The Ice House

by Tim Clare

  As the wind dropped, she heard his mushy, chanted words.

  ‘Ma sœur, ma sœur, ma sœur . . .’

  She knelt and smiled and wept. ‘Oui. Nous sommes tous frères et sœurs dans le Christ.’

  She pressed the coat to his brow, like a kiss. Inside its damp, furry warmth, her finger found the ring-trigger. An end to suffering. One life closer to the Father. Deny my death, deny my salvation. Wind seared her cheeks and eyes. The man breathed fast and hard. He wanted this.

  A muffled thump echoed off the flagstones, like snow sliding from a roof. The coat bucked. A scatter pattern of red droplets flurried into the wild white air beyond the balustrade, then hung, as if repenting, before whipping back towards the terrace and spattering it in soft rain. Warm kisses struck her eyelids.

  Without the coat, cold was gnawing at her bones. She lifted his legs and hoisted them over the parapet. His body was lighter than she had expected – unburdened, perhaps, by death. No person remained, just the shattered trap. She rolled it over the smooth lip of the balustrade. The body bounced once on the black mountainside, then drifted, twisting into mists.

  She tossed the empty pistol after him, and, a little ruefully, her ruined musk ox coat. She felt a weight in her heart as the coat left her hand. It had served her well the last two days. Still, better not to get attached to worldly things.

  There was a small dark stain on the balustrade. Hagar looked at her rope, swaying from the eaves, too high to reach. The lodge was virtually soundproof, built to withstand the harshest mountain winters. There might not be any more guards inside – they were all concentrated down at the gatehouse, protecting the only road up the mountain – but if someone spotted that rope, they would raise the alarm.

  She glanced up at the overhanging plateau from which she had jumped. It was capped with a firm crust of snow. She could not get back up there without getting onto the rooftop, and she couldn’t reach the roof without retrieving her line and grapnel . . . which were stuck on the roof.

  She slotted her stiletto into its scabbard. Her hands trembled with the afterglow of combat. She was not getting out the way she had got in. At the far end of the house, a wooden balcony hung above a swirling white void. She could not reach it from outside.

  Hagar tightened the straps on her knapsack. Plans were a form of attachment – they made one cling to certain outcomes, blinded one to new possibilities. The conditions had changed. So must her strategy.

  Hagar rang the bell at the servant’s entrance and when a maid answered, Hagar garrotted her. The girl was perhaps sixteen – although after almost four centuries Hagar found it difficult to judge age – with large ears that managed to be rather fetching in their scooped, creamy flamboyance, like Easter lilies, her cinnamon hair tucked behind them, the capillaries in her wide eyes bursting as her face turned the colour of blood sausage.

  It was an unpleasant business, especially the finish, when the girl was no longer fighting but Hagar had to make sure the job was done, gripping the wire while the girl hung limp. Hagar shot glances into the corridor to check no one was coming. At last, the body slumped. Hagar felt a terrible sadness in her belly and she bent and kissed the girl’s clammy temple and pressed the lolling head to her breastbone.

  There was a closet for coats and shoes that stank of leather and boot blacking. Hagar folded the body up behind the coats, upon its side with the knees tucked up to the beautiful pale ears. She covered it with a fur-lined oilskin. She envied it that comfort, that final rest. Hagar closed the closet and was about to step out into the snow when she remembered why she had come.

  Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour.

  She crept into the lodge.

  The inner walls were all smooth-planed golden timber, the ceiling lined with sturdy beams. She heard muffled clanks and bangs a short distance ahead. From beneath a door at the end of the corridor wafted a rich, gamey aroma.

  ‘Adoleta?’ The voice came from the other side – female, vesperi, harassed.

  Hagar backed away, holding her breath, and followed a fork in the corridor, until she reached wooden stairs leading up.

  Now she was out of the scything wind, sensation was returning to her extremities, and with it, pain. Her feet throbbed as she climbed towards a door padded with studded blue leather. The staircase seemed incredibly long. A burrowing, penetrating ache had started in her skull. Crossing the mountain, she had travelled light. Since making camp just below the treeline the previous night – where the fire had allowed her to turn snow and the last of her barley into a tepid porridge, to which she had added her final sliver of goat’s butter – she had eaten nothing but nencha, the local sugar biscuits: fatty, sweet and, in these temperatures, hard as slate. Her stomach gurgled, her lips cracking when she clenched her teeth. Within her gloves, her fingers burned.

