The Ice House

by Tim Clare

  No need to hide Tonti’s fate. Besides, there would be other bodies.

  She went out onto the balcony and washed her hands in snow. She scooped up more and scrubbed her face. When she stepped back into the attic the skin across her cheeks and brow felt tight and glowing.

  Hagar poured the last of the tea. It was lukewarm and sour, enough to make her lips purse. The cup shook as it left her lips. Black leaves swirled in the bottom of the cup.

  She draped a pillowcase loosely round the poker and dipped the end in the soup. Cradling it, she walked towards the stairs.

  Creeping barefoot through the narrow lodge corridor, Hagar could hear Tonti’s cook Jai singing both halves of a two-part piece: a low, slow harmony under quavering noseleaf trills. There were gaps – short periods of silence – where doubtless the song continued in a range only skyfolk could hear. That was the fatal problem with the vesperi – they dipped in and out of groundfolk’s perception. Some part of their world would remain forever unknowable, and that which we do not know, we fear.

  Hagar thought she recognised the refrain, maybe from the Siege of Atmanloka. Could it really be that old? Of course, back then many tens of thousands of voices would have joined in chorus. But which side had sung it? The defenders? Or the victors? Her memories were so elusive.

  She smiled sadly at the irony. Jai was lulling the human child to sleep with a battle hymn.

  As she neared the door Hagar did not bother to soften her steps. There was no sense in trying to sneak up on a vesperi. One could not disguise one’s presence. Only one’s intentions.

  Hagar placed her palm against the oak-panelled door. The lullaby faded and stopped.

  She entered. Jai sat at little Agatha’s bedside. She had high, hunched shoulders and a grey woollen dress that came down to her bootcaps. Her furled wings were bound with a sash. In her cotton-gloved hands she held a bowl of milk, a wooden spoon resting in a groove on its lip. A taper burned on a small cupboard covered with lace. The walls of the room were decorated with framed cases of crickets, locusts and moths under glass, each creature pinned and identified with a handwritten name card. Agatha lay with her head sunken in a stack of three pillows, the purple and red damask quilt drawn up to her chin. On her bedside table, a pastille smouldered in a blue china dish, giving off a sharp whiff of gunpowder, pennyroyal and loam – the type doctors prescribed for feeble lungs.

  Jai swivelled her head, candlelight picking out her stern projecting jaw, the ears that hung above her scalp like a black hood. She was unafraid.

  Hagar held out the soiled pillowcase.

  ‘I got soup on my pillow,’ she said. Concealed by folds of cotton, the iron poker lay cool and weighty across her two palms.

  Jai’s yellow eyes narrowed. ‘Where’s Master Colstrid?’

  It was strange, how similar the dry, faintly lisping Athanasian vesperi voice was to her own. It gave Hagar pause, long enough that Jai frowned, and Hagar had to twitch herself alert.

  ‘Upstairs. Will you fetch me a new cover? It was my fault. I wanted to ask you myself.’

  Jai glanced from the pillowcase to Hagar. She was on her guard. The smooth ridges around her nostrils expanded as she inhaled.

  Hagar waited for a moment of distraction.

  ‘If it pleases you, Miss Ingery, I’ll bring fresh bed linen once I’ve put Mistress Agatha to sleep.’

  Hagar took a step forward, smiling. ‘I can put her to sleep.’

  Jai hooked her thumbs over the rim of the bowl. Did she suspect? Or was she just resentful at the intrusion?

  ‘No, thank you.’ She spoke in a firm monotone. ‘The master requested I tend to her.’

  Hagar cast a slow glance back towards the stairs. ‘I’m quite sure he won’t object.’

  Jai set the bowl down. She glanced at Agatha.

  ‘Aggie?’ she said. The child gazed in wonder.

  Jai blew out the candle.

  The room went black. Hagar blinked, as if the problem were her eyes. At the sound of movement, she recovered her wits and lunged, swinging the poker in a broad backhand.

  It swished through space. The tip banged into the wall, scratching the timber with an ugly rasp.

  A breeze kissed the nape of her neck. Behind her, the door slammed.

  It might be a bluff. In the darkness, Hagar visualised the spot where the child’s head had lain, stepped towards it and brought the poker down hard. Iron thumped pillow.

