The Ice House

by Tim Clare

  Hagar brought Räum about to face the city, smoothing his neck feathers to keep him calm. Sloping red-brown roofs spilled down the hillside, following the zigzag of mazy backstreets, punctuated by bursting fronds of green succulents. Down in the bay, single-jib fishing boats drifted alongside the new huge full-rigged steam ships. The stilt city had spread. Most of the water was still in shadow. Twin lighthouses glinted on the narrow mandibles of their respective headlands.

  Hagar rubbed the crusts from her eyes and marvelled. She felt light and sad and mortally afraid. She had reached the vast silvered barrier of the ocean.

  They could go no farther. This was where it ended.

  Late that afternoon, her feet aching, she walked down to the harbour.

  ‘I need to charter a ship,’ she said. ‘One of your steamers that visits the southern floe. With a hold full of ice. And a crew. And I need them to be ready to leave for the next four weeks.’

  The fat skipper smiled indulgently. Behind him, greenish water slopped against the quay.

  ‘Off on an adventure, are we, little one?’

  Hagar was already growing weary of this city’s aggressive avuncularity. She popped the top three buttons on her riding coat and flashed him the ducal seal within.

  ‘I am deadly serious.’

  He tugged at his beard. ‘Mademoiselle, the Festival of Tides is in just a few weeks, and just after that it’s—’

  ‘Inauguration Day, yes, I know. When can you be ready?’

  ‘Ah.’ He wafted his cigarette. ‘It is not this easy. We have commitments, the steward must acquire provisions – where should this ship prepare to go?’

  ‘Anywhere in the world.’

  The skipper spilt his mug of red wine all down his trousers. He leapt up, snatched a rag off a hook on the side of his hut and began slapping at his sodden thighs. He was chuckling.

  ‘Mademoiselle, this is quite a story you are telling me, and for that, I thank you. I will tell my friends tonight and watch them debase themselves in the manner I just demonstrated. This will be most enjoyable. I am in your debt.’

  ‘How much to charter the ship?’

  He sniffed the rag and pulled a face. ‘More than the moons and the stars, my child. More than the dewdrop wept by the fattening grape and more than the taldin’s shadow that swims through the corn.’

  He was misquoting the Consolations. It had never sounded good out of the original Sinpanian. Hagar felt a queer mix of irritation and longing. Her skin itched and she saw flashes of herself driving the pommel of her dagger into his temple, then perforating his paunch again and again as finally he took her seriously. She was a fool. She clutched at her fringe. Why had she ever believed Morgellon would change? That she might be able to reason with him? Why did she still care?

  She took a breath.

  ‘I am well resourced.’

  ‘It would certainly be a costly suicide.’

  ‘How costly?’

  The skipper scratched his thick eyebrow with a cracked fingernail. ‘Thirty dukes a day to be sea-ready, plus the cost of inventory.’ He hung the rag back on its hook. ‘Sixty a day once we’re at sea. She is a vessel of great speed, but if someone tries to board us, neither my crew nor myself will resist, so I suggest you hire guards.’ He turned to face her, squinting at the midday sun. ‘Three hundred down.’

  ‘I could book passage on steamers for the next fifty years for that sort of money.’

  ‘You could, mademoiselle.’ He stepped in close to her, and she could smell the hot sour wine soaking into his tattered trousers. ‘So I anticipate there is a very compelling reason why you do not. Yes, I think this is most likely.’

  ‘Fifteen a day while you prepare, forty a day if we cast off.’

  ‘Ho ho.’

  ‘I can get you your deposit by sundown.’

  The skipper walked to the quayside and stood with his toecaps hanging over the water, rocking back upon his heels, looking out across the forest of masts. His hair was a salt-stiffened nest of brown and grey radiating out from a blotchy bald patch.

  He rolled his hunched shoulders in their sockets. ‘Twenty-five a day in dock, fifty at sea. I’ll need at least a week to secure a suitable vessel. And I’ll need proof you can honour your debts.’

  ‘Done.’

  He looked her up and down. ‘Good. Deliver the money by sundown and I’ll start preparations.’

  ‘If anyone asks any questions—’

  ‘We didn’t speak. Yes, yes, this is implicit.’

  ‘I doubt they’ll believe you,’ she said. ‘We’re watched even now.’

  The skipper took a step back from the quayside. ‘Ah. And if they ask?’

