The City of Ice

by K. M. McKinley

  A sunburst whited out the arcade. Hot wind blasted out in every direction. Madelyne blinked tears and grit from her eyes. Between after images, she saw the duke, fire wreathing his naked, crimson body.

  “Back Andrade! Back!” he boomed. He held up his hand. Fire roared from it.

  “Trespassers...” hissed Andrade.

  “You failed the last time. Go back to your rest. Back to death. You are no more. You are dead. Sleep now.”

  “Trespassers!” she said. She raised her sword. The duke punched forward his fist, and a column of fire blasted from it, connecting with the sword and Andrade’s arm. The fragments glowed red, then white, the glass running and the pieces fusing together. Andrade screamed. Madelyne scrambled to her feet, urgency blocking the pain from her thousand cuts.

  Andrade swung her cooling arm at Madelyne. It bent before shattering into pieces glowing cherry red with heat. These did not return to the goddess, but went black and scattered themselves across the ruins of the hall.

  The duke strode forward. “You are dead. Your powers are weak. You cannot stand before me. Leave this woman and this man. They are mine.”

  Andrade brandished her unharmed arm and sword. The duke took another step forward. Andrade slithered backwards, mouth gaping, becoming more snakelike in her defeat.

  “Go back!” commanded the duke.

  Andrade screeched, turned, and with the rattle of glass on rock, sped away toward the Yotan.

  Madelyne wept in terror and shame. The duke looked down on her through burning eyes. When possessed by wrath he was so much bigger than his Earthly aspect. Fire wreathed his head and limbs.

  “You... you came after me?”

  “While you wear my collar, no harm will come to you,” he boomed. “I take care of my property, Madelyne.”

  A rush of heat conveyed her from that place. A wall of fire rolled away, and she was in the park, in the shadow of the Godhome near the bench where she had met Harafan. Upon the overgrown road the duke’s carriage waited. Markos sat in the driving seat. The drays sniffed curiously at the breeze.

  The duke stood before her, his mortal body cloaking his true nature once more. Harafan cowered at his feet in a ball.

  “This one would have left you,” he pointed imperiously at Harafan. “So fickle mortals are. A lifetime of friendship, and he betrayed you. Shall I destroy him for you?”

  “I had no choice!” screamed Harafan. He looked at Madelyne, pathetic in his fear. “Please Madelyne, please, your grace.”

  For a second, Madelyne would have killed him. Only a second. She could not be sure she would have not done the same as him in his place. Maybe she would have fled too.

  “Don’t harm him. Please, your grace. Do not.”

  The duke glared down at Harafan, as if he was going to stamp his skull into pieces under one heavy boot. Madelyne held her breath.

  The duke prodded Harafan with the toe of his shoe. When Harafan looked up, the duke raised his finger and pointed down the road toward the safer precincts of the park. “Go,” he said. “If I ever see you again, I shall devour your soul.”

  “Thank you, your grace, thank you!” Harafan scrambled up onto his hands and feet and ran away, his torn pack dribbling riches into the weeds.

  “Harafan!” she called.

  He did not look back. Something delicate in Madelyne’s heart broke.

  “You,” said the duke. “Come with me.”

  Numbly, Madelyne reached up her hand to take the duke’s.

  He helped her up into his carriage.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  An Offer of Slavery

  GARTEN AND JOSAN emerged through a stone door in a long corridor full of hundreds of others. All except theirs was shut. The doors were thin as shell, light visible behind, and joined seamlessly to the stone of the gateways as if all of one piece. As they walked away from their gate, its light dimmed, the edges blurred together, and it became like all the others.

  “This is your abode?” he said.

  “You expected a palace?” Josan laughed. “This is the Castle of Mists, and here we do not live, only survive.”

  She led him through a series of vast halls that opened themselves to him in solemn procession. Typical Morfaan craftsmanship greeted his eyes wherever he looked: flawlessly made, artful in form and symmetry, yet all of it lifeless, and of proportions disturbing to the human eye. There was a feeling of great age, but also of impermanence, giving the sense that the building teetered on the brink of dissolution, and that if he put his hands to the jointless marble it would crumble at his touch and show itself to be nothing more than rotted plaster over wood. How chilly, how damp, how drear, Garten thought. A mausoleum. Where there were windows, he saw only mist outside.

