The City of Ice

by K. M. McKinley

  A rapid rustling in the bushes behind filled her with dread.

  “Harafan!” she said in a high whisper. “Harafan!”

  He stopped a dozen steps ahead. “What?”

  “Movement.”

  She caught sight of something speeding through the brambles that made her palms sweat. Someone spoke off to the left. The voice put her in mind of the duke’s invisible servants, a whisper, just audible, but of a type that insinuated itself poisonously into the psyche. Another movement rushed through the bracken. Something tittered behind a tomb.

  “Harafan!” she said.

  “Don’t stop,” he replied without looking back. She reached him as he withdrew fistfuls of powder from the bags on the belt. He held his hands away from his body a little, and let the filings trickle free.

  “Follow me, stay between the lines of iron. Don’t stand on them if you can avoid it.”

  She saw things in the bushes, heard a tittering and saw the flash of wild yellow eyes not far from her legs. Startled, she moved closer to Harafan. They continued together at a quickened pace. The Godhome filled the world with steel. It looked near, but judging its distance was hard because of its enormousness and they closed on it far too slowly.

  A high trumpet sounded, and the undergrowth erupted with movement. Things burst from the brambles on wings. Tiny Tyn rode out onto the stairs mounted on the back of rats and small dracon-birds. Larger, impish creatures emerged from behind the tombs, looking lecherously at Madelyne. The cemetery was all a twitter with their speech. Wild Tyn of every conceivable shape and kind gathered around them. Some clutched spears no mightier than pens, others drew tiny swords hammered from discarded nails. Their clothes and gear were the cast-offs of mankind, shreds of cloth stitched into parti-coloured trousers, gloves repurposed as little suits, the thumbs cut off. There were Tyn no bigger than insects riding moths, others the size of human infants, several with flat faces like bats, one had three heads on the necks of serpents. They had feather, furs, scales and rocky skin. There was one that looked like a tiny, jewelled dragon. Some appeared human, but with the reverse jointed legs of fowl. Some glowed, some were shadows, some vanished and rematerialised elsewhere. Wide mouthed, thin mouthed, toothy and toothless. Some with a dozen eyes, several with none. They were glum, elated, suspicious, mocking, surrounded by an overpowering smell of leaf mould and magic.

  “Stay close!” hissed Harafan. He cast a handful of sand behind him. A knot of lesser Tyn drew back with small cries of alarm. On both sides, the Tyn pressed in, whispering threats in a dozen tongues. But they stopped short, curls of dissipating magic boiling off an invisible barrier over Harafan’s mix of iron and glimmer rich sand when they came close.

  “We’re going to have to run!” said Madelyne. The black sand dribbled from Harafan’s hands too fast, she had to quash the urge to scream at him to close his fists tighter. “How much do you have?”

  He thrust into his pouches and drew out more. “Not enough,” he said. “Are you ready?”

  Madelyne nodded.

  “If we don’t make it, we can say we tried. On three, two, one!”

  They broke into a mad sprint, fear propelling them up the hill toward the Godhome. The Tyn let out a wicked war cry, and surged after. Tyn riding birds, beetles moths and broken butterflies swooped upon Madelyne, tugging her hair free from its dressing. Those mounted on flightless beasts galloped alongside their prey, ululating and brandishing their tiny weapons.

  Harafan thrust his hands into his pouches and threw out a sifting of sand. Where it touched upon Tyn skin they howled and fell back, smoke pouring from their bodies.

  They approached the Godhome. The ground became difficult. There were mounds of bones all around it, tangled with the black bushes and the stone of toppled tombs. The bank the fall had thrust up broke the ground for twenty yards before the steel wall of the Godhome’s underside. Harafan stumbled, punching the ground painfully to arrest his fall rather than spill the precious sand.

  The Godhome’s wall was ten yards away, eight. It let off a strange vibration that shook the roots of Madelyne’s teeth. She and Harafan practically ran into it. When she touched it, the metal was freezing cold. When she breathed on it, her breath spidered into short-lived frost.

  “Do the thing, whatever it is,” he said. He flung out two fistfuls of the iron and sand in broad arcs, creating a semicircle in front of them

  More Tyn screamed as it burned them. The diminutive horde came to a thundering stop only a few feet away.