  She had made a misjudgement, coming the long route. At the inn, the guide had warned her in his lilting highland dialect that the harsh winter was not yet over.

  But he had worn that condescending smile, that look that said: and of course you are just a little girl.

  Yet she had plied him with wide-eyed questions, and he had continued to drink his port-wine, and he had confirmed, hypothetically, the route one might take up the east face, marking the path on her map. She did not ask for the route to the Prefect’s lodge – never reveal your true destination – but the last portion of the climb had looked easy enough.

  And now her eyes were streaming, not out of remorse, but from partial snow blindness. She felt faint. The guard must have hit her harder than she had realised.

  The best plans are the most unwise. That is why no one sees them coming.

  Hagar decided that this plan had been very, very unwise. That was why it was so brilliant. That was why her larger plan would work. It was so audacious, no one would see it coming. Not Morgellon. Not even Arthur, silly boy. She clutched at the stair-rail and missed. Down in the corridor, she heard the kitchen door open: ‘Adoleta!’ Then her legs gave out, and there was weightlessness, sleep.

  The first thing she felt was the press of the flames.

  Her body was burning.

  She tried to move and hot scourges mortified her flesh. Her arms were pinned by her sides. She opened her eyes. They were raw and weeping and she was blind.

  She opened her mouth to cry out. Her tongue was dry and swollen. She inhaled. The air was hot, smoky. She blinked; blinking hurt. Light stung her eyes. Crushing pincers pressed into her temples.

  She moaned. Her voice sounded weak and bleating. The squalor of her self-pity brought her round. She was alive. She still had a chance to make things right. The acrid-sweet smell of gopherwood hung in the air. As she blinked and squinted she saw the joists of a high timber ceiling. She was in the lodge.

  She tried to rise and again pain flared across her skin. She was headsick; her legs ached as if they had been clubbed. A heavy gorilla fur blanket lay on top of her, pinning her down. She slipped a hand over her belly.

  She was naked. The flesh felt clammy-cold.

  Panic lanced through her. She tilted her head to hunt for her clothes and the room lurched; she thought she was going to vomit.

  ‘Hagar?’

  A male voice. She recognised the nasal vowels and breezy intonation – the stress landing on the second syllable instead of the first, so her name sounded exotic, vaguely lewd. She writhed, trying to burrow under the covers so he could not see her.

  ‘No, no,’ he said, coming nearer, ‘please – don’t move.’ The scrape of a stool. ‘I bring you some soup.’

  Hagar dragged an arm up from under the blanket and with great effort rubbed her watery, stinging eyes. The room was oppressively bright. She squirmed down beneath the covers, her limbs protesting, until the gorilla pelt came up to her nose.

  A middle-aged vesperi servant with teak fur and a white cloth cap set down a tray at the bedside. Hagar tried to bring her into focu
s and the ache behind her left eye intensified into a migraine. She closed her eyes. The pain receded.

  Footsteps led away over rug, bare boards, then stairs. The servant had gone.

  Prefect Colstrid grunted, his stool creaking.

  ‘It is you, eh? Not some trick?’

  She allowed her eyelids to part ever so slightly, peering out through slits. Colstrid had put on weight; his jaw and neck had melded into a contiguous bulge of tallowy flesh, and his loose-knit blue sweater swelled around a statesmanlike paunch.

  ‘My cook finds you below stairs, unconscious, bleeding. You have no coat. You are wet, freezing. How is this possible, strange sister? Were you attacked?’

  Hagar groaned.

  ‘Ah, forgive me. I ask too many questions. Here – eat soup.’ He leaned across to the tray and with fat, gold-ringed fingers took a white porcelain spoon, dipping it into a bowl of yellowish broth. He began conveying the spoon towards her concealed lips, one hand cupped beneath it. She gritted her teeth and shook her head vigorously.