  ‘Tell them I’ve chartered a boat for my lord and master. Tell them . . .’ She flexed her fingers, then bunched them till the knuckles popped. ‘Tell them I plan to make a little pilgrimage.’

  Later that evening, Hagar took a mallet and short-handled pick, wrapped herself in the cowl and long brown robes of a murmurer, her tools hidden and the hood pulled low over her eyes, and slipped out onto an unpaved backstreet.

  She walked barefoot, in keeping with her disguise. Shrubs with orange berries and sticky leaves had pushed up through the dirt. The earth was sticky underfoot. She heard rustling as rats ran parallel to her, freezing whenever she stopped. The humidity was high; moisture condensed on her cheeks, her upper lip. The pick swung heavy at her hip, clipping her knee – she had to hold it steady, and when she did she realised her whole body was trembling.

  She turned onto the Rue Fulmar, where the air was laced with the fishy tang of leviathan oil. Lamps burned through open windows, lit not for light but because their stink deterred pinflies. Smooth cobblestones pressed into her arches. A harka girl walking a fox mongrel on a length of twine was coming down the hill, and Hagar dipped her head, as if in penitent humility. The fox strained on its leash as she passed, dirty blond tail lashing the dust, fangs standing out in a snarl.

  ‘Coucher Dagobert! Ici!’ The girl yanked on its string. ‘Désolé, bonne sœur.’

  Hagar did not look up.

  The street led towards the oldest part of Fat Maw’s high town, the holy quarter. She passed tall box-framed houses built in the Sinpanian style from a mess of imported materials, their upper storeys leaning precariously over the street on timber jetties. Many of the big family room windows had been modified with wrought-iron balconies, from which hung drying housedresses, lotus creepers, sumptuously embroidered blankets and birdcages pulsing with sweetwings. The tiny pink and orange birds sang in cacophonous trilling arpeggios. Most houses had a block and tackle hanging from a bracket on the top storey, sometimes with a rush basket attached to the hook. One pulley had a wooden slat attached via a loop of rope, perhaps so residents could sit on it and lower themselves down to the street.

  As the road dipped back down towards the jungle, the cobbles gave way to a muddy track. Sharp stones knifed her feet. The houses became squatter and simpler: wooden frames with bark walls and threshed reed roofs. Hagar had the queer sensation she was drifting into the past. This felt more like the Fat Maw she had known. Faint at first, then rising in waves, came the sound of bells and singing.

  Tides of perfumed incense wafted from the smokelore compound, and as she drew nearer Hagar realised the occupants were celebrating a funeral. The smokers had moved into the old naval school, patching the roof with poles and canvas. Rising crookedly from one of the holes was a tin chimney. Paper lanterns lit the entrance arch. From over the grey brick wall she heard the crackle of a fire pit.

  It was odd, hearing Low Thelusian so far from the old country, the chants and the percussive jangle of bellfists, the sour floral aroma of the petty miasma. The smokemaster’s coarsened voice resonated beneath the other mourners in a sonorous baritone, rich and griefy with the tongue of their lost homeland. He sang, and others followed, some simply moaning in time, vesperi voices adding a high contrapuntal melody that keened and sliced. The street was hazy with pyre-waft.
Hagar found her lips mouthing the death chant, the life chant, the sadecstatic creed of the smokers, along with the master’s song:

  Vo yag, di maundi merto

  Den heforo, den flori sun zefoir Look thus upon this dying world A star at dawn, a petal in the breeze

  Den vot ardo sun foco A lone prayer burning in a sacred fire

  Den flati petto, den flucti com achoir A puff of smoke, a ripple and a sneeze

  Such half-truths! How perverse, to recognise life’s treasures as hollow, melting illusions, yet not to search for the treasure beyond life. How base, to accept endless cycling death and misery as one’s lot – and to call this wisdom! She longed to march into the courtyard and remonstrate with them. They were so close to waking up!

  Angry, she hurried along the street. The music faded behind her – first the words, then the bells, and finally the thump of drums. She felt dizzy from the thunder of it. They were drunk on tragedy, resigned to oblivion. Surrender was all very well – an essential step in the journey to restoration – but what of love? If all was meaningless, whence sacrifice? The fatal mistake: they believed they were just another product of the great fraud, instead of the celestial beings upon which the fraud was being perpetrated. Half-truths!

