him, too, from her time spent in his Amazon prison. She raises her sword and points it at him, and the point trembles.
“Hello, my dear,” he says to her, stepping toward us. “Is that any way to greet an old friend?”
His left calf and thigh are heavily bandaged. I must have seriously wounded him with my blast from the umiak paddle. But the Dark Lord is clearly a quick healer, because he barely limps as he advances toward us.
“And welcome also to you, son of Dann,” he says. He turns his head slightly to look at me, and for a moment in the fading light I see a long scar down the side of his face where I stabbed him with a shard of glass. “We have some unfinished business,” he tells me. “Why don’t we settle accounts right now?”
“Suits me,” I tell him, trying to get into a fighting stance. I can barely stand upright on the trembling ice.
The Dark Lord could probably walk across the ice, but he chooses a more direct route. He launches himself at me from twenty feet away in an impossibly fast leap. I anticipate his jump and also guess that because his left leg is injured, he’ll kick with his right. Even so I’m too slow. By the time I start to raise my left arm in a block, the ball of his right foot thunks into my chest. I’m knocked spinning backward, as unable to stop myself as I was when blown by the Piteraq.
I crash into one of the crevasse’s ice walls. It’s as hard as granite, and the impact stuns me. When the gleaming blue world stops spinning I see that the Dark Lord has turned toward P.J. She backs away from him, her sword held at the ready. She’s being very brave, but she’ll never be able to hold him off! I try to run back to save her, but a vengeful canine beats me to it.
Gisco has his own score to settle with the leader of the Dark Army. When they tangled in the Amazon, the Dark Lord used his telepathic powers to scramble the dog’s brains. Now, Gisco charges at him fearlessly from behind and sinks his teeth deep into the Dark Lord’s injured left leg.
The spidery fiend flips over onto his back, and for a second I think Gisco has the upper hand. Once a big dog has a person pinned to the ground, it’s nearly impossible to get back up. But the usual fighting rules don’t apply to a human tarantula. As he falls backward he pulls Gisco close to him, and then uses the momentum of his fall to catapult Gisco into the air.
My canine friend is launched like a rocket. He flies high and far and touches down on his back with a sickening thud. The Dark Lord hurled him toward the river, and before Gisco can stop himself, he slides over the lip of the bank and disappears into the frigid blue water with a yelp and a final desperate twitch of his tail.
Then the Dark Lord turns to face me.