  ‘You must warm up,’ he said. ‘It’s good. Look.’ He lifted the spoon to his full, rosebud lips and tilted it, slurping. ‘See? Not poisoned.’ He winked.

  Beneath the blanket Hagar shuddered.

  ‘Clothes,’ she whispered. He throat felt itchy and raw.

  Colstrid frowned, then his eyes widened. ‘Oh! Of course.’ He turned and indicated a point in the room which Hagar’s blurry vision could not yet discern. ‘If you’d remained in your wet things you would have most certainly died. They’re drying in the laundry room. In the meantime, you may borrow these from my maid.’ He placed his palms on his knees and stood with a snort. ‘She seems to have sneaked away for some private time with Mr Garn yet again, so it is only fair.’ He sighed, then the sigh became a chuckle and the chuckle became a cough. ‘Oh dear. I think soon he comes to me to ask my permission to marry. Her family has worked for me three generations, you know?’ He took some folded clothes from the back of a chair and padded to the bed. He chuckled. ‘I remember when her grandmother was just a little girl, scrubbing pots in the scullery.’ He placed the clothes next to Hagar’s pillow. ‘Does time ever slow down again?’

  Hagar was thinking about her belt, with her stiletto knife, and her tunic, with her garrotte wire threaded through the sleeve, and her knapsack, with its precious cargo – all down in the laundry room. Bracing against the pain, she spoke:

  ‘Go . . . away.’

  ‘Hmm?’ He glanced up while lowering his backside onto the stool.

  ‘Go . . . away . . . so I . . . can . . . dress.’ The effort of talking left her breathless.

  ‘Ah!’ He began shuffling round on the stool, exposing his wide back. Providence was offering her an opportunity. She checked the tray for a fruit knife.

  But even leaning forward made her head swim. She was too weak.

  ‘Go . . . out.’ She coughed, and it felt like a kick to the chest. ‘Please.’

  Colstrid slapped his thigh and rose, shrugging. ‘Very well. Make yourself at home.’ Some of the conviviality had left his voice. ‘When I return, perhaps you answer my questions, eh?’ And he stomped away in his heavy house slippers, the stairs groaning as he descended to the ground floor.

  Hagar grabbed the clothes – white cotton underwear, long johns, a cotton slip, a blue woollen housedress and a pair of long blue socks. Garments passably warm enough for a well-heated house. Outdoors, she might survive fifteen minutes.

  She felt as if she had been drugged. Perhaps sweet Tonti was at long last growing canny. Dragging each piece of clothing under the covers, pulling the scratchy long johns over her tender legs – these actions felt complex as teasing frayed thread through the eye of a needle, or stitching shut a wound. Her swollen joints ached. She found bruises on her shoulder, where she must have fallen, and another on her face, where the guard had struck her.

  As she dressed, moving grew easier. Little by little, the sick, whirling sensations subsided. She heaved herself up onto her elbows. The bed was next to a huge open fireplace, heaped with blazing logs. A large black iron poker stood against the jamb, blunt but heavy-looking, and beside that an iron toasting fork, with three prongs that tapered to narrow points. Above the fireplace was an oil painting of Colstrid as she remembered him, at his inauguration over sixty years before, leaner, his lush dark hair swept back, clad in the ceremonial white robe, kneeling before Lord Jejunus, his chin raised, the sword point at his throat. A valet’s oaths of fealty were to the perpetuum, but Morgellon’s rather direct interpretation of the rites left onlookers in no doubt as to whom he considered the ultimate authority. The artist had filled the Spire chamber with long austere shadows, which Hagar thought fanciful given the river of candles surrounding them. She spotted herself, off to the right, also in her whites, but standing, her head lowered, identifiable only by her shortness and her ragged bald strip which the artist had taken great pains to capture, a lurid pink against the drab mustard of her long hair.

  Vanity! How foolish that, even now, her ugliness made her heart hurt a little. Why did she care? The only one whose opinion she had ever cared about was dead. She had watched the beautiful grow old many, many times over. She would never experience their slow, hollow agony. She had always been wretched.

  And there, at the back of the picture, was Mitta. His black marble effigy gazing down upon the ceremony. Deathless. Her breath caught. God damn him.