  “Now?”

  “I don’t think we’re going to have much time to consider the best moment. Now, or never, and we can join these poor buggers littering the ground.”

  Madelyne drew in a deep breath and shouted as loud as she could. “By dint of pen and pint of gin, open gates, and let me in.”

  The Tyn snickered evilly.

  “That’s it?” said Harafan. “That’s it? That piece of doggerel will get us into the palace of the gods? You’re fucking joking! We’re going to fucking die!” His laconic manner vanished. Genuine panic surfaced.

  “Yes! Yes! The duke told me so.”

  Harafan’s eyebrows rose high up his forehead. He shrugged.

  “I don’t know what I should have expected. He is the god of booze and shit poetry. I never liked him. That’s really it? We’ve been duped.”

  The Tyn stormed around the arcs of sand, tumbling over one another in their eagerness to be at the humans, jabbing with their puny spears and hissing through pointed teeth. They were growing braver, coming closer, picking their way between the haphazard barriers Harafan had cast out. Madelyne looked up at the wall of the fallen Godhome. It remained impervious, shut.

  “Nothing’s happening,” she moaned. “I... I’m sorry. I guess he took me for a fool.”

  “We’re finished,” said Harafan. “I knew this was too good to be true. I wonder if I can stab them? Can you even kill a Tyn?” He dusted off his hands in the direction of the Tyn, making them shrink back, and drew out his daggers.

  “It has been nice knowing you. You know that, right? I take the piss a lot. Life hasn’t been kind to us. You’ve been the one good thing in it. We’ve no parent in common but you’re my sister, you always were, in all the ways that matter.”

  Touched, she reached up her hand and stroked his shoulder. “I know.” She drew her own weapon.

  “Come on you little bastards!” shouted Harafan. “Let’s have you then!”

  The Tyn laughed. A couple played a hideous ditty on tiny instruments. Madelyne’s stomach rolled at the sense of magic about to be unleashed.

  And then the Tyn stopped. As one, the whole lot of them looked up and shrank back, blinking fearfully at something behind the thieves. The groan of tortured metal screeched over the cemetery, and Madelyne turned.

  Nothing had changed.

  “What the hells is goin—” began Harafan.

  Madelyne and Harafan blinked out of existence.

  Screeching, the Tyn turned on their tails and fled into the brush. Bushes quivered into stillness. The Tyn’s screams faded, leaving nothing around the Godhome but bones and fallen stone.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  Remnants of the Past

  FEEBLE LIGHT BROKE the dark, not enough to truly see by, but enough to grant pale outlines to the walls, Garten’s arms, and the debris on the ground. Water glinted around a small box lying on its side.

  “Get me up, you oaf, before I drown!”

  “Issy?”

  Garten groped his way toward her, his feet plashing in standing water and kicking aside half-glimpsed obstacles. Their textures were almost as mysterious as their shapes through the souls of his boots—soft, hard, brittle, unyielding. Glass broke under his heel.

  He picked up the box and looked inside. The light was coming from Tyn Issy. Screwing his eyes up he opened the door. The inside of the box was wet with dirty water, and she was not happy about it.

  “Morfaan! Brutes where magic is concerned,
no fine control over will or form. They should never have been brought into the world.” She sniffed. “It is a wonder they lasted as long as they did.”

  After a few moments Garten’s eye adjusted to the gleam of the Tyn and he played the box’s light about. “Where are we?”

  “Hey! You are not to use me as a lantern!” she snapped.

  “How long can you keep this up?”

  “A while,” she said. “Didn’t you hear what I just said?”

  “Fine, stop shining, save your dignity. We can both starve to death down here in the dark.”

  She blew a raspberry, her standard response to sentiments she did not like, but maintained her effulgence, choosing to temper it with a scowl.