  The road sank in a twisting zigzag, edged by narrow-leafed palms and ferns with sprays of club-shaped fronds. A green-gold civet emerged from the foliage to drink from a wheel rut. The steady din of the jungle’s night chorus rose and merged with the shush of the ocean. The breeze was warm. A few stars quivered in the night sky. A tepid perfume of rain tickled her nose.

  She stopped before a set of iron gates. In the moonlight, she could still make out the words on the faded wooden sign: Jardin Des Anges De Couchage. Her memory restored the curlicued letters to their former grave majesty. She remembered when the paint was still wet. For an instant, she could smell it.

  A sentry box stood beside the gate, one side coated in climbing vines with brindled leaves and bright orange bellflowers. She knocked on the wooden shutter. From inside came shuffling. Someone yanked a cord and the wooden slats shucked up.

  A vesperi sat on a fold-down seat bracketed to the wall. Like her, they wore a cowl. All she could make out beneath the grey hood were two yellow eyes, regarding her impassively. A wire bell-pull hung from an aperture in the slanted bark roof. On the floor lay a candle in a tin holder (unlit), a large knife and a gun.

  Hagar reached into her robes. She placed her ducal seal on the counter.

  ‘I’m here to see the Ambassador.’

  The vesperi did not look up. Their hand went to the bell-pull and they yanked it in some quick, slow, quick-quick, slow code. The shutters dropped with a crack.

  Hagar waited before the gates. The rain brought a freshness. She closed her eyes and breathed in the scent of moist soil. It smelt intimate, faintly indecent. She prayed for resolve.

  With a dry scraping, the gates began to part inwards.

  There was no path, just damp black earth, cool on her feet. She walked amongst looming, swollen fungi. Rain pooled in the purple-white trumpets of manna funnels and plashed from the scaly green caps of stocky, fat false jacks. Giant white puffballs shone like fallen moons. The old stone priory lay ahead, weathered, inert.

  Behind her, she heard the gates grinding shut, the squeak of some mechanism evidently better at pulling than pushing. As she advanced, the soil became thicker, more textured, her toes sinking into a mulch of leaf litter and decaying bark. Gnarled saddle fungi stood at chest height, their moonlit folds the colour of old parchment. She passed the wrinkled, fleshy caps of godheads, hunched on puce stems like huge, dripping brains. Her robe was heavy with moisture, clinging to her skin like slimy vellum. With every step, the earth wheezed.

  The priory was a single-storey building of grey stone, its corners reinforced with trachyte quoins. Steps led to a sturdy door with iron strap hinges. The lancet windows were unlit.

  A death blusher mushroom rose from the dirt on a thick, fibrous white trunk. It was tall as a hay wagon, its cap pocked with ivory warts, its gills thickly bunched. The ground around the steps was carpeted in translucent yellow lobes.

  She stopped at the edge of the fungus patch. Her mouth was dry, her stomach a tight knot. Had the Mucorians kept their promise? Was a promise a meaningful concept to them? Voluntary obligation with implicit penalties for non-compliance. Surely they comprehended the utility of a mutually binding social contract, even if it seemed arbitrary or eccentric.

  She lowered her bare sole onto the alarm fungus. Leathery, tumorous sacs popped under her heel, sneezing a fine mist. She tensed, waiting for the death blusher to hiss, for its gills to slough apart, sighing spores.

  Rain fell, undisturbed.

  She exhaled. The glistening fruit bodies of the alarm fungus lived on the death blusher as a parasite, leeching nutrients from its bulbous stem base via a submerged threadwork of hairy ganglions. They could be cultivated to distinguish between species, even races within species – if she had been a lanta, she might have been prostrate by now, her eyes burning and filming over, her lungs filling with fluid. Or perhaps it was set for harka. Or high-caste vesperi. Perhaps the alarm nodes weren’t grafted to the death blusher at all. Perhaps they activated something deeper in the complex.

  Her feet moved from soil to stone. She climbed the steps. She grasped the door’s heavy brass drop handle, and pounded the stirrup once, twice against the scuffed backplate.

  Rain pattered against the death blusher’s scabbed crown. Trickles of water pelted the mulch with a sound like moist, open-mouthed chewing. Cold water drooled between Hagar’s shoulder blades. She shivered. The embassy ran to its own schedule.

  She heard the clack of a spring-latch. The door drew back.

  A young woman stood barefoot on the stone flagging. She wore a one-piece dark brown skeleton suit made of hide, with a row of shell buttons up the left side. Behind her, the darkness was heaped so thick that the wedge of light on which she stood seemed to hang over a chasm. Long fawn hair, twisted into loose plaits, spilled down her shoulder. Her head was lolling forward and she regarded Hagar with upturned eyes.