  On the tray at her bedside was a teapot in the shape of a mammoth, all shaggy and indomitable with its exaggerated snout-spout leaking braids of steam. She shuffled to the edge of the bed, her legs aching as she swung them floorwards. She picked up the pot with both hands and, trembling, poured herself a cup. Her thoughts were churning, folding back on themselves. She needed heat.

  She spooned clear honey from a clay jar into the tea and swirled it until it dissolved. The cup scalded her palms but still she clutched it tight, willing strength back into her limbs.

  Through big glass screen doors she saw the balcony, and snow glowing against the black night beyond. Sudden flurries galed from the abyss; every so often, a chunk would pad softly against the pane, sticking.

  Any moment they would find the body. Armed guards would rush up the stairs. Perhaps Colstrid would have her tortured. If he were wise he would have her hurled into the valley.

  She sipped her tea, scalding her tongue. She was growing feverish, irrational. Little Tonti suspected nothing.

  Her mission had not yet failed. She must remain calm. All she had to do was get warm, deal with him and escape.

  Her heel knocked an object beneath the bed. She fished for it with her foot, her calf aching, and her toes found the edge of a small black box.

  She picked it up. It was light and smooth, with a round lens on the front and a rectangular glass window set in one corner. She had seen cameras before, but this one had a suspect compactness, an alien sparseness of design that smacked of contraband. Probably either Colstrid or one of his servants had hidden it when they laid her in the bed. Theoretically, possession of a single object from the old world was grounds for a reprimand, a humiliating self-criticism session, and a loss of face before the Grand-Duc’s assembly, but in practice it was the kind of peccadillo everyone with connections to the Albion threshold security indulged in – an unspoken perk of seniority.

  Hagar hefted the device thoughtfully. From the little she had gleaned from smuggled newspapers, lately the old world had become a carnival of diabolic wonders. Vast electrical brains connected every home, consulted daily by patient, trusting families. Bombs could turn cities to ash in a finger snap. Fist-high fur-coated automata muttered arcane gibberish. Resplendent miracles jostled with unfathomable gewgaws.

  Of course, these trinkets could not be allowed to reach the masses. They would turn indifference and disdain towards rumours of the closed-off barbarian world into fascination, perhaps worship. Most ordinary citizens were sceptical that another world existed.

  She held the cam
era against her chest, its lens pointing towards the sliding glass doors, the wooden balcony, the falling snow. A box that captured time. Hast thou entered into the treasures of the snow? Or hast thou seen the treasures of the hail, which I have reserved against the time of trouble, against the day of battle and war? How could these queer riches not set a yearning in their owners’ hearts? They were whispers of ingenuity and defiance, haughty little Babels that seemed to thrum with an inner fire. She pictured lost people all round that strange cousin planet, sitting on beds just as she was, surrounded by their glowing, nickering treasures, blank and heart-hollow, lonely, trapped.

  Outside, spots of white swirled against black. She felt on the box for a switch. Oh Mitta, that you would come back to me. That I could have rescued those moments. Her finger found a sunken button. She pressed. A click. A bright flash. The camera whinnied; a slot at its base spewed a glossy tongue of card.

  ‘Hagar!’ Colstrid’s voice boomed up the stairs. ‘Are you decent, my dear? Cry out if not!’ But already his house slippers were thudding up into the room.

  Startled, she bent over, set the camera on the floor and backheeled it under the bed. She came back up too fast – her head swam and the room dimmed. She grasped at the bedside table, jolting the tray so the cutlery clattered. Scalding soup slopped over her fingers.

  She winced and wiped her hand on the gorilla skin.

  ‘Aha!’ said Colstrid. ‘She is risen.’

  He leaned one palm upon the newel post, a slight sheen on his brow and jowls, his other arm trailing behind his back. ‘There’s someone who wishes to meet our surprise visitor.’ He glanced over his shoulder. ‘Come on then, my darling.’ He stepped aside to reveal a female child of perhaps six years with odd, bulbous eyes and wide cheeks, clad in a one-piece garment of blond llama wool with attached bootees, a hood hanging down the nape and a glass clamp jar dangling by a loop of wire from her curled fingers. In the jar floated dozens of tiny polychromatic transparencies.