  They were in a tunnel of some kind, masterfully wrought of well fitted stone patterned with tiny, precise chisel marks. Trash dotted the floor, old bottles, rags, bones and the like, scattered mostly, but heaped up into piles every forty paces. Whoever had stacked it had done it a long time ago; it was old, a uniform mud grey, and smelled only of damp, not fresh rot. Water dripped everywhere, running down the walls into puddles. Small stalactites of dissolved mortar hung from the apex of an arched ceiling. The water around their feet was odourless, muddy but not foul. Garten walked to the wall and touched it. The chill of deep caves penetrated his fencing glove. He panned the light around a little further. A large rat bared its broad teeth at him in a show of aggression, making him stumble backwards in surprise, and bounded off into the dark, its feet sending out tiny, echoing splashes long after it had disappeared. After that, Garten went to retrieve his sword.

  “Garten Kressind.”

  Garten turned back toward the Lady Morfaan’s voice, heading down the tunnel in the direction the rat had run.

  “Don’t go,” said Issy. “Let us go in the opposite direction. It is the sensible course. Hey! Are you listening to me? These Morfaan are bad news for everyone. Garten!”

  He would not listen. He went some hundred yards down the tunnel, treading carefully where the layer of rubbish thickened into a carpet. Soon the white shapes of the Morfaan leapt out of the dark in Issy’s witch glow. Josan bent over her brother, cradling his head in the crook of one arm.

  “You will escort us,” she said.

  “I will gladly take you back to your quarters in the Palace, Lady Morfaan,” said Garten, “if you would but show me the way. Where are we?”

  “We cannot go back. Not yet. I must see to my love, my brother.”

  “He is dead,” said Garten. “I am sorry.”

  “He is dead and he will remain so if we are not hasty!”

  She did something with her hands that Garten could not understand; it was as if he wasn’t seeing them or that they would not be seen. Josanad flattened out, faded, became a representation of himself. She rolled this up, folded it twice until Josanad was the size and shape of a large letter, and secreted him inside her dress. Unconsciously, Garten retreated a step back.

  “See,” said Issy. “They are not like you. Turn back, my friend, before it is too late.”

  “Do not listen to her,” said Josan. “The Y Dvar who chose the wild were never fond of us.”

  “Absolutely correct,” said Issy. “You are things that never should have been.”

  “Whereas you squandered the gifts bestowed upon you,” retorted Josan. “You will escort us,” she repeated to Garten.

  “But to where?” said Garten.

  “To the Castle of Mists. There we shall restore my brother, and return to the World of Will, whereupon I shall exact my revenge.”

  “You cannot, Lady Morfaan. The duel was fairly fought and won.”

  Josan turned from him, and set off further along the tunnel.

  “The woman Asteria shall pay, nevertheless.”

  “You did not think she would win,” said Garten.

  “She should not. She would not if Josanad had been complete.”

  “So there is something ails him,” said Garten.

  “He is a prince among my people, and an emperor to your kind!” she said.

  “He was not well. You lied to me.”

  She continued along the tunnel which went dead straight as far as Issy’s light fetched. “We are not immortal as your people believe,” she said after a space. “Between our visits to your world we sleep, watched over by others of our kind who have made a great sacrifice. Our vigil has lasted too long. Every time we awake, a little less of our spirit remains. My brother is worse affected than I.”

  “I understand,” said Garten. “My father—”

  “Your father and your sympathy is of no interest to me,” she said. “Guard me, do your work, and we shall return to resolve this matter of the new High Legate, then I and my brother shall remain to help you prepare for the coming of the World of Form.”

  “The Twin, the Dark World?”

  “Yes. The Twin,” she said. She looked in disgust at the rubbish on the floor. “This tunnel was built by my kind thousands of years ago. It brought water to the lower districts of this city, the capital of the eastern province. Now it is choked with your refuse. You have used it, and moved on, ignorant of what it could do for you if used correctly. You disgust me, humanity, you are verminous, beggars, snatch thieves plundering our past.”

  “Then why guide us?”

  “How else are we to rule our subjects?” she said bitterly.

