The Ice House

by Tim Clare

  She fired. Slates just shy of Hagar’s toes exploded musically. The shot rang across the esplanade. Any other night, gunfire would have drawn armed peace officers, but citizens were walking round with aprons full of firecrackers, discharging miniature cannons. Hagar looked for cover, but on the Advocate’s flat, featureless roof she was utterly exposed. The girl lined up a second shot, her signet ring winking ruby in the bloody sunset.

  Hagar felt dizzy. She had been overconfident. The fatal mistake. Time slowed.

  The girl held the gun two-handed. She closed one eye.

  Hagar took a step forward. She took another, then a third, and walked off the edge of the building.

  The alley surged towards her then the rope tied to her belt pulled taut and she swung into the opposing wall. Her boots connected hard, knees slamming up round her ears, teeth clacking in her skull. She was hanging a storey and a half from the ground. She looked up. A trickle of grit fell towards her. A jolt passed through the rope.

  Hagar’s soles skidded against the wall. The girl had unfastened the grappling hook.

  Hagar released the rope, kicked. Cobbles, red sky. She hit the opposite wall, kicked off it, and crashed into the ground shoulder-first. She rolled, throwing her momentum sideways. Her belt-boxes chattered on the cobbles. She was still.

  She lay on her back, panting. Her jacket had absorbed the brunt. She opened her eyes.

  She twisted aside; the grappling hook clanged into the spot where her head had been, flukes gonging like a church bell.

  Small mistakes.

  She stumbled to her feet. She had skinned her palms and her shoulder ached, but she was alive.

  Delphine. Was that the girl’s name? She helps you, though she may not mean to. Hadn’t the angel said something like that? It had been so long ago. Her accent was certainly peculiar. And that gun was definitely contraband.

  And let it be, when these signs are come unto thee, that thou do as occasion serve thee; for God is with thee.

  Hagar retrieved the grappling hook. Portentous or not, the girl was a potential witness. One way or another, she had to be dealt with.

  Hagar watched a silhouette drop the last few feet from a pulley rope at the rear of the wine merchant’s. She saw the smooth profile of the hood, then the robe melted, crumpling round the figure’s ankles.

  The street was steep, lined with slanting, semi-timbered houses. Oil lamps shone in large, ornate windows, some of which had been decorated with necklaces of taldin skulls or bloodwrack and other traditional wards. The sun had all but set. Hagar had trained in the darkness. In Umbris Sorores.

  She crept to the western side of the street, where it was darkest, moving lightly on the balls of her feet. The girl walked a short distance, then stopped before an oriel window. Behind the glass leered an eyeless totem of sticks and woven grass, crowned with a diadem of sea briars. Her hair shone white in the lamplight, her expression consumed by shadow.

  Hagar ducked beneath a windowsill, holding her breath. The girl was dressed for the festival – leather half-cape and a long woollen shunning hood. She pulled the hood down over her face, checking her reflection in the glass.

  Hagar pressed herself into the recess beneath the low sill. If she stuck to the shadows, the girl would not spot her until they were feet apart. Bangs echoed over the roofs of the houses. Drumskins began to reverberate with fat, bass pounds, accompanied by the frightful jankling of bellfists. The shunning had begun.

  Hagar waited. She had to know who this girl was, what she had come for. She had a part to play – Arthur had promised. Thudding came from the top of the street. The girl tightened the cord round her hood and turned from the window.

  Demons came pouring down the hill.

  Skull-masked and razor-beaked, lip-stitched, gnash-jawed, serpent-maned and pit-eyed, segmented prowling ones, skittering little ones, roaring, clicking, popping, jeering, jangle-stamping, swinging smoking torches, beating drums with clubs, rolling a barrel of flaming tar before them as they danced and swarmed and revelled.

  Colour flooded the street. Shadows stretched, solid black blades, then retracted and shrank as more and more torches appeared. Ugh – light. Hagar recoiled, hiding her face.

  A firecracker went off with an echoing bang. She suppressed the instinct to throw herself flat – her old war reflexes. When she looked up, the girl had already clattered past, shoes slapping the cobbles as she pelted downhill.

  Hagar spat. She could not let her get away. She drew her collar up round her ears and gave chase.