  Jai had fled with Agatha. Hagar staggered – dizzy, impressed. She had not expected such decisiveness. Her plans were unravelling.

  Jai might hesitate to assault a handmaiden, but if she reached the gatehouse Colstrid’s guards would protect her and the child. Hagar could not kill them all. She was not even sure she could kill Jai in a fair fight.

  But witnesses meant failure.

  She groped for the door handle, finding it on her second attempt. As she stepped out into the dimly lit corridor she heard footsteps echoing towards the lodge’s grand hall. She ran.

  When Hagar reached the landing, Jai was halfway down a flight of green-carpeted stairs, clutching little Agatha to her chest. Below, candle stumps shone in clay candelabra on circular glass tables. The stairs descended into a grand hall decorated with yak rugs and leather divans and a stuffed snow gorilla posed in a fearsome attitude, its raised arms casting a long, antlered shadow up the wall.

  Hagar flung the poker overarm.

  Agatha cried out: ‘Jai!’

  The poker flew in a tight arc, spinning. Jai turned and it scythed through the space where she had been. It struck the snow gorilla’s head with a whump. The gorilla rocked on its marble plinth; Jai spun to face it.

  Hagar was on the stairs. Her joints ached and a liquid fatigue dragged at her limbs. She had overreached herself – she had not counted on a pursuit. Without turning round, Jai tugged at the knot securing her wings. The sash fell away, her wings spread like huge black sails and she leapt over the bannister, leathery envelopes filling as she spiral-glided to the floor.

  Hagar leant over the waxed wooden rail. Jai landed heavily, weighed down by the child. She hobbled towards a corridor. Perhaps the front doors were locked.

  It was too far to jump. Hagar almost called out: I only want to talk to you! But that would have been a lie.

  Besides, the cook was too smart.

  Hagar ran. Her feet were sacks of wet sand. How foolish she had been! Of course Jai had checked Hagar’s clothes and found the misericord. Of course she had suspected Hagar’s intentions. Jai knew the lodge. She was fit. She was energised by fear.

  A yak rug rucked under Hagar’s feet as she rounded the newel post. She grabbed a clay candelabra as she passed, hot wax splattering her forearm. The pain focused her.

  Jai shouldered through a service door and it swung shut behind her. Hagar ran down the hallway. She kicked the door aside and found herself on the staircase leading down to the servants’ quarters – the one she had been climbing when she passed out.

  Jai and Agatha had vanished.

  Shadows stretched and see-sawed in the guttering candlelight. Hagar descended, listening. At the foot of the stairs, she was about to turn right, towards the servants’ entrance, when she heard the faintest noise from the opposite direction – a short high note that cut off.

  A child’s muffled sob. It was coming from the kitchen. Hagar followed it.

  The lodge was built into the cliffside. If Hagar remembered rightly, any kitchen windows would open onto a sheer drop. Jai and the child were trapped.

  Jai would hear her coming – Hagar pictured the vesperi flattened against the back wall beside the range, cowering, or perhaps standing tall, defiant – and so, wishing to calm the poor wretch, she called:

  ‘Pour la vie sois en paix, et que la paix soit avec ta maison et tout ce qui t’appartient! I have no desire to cause you suffering!’

  Which was true.

  She had no weapon. She tested the candelabra in her fist. It felt light and brittle.

&
nbsp; She put a hand to the kitchen door and pushed. It moved an inch and stopped. Something heavy was wedged against the base.

  Hagar shoved. She turned her shoulder and barged. The door rattled but did not budge.

  ‘Sister!’ she cried. ‘I bear you no ill-will.’

  ‘I’ve rung the bell that summons the guards!’ Jai’s cry came from deep within the kitchen. ‘They’ll be here in minutes!’

  Hagar’s neck hairs prickled. An alarm? The plans she had read mentioned nothing about an alarm in Colstrid’s lodge. Was Jai bluffing?

  Perhaps it had been recently installed. It made sense to have some means of alerting the gatehouse – and Colstrid had certainly been paranoid. If Jai spoke the truth, Hagar guessed it would take five minutes for armed guards to run up the long, curving mountain road and reach the lodge.

  Hagar barged the door harder.

  ‘Let me in!’ She barged it again, pain blasting her shoulder. ‘You don’t understand! I’m trying to save you!’

