The City of Ice

by K. M. McKinley

  Midsummer approached. The month of Gannever opened hot and glorious. Harafan sent messages to her constantly, but she ignored him. She came to share the duke’s bed, at first occasionally, then nightly. Her aim at being in the mansion retreated from the forefront of her mind, niggling only when another message from Harafan arrived, all of which she dithered over before discarding. When the time came to gain the knowledge she needed, it was unexpected, almost done as an afterthought.

  Madelyne nuzzled into the duke. Such a powerful presence beside her. Perversely, she felt safe with him despite what he sometimes did to her. After the incident with the mask and the hands, she had seen his face when he struck her and saw only concentration, the desire to awaken all her senses, perhaps anxiety that he went too far, maybe a little hope that she would be the one. There was no trace of the brute lasciviousness she had seen that one and only time.

  “What is it like, being a god?”

  The duke pulled her closer, and she snuggled into his enormous arm. The curves of its muscles fit into her back perfectly, big enough to be a bed for her all by itself.

  “That is a peculiar question,” he said.

  “You cannot say you have never been asked before.”

  “Yes! Yes, I have.” He laughed drowsily. “But it is still peculiar.”

  “Yes?”

  “Do I ask you how it is to be a woman? It is impossible to answer.”

  “No,” said Madelyne. “But you are a god, unique. I am one of millions of women.”

  “You are still unique,” he said. “All things are.”

  “Maybe, but I am not so special as you.”

  “You are to me.”

  “Did you answer these other girls when they asked?” she said, a touch jealously.

  “Yes. And I will tell you. I told you that I would hold nothing from you.”

  “So tell then!” She gave him a playful slap.

  “Truthfully, I cannot answer well. How do I explain what I am and how I feel in terms you would understand? Another person cannot really do this truthfully to a second, so how can I? I have been many things, but I have never been mortal and the state remains a mystery to me.”

  “So you pursue romance with women without knowing their minds?”

  “Oh, I know their minds, and their hearts, and their bodies.” He ran a pointed nail down her back, drawing quivers of pleasure from her muscles. “But I cannot claim to be human. Being a god is lonely. I am alone. Hence all this.”

  “There is Eliturion.”

  “Eliturion is a sot who thinks himself a poet, and they are the worst kinds of sot of all. He was above me in the pantheon—I am a lesser god at best, not worthy to be worshipped. I was the servant of the Dark Lady, not a deity in my own right. Being a god then was...” He searched for the words. “Playing a role. A repetitive, dull charade.”

  “Eliturion says stories made you.”

  “He does. He tells everyone who will buy him a drink that. It is not true.”

  Madelyne propped herself up on her elbow. “How so?”

  “You cannot make something from nothing. Every time something is created, something else must be taken away. To make fire, wood must burn. To sate hunger, food is consumed. To water a factory, a river must be drunk dry.”

  “But, but it’s magic. Magic makes something from nothing.”

  The Infernal Duke shook his head. His horns caught on the fabric of his pillows. “It does not. As your magisters and engineers are discovering, magic can be harnessed through the medium of glimmer. Once that is used up, then what is left? Sand.”

  “What was used up to make you?”

  “Something that is long dead,” he said sadly. “I was not always this way. None of the gods were. Once we were free; we coursed the atmosphere without form, beings of Will. You know the balance of Form and Will?”

  “No,” she said.