  Hagar stalked the girl for over an hour, from the cobbled streets of the high town down to the docks, towards the boardwalks of the stilt city. The moon was a slitted eye above the northern headland. A distant din of bells and drums carried on the breeze.

  As they left behind the southern wharfs’ vast coal-burning cargo ships and sleek clippers, the vessels grew smaller, more makeshift – turtleboats, rickety fishing junks and old river barges converted into homes. Tethered softshells slept in their giant pontoon-nests, their sonorous, creaking snores covering Hagar’s footsteps as she crept low and furtive from crate to crab pot to capstan. On the landward side, cabins stood on multiple tiers, raised on wooden posts and connected by rigging and plank walkways. A heady musk hung so thickly that it coated her tongue – a mix of tar and brine and effluent.

  Hagar slipped a cartridge into her little single-shot pistol and snapped the breech closed. She had acquired it from a gunsmith in Athanasia in part-exchange for an antique fowling piece some twenty years ago. She had just been turned away from the palace, yet again. She remembered the sting of rejection, how dust hung in the cramped shop, her cheeks still burning with humiliation. She remembered wondering if the Grand-Duc’s allies – her rivals – would let her leave the capital alive. The gun had been her way of assisting providence.

  It was nasty but inaccurate. Good for close quarters. Insurance, in case the girl was still feeling combative.

  The girl stopped beside a black mountain of nets. Boats were moored with ropes and chains. Hagar dropped behind a stack of empty cages and peered through the corroded mesh. Silhouetted, the girl glanced up and down the boardwalk.

  Hagar removed her boots and socks. She moved on the balls of her feet, stealing along the edge of the boardwalk, the sea lapping at thick christwood pilings some twenty feet below. In the faint moonlight, the girl’s hair looked silver.

  Hagar broke cover and tackled her.

  The girl went down hard. Hagar heard the crack of her head hitting the boards. A leather book went skittering across the planks. Hagar pulled her knife and straddled her.

  ‘Delphine?’ she said, raising the blade. ‘Is that your name?’

  The girl scowled, reached for her belt.

  Hagar drove the knife into her shoulder. It slipped in easy.

  ‘Tell me!’

  The girl grunted, grabbed Hagar’s wrist. She swung her elbow into Hagar’s windpipe, rolled. They clattered over one another; the dagger slipped a little deeper and the girl cried out. She shoved. Hagar skidded backwards across the boardwalk.

  The girl staggered to her feet, ran. Without thinking, Hagar grabbed a length of chain and slung it after her. It struck the girl in the back of the skull and her legs crumpled. Hagar ran to catch her, but the girl’s face thumped off a wooden mooring post and she tumbled off the boardwalk.

  The body dropped twenty feet and hit the ocean with a flat slap. Hagar ran to the edge. She dropped to her hands and knees and looked down.

  Wooziness swept over her and everything went dark. She blinked and found she had collapsed against the boardwalk. She must have gone down too fast.

  Her back was wet. It was raining.

  Below, the dark ocean slopped against the pilings, marbled with spume. She watched, waiting for the girl to surface. She could see all the way under the boardwalk. She waited. And waited.

  And waited.

  CHAPTER 5

  THIS CHICKENSHIT OUTFIT

  S
he sank. Meat in a soft black void. Then heat. Thirst. Skull ache.

  Let me sleep, let me sleep.

  She woke.

  Delphine lay on a canvas bunk. Here were plank walls and a door. She was in a small room with a low rush roof. The air was muggy.

  Her gut clenched. She sat up. The room swooned. A big clay bowl lay on the floor next to her bunk and she had just enough time to turn over before she threw up into it.

  She vomited dark fluid, pints of it. It came up easily. Stomach acid burned her throat and nostrils. She spat out the last few drops and lay back in her bunk, sweaty, shuddering. A dirty white air conditioning unit oscillated softly.

  She closed her eyes. The room lurched. She opened them again and it steadied.

  Her bunk sat low on a floor covered in coarse rope matting. On a crate next to the bunk stood a pottery jug, covered with a piece of muslin. A slit in the rush-mat blind admitted a thin knife of light that sliced the crate in two.

  She studied the jug. She had the oddest feeling it only existed because she was concentrating on it. She checked the room. Four walls of blond unvarnished wood.