  Hagar stopped, out of breath. The door was thin – made for swinging aside easily when a maid emerged with platters of hot food – but sturdy enough that someone as small as her would never break it down before the guards arrived.

  She stepped back, her shoulder smarting. Could she start a fire? Ridiculous. Even if she found fuel, it would take too long. Besides, fires were unpredictable – good for destroying evidence, less reliable for killing. If either Jai or Agatha survived, she was undone.

  She glanced about the corridor. To her left was a door with a small steamed-up porthole. She opened it and went in.

  Cotton undergarments hung from great clotheshorses suspended on pulleys. An iron stove burned in the corner. Several brown felt bodices had been fastened – rather immodestly – around its thick black chimney, moisture beading on their surfaces as they dried. Next to the stove was a basket of split logs and an axe.

  She spotted her clothes, hanging from a rack. She had nearly forgotten them. Aside from anything else, they were evidence placing her at the lodge.

  She slipped off the borrowed housedress and donned her socks, boots and her trousers with their belt of boxes and holsters. The misericord was still in its sheath, and as she fastened the belt buckle – listening all the while for movement out in the corridor – the dagger settled at her right hip. Already she felt the old faith returning, the surety of purpose.

  She found her goggles hanging from a peg and put on her blouse and tunic. She fastened crampons to her boots – though they were cumbersome indoors, she would have no time to attach them once she left the lodge. On the floor, most vital of all, was her little knapsack. She checked the smooth bundle inside. Her gut clenched at the thought of using it. But perhaps she would be forced to.

  She felt her cuff for the stiff loop of garrotte wire. Still there. She inhaled hot, damp, scented air. It was time.

  She picked up the axe and walked back to the kitchen door, cleats clacking on the boards.

  The blade bit into the wood beside the hinges with a resonant bang. It was hefty and sharp and the door panel was flimsy. Hagar swung the axe with her whole body. On the second stroke, the axe head punched through and she had to brace her boot against the lower part of the door to tug it out. Splinters fell with the soft whisper of ash.

  She felt dizzy and had to steady herself against the wall. The floor seemed to flex and tilt. When she tried to lift the axe, her arms did not want to obey. Feebleness spread through her limbs.

  He giveth power to the faint; and to them that have no might he increaseth strength. Hagar squeezed the axe handle until the tremors rose up her arms. She bit down on the inside of her cheek. She would not fail. She was an instrument of salvation.

  She hacked two ragged slits into the upper panel of the door, then pounded a hole between them with the flat of the blade. Behind, the kitchen was solid black.

  She pushed the candelabra through the gap. Two of its flames extinguished. The dimensions of the room shifted, lit gold and red and purple. Long shadows stretched towards a far wall. A piercing breeze carried the salty, sweet scent of snuffed tapers.

  ‘Sister Jai?’ she said.

  A plaited brown loaf, half sawn into rounds, sat in the centre of the kitchen table. A pair of plump, silvery fish lay nose-to-tail in an earthen dish, strewn with white crescents of shallot, soaking in a marinade up to their sumptuous iridescent lips. Beside these were a chopping board, a bottle of dark rum and an empty mug.

  Hagar’s eyes were watering from the cold. She could hear the faint, mournful lowing of the wind in the valley.

  A window was open.

  She hoisted herself through the hole in the door. A coal scuttle was wedged between the door and a cupboard.

  Another of the candelabra’s flames went out. A single, trembling light remained.

  She eased the candle’s flame left and right, taking care not to snuff it by moving too fast. Bronze pots and pans lined shelves like skulls in an ossuary. There were glass jars of pickled fish, racks of boning knives and shucking knives and fruit knives, deep ceramic pudding bowls decorated with images of leviathans, and a cast-iron meat grinder bracketed to the wall, candlelight picking out the fluted profile of its funnel, the dark honeycomb mesh, the hand-crank hanging like a withered limb.

  Hagar reached for the sheath at her hip and closed her free hand round the hilt of her stiletto.

  Gingerly, she stepped round the table. A tub of sugar had been upset at the foot of a pie cupboard. Perforations in the cupboard’s tin panels formed the eight-pointed star of the perpetuum. She advanced, the sugar crystals sparkling like snow.

  A gust ruffled her hair. The flame snuffed.

  Blackness.