  Hagar did not recognise the body. A new recruit from the undercity, perhaps. People went missing all the time. She had heard rumours of floating slave markets serving villages and plantations upriver. It was easy to exploit people who did not officially exist. Unless this was a volunteer. Hagar was not sure which possibility she found more disturbing.

  ‘I’ve come for my girl,’ said Hagar.

  The woman’s skin was pale to the point of translucency, under-snaked with thin blue arteries. As she tilted her head, the hair sloughing from her shoulder resolved into a filigreed mat of fungal strands, branching from a split at the crown of her skull. Hagar held out a hand, palm up, and pushed it into the mass of fine hyphae. She felt tiny fibres brush her skin, absorbing sweat and rainwater, tasting the minute grooves.

  The woman stepped aside. The mycelium web slid from Hagar’s fingers, slopping back over the woman’s bare shoulder. A muscle below the woman’s eye ticked.

  ‘Miss Ingery.’ She spoke in a husky monotone. ‘The Mucorian delegation recognises you.’

  ‘Ambassador.’ Hagar bowed out of habit, and immediately felt absurd. She might as well salute a rosebush. Even the title ‘Ambassador’ was a misnomer, a foreign concept imported to make communicating with the Mucorians’ linked protominds via a single body less disconcerting. If she noticed Hagar’s embarrassment, she gave no sign.

  Hagar moved to enter the compound, hesitated. ‘Ah . . . Ambassador, would it be possible to have some form of . . . light?’

  The Ambassador’s pigmentless eyes were underscored with angry red crescents. She blinked.

  She stepped away from the door and padded into the darkness. Hagar listened to the slap of feet on stone, a metallic rattling in a far corner, then the footsteps returning.

  She had expected a stub of candle in a rude holder, and was surprised when the Ambassad
or handed her a modern oil lamp of lacquered steel.

  Hagar shook it, checking there was oil in the reservoir. She reached under her robes and fumbled amongst the leather pouches and cedar wood boxes hanging from her belt until she found a packet of matches. The glass mantel was smutted with soot, so she removed it and wiped the interior with a damp cuff. She trimmed the wick with the little key at the base so it would not smoke when she lit it.

  As Hagar performed these ministrations, an ache started in her gut – the old ache, the yearning cramps, the mewl of the Grand-Duc’s body craving the black medicine. It would get much worse if he chose to delay taking his next dose, but still she did not rush. She had waited this long. She wanted to see clearly for the work ahead.

  For the commandment is a lamp; and the law is light.

  The wick flared – an impossible, piercing white star. The Ambassador closed her eyes. Hagar lowered the mantle and lifted the lamp.

  The priory’s interior comprised a long, windowless stone hall. Thick oak trusses spanned a vaulted roof. Small recesses in the walls held oil lamps identical to Hagar’s – the one nearest the door was vacant. There was no furniture, nor tapestries, nor icons. Footprints led across the dusty flagstones to a flight of steps, heading down.

  Hagar descended.

  The old Calvarian catacombs had acquired a dry, bitter scent since the Mucorians’ arrival just over seventy years ago. Poor Tonti had approved the embassy’s location – an overgrown ruin on the edge of town, away from any houses but high enough up the hill to be safe from seasonal flooding. It had been one of his first acts as Prefect after Morgellon brought him in to replace Anwen. In a pattern that would come to feel emblematic of his tenure, what he had intended as cautious pragmatism served only to distribute resentment amongst the broadest possible audience. The protests had been violent, their suppression heavyhanded and bungling.

  Ultimately, the only salve to the populace’s ill-feeling was several decades of the embassy’s presence having no effect whatsoever. Some vintners to the north had muttered darkly of wind-borne contamination during years when bitter rot or ash blight crippled the harvest, but for the most part the Mucorians had remained shrewdly obscure. Avalonian society was already replete with scapegoats – murmurers, the vesperi, the lanta – and as the wars passed out of living memory, so the few Mucorian embassies around the perpetuum – one in Fat Maw, one in Cambridge, one off in Luminix, and one in the capital, Athanasia – were regarded less as beachheads in a sinister occupation, more as quaint historical courtesies commemorating the alliance that had turned the tide against the Hilantian menace. It was hard to feel threatened by something that had always been there.