The City of Ice

by K. M. McKinley

  “I did,” said the duke, his expression stony. “Maybe I should not have. You lied to me. Women come to me to be loved! To be safe and cared for. They come for the chance of an eternity of bliss and companionship. They do not come to me to steal.”

  “Some do. Some come only for the money. They use you.”

  “No more than you have,” he said.

  “I am sorry. I promise I shall be good. Please.” She slipped from the seat to floor where she knelt and rested her forehead on his thigh, her wounded arm stiff at her side. “I only did it because I promised Harafan. I almost did not. I never expected to... I... My feelings... I don’t know what is happening to me.”

  The duke rested a heavy hand upon her neck, and stroked the base of her skull, toying with the links of her collar with a long fingernail.

  “I know what is happening to you. You cannot help yourself.”

  She nodded miserably.

  “Raise your head.”

  She looked up at him, hope in her red eyes.

  “Do you think I was unaware of what you were about, Madelyne?”

  She blinked, her lips parted, but she could muster no words. “I...”

  “I knew you were lying from the start. Why do you think I chose you? Your scheme’s brazenness fascinated me. Here, I thought, is a strong woman, one that is willing to endure torment for her own gain. Such will! I thought. She might have it in her to be my equal. What kind of woman puts herself into this situation?” He sighed and lifted the edge of the carriage blind with his finger and peered out. “There are women who greatly enjoy what I offer, and have come to me for that alone. Others seek my wealth and my position. Others yearn for deathless life—although curiously few. But you, you wanted to cheat me, I admit not directly, but you were dishonest nonetheless. Cheat a god! You did not want anything of mine, you had a goal of your own. I respected that. And still we have found affection for one another despite it.” He dropped the blind back in place and looked down at her.

  “Yes, yes we have!” she said. “I have.”

  “I know,” he said. “I know.”

  She forced her hurt arm to bend so she could clasp her hands together under her chin. She bowed her head. “I know you. You are kind, and wise, and merciful. You could have left Harafan to die, but you saved him.” The crust on her wound broke, and blood dripped into the carpet.

  The duke watched the blood flow disinterestedly. “I considered it, he abandoned you. I would have burned his soul in front of him for that. But how would that have made you feel, if I had occasioned your foster brother’s death?”

  “I’m sorry,” she began to sob. “I am hiding nothing else, please do not let this be my last test. Please.”

  He was silent. When he spoke next, his words were measured and portentous.

  “Why do you wish to remain with me?” he asked.

  “Because I love you.”

  “Another lie?”

  “No! I swear!”

  “It is not the acts of physical love? Not the money? Not immortality?”

  “No, no. Those things I could find for myself elsewhere. It is you. You are why I wish to stay. You are no demon as they say, but a caring soul. I can see that you hurt. Let me stay with you, let me help you. I hurt also, in here.” She put her hand on her heart. “I have never had anyone, not like you. Now Harafan has gone, we are both alone.”

  He nodded, and growled affirmatively. “Very well. And you promise me no more lies?”

  “Never. Not one,” she said earnestly. “For everything else I have told in all our discussions has been the truth.”

  “And will you take me as your only one, and remain true to me for all time?”

  “There is no other like you. There is nobody that could tempt me. Take me back, and I will love only you.”

  He lifted her chin.

  “And do you submit yourself to me completely, body, heart and soul, to be my companion and my plaything, to obey me in all things, and to follow me without question, come what may? To give yourself to me no matter what pain I may mete out to your body, or the discomfort I might put you to. That I might brand and whip you, and push you into the heights of exquisite agony?”

  “I already agreed, at the beginning. I have not refused or departed.”

  “This is a new start, and it may last a long time, and there are many other tests yet to come. Do you submit yourself to me entirely?” he demanded.

  “Yes,” she said, sobbing. “Yes I will. I think I can. I am yours.”

  “And do you place me above yourself?”

  “I am nothing. You are everything.”

  “And you do not speak only from terror of what I might do?”