  Dropping the candelabra, she ducked and rolled. A grunt, a clatter, then a BOOM inches above her head. She was under the table. Something had struck the upper side, hard.

  Obviously Jai no longer felt constrained by the laws against assaulting a handmaiden. In the dark, a vesperi had an overwhelming advantage.

  Hagar scuttled backwards under the table. She listened for movement. Jai would be listening too, could hear a hundred times more clearly. With every passing second, the guards neared the house. The quieter the room became, the easier it was for Jai to discern Hagar’s precise position.

  Aha.

  Hagar sprang onto her haunches, pressed her palms and shoulders to the table’s underside and shoved. The table resisted, then rose. Objects slid down it. A bread board clattered to the tiles, then wooden spoons, shattering crockery, the jangle of knives and spoons. She charged forward on her hands and knees.

  She could perceive vague outlines – a few faint angles where moonlight caught the edge of a cupboard, the scalloped rim of a salver. She stabbed at the darkness with her stiletto. She had studied blindfighting back at the Sciamachian Order, but it assumed both combatants were equally disadvantaged.

  A hand yanked her tunic collar. Jai slung her round in a tight arc. Hagar slammed into a cupboard door face-first, the brass handle socking her in the eye. She pulled the door open – a blade thocked into the opposite side. Milky light frosted the thick edge of a cleaver wedged in the wood between her middle and ring fingers.

  She thrust in the direction it had come from, found nothing but air. A fist pistoned into her cheek. She twisted with the blow, spun and jabbed her knife back towards her assailant.

  Again, the blade met air. Another punch caught her square in the forehead. She crashed back into the cupboards. Cutlery clattered in its drawers. Pans toppled in a gonging shower. This cook was a mean fighter – but then, bare-knuckle boxing was to northern Gallian vesperi what dice games were to south-coast Thelusians.

  Still. Jai couldn’t punch what she couldn’t see.

  Hagar groped for the cutlery drawer, found it, and dragged the whole thing out, upending it in a cacophonous cascade.

  Hagar charged, swinging. She sensed movement, jabbed at a shadow and felt resistance, as if the blade doubted its purpose, so she steppe
d behind it and drove it home.

  Jai let out a tight wheeze. The knife returned slick.

  A crash. Jai fell amongst the scattered forks and spoons. She was clutching at the wound in her side but Hagar stamped on her wrist then dropped a knee on her chest and wound the garrotte wire round her thin, downy throat. As Hagar’s eyes adjusted, she could see Jai’s tapered tongue lapping at the backs of her teeth, her crushed wings scratching and slapping the tiles. She was thumping Hagar with her free hand but the stab wound had drained the strength from her. Each punch was little more than a tap – almost sporting, like the touch of a fencer’s foil.

  Hagar pulled the two ends of the wire tight and smashed Jai’s head against the tiles until she stopped moving.

  Hagar stood, feeling giddy and outside of herself. A steady glow spread through her belly as she retrieved the candelabra, struck her pocket flint and relit two of the candles.

  Her left eye would not open properly. Her teeth tasted of blood. The guards were surely almost here.

  ‘Agatha?’ said Hagar. ‘Don’t be afraid.’ She glanced at the open window. Surely Jai would not have fought with such ferocity if the child had already leapt to her death. ‘Won’t you come out and talk to me?’ She paused, listening. ‘I know where your father has gone. Je vais te conduire à lui!’

  The two fat fish sprawled open-mouthed amongst pottery shards in a stinking pool of alcohol.

  Hagar began walking down the line of cupboards, creaking their doors ajar. Inside were white plates with gold trim, crystal dessert boats, nested sieves, cooling racks for scones and griddle cakes, porcelain taldin vinegar pots, pressed glass salt and chilli cellars sculpted to look like naval clippers, lined up beside a huge silver master cellar modelled after the royal galleon, with banks of enamelled cannon and an intricate – fanciful – effigy of Morgellon himself posing upon the prow, clad in braided epaulettes, sabre at his hip, his hair swept back, facing the future with a single outstretched finger and blank, pupil-less eyes.

  Hagar fancied she heard shouts on the wind. She began marching down the line of cupboards, throwing doors open with a succession of smart bangs.

  ‘Agatha!’ Candle wax dripped onto the tiles. ‘You have a part to play! You are a very important little girl!’