He tugged her hand, bringing her up next to him, and pointed again. “See, the two thick pillars with three thin ones between? The thin ones are behind the thick ones. You can see the lintel from this angle, a very subtle tilt that distributes the weight of the top to the side, so the door doesn’t cave in.”
“Should I be worried about that?” Not nearly as worried as she was about what his proximity was doing to her insides. Almost as if Friday night started a fire that never went out. Her body even heated in response to his closeness. Shane. Focus on Shane, and navigating this place. The rules are different here.
“With the right materials, the design is sound. I don’t know if these are the right materials.”
“Time and distance are different here, remember? Maybe physics is, too?” She pulled her phone out of her pocket and noted the time, right next to the four bars of her reception. They’d been on the slide and out here talking for a good ten minutes by her internal reckoning, but the clock on her phone only moved one numeral past her check in the inflatable castle.
Jack glanced at her phone. “Time and distance might not work the same way, but wow, they get great reception from cell towers.”
She pulled away, just enough to move them forward. Otherwise she’d let herself be frozen in place and time and just be there with him forever until they froze over and became part of the landscape that didn’t make sense or quite match, but may have come from wishes and dreams.
Her grip on his fingers tightened. “Let’s hope this place has a building inspector that knows the physics, then.”
~*~
They stepped into the shadow of the doorway. Up close, it was easy to see the unusually tall doors. Their escort scooted in front of them, winding between their legs like a blue and white cat that walked upright, but no less nimbly. “Majesty is bid welcome to Iceberghaal.” The little Frostling bowed with a flourish.
“Iceberg Hall?” Jack repeated.
Lin corrected. “Iceberghaal. Sounds Scandinavian.”
“I’d have thought it would be more Russian.” He glanced around at the entryway, with its distinct lack of onion-shaped towers and Cyrillic sensibilities. At Lin’s questioning glance, he explained. “I always thought my mom was from somewhere in the Soviet Union, and that was what made her jumpy around strangers and crowds. She never corrected me on it.”
A slow trickle of sourness curled through his gut when he thought of all the times his mother could have said something. What could she have said that didn’t make her sound crazy? His logical mind countered, but he couldn’t help believing that somehow, his mother would have known how to tell him her truth, and he would know to believe her.
She shrugged. “My dad’s a folklorist. He always says that cultures that share similar circumstances often come up with similar mythologies. Desert people have thunder gods because rain is so infrequent and life-giving that their culture gives it mythological significance. Scandinavians and Russians probably share a lot of stories about snow.”
Ahead of them, the little guy darted to the doors. The handles, cleverly designed in typical Scandinavian modernist minimalism, blended into the striated surfaces of the doors until you were nearly on top of them. A condition the short Frostling couldn’t quite achieve.
“Your dad’s a folklorist? I thought he was a teacher.” Wind had started up, blowing long strands of hair in Lin’s face, and he gave in to the temptation to tuck it behind her ear. In front of them, the Frostling jumped twice, missing both times. The second time, his body slid down the surface of the door.
“He’s a professor of folklore. It’s how he and my mom met. He went looking for stories, and she was full of them.” She shrugged. “Stories weren’t enough to keep them together, I guess.” She looked away.
“I’m sorry.” They were the only words he could say. Not having a father figure present in his life left him without the experience of having to lose one, and to pretend otherwise didn’t feel honest. “What about Japan? Do they have stories about snow?” He wasn’t even thinking when he bent down and picked the small humanoid up under the arms and helped him reach the doors.
“It’s in the lexicon.” Lin shrugged. “My Japanese name means something about snow. My mother’s hometown is all about snow. Has a big festival every year to appease some snow demon.”
“Snow demon?” There are demons? Jack whipped his head around, halfway expecting something with horns and a bad attitude to come galloping over the snow after them.
“But according to her, there’s a youkai behind every bush and under every rock.” Her tone turned derisive. “And they’re all after you.”