  The duke shifted, bringing his arm up around Madelyne so that he could gesture with both his hands. “All things are made of two components. Will, that is the ineffable,” he said, lifting his right hand, “and Form, which is the solid.” He repeated the gesture with his left, bringing his fingertips together to make a cage. “Both are real, both are actual, but one is perceptible, the other is not. All thinking beings comprise a deal of Will; it coalesces into something approaching substance to give us our souls. Whereas Form is the crude matter of the universe. You men and women who call this Earth your own, you approach a balance between the two, and that makes you dangerous, for you can call upon the strengths of both. We gods are—were—mostly Will; the Morfaan somewhere between us and you. All things were created to rest somewhere on this scale of spirit to matter. A rock has more Form than a bird, a fish more Will. There was a beauty to it, but its pattern, whatever it was intended to be, is disrupted. We are not made of stories, Madelyne. We gods were imprisoned by stories. Stories wove cages round our spirits, divorcing us from our purer state. It is partly our own fault, but I did not ask to be this way. I am not comfortable with what I have become—the Infernal Duke! Lord of the Fifteenth Hell!” he declaimed ironically. “My essence, such of it that remains, fights against this imposition but every year, as the stories become legends and the legends feed history, and the stories are repeated again and again, I become less and less what I was, and more as people expect me to be. Res Iapetus saw the gods as tyrants, but he did not comprehend our nature. We are slaves, doomed to preset paths of myth and the retelling of myth in ever less subtle variation, until you are done and we are used up. So you see, I thank Res Iapetus, in a certain way, for he freed me a little from the trap.”

  She gave him a questioning look.

  “I am no longer venerated,” he said simply.

  “But who created all this,” she said, “if you are not gods?”

  “The Ishmalani believe in the One, the creator, the spirit of the world. They are also incorrect.”

  Madelyne, sensing her opportunity, pursued her questioning. A fresh thrill excited her mind. Now was the time to uncover what she had suffered for. But she had to force herself to ask. It was not so important any more. “To me, you are a god, and to everyone else...”

  “Every human else. Try asking a Tyn sometime what they think of me.”

  “Every human else,” she agreed. “You are powerful, magical, dangerous. If our stories really did trap you, they also made you strong.”

  “Agreed,” he said. “Though we were not feeble beings before.”

  “So how did Res Iapetus drive you away?”

  “Do you know why he did what he did?”

  “Something to do with his wife, they say.”

  “That is true. She died in childbirth. Her ghost was collected from her deathbed, as the legends say should happen and so therefore did, by Alcmeny, goddess of love and perfection. It was her custom to take the ghosts of women who had died so into her service. They became handmaids to her, while their children’s unformed spirits became flowers in her garden.”

  “That’s... that’s sort of awful.”

  “Not according to your ancestors. They thought it a great honour. By the time of Res Iapetus, two hundred years ago, the intellectual revolution that led to this modern age was well under way. Men began to question what came before life. They started to look beyond the veil of death to what might be next. Ghosts rose, where did they go? They did not find out, no one ever will, but the first Rationalists formed an inkling—half right I have to say—that the ghosts who went on continued on, and that corporeal life might come again to them. Freedom was the watchword of this new mode of thought. The fate of those half-formed souls transformed into flowers, and the weeping mothers set to wash Alcmeny’s feet for eternity with their tears ceased to seem like such an honour, and to none more than Res Iapetus. He petitioned Omnus, the lord of the gods and the master of us all, to release his wife and child so that they might pass into the next world, and be free to continue through the cycles of existence. Omnus refused. Iapetus threatene
d him. Omnus appeared then in person, and destroyed Res’s fastness in a battle that lasted a day. In response Res retreated, disappearing from our knowledge for several years. The gods thought him done, but he returned more powerful than any mage before him, breached the Godhome and banished the gods.”

  “As simple as that?”

  “As simple as that. I still do not know how he became so powerful. It was unprecedented, though he had help gaining entry to the Godhome. We will not see his like again in this age. Do they not teach you this?”

  “I didn’t get much schooling in the poorhouse.”

  The duke shifted. She ducked his narrowing gaze.

  “You do not appear uneducated. You reinvented yourself well. It is one of the reasons you intrigue me.” He settled deeper into the cushions and gave a loud yawn.

  “Iapetus was a long time ago,” Madelyne prompted.

  “Two centuries is an eye blink to me,” he said sleepily.

  “To you. To us poor mortals it might never have happened.”

  “It happened!” The duke’s laugh rumbled in his chest, and Madelyne’s whole body trembled with its vibration. “Mortality need not be your fate, Madelyne, if you continue to please me, then twenty decades will come to seem like nothing.”

  “Yes, your grace.” She became quiet. The duke said no more. His chest began the steady, slow rise and fall of a sleeper. She almost left it there, content with this thing she had found but had not sought. But the talk of the poorhouse reminded her of Harafan, and guilt drove her on.

