She said a quick prayer for the souls of the Green Storm aviators, hoping that their ghosts would hurry down to the Sunless Country and not hang about up here to make more trouble. Then she went stiffly to stand beside Tom. He gave up his useless struggle with the controls and put his arms around her, and they stood there holding each other, staring at the view ahead. The Jenny was drifting over the shoulder of a big volcano. Beyond it there were no more mountains, just an endless blue-white plain stretching to the horizon. They were at the mercy of the wind, and it was carrying them helplessly into the Ice Wastes.
6
ABOVE THE ICE“ It’s no good,” said Tom. “I can’t repair the damage to the engines without setting down, and if we set down here…”
He didn’t need to say any more. It was three days since the disaster in the Drachen Pass, and below the drifting wreck of the Jenny Haniver lay a landscape hostile as a frozen moon; a cross-hatched waste of thick, ancient ice. Here and there a mountain peak thrust up through the whiteness, but these too were lifeless, white and inhospitable. There was no sign of towns or cities or wandering Snowmad bands, and no answer to the Jenny ’s regular distress calls. Although it was still only early afternoon the sun was already going down, a dull red disc that gave no heat.
Hester wrapped her arms around Tom and felt him shivering inside his thick, fleece-lined aviator’s coat.