  “Do not delay!” she chided as he slowed to take in a high hall whose pointed vault was murky with shadow. “Every second Josanad stays without life, I risk losing him forever.”

  They went into a corridor encircling some other space. A number of doors of differing precious stones pierced the wall. She stopped before one made of emerald.

  “I must go into the courtyard beyond. So must you, but you cannot use the emerald door, that is for Morfaan. Go around the corridor. You will find a door made of agate, made for men. Go through that. Do not use the others or you will perish. When you are inside, do not reveal your small friend, for both our sakes.”

  Garten said he would do as asked, and she went through the emerald door. Josan’s urgency had affected him, so he rushed past the other doors looking for his own. Opposite each, matching portals led back into the castle. He came to a door made of a single sheet of blue agate, rippled with lighter blue curves, and the centre a blotched white starburst. It was so thin he could see shadows through it.

  He grasped the handle, and his mind was filled with a clamour of voices.

  “Someone attempts the door of man!” a male said.

  “A new development, finally,” said a female. “Perhaps he comes to end us, and this will all be—”

  Garten snatched his fingers back, alarmed at the intrusion into his mind. Taking a deep breath, he grabbed the handle again, twisted it sharply, and stepped through into a courtyard of middling size. Five heroic statues ringed a tree of green stone. Chill mist scudded overhead, hiding the castle’s upper reaches. The voices began speaking again, questioning him all at once. Garten collapsed to the floor in agony. He heard Josan shouting, quieting the others, and she came to help him to his feet.

  “You waste my time!” she hissed.

  “Where am I?” he said.

  A single voice spoke inside his head. Every word was a nail in his skull, but one voice he could bear.

  “We are the Marble Council. I am Mathanad, its leader. Welcome to the heart of the Morfaan empire in exile.”

  A female voice laughed wildly. “So mighty in our pomp! Fear us!”

  “Silence Lorinan!” said the first.

  Another voice muttered incomprehensible nonsense.

  “Why have you brought him here, Lady Josan?” asked another female, her voice reasoned yet cold. “Is your mission to the world of Will done? Does the enemy come? Is there a new High Legate? Bring us news!”

  “No, no, no!” said Josan, full of grief. “Lords, Ladies, please, Josanad is dead, slain in a duel.”

  “Impossible!” said Mathanad.

  “The world of Will has changed much in only thirty years,” said Josan. “Events there have outpaced us. Its heart grows weak.”

  “They use too much. But that might be in our favour. Might they then be ready?” said a second female hopefully. “Can they defy the Draathis?”

  “I don’t know!” Josan said. “I beg you, let us talk of this later. You must release to me the machineries of revivification, so that Lord Josanad can return. Then I will answer all your questions gladly.”

  “Where is he now?” asked the second women.

  “I have folded him into the two-width dimension. He is in the null state.”


  “Then hurry,” said the female. “I release the machines.”

  “There must be a vote to release the machines, Helesin!” shouted Mathanad.

  Lorinan laughed nastily. “All hail our mighty lord!”

  “As you acted before unilaterally, now do I. It is done!” said Helesin. “There is no time for debate. Go Josan, save him!”

  Josan ran out, leaving Garten behind. He did not know if he should stay or go.

  “What is this?” said Garten. “Where are the other Morfaan Josan told me of?”

  Lorinan laughed loudly, and Garten reeled as the sound pounded at his mind. “We are the others, foolish little thing,” said Lorinan. Her voice hurt more than the others, prickly as it was with incipient madness. “Five of us took ourselves into these statues. Two remained as flesh as ambassadors to your primitive kind. Now we are four, and the flesh may soon be one. Our vigil was never supposed to last so long.”

  “You tell him too much,” warned Mathanad.