  “Your grace?”

  “Mmm?” the duke said. He sighed with pleasure as Madelyne nestled further into his side.

  “How did Iapetus get in, to the Godhome. Who helped him?”

  “Eliturion,” the duke said, falling asleep. “Eliturion struck a deal with Iapetus. I don’t know why. He betrayed us. All of us...” he said, drifting away again.

  “Your grace? How?”

  The duke whispered. “All of us had a key, a phrase that brought us into the Godhome.”

  She knew this, but acted surprised. “What was his phrase?” she asked in a playful way, though her heart was in her throat.

  “Hmmm?” he came awake a little. She stilled, scared she had asked him too much. There was no going back. She smiled at him, he smiled back, his eyes hooded. They slid shut again.

  “What was Eliturion’s phrase?” she whispered. “Go on, tell me,” she made her voice teasing, though she felt no playfulness. “I shall tell no one. I promise.”

  “Hnh,” said the duke. “You’ll never believe it.” His smile permeated his voice, making it warm and soothing as heated mead. The Infernal Duke’s words were thick. Madelyne had to lean close to hear. And then he told her, a short poem, each word spaced by deep breaths.

  “Is, is that it?” she said.

  “Indeed. My reaction precisely. Stupid, isn’t it?” said the duke.

  Madelyne let him drift away to whatever dreams gods have. She repeated the phrase again and again to herself in order not to forget. Her pulse thrummed in her chest. This was what she needed. She could leave. But she found herself conflicted at the prospect. She was content, happy even, in the arms of the duke. He encircled her, larger than the world. To be in his power had stopped being terrifying. He had become comforting, a shield against all the hardship she had been forced to endure in her miserable life. She could stay here forever, she knew.

  Then there was Harafan, the only person who had ever cared for her, waiting for her to get in touch.

  Waiting for her to betray the duke.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  Threading the Needle

  “THAT IS AN insane idea,” said Captain Heffi. He sat back in his chair in the stateroom with his hands crossed over his belly. The other expedition leaders kept their lips buttoned, waiting to see where this would go.

  “No more insane than getting torn to pieces trying to go through,” said Trassan.

  “Yes, but under the ice? Are you serious? Really Trassan, I understand your eagerness to get to the shore, but this is too extreme. What if the ice falls in on us?”

  “It won’t,” said Trassan.

  “How do we know the ice does not go all the way to the seabed? Or that the entrance to the docks isn’t frozen solid? If that happens, we will be stranded.”

  “We’ll have time to get out well before the tide comes back in.”

  “Another objection,” said Heffi. “The tide may go out too far for us to come close to the dock. What then?”

  “I don’t believe the Morfaan were such shoddy engineers. But again, we will have plenty of time to get out. If the worst comes to the worst, Goodmage Iapetus here can clear the ice from over our heads.”

  Heffi looked at Vols doubtfully. He did not look at all well—grey skinned and drawn.

  “Come on!” said Trassan, slapping the table. “We all know he can do that.”

  “Yes, but so much of it—”

  “I can do it,” said Vols. “It is simple.”

  “I have full faith that he can,” said Ardovani.

  “Tell them what you have seen, Vols,” said Trassan.

  “Goodfellow Trassan had me perform a sending,” said the mage. “You must forgive my appearance, but projection of the soul is among the most draining of all acts a mage might perform.”

  “You were successful then?” said Heffi. “I do not mean to be rude, goodmage, but you have had precious little success in reaching Karsa.”

  “I was successful this time.” He cleared his throat and relaxed into his chair. His eyes became unfocused, looking through the walls of the ship, his voice dreamy. “The ice sits on the water. It is thick, much thicker than the pack ice—that is the correct term?” he looked dazedly to Antoninan for confirmation.

  “It is.”

  “Wrinkled and stacked. It whispered its creation to me, for a man unbound from his flesh is open to all the voices of the world. Many tides pushed me, it said, many tides made me climb.”

  “I admit, I’m impressed,” said Bannord. “Did you think to ask it if it would hold?”

  “I did,” said Vols proudly. “‘What happens to you when the tide goes out?’ I asked it. I become the sky, it said. I become the sky. I passed through the ice and into the sea, and gratefully, for the ice is so cold it affects the soul, hard as iron and more unforgiving.”

