The Cane clutched at Marcus’s armored shoulder with one paw-hand, and the steel plates creaked in protest at the strength of the grip. Marcus gritted his teeth and tried to keep the damage to the ice sheet to a minimum as he parted the earth around them as if it had been water. He held a compact sphere of open space around them, small enough to force Sha to hunch over almost double. Marcus was acutely conscious of the Cane’s hot, panting breaths sliding over the back of his neck.

“Easy,” he said. “We’re fine.”

Sha growled. “How long will it take to reach Khral?”

Marcus shook his head. “Depends on the ground between here and there. Earth will only take a moment. If there’s much stone, it will be more difficult.”

“Then begin.”

“Already have.”

Sha let out a pensive rumble in the close darkness. “But we are not moving.”

“No,” Marcus said. “But the earth around us is, and carrying us with it.” He took a shuddering breath. He hadn’t used a tunneling crafting in fifteen years. He’d lost his appreciation for how strenuous they were. Or perhaps he was just getting old. “I need to concentrate.”

Rather than make any affirmative response, Sha simply fell silent.

Crows, but it was good to work with a professional.

The ground between their entry point and Khral’s ship was heavily scattered with megalithic boulders, the leavings of some long-vanished glacier, freed from the ice and sunk into the silt in the following thaw, most likely. He detoured around them. Passing directly through would have been possible, but stone was an order of magnitude more difficult to craft than earth. Though it doubled the distance the tunneling had to travel, Marcus judged that, even so, he would come out ahead in terms of energy expended—though time would be a concern. It took them nearly twenty minutes to reach their destination, which was under the safety margin he’d estimated in planning, if only barely.

It was impossible to feel the ship itself through the baffling layer of ice upon the surface, but it was easy to sense the pressure of the ship’s weight, transferred through the ice and pressing down upon the soil. He guided the tunneling to the ship’s aft and began to nudge slowly upward. The temperature inside the little bubble of air suddenly dropped, and the earth of its curved top was replaced with chill, dirty ice.