  “No. Not only.”

  The duke searched her eyes a long time and let out a sorrowful sigh. He let go of her face and looked away to hide his disappointment.

  “You are telling the truth. That is unfortunate.”

  With a single, swift movement, he grabbed the top of Madelyne’s head and twisted it with great force, shattering her neck. Her head lolled to the side, her final expression one of incomprehension.

  The duke drew in a sharp breath through his teeth and shut his eyes. He was not without compassion, and her death hurt him.

  Corpselight stirred around Madelyne’s head. A being of green light rose from her body. Her soul’s face was sad, full of questions she could not voice. The veils of life and death parted. A light shone from above, and the duke looked into the realm beyond with her. The next life beckoned. He looked into this place forever denied him, with its wonders and continuations, cruel extinctions and miraculous turns of fate. Madelyne rose toward it, but the duke grasped her ghost, digging his fingers deep into the stuff of her spirit. She looked down at him plaintively, eyes pleading, begging to be set free.

  “I do not want someone to be mine entirely,” the Infernal Duke told the ghost. “I seek someone who can take pleasure from all that life has to offer, pure and abominable. I wish to bend them, to see how far their spirit will go without breaking. You broke, Madelyne. You seemed so spirited. I will have not someone who will subsume their will to mine. I want a companion, not a slave. Gods need worship to live, my love, but I crave equality. You had to be tested. I am sorry that you failed. I would have given you the world in return for a further spark of defiance, but that was not to be.”

  The ethereal light shone where the carriage ceiling should be. A chorus of free spirits called to Madelyne from the other side of death’s veil. She raised her arms toward them in a silent plea for help.

  The duke would not release her. He stuffed a scrap of her being between his lips, and drew in a mighty breath. Madelyne’s shade struggled as it was drawn degree by tortuous degree into the duke’s mouth. His eyes glowed with her stolen soul’s light. She could not speak but she keened quietly as she was consumed, her body and her limbs slipping down his throat. Then her head, ballooning as it was forced into his maw. His jaws distended as he sucked her down. The top of her head vanished, and the screaming stopped.

  The light above went out, closing with the finality of a slammed door.

  When the duke was done, he had an eighth skull on the chain at his neck. He parted his shirt to admire it. Ghostly eyes rolled madly within its empty sockets a moment, then faded away, and it became a glass bead. The duke tucked his new necklace into his shirt and looked at Madelyne’s broken body in distaste, at her hands still clasped together in a final plea. After a moment’s thought he opened the door and rolled her from the carriage with his foot. She flopped into the overgrown road. The bushes twitched with sinister movement. Red eyes blinked hungrily in their depths.

  “Feast well,” the duke said.

  He looked up. Flickering witchlight still played over the underside of the Godhome. All over the city bells rang as Perus raised its voice in praise of the returning gods.

  The duke pulled the door shut and hammered his cane’s head into the ceiling of the carriage. “Markos! Home!” he sh
outed. “I have business in Karsa,” he added to himself. The drays bayed loudly and the coach raced away into the night.

  From the brush around Madelyne’s corpse, the Wild Tyn emerged.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  The Black Sands

  FAR OUT IN the black sands, beyond any place trodden by human feet, a lone dracon rider rode up to the edge of a bluff of sandy rock. He pulled back on the reins, bringing his mount to a halt. It stamped from foot to foot and croaked, irritated that its run had been interrupted. Shushing and patting his mount into stillness, the rider lifted a battered brass telescope to his right eye and focused it upon the desert below.

  Hundreds of leagues of glittering black sand rolled away into the east and west. Behind him were the broken nubs of ancient hills, worn down by relentless winds. North was where his attention went, toward a grey-green blur that walled the desert from horizon to horizon. Great mountains, huge and imposing, still hundreds of miles away, but so lofty their presence dominated all.

  Heat haze wavered on the crests of dunes. Shining silver pools of false water collected in the troughs. It was hot in the far north. Beyond the mountains was more desert, and then more still, albeit of a less uncanny kind. Past that, the strange and mysterious lands of Ocerzerkiya, and the emperor there.