  “Tell them what you saw under the ice,” said Trassan.

  “Thick pillars of ice. Platforms of ice, tunnels and caves of ice.”

  “Do you see?” said Heffi. “A labyrinth to catch and kill us.”

  “But there is a way through,” said Vols. “Several. On the far side of the ice is a large cave. The docks are there.”

  “Tell us what the docks are like,” said Bannord.

  “They are shielded from my vision by ancient wards. But I did leave the place, and soared high. I saw the city from above.” His eyes shone. “A city made all of ice.”

  “We stick to our original plan, and go overland,” said Antoninan.

  “There is no way. This is the way,” said the mage. He blinked, coming out of his half-trance.

  “Well,” said Heffi. “Well, well, well.”

  Trassan looked around the faces of the men in the room. It was so full they obscured the light of the lamps on the wall, making the room a dim cave. “I am not going to force this course of action on the expedition,” said Trassan. “It is risky, so I have called all of you here—the leaders, foremen and knowledgeable goodmen—to put the plan to a vote. I repeat that is shall be a risk. But I believe a greater risk would be to wait, or to turn back, or to seek another route through to the city. If we cannot get through, we shall turn back. Tolpoleznaen, can you take the ship through?”

  “Mage,” said the helmsman, “can you provide me a map of the way through?”

  “I can try,” said Vols. “I am no skilled draughtsman, but I should be able to give—”

  “With a map, I can do it,” said the Ish
amalani. “To refuse would be an affront to the One. The One put this challenge before me. I will prove myself equal to his task.”

  “It cannot be seen, but it can be reached,” said Trassan. “This is what Heffi and I learned from the shaman of the sea people. So, we have a choice. We turn back now, or we try the passage under the ice. The next close approach of the Twin is in two nights time, and comes with the White Moon. There will be a Middle Great Tide. Then we shall attempt the crossing under the ice.” He shrugged. “Or not. It is not a choice I will make alone. I have no right to. But if you decide against, then all we have worked for will be in vain and we shall return home poorer than when we left. Who is in favour? Give me a show of hands.”

  Heffi’s chief officers, Tolpoleznaen, Volozeranetz, Drentz, and Suqab all raised their hands, some more quickly than the rest. Bannord put his hand up right away, as did Antoninan. Ullfider the antiquarian’s hand shot up, for he was most keen to get his hands on the Morfaan’s secrets. Kororsind the alchemist hesitated for a good second. Tyn Gelven shook his head. “We should go back,” he said. “We are being told something. We should listen.” The cook, Henneman, looked bewildered to have been invited to the vote. He shook his head, staring at his hands which remained curled upright in his lap. His Tyn counterpart, Charvolay, put her hand up slowly, glancing at the others as if asking permission. The physic Mauden simply said, “No.” Trassan’s engineering chiefs, Goodman Ollens and his assistants, agreed unanimously. Trassan smiled with satisfaction and raised his own hand.

  “Well Heffi?” asked Trassan.

  Heffi grumbled and stuck his own hand up too.

  “To the hells with it,” he said. “I could do with a fright to put me off my food a while, I’m getting fat.”

  THE SNOWSTORMS SPUTTERED out. Two days of preparation went by in a frantic blur. Gelven had his iron whisperers interrogate the ship until they were ill with the touch of it. Ardovani slept little, spending his time renewing the protective wards carved into the ship’s decks. “All this iron makes protective ritual hard,” he would tell anyone that would listen. “But a little is better than nothing.” Antoninan began preparing the expedition’s equipment to go ashore. Vols spent his time meditating, clearing his mind of the certainties of reality in case he should need to change it, given confidence by the recent ease with which magic came to him, which he confided only to Ardovani. Much of the crew busied themselves hacking the ice from the ship, working with such energy that it was soon clear from prow to stern. Trassan paced impatiently, shouting when asked a question, taking over tasks in irritation when he deemed them performed imperfectly. The rest of the time he had his glass to his eye, scanning from east to west and back again in search of his rival, but Persin remained elusive.