“Youkai?” He lifted the Frostling to the handle height, which would have been awkwardly high for a full-sized human.
She turned her palms up. “Demons. Not like devils. More like—” She looked up at the sky, then down at the snowy ground at their feet, “—spirits. Of everything. Sometimes people, sometimes animals, plants, even rocks.”
Jack made to pull the Frostling back to open the door, but the half-pint wriggled free of his grip with an injured glare, clinging to the door handle. “What on earth could you do to piss off the spirit of a rock?” To the Frostling, he tsked. “Do you want my help, or not?”
She shrugged. “Beats me. That’s why my mother drives me crazy. Every move you make ends up pissing off a magical creature. Or kissing up to one.”
“Majesty must allow this one to perform Frostling-tribe’s duties with dignity.” If a three foot tall blue-skinned halfling could grow on miffed offense alone, the Frostling would have grown four feet in two seconds.
“See what I mean? Pissing off or kissing up.” After a moment, Lin elbowed him in the side. “Although if you’re technically part of that bestiary, I could warm up to the kissing up part.”
The spark in her eyes pulled the corners of his mouth up as he turned to her and left the Frostling to his own devices. Whatever other weirdness that happened around them, feeling her in his arms struck a blessed chord of normalcy. He bent his head down closer to hers. “I like the kissing part.”
Her lips brushed against his. “Mmmm...now if only you could grant wishes.”
He slipped his hands underneath her sweater. “I could probably see my way to granting you a wish or two in the orgasm department.”
Her body pressed up against his, the laugh in her belly rumbled into his. “I’ll take you up on that one, if you—”
“Ahem!” The Frostling’s voice cut into their moment. And into anybody else’s moments that might be going on within a mile-wide radius.
~*~
“Majesty is In Residence at Iceberghaal!”
Jack couldn’t keep a guilty jump from twitching his limbs and breaking them apart from what could have been a lovely interlude of hot, bantery action. The Frostling still held onto the door handle, only the handle itself had levered downward and begun what must have been a hydraulic process, because both of the oversized doors glided open on near-frictionless hinges.
The tolling of resonant chimes robbed the mirth from her eyes. For a second, the unearthly music captivated something inside him. Mellow chiming mixed with crystalline tinkling borne up on sonorous low notes, mixing to create a music he almost recognized, but couldn’t quite place. As if his soul knew it, even if his mind didn’t. He breathed in and inhaled the music along with the cold air.
The fascination passed as voices floated out the doorway to them. He sighed, irritation pulling at his features. “See what I mean about them always spoiling the fun?” Suddenly reminded of why he was here, he glowered down at their escort. “Hey, you said ‘She.’ You never said anything about ‘they.’”
“Iceberghaal-clan live here, Majesty. Iceberghaal, as all the Winterlands, must have humble and proud kin to sustain it.”
As they passed under the lintel, Jack glanced up, expecting to find criss-crossed girders of support for the oddly-angled walls and ceiling. The lack of them swept vertigo through his brain and he
halted. “I hope some of those kin are manifestations of load-bearing devices.” All that open space without structural support made him nervous. He eyed their escort. “Don’t you people have building codes or something?”
The escort scratched his head. “Majesty speaks in riddles.”
“Pot, meet kettle.” When the creature’s puzzled expression failed to clear, Jack sighed. “Who built this place? I don’t think it’s safe.”
“Iceberghaal-clan thanks Majesty for its home.” The Frostling made an expansive gesture, encompassing the entire structure.
“Jack, they live here.” Beside him, Lin was taking in the interior in awe. “This place is huge. Like an airplane hangar.”
The opaque walls seemed to glow with aquamarine light, casting everything in shadows from palest cyan to deep ultramarine. The artist in him could have gotten drunk on the purity of the blues caught in the luminescence of the icy walls. In fact, the shadows seemed almost mobile. No, they were moving. He tracked movement inside—or behind—the far wall, a shadow that grew darker, then receded and faded as it traveled along a segment of wall. The subtly shifting light cast around the hall in random ripples, filling the silent space with motion and color.