  But there was no way through the mountains. No pass breached the High Spine.

  The rider swept the glass back and forth, caught something, and panned back. He leaned forward in his saddle, causing his dracon to shift and chir. Movement in the desert. Through his glass, he spied a caravan of dozens of carts flanked by modalmen riding their great beasts. He ran the glass up the line, to where it faded into a spreading cloud of dust. He snapped the glass shut.

  Rel Kressind unwound the scarf from his face. His skin was dark from the desert sun, a browner stripe across his eyes where his skin had tanned more deeply. Black sand stained the lines in his face, lending him years he had not yet experienced.

  He cupped his hands about his mouth. “I see them!” he shouted. His voice spread out upon the hot breeze, smeared to silence by the immensity of the desert.

  With a honking low, Shkarauthir’s mount huffed its way up the steep slope to the ridge. Garau, the beasts of the modalmen were called. They were fast, but their odd arrangement of six legs did not suit steep hills and it complained all the way to the top.

  “They’re heading dead north, toward the High Spine. There.” Shkarauthir shaded his eyes with two of his hands and looked where Rel pointed.

  Among the many things Rel had learned of the modalmen was that their eyesight was weaker than a man’s in daylight, and it took Shkarauthir a while to find the caravan.

  “We shall go closer. We shall see.”

  “They are there. I have seen them.”

  “I see dust and smears.”

  Rel wheeled Aramaz about. “Can you not see your way to trusting me yet?”

  “What is trust?” said Shkarauthir philosophically.

  “You could look through my telescope, that would settle it.”

  “A modalman trusts no device,” said Shkarauthir. “We shall see, when we go there.”

  “You just said, ‘what is trust?’.”

  “Indeed,” said Shkarauthir gnomically.

  “Fine,” said Rel. “But there they are, and they are going north, as we will presently see when we’ve wasted a day getting closer to look. You can head off my seething resentment by telling me what’s up that way. Where are they headed? There are no passes through the High Spine to Ocerzerkiya, not that I know of.”

  “You do not know everything.” Shkarauthir turned his mount around, and they descended the hill together. Aramaz darted around the garau’s feet. It snorted in annoyance at the smaller beast. Aramaz croaked happily back.

  “So you keep telling me,” said Rel, giving up on his attempts to stop his dracon baiting the garau.

  “They do not go to the far lands. They are headed to the fallen citadel.”

  Rel waited for more. “Yes? Is that it?” he prompted. “Fallen citadel? A bit more information please,” said Rel, frustrated at Shkarauthir’s unforthcoming nature.

  “Like your fort of glass. A castle of our masters, broken.”

  “And, and?” said Rel. “What is there for them?”

  Shkarauthir considered his answer a long time, or maybe he was making Rel wait for his own amusement. After a few months with the modalmen, he was beginning to suspect they might have a sense of humour.

  “That is simple, small one,” Shkarauthir said eventually. “They are on their way to the temple of the Brass God. And now, so are we.”

  Shkarauthir let out a whoop. His garau responded and broke into a lumbering gallop. Rel reined Aramaz in and let Shkarauthir get ahead to join up with his two clanmates at the foot of the hill. He pulled his scarf up over his face.

  “Bloody modalmen. Bloody desert. I never should have screwed Goodfellow Dorion’s wife,” Rel muttered to himself, and sent Aramaz running after.

  NOTES ON THE

  HUNDRED KINGDOMS

  THERE ARE NEITHER One Hundred Kingdoms in the continent of Ruthnia, nor are they all kingdoms. Instead, the collection of Principalities, Duchies, Counties, City States, one Queendom and a number of actual Kingdoms make a total of ninety-five. That is thirty-nine major states, the forty-nine minor territories of the Olberlands and the seven free cities and statelets of the so-called Herring States, which occupy the mainland coast of the Sea of Karsa.

