Hell: named after the ancient religious concept of eternal punishment.  Over a thousand miles of dead glare-ice wilderness between Baffin Bay and the Bering Sea.  A sharded tumble of floes and bergs and nightmare crevasses, of daggered ice cliffs and howling glacial frost winds.  A crippling, killing, freezing, forsaken world of white on white on white.

Hell: fourteen burrows in an irregular semicircle on the lee side of a storm-carved berg.  Each cramped ice cell clawed from the iron surface by dying, lonely men and women working subzero cold.  Near the entrance to one hide-hole was a rich red stain on the ice glass, where an unknown convict had lung-hemorrhaged under the refrigerated glare of the midnight sun.

The maelstrom of cold had shaped a ledge into a stubby pedestal, and topping the pedestal was a hand-hewn ice block.  Within the transparent mass a dark shape swam in frozen silence.

There were no guards.  Nor were they needed.

No man ever walked out of Hell.

When Logan and Jess arrived, an alarm sounded.  The platform itself dealt with them.  They were needle-stunned, packaged and conveyed through a force field labyrinth and dumped on the ice.

The platform had disappeared.  There was no way back.

Warden came to meet them.  A man hunched against driving wind, a fur-shrouded scarecrow.  His feet were rag-wrapped, his face old leather and iodine; his eyes burned under a filth-stiffened parka.

He bent over their cocooned figures and his mittened hands clumsily stripped away the con-webbing.  Wadding the precious material, he thrust it into his parka.

Cold clubbed them.

Logan stumbled up, pulling Jess with him.  In the severe cold the effects of the needle drug were rapidly dissipated.

"Wh - where's the key?" he asked Warden.  This man must be their contact.


"When you come to Hell they throw away the keys."

Logan felt the brass taste of fear in his mouth.  They were in the escape-proof prison city at the North Pole.

"Come learn the rules" said Warden.  He turned his back and paced off across the glare sheet.

They struggled after him.  The wind died to a low snarl as they reached the partial shelter of the great iceberg which loomed over the burrows.

"Your neighbors," said Warden.

Fur-swaddled figures surrounded them, emerging in clots of twos and threes from the ink-mouthed holes.  Logan scanned the emaciated, skull-haunted faces that hedged him in a wolf circle.

"Rule one," said Warden.  "A new convict can pick his antagonist.  Two: the antagonist can use any weapon he has to defend himself and his goods.  Three: the new man fights barehanded.  That's all the rules we got - except winner gets first cut."

"And if I don't fight?" asked Logan.

"Then ya die on the ice," said Warden.  "Course, that don't go for the girl."  He grinned.  "And ya better get to it.  Couple minutes more out here, dressed like you are, and you won't need to choose."

Under the wind's hammer, Logan's clothing was gauze.  He measured the corded figures, looking for weakness and found none.  These were survivors.  No soft ones here.

He pointed a random finger.  "Him," said Logan.

The circle tightened to take up the slack left by the man who stepped forward.  Tall.  Long-armed.  Thick-shouldered.  From the matted fur at his chest he drew forth a needle-pointed stiletto of hand-burnished ice.  Eight inches of lethal blade, shaped with an artist's care.

Instantly he lunged.  The stiletto flashed.  He had led with the knife.  Logan took advantage of this mistake to chop the weapon from his hand.  It shattered on the ice, but Logan's foot slid on one of the shards and he was down, the man atop him, hands at his throat.