Faint, underneath the chatter and background noise of the Oddlings gathered, he could hear pops and groans—building settlement—but also a persistent, liquid sound. Running water somewhere. Great. The place sprung a leak.
The outer walls appeared to be the only supports of the great hall soaring above their heads. He revised his earlier opinion about the hall’s inverted silhouette. The architect of this place wasn’t bold, he was stupid. Without structural support, the roof could go at any minute. He gripped Lin’s hand a little tighter. “Hey Snowflake?” He glanced upward, noting the lack of roofing trusses between the ceiling and the sloped walls.
“Yeah?”
“Stick close to me, okay? And if things start to fall from the ceiling, get to the doorway.”
She followed his gaze. “Sure thing, your Majesty.”
He groaned. “Not you, too.”
A shivering susurration of noise tore his attention away from impending structural doom to the assembled oddity of eyes fixed on him. He stared out over an audience that could have been assembled in a puppet studio. Creatures of varying shapes and sizes stared back at him from alien eyes that tracked his very breathing as he stood frozen for a long moment and catalogued the strange limbs, bizarre skin tones, and unusually-proportioned shapes.
Beside him, Lin breathed her barely-audible awe. “It’s like someone had way too much fun with the 3DFX graphics render.”
Except instead of coding the physics behind fur textures, these things looked—real. Spindle-legged creatures made of bare tree branches jostled for position next to lethal-looking figures made of icicle shards stuck together in the vaguest of humanoid shapes. Frostlings darted in and out between the shaggy, fur-covered legs of wooly bipeds, and Chillsprites shoved each other out of the way to get a better look at him. Wolves and snow leopards lounged at the fringes, at the feet of taller, slightly more human-looking creatures.
It hit him, then, the reality of this place. Behind and beneath the invigorating cold air, he could smell animal scents, the vitality of plants. The air humidified with the breath of three dozen strangely real—and really strange—creatures that should not be real. A spirit behind every bush and under every rock.
This subtle change in perspective made the building come alive. The lights were no longer random flashes, they became a pulse, flaring when the structure inhaled, and dimming as it let out breath. Jack suddenly felt a connection that went through his shoes into the floor beneath them, and straight into his solar plexus.
A low, deep thrum shivered its way through the floor. The opaque coating of frost on the far wall drifted to the floor in thick flakes, clarifying the translucent ice behind it. His higher thoughts all fell away when his eyes locked on and resolved the sight before him.
~*~
The wall opposite the entrance glowed with faint aquamarine light. But what had appeared to be lights and shadows, or impurities in the ice had resolved itself into what looked like a fifty-foot woman reclining just behind the scored surface. A fifty-foot, heavily pregnant woman.
The Frostling answered, her voice low and reverent. “She is The Great Blanketing Snow.”
“Her meltwater runs in our veins,” murmured the Evergreen girl.
“She embraces the world in quiet sleep.”
Through the wavery ice, opaque in patches, her blue, transparent body shifted. She turned her head to meet his eyes. She smiled. The bottom dropped out of his stomach at their stunning blueness, at how far they might see into him.
For a moment, a memory seized him. His ninth birthday. A clear, cold night, waiting at the window for Mom to come home from work with a promised ice cream cake. They hadn’t yet moved into the neighborhood where he would meet Bailey so it would be just the two of them, but he’d spent the evening drawing pictures of the house he wanted to build for her someday. He’d heard her bus and left the window to meet her in the courtyard.
She was turned away from him, her arms full of groceries. Her face turned up to the moon, just rising in the sky. She lifted her hand and pulled the pin out of her bun. She sighed and her hair came down. Her face in profile, lit by moonlight, might have been the most beautiful, magical thing he’d ever seen in his young life. Momma’s tiredness fell away, the worry in her face cleared and her smile held joy that made his nine-year-old heart swell.