  This territorial division is, it has to be noted, only one way of reckoning the numbers of the Hundred. Another is by the right or the custom of each country to send a representative to the Assembly of Nations in Perus. Farthia, for example, is one country divided into four semi-independent provinces, each of which has their own representative in the Grand House. Some states ordinarily send no representative, such as Kuzaki, which although nominally independent and having the right to do so, has such a tiny population it is administered mainly by Khushashia. Khushashia is sometimes divided into three separate entities by cartographers (near, north and Farside), and has in the past provided two representatives. To confuse matters, parts of Khushashia, such as northern Farside and The Black Sands, over which it claims suzerainty, lie outside the customarily agreed bounds of the Hundred. Whereas Maceriya, the most powerful of the Hundred, boasts three representatives, but could technically only be divided into two actual parts; the city of Perus, and the rest, the third representative being a holdover from its dim imperial past.

  The Morfaan, long absent from the Earth in any numbers, also have two representatives present at the assembly, and so the hidden kingdom of their remaining few people is sometimes reckoned among the Hundred.

  Many of the political entities in the Hundred are the fractured remnants of older empires. The Old Maceriyans ruled much of the west thousands of years past, and the people of Maceriya, Marceny, and Macer Lesser—as well as some other peoples—still self-identify as ‘Maceriyan’, even though their governments are often at loggerheads. Mohaci likewise dominated the southeast, although in much more recent times. There are provinces within both Mohaci and Maceriya that constantly lobby for their own independence, and they too are sometimes counted as individuals. Not only these imperial rumps states could be further broken down, but Toros is a federation of tribes, Suveren of principalities... And so it goes on.

  Therefore, numerous manners of subdivision of the Hundred are possible, and numbers of the Hundred Kingdoms (or Hundred Lands, as some prefer) can be calculated at anything between eighty-three and one hundred and fourteen.

  On the Geography of Ruthnia

  THE EARTH IS circled by two moons and shares a common orbital point with its sister planet, most commonly named ‘the Twin’ in the Hundred’s many tongues. The influence of these heavenly bodies upon the sea are responsible for the large variation in and complex nature of the tidal levels described in this book. The tidal range of the sea around Karsa’s islands can be in
the order of hundreds of feet, making for a very broad swathe of littoral that does not belong fully to either the land or the ocean. The sea can retreat tens of miles in places, while the rivers of Ruthnia are subject to tidal flow for most of their often considerable length. The Great River Olb is tidal all the way to Mohacs-Gravo, a distance of some one and a half thousand miles. In light of this, the map provided of the Hundred shows the water level at the highest or Great Tides. A map which showed the lowest tides would look considerably different. As those lands are in the main useless to the inhabitants of the Hundred, only areas that are always free of inundation are depicted.

  Additionally, the Earth is much troubled by seismic upheaval. The geography of Ruthnia tends to upland, its rivers follow major faultlines. Actual mountain ranges are found only along the northern coasts, southern peninsulas, and the east, where the Appins fence off the hundred from the Black Sands. However, much of the rest of the continent is dominated by high plateau or rugged hill country that can be traversed only with difficulty. Even the plains of Khushashia and Maceriya are many hundreds of feet above sea level, and these are cleft by the Great River Olb and its many tributaries.

  The extreme tidal nature of world’s oceans dictates that sea travel is also not undertaken lightly, much of the coast is not particularly navigable, and so many lands of the Hundred have, at different times in their past, undergone periods of isolation.

  The continent of Ruthnia occupies part of the southern hemisphere. North takes one towards the equator, south towards the pole.

  On the Languages and Peoples of Ruthnia

  THERE IS NO single common source of origin for the languages spoken within the Hundred, nor for the people that speak them. Since the sudden population of the continent in prehistory there has been much admixture of tongues, and the dominant languages of certain periods, most notably Maceriyan, have evolved into distinct language families of their own. These can exhibit marked differences to one another, having absorbed features from various original populations, but they share a common root nonetheless.