  She peeled back the muslin. The liquid inside was clear. She sniffed it. No odour. She dipped in two fingers and sucked them. It tasted like water. Was she imagining water? Had she created water?

  She checked the room again. Still there.

  Her tongue felt gummy against the roof of her mouth. She lifted the jug and drank. Cool fluid ran from the corners of her mouth, spilling down her chin and neck. Her belly was sore so she sipped rather than gulped. The water had a leafy aftertang.

  She set the jug down. Where was she? The room looked just the same as it had when she had woken up. Was time repeating itself? Had she thought that before?

  More nausea. She pinched the bridge of her nose until it passed.

  She ran her thumb across the jug’s glaze. Words were etched in a script she did not recognise. What was that? Cyrillic? She looked at the thumb rubbing them. She looked at the hand.

  It was not hers. She tried to pull away and the fingers twitched and followed. A strange pale arm hung in the air. She tried to swat it and the phantom limb swiped at nothing, mocking her.

  She dropped to the floor. The arm followed her. She covered her head and shut her eyes. She inhaled, felt alien lungs stretch beneath an expanding ribcage, foreign bones straining against a tent of foreign skin. She was full of other. This was not her body.

  She tried to breathe but it was the alien body that was breathing. She was trapped inside. The heart was a kicking pain. Oh God. She was trapped, she was dead—

  She bit the inside of her cheek. Calm down, you foolish thing. What would Mother think of all this?

  Mother used to say panic was a form of regression. It was a mistaken application of tactics which had served one well as an infant. In grown-up life, there was no parent waiting to recognise your distress, to swoop in and rescue you. No adult at all – except you.

  She opened her eyes and stared up at the rafters and the underside of the slanted rush roof. She inhaled, focusing on the smell of the rope-mat floor, musty and fibrous like an old library. She counted her breaths: one . . . two . . . three . . . four . . . five. Right. Shall we have a look, then?

  She glanced down.

  The arm lay beside her like a dead branch. Three moles dotted the bicep. The forearm was covered in short dark hairs. She could see the tendon where it met the wrist.

  She imagined the index finger rising, thought about electrical impulses shooting out of a brain, activating tiny muscles.

  The finger twitched.

  She winced, looked away. Sick fear was swelling in her chest.

  She concentrated on the planks in the wall. They were rough, shaded ivory to deep orange. Her focus seemed to lock them in place. Perhaps she had died, and this was the afterlife, and if she didn’t keep imagining her surroundings and holding them together, they would dissolve and she would melt away into nothing.

  She lifted the wrist. Faint arteries threaded over the tendons. She made a fist. The flesh on the back of her hand was firm, the knuckles the same light pink as the surrounding skin. She flourished the fingers in a little arpeggio. They obeyed.

  She sat up and looked at the bare feet. Her feet. She wriggled her toes. Scrunched them. Released.

  A shapeless white smock came down to her knees. Clothes lay folded beside the bunk in a neat square – a white cotton vest, white cotton knickers and a pair of blue canvas trousers. She picked them up, turned them over. The vest had a label in the collar: FABRIQUÉ EN CHINE.

  She stood. The body stood. The two actions occupied the same space. Instinctively, she grasped for stick or bedpost. There was nothing to grab.

  She shifted her weight from one heel to the other. Balance held her as the sea holds a fish. She rolled her foot heel to ball. She had arches. She raised her foot. Took a step. She went up on tiptoes.

  She windmilled her arms. Her shoulders swivelled, loose, compliant. She strolled across the room, then marched, then sprinted. She dropped into a squat and monkey-scrambled across the matting on her hands and knees. She leapt off the bunk. She tried placing a palm on the floor, listening with her whole body for the muscle-memory of a cartwheel. Had it gone? She attempted one half-heartedly, ended up kicking her legs out in a wild, capering genuflection. Come on, Venner. You’ve got to commit. She took a run up, throwing herself into it. Her ankles swung high over her head and when she landed upright her hair flopped into her eyes.

  She threw a few punches, though it was decades since she had shadow-boxed. Her heart was hammering. When she bit down, full sets of smooth molars sank into register.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  She swung round. A figure stood in the doorway, one hand on the rickety jamb.

  Delphine spun on her heel, revelling in how thoughtless the motion felt, how it seemed to execute itself. He was silhouetted against blazing white sunlight. She swept hair out of her eyes, squinted.