  “And you will let him leave, I suppose?” said Lorinan. “His bones will lie with the others in the Court of Death soon enough. Let me talk to him, I am bored with your company, you tedious wretch.”

  There was a short silence, interrupted by the fourth Morfaan’s senile mumblings. When they spoke next, it was Helesin’s voice that addressed him.

  “We five gave up our bodies to watch over this castle and the two ambassadors to the World of Will until such time as we could return.”

  “Return? The seven of you?”

  “Five now. Qurunad fled thousands of years ago, Josanad is probably gone for good, and Solophonad doesn’t count anymore, because he’s gone mad,” said Lorinan. “Isn’t that right, Solophonad?” she bawled.

  “What? Eh?” said the fourth voice.

  “Mad!” she said.

  “More than seven,” said Helesin. “The others are safe. One day, the enemy will be gone, and we shall come home and recall our brothers and sisters.”

  “What enemy? The Twin? The perigee of the Twin coincided with the fall of the Morfaan and the end of the age of Maceriyan Resplendency, so say our empiricists. Are they right?”

  “See!” said Mathanad. “Science! Rationalism! They begin to work it out for themselves. Perhaps they are strong enough to resist the Draathis after all.”

  “In all things, two is best,” said Helesin. “As with the World of Form, and the World of Will, so were we and the Draathis we created together, we to be of greater will, they to be of greater form. We coexisted for thousands of years, until...”

  “Until they turned on us!” snarled Lorinan. “We fought. We drove them away, off to the World of Form they went! We thought it done, and we masters of the World of Will for evermore.”

  “They returned,” Garten said, he examined the statues more closely. He thought he could match their voices with their marble faces.

  “The first time they returned they destroyed our homeland, and we dwindled,” said Lorinan. “We shut our gates, and turned our attention to the creatures we had collected to serve us. Four millennia passed. We grew complacent. The second time they fell from the sky in burning ships of iron, and attempted to force the gates from our side. It was but a raid, and yet they still cast down the civilisation of men we had so carefully raised up, and poisoned the sun so that its rays burned us. We fled.” Her statue was of a laughing maiden, holding aloft a double pipe as she danced. Her expression was at odds with the bitter tone of her voice. The statue was carved wearing a diaphanous gown, revealing her anatomy beneath in every detail. But there was no sign of the lesser arms he had seen on the ambassadors.

  “The lesser arms are vulgar,” said Helesin, reading his mind. Garten winced at her soul touching his. “Weak. They remind us of the beasts of the Earth.”

  “The dracons, dracon birds, dragons and so on. All of them have six limbs. We men do not,” said Garten.

  “You are of another Earth, of another creation,” said Mathanad. “You were our servants, conveyed here to aid us in the first war, along with the beasts you husband to sustain you.”

  “What?” said Garten. This was too much.

  “It’s true!” said Lorinan. “You were our slaves. We freed you, thinking you might prosper. Have you? I do not think so. Best you die now.”

  “You must prepare for another war,” said Mathanad. “The World of Form, the world you dub the Twin, comes close. At this time, it is easiest to traverse the space between the worlds. And now the Gates of the World will open for them, you will be sorely tested.”

  “The gates were sealed,” said Helesin. “They were our greatest achievement. Once we ranged far and wide across all the many layers of existence, stepping from one reality to the next as easily as you might walk from one room to another. We were forced to shut the gates when the Draathis learned their use.”

  “And now, now!” gloated Lorinan. “You put yourselves at great peril! You use too much magic, you disrupt the spirit of the world.”

  “The glimmer you steal from the desert of the Black Sands may seem infinite to you,” said Mathanad. “But what it draws upon is not.”

  “The locks we placed upon our gates are wrought of powerful spells that require much magic. They are failing because you are greedy,” said Helesin. “You deplete the world spirit, and the magic that sustains the Earth.”

  “Should the Draathis still exist, they will fall upon your people in great number, and slaughter you all!” said Lorinan exultantly.

  “And if not, then you will return, to resume your overlordship of our Earth,” said Garten.