  The tunnel took on a curve, and began to head upwards, bringing them out into a complex of large rooms and grand corridors, where the chiselled stone was covered in broken facings of marble. Rubble filled many of the rooms, and the walls between them had been brought down. Light fittings of the Morfaan steel hung from the wall. Puddles of water gathered, still as sheets of ice, on mosaic floors of marvellous intricacy. Everything was damaged, most of it devastated. Some corridors were wide enough to be roads but these were blocked by boulders come down from the ceiling. There were signs of miserable human life in the wreckage, fresher rubbish, a discarded blanket, scorch marks of a fire in a drier room, and, in the middle of a half-collapsed great hall, a huge midden covered in a dense fur of mold.

  “You soil the palaces of your betters. Ignorant,” said Josan. Worse came. They passed a gurgling waterfall of effluent running from a crack overhead. It steamed and stank in the chill, underground air. Heaps of clay-like faeces spattered the marble. The sewage ran for fifty feet in a revolting stream, before finding its way through a chasm in the floor. Issy’s light showed the contents all too clearly, scattering rats from their feast.

  “We are under Perus,” said Garten. “In the ancient Morfaan city.”

  “Obviously,” said Josan. “This was once a district of fine palaces and galleries. Now it is buried and you have made it your cesspit.”

  “There was war here,” said Garten. “I can see it.”

  “There is always war,” said Josan.

  “Where exactly are we in relation to the new city?”

  “If we were to walk in that direction,” Josan pointed. “We would come to one of the places your kind call the cavernas.”

  “Let us go there, we might fetch help.”

  “Not yet. This way.”

  She led him from the main way and into a building half-crushed by a vast slab of stone dislocated from the cavern roof. The way on appeared impassable, but Josan headed down an obscure path evidently used by others—there were the nubs of tallow sticks stuck to rocks, and the floor had been cleared of loose debris. He realised that he could see all this without Issy, for there daylight seeped into the underworld. When they reached the back of the building, he bade her extinguish her light. She was only too happy to comply.

  They were in what had been a windowed gallery. All but one of the columns had been shattered by a massive slippage of stone. A fragment of arch remained, unseated from the column top but jammed in place by rubble. A crack wide enough for a man to squeeze through opened in the wall. At the far end, Garten saw bright day, and heard the faint sounds of city life. A sl
iver of cliff, built upon with precarious houses, was visible through hazy air.

  “So you see,” said Josan. “The Caverna of the District of Ravens. In our time this building belonged to a rich merchant, and this gallery looked out across a forest park full of the most beautiful creatures. All that has gone, the creatures are dead, and you are in its place.”

  “I cannot help what I am,” Garten said. “Do not blame me for the way the world has changed.”

  “It is not you I feel anger for, but for my own kind,” she said. “We can help what we are, and we chose badly. This is all our own doing.”

  She took him along the gallery and through a tiny gap into a wide place that might once have been a plaza open to the outside world, but which was now buried by another gigantic slab of rock that brushed their heads as they walked toward the back. At the rear where natural rock walled the plaza in, there was twenty feet or more of clear space, but at the far side, toward the surface beyond the rock, there were bare inches between the shattered paving and its stony lid. Fragments of statues lay by broken pedestals.

  “Here,” Josan said stopping. “The swiftest way home.”

  They stopped by a circle carved into the living stone walling the back of the collapsed plaza. A fine script was carved around the circle’s circumference, but it was marred by a crack down the middle, dividing the circle in two and putting its halves out of true.

  “You have more magic,” said Garten. “You must. This looks like solid rock.”

  She nodded. “It is solid enough, but there is a layer to the world beyond that which you see. There are many layers, in fact. And many worlds. Here is a weakness in the substance of creation, the underpinning which makes Form, Form and Will, Will. A crack in time and in space. This is a world gate.”

  “This is how you come from your land to ours?”

  “This is how we come home from exile,” she corrected. “This realm that you call your own is our land. And once, the gates led to many other places. There were hundreds of such gates in this city alone. Now most are destroyed, the rest hidden or sealed, and it is dangerous to open them. But we must, or Josanad is lost. This one is damaged, but functions still.” She bowed her head, and said something soft in her own language. The gate responded immediately, the carved lines shining with a blue light. The crack in the circle hampered the gate’s operation, and light sparked and spat in the gap. Josan said something more, and the light stabilised. The stone of the earth’s bones vanished. In its place was a tunnel of vapours, just like the one Garten had witnessed in the Meadow.