  ‘It’s me, you idiot,’ said Butler.

  Delphine blinked. ‘How long have I—’ She flinched. Her voice was wrong. ‘How . . .’ It was high-pitched and smooth. ‘Ah. Ah. Ah.’ It was like a strange child kept anticipating her every word. She put a hand to her throat. ‘Oh God.’

  Butler sighed heavily. ‘Any bleeding, severe internal pain, problems breathing?’

  Delphine prodded her ribs through her smock. ‘No, I don’t think—’

  ‘Right then. Put some clothes on. We’ve got work to do.’

  In a rush, she remembered the deal she’d made. ‘Wait. Is—’

  He slammed the door.

  Delphine wriggled out of the smock and pulled the T-shirt over her head, squeezing her wide skull through the hole. The fabric had that salty new clothes smell. She hopped round the room as she yanked the trousers up her legs.

  She opened the door. Heat hit her in a drenching wave.

  Reed-thatched huts stood on a red dirt plateau. To her right, a steep scree slope climbed up and up, till it broke into rust-dark cliffs. To her left, the ground fell away, dropping forty feet to black thorns and jagged glinting stones. Far, far below, under a lamina of pallid cloud, trees rose in a dark, clotting mass.

  Her skull pulsed with a thrilling numbness. She was on a mountainside.

  Butler was skulking in the shade beneath the hut’s ragged eaves, useless wings drawn round him like a cloak. He glanced at Delphine sidelong.

  ‘Put those on.’

  Delphine looked down. In the stirred dirt outside the door lay a pair of wooden clogs.

  ‘Wait.’ Her new voice made her lose her thread. She closed her eyes. ‘Butler. Please. Is she here?’

  ‘Follow me.’

  When he rose from the wall, she saw he was wearing a maroon silk shirt with the sleeves rolled up past his elbows, and a grey sarong with gold galloon trim. He began walking away, his clogs scuffing up little devils of red dust.

  She stepped out of the shade. Her left
foot sank into dry, powdery dirt.

  Searing pain rushed. She leapt back, slamming into the hut. In the shade, she crouched and massaged her sole. The ground was scorching hot.

  She picked up the clogs. They were flat rectangles balanced on a pair of four-inch wooden teeth. She sat against the hut and fastened the cloth thongs between her toes with thumb knots. She set off after Butler.

  He was following a wide track of fine black gravel away from the huts, marching with purpose and stamina, at a pace that Delphine felt was spitefully fast.

  ‘Hey!’ she called. ‘Wait!’

  She pursued for a few lunging, treacherous yards, the clogs wobbling beneath her. She was going to turn her ankles. Christ’s sweet tree, she loathed heels. She stopped to tighten the straps.

  Liquid heat radiated up from the gritty track as she squatted, bathing her cheeks and brow. The air was sweet and thin. She rose. From the foot of the mountainside, an undulating canopy spread for miles, coating foothills and misty valleys in dense, verdant havoc. Purple-underbellied anvils of cloud pulsed on the distant horizon as they swapped lightning with the earth. The scale of it caught in her heart. Oh Algernon. We found it.

  Butler was blurring with heatwarp. She stumbled after him. Her burnt soles felt tender against the flat paddle of the clogs. She began to get a feel for them, shifting her weight onto the balls of her feet, letting the wooden teeth bite into the dirt. She focused on the crunch of clog on grit. Her pace improved. Something lithe and silver flickered across the track, using her shadow for cover.

  Though Butler appeared to be moving at a gentle trot, she was falling behind. She doubled her pace. The heat was punishing. Her vest was glued to her breastbone with sweat. Breaths came harder, thinner. She wished she had drunk more water before setting off.

  She tried to speed up; one of her clogs went over on its side. She threw her arms out, so raddled with adrenaline, she squawked.

  For Christ’s sake, woman. Keep. Your. Head. She pumped her arms, accelerating for the final, steepest part of the climb.

  She crested a rise and found herself on the red cusp of a crater pond. On the plateau beside it stood a long hut with shuttered windows and solar panels lining a wide, palm-thatched roof. A cauldron sat over a charcoal fire pit. Steam rose from its wide mouth; she smelt red meat, wine, spices. Flat grey stones lay round the pit edge, cooking papery blue fish that hissed and smoked.