  “Just so,” said Mathanad. “We would aid you in this war if we could, but Josanad’s mind is failing whether he survives or not. Josan has forgotten much of what she knew. We of the council cannot leave this place.”

  “Death or slavery? That is our choice?”

  “Extinction or peace,” said Mathanad. “You were our slaves, you are no longer.”

  “But you will be our masters again.”

  “Are you not the masters of your dogs? We are as high above you as you above they. It is the way of things,” said Mathanad. “Do not resent it.”

  “But we thought you our friends, our advisors!”

  “No doubt the dogs and goats and other creatures you brought into our world with you feel you are their friends,” said Mathanad, “until they are led to the butcher’s block, or have their children snatched away. We are kinder masters than you. Without us, the era of Maceriya’s Resplendency would never have occurred. Science, magic, art, healing, power! All these things we gave to you. If you submit you shall be raised up to untold heights again, and worlds unnumbered will be yours. This would have occurred before, were it not for the Draathis. You will be safer as our subjects than on your own, you cannot be trusted to manage your own affairs. We see that now.”

  “The Hundred will never acquiesce to that,” said Garten. He turned, uncomfortable that he could not keep all the statues in view, as if they might step down from their pedestals and run him through while his back was to them. “I understand why you will not permit me to leave,” said Garten. “Very well. But who shall stop me? You?”

  “We have servants.”

  “Which he shall evade. You always were dimwitted,” said Tyn Issy, breaking her silence. She opened the door of her case from the inside and threw it wide.

  “An Y Dvar!” shrieked Lorinan. “Here, in the Castle of Mists, in the Court of Marble!”

  “Hello,” Issy said. Pressing up against the bars of her travelling case she pulled faces at the statues.

  “We are betrayed, undone!” shouted Mathanad.

  Garten reeled. The panic of the Morfaan council ground at his mind with a millstone’s power. He staggered to the agate door and tumbled through it, slamming it against the psychic racket so hard the delicate mineral pane cracked. Peace returned. Head swimming, he leaned, panting, against the wall.

  “You should not have done that,” said Garten.

 
“I don’t like them. I don’t care.”

  “The feeling appears to be mutual,” he gasped. He shook his head to clear it and could swear he felt his brain moving inside his skull.

  A wailing cry filled the castle with sorrow. Garten looked up. “Josan?”

  “Most likely,” said Issy. “She does not sound very happy.”

  THEY FOUND HER sobbing in a hall full of quiet devices. Her brother sat in a coffin-shaped, stone machine alive with red and yellow light. He was whole in body, but not in mind. Lips twitched over nonsense sounds, and he dribbled freely. He reached for his sister with all four of his arms, the fingers moving feebly to stroke her dress. They smeared gelatinous liquid on her clothes. Josanad let out a moan, dumb as a dracon-cow’s lowing, when she moved away.

  “Lady Morfaan!”

  Josan looked up accusingly at Garten, then went back to weeping without restraint.

  Garten approached her awkwardly, unsure as what to do. He placed his hands on her shoulders. Her bone structure was odd under his hands. She leaned into him hesitantly, then completely, clawing at his back and squeezing him mightily in her grief.

  After a time she took in three trembling breaths and gasped out, “His mind is gone. It did not work. Josanad, my love and hero of the Morfaan, is dead.”

  In his stone coffin, Josanad blinked stupidly. Josan’s tears returned. Garten held her awkwardly, taken aback at her display of raw emotion. When she calmed, she pushed Garten away.

  “Will you return with me, to Ruthnia?” he asked.

  “I must. Matters there hang in the balance. The chance of war between the Hundred Kingdoms increases if I am not there to ratify the election of the High Legate.”

  “You sound as if you care for the fate of mankind,” he said.

  “I do. Who wishes to see suffering that can be prevented?”

  “And not only for your own people? Your plan is to supplant us, and rule the Earth again.”

  Her inner eyelids blinked sideways. “They told you. Who we were, what we are.”

  “They told me my people were brought to the Earth to be your slaves.”