He saw his mother now, again, in that moment. The shape of her nose, the line of her cheekbones, the creases at the corners of her mouth where she held a frown of concentration. Only this time, her shoulders were twenty feet tall.
“She is the Mother Glacier,” the Envoy whispered. “In the deepest of cold, She cradles us. It is from Her that we all come.”
“She’s—she’s—” Jack couldn’t find the words. Any description seemed to pale before the enormity of her reality. Like trying to describe the great cathedrals, or the Sears Tower, or the Pyramids. Words just didn’t do her justice.
“Huge,” Lin supplied. “The poor thing’s going to pop any second. I don’t care who or what you are, that can’t be comfortable.”
Terrified, and humbled at the same time, he bowed to her, if only to get out from under the gemlike gaze. “Ma’am.” His hand went to his chest, whether to convey sincerity in the bow or keep his heart from breaking out of it, he couldn’t say.
If the Oddlings followed him, they worshipped her. She reached one massive arm out towards the icewall that separated them, trailing a hand the size of his whole body along the wall. From somewhere outside the immediate vicinity, the sound of trickling water tickled his consciousness.
The Mother Glacier reclined within the ice, as if sculpted there, but her immense body moved through it like it wasn’t even there. She turned her face towards him and stole his breath.
“Black Ice. My sleeping child.” Eye sockets filled with delicately faceted ice, lit ultramarine from within, met his and trapped him in their countenance. “I have missed you grow up.”
Jack’s mouth went dry. He didn’t realize he’d moved until his fingers touched the stinging cold of the ice that separated them.
She didn’t seem to need to hear him speak. A gentle smile tugged at her lips, mitigating the exhaustion in her eyes. “Of all my children’s realms, this one has captured my attention the most of late.” Her breathless laugh shook the ground beneath his feet, resonated so that his internal organs itched up against each other. “A small realm at the edges of my influence, with two generations of rulers in exile. My son, was it difficult for you?”
“I don’t understand.” He shifted against the sudden feeling of having to scratch inside his skin, The churning that came when she called him her son in his mother’s voice cut through some of the awe inspired by her sheer magnitude. Magical, magnificent, she may be, but...You’re not my mom
. “Was what difficult?”
“Living apart from our kind.”
He heard the scorn in the great voice and understood not to be too offended. This was a creature for whom humans were mere annoyances. Ants scurrying around her feet and beneath her notice, living out their days in mere blinks of her eyes.
Still, he couldn’t keep his hackles from going up. His eyes narrowed. “I wasn’t apart from ‘my kind’. That only happened after your critters started invading my life.” He tried to keep the bitter edge from his voice.
“Dear boy. You should have been brought up in your court. Raised with your kin. Allowed to be. Black Ice, as your nature intended.”
He didn’t understand her references to black ice. Not yet, a small voice warned him. He wasn’t about to ask. “Don’t worry about me. I had a great life. Until your people invaded it.”
“Jack.” Lin’s voice deepened with reproach. “He was raised with manners, ma’am, even if he doesn’t use them.”
He squeezed her elbow lightly. “We need to talk about helping and not helping.”
Lin raised an eyebrow. “And how, exactly, is your hostility helping? Did you forget why we’re here?”
Right. Shane. The floor beneath their feet juddered—not enough to throw them off-balance, but enough to shift Lin’s expression from annoyed to anxious.
Jack glanced around the room, the lack of load-bearing supports nagging him. There was something fundamentally wrong about this hall. He could feel it in his gut, behind his eyes. It made him want to look away, like a skewed-perspective art piece, but nowhere near as intentional. Who built this place?
“Amaryllis never should have removed herself.” The Mother Glacier’s voice hardened, reminding him of the “glacier” part of her name. “I allowed it because your realm is an insignificant point along the border of My influence.”
Jack’s eyebrows went up. “Insignificant, huh?” He pointed to their escort. The little blue critter looked up at the Mother, enraptured, even after she’d just insulted his home base. “They don’t seem to think so.”
WinterJacked: Book One: Rude Awakening Page 23