The Ice House

by Tim Clare

  ‘Some lanta consider it sacred,’ she corrected.

  ‘Sacred.’ He weighed the word on his tongue. ‘Something precious, which is to be feared.’ He dropped his gaze to the twisted plants at his feet. ‘You probably think I do this for a feeling of power.’

  ‘Yes.’

  He shook his head. ‘When you study the world – really study it – you don’t feel powerful. You realise how tiny you are. How impossible it all is.’ He bent down and ripped up a weed. ‘But I’m still young. I have time. Already we’ve improved upon the godfly parasite’s work. Rats are just the beginning. We’ll unpick age. We’ll unpick sickness. We’ll save the world from the error of death.’

  Hagar felt a crawling sensation on the nape of her neck. The doctor’s phrasing was suspiciously particular. Had Arthur visited him too? Was that the source of his zeal?

  Noroc raised his chin as he spoke. Some of the old poise was returning to him. ‘Come on, then. We both know who you’re really here to see.’

  ‘Where is she?’

  ‘Where she always is.’ He pointed downwards. ‘The ice house.’

  Noroc waited until the guard had locked the steel-panelled door behind them. He bolted it from the inside and turned to face Hagar. In the cramped stone antechamber, she had to crane her neck to meet his gaze.

  ‘Remember: don’t look at them. You’ll be perfectly safe.’

  She detected no malice in his warning, but no concern either. His face was underlit by his lantern, sweat greasing the line of his jawbone, windpipe curving from the soft palate beneath. He spent an abnormal amount of time adjusting his shirt cuff.

  ‘Thank you, Doctor.’

  Droplets sweated from milky fissures in the ceiling, dripping onto the brim of Hagar’s hat. The room was little more than a box cut out of the rock, big enough for two harka to stand abreast. There were holes bored in the wall that had once held a torch bracket, from back when House Dellapeste still used this place as a prison.

  Noroc unlocked the second door with a large key hanging from a leather cord round his neck. The door opened onto a long stone corridor with a series of roughly hewn archways in either wall and a metal gate at the far end.

  Someone was singing.

  ‘Stay close,’ Noroc said.

  He began walking down the corridor, lamplight gliding over the slick, pitted rock like chalky fish ghosting a riverbed. Hagar followed, keeping her eyes on the seam running down the spine of his overalls – it made her think of the elytral suture on the wingcases of portal lanta. The air was stale and she felt lightheaded.

  ‘Hagar.’

  The voice was delicate, male, lilting. It came from one of the old cells. She kept walking.

  ‘Hagar. Hagar Ingery.’ It was neither urgent nor mocking. It sounded tantalisingly like someone she ought to know. But that was all their guile. She could feel them digging around in her head for scraps of biography. ‘The bay looked beautiful, didn’t it?’

  Dizziness washed downwards from her scalp. She stopped, shut her eyes.

  ‘Ah. Almost,’ said the voice. ‘Almost.’ The walls seemed to buzz. She could not tell if the voice was real, or inside her head. Or both. ‘Oh. But you took me into yourself. You understood, Hagar! Oh. I’m so proud of you.’ She pinched the bridge of her nose. The burrowing sensation intensified. She was losing herself. No. ‘Why do you grieve so, Hagar? I went willingly. It was you who wouldn’t let go. Speak to me. Speak to me.’ She took a step forward. ‘You cannot hide. For his eyes are upon the ways of man, and he seeth all his goings.’ The voice groaned, beatifically, almost obscenely. ‘Not an error. A gift. When will you tell the truth to Arthur?’

  She whirled round. Through rusted iron bars, sitting on a cot made from crates covered by a tatty hide, was a man with jutting shoulders, angular elbows and knees, sleek black hair and a soft, sentimental face that fell as her eyes met his. Vapour rose from the back of his skull. She could smell soap and burning.

  ‘Won’t you dance with me, sister?’

  ‘Mitta,’ she said.

  An arm locked round her throat and she was rising. She tried to cry no, she wanted to stay, she needed to hear his gentle, mirthful voice. The crackling and churning in her skull expanded into a white, ablative rush.

  ‘Hagar.’

  She opened her eyes. Dr Noroc was standing over her.

  She was sitting upright. She raised a palm to shield her eyes from the lantern.

  ‘I told you not to look,’ said Noroc. ‘They can make you see things.’

  She was in a small stone chamber lit by gaslights.

  ‘Was that . . .’ Hagar closed her eyes and massaged her eyeballs. Of course not. He was long dead. ‘I was unprepared.’

  ‘Being a handmaiden grants you no immunity – we’ve conducted tests, naturally.’

  ‘So you must run a gauntlet of, ah . . . samples with mind-altering powers, every time you want to come down here?’

  ‘We’ve developed countermeasures.’ He rucked up his sleeve. On the underside of his wrist was a glossy, shrivelled thing, like a date or prune. The flesh around it was mildly inflamed, and it took her a moment to understand she was looking at a giant, bloated tick. A brown stylus extended from its engorged body, puncturing the skin just below his palm. ‘A little breeding programme inspired by studying the resistances of our guest.’

  A device for neutralising the talents of a peer? He had been holding back. Testing her, perhaps.

  ‘Does it work?’ she said, trying to hide her eagerness.

  Dr Noroc pulled his cuff back up and used it to clean his spectacles. ‘Against these samples, yes. It suppresses any attempt at remote mental influence. But their powers are modest: mild hallucinogenic phenomena, changes in perception, mood alteration – small beer compared to the talents of our Grand-Duc.’ The innuendo was clear: he understood she planned high treason. He seemed untroubled by the prospect. He placed his glasses back onto his nose. ‘We can’t keep them in the main facility. Too disruptive. We lost some staff to . . . emotional disturbances. At least here they deter intruders.’

  Hagar stood, adjusted her hat. ‘I’m convinced of their efficacy.’

  Noroc led her through a low tunnel and down a flight of stone steps cut into the rock, moving with officious urgency. Hagar wondered if passing through the mind-readers affected him more than he let on, even with his device. She wondered what their effective range was – whether they sinuated into researchers’ dreams.

  The temperature dropped. Noroc’s lamp filled the air around him with rippling vapour rainbows. Moisture streamed down the walls and dripped from the galvanised-iron handrail. Hagar became aware of a low vibration, an almost subsonic thrum, permeating the rock, the rail, her teeth.

  At the foot of the stairs was another antechamber and a steel-panelled door. Noroc approached a wall of speckled grey-black igneous rock, lit by a single gas jet. He stooped, pressed his palm to the wall. A disguised cylinder of stone swivelled beneath his fingers. He slid it out, then took a thin metal rod from under his jacket. The rod had a complicated claw-head lined with gear teeth. He inserted the rod into the recess and gave it a quarter turn.

  Hagar watched as the steel door began rolling aside. It was a perfunctory bit of subterfuge – the seam round the hidden lock was clearly visible – but Noroc was making use of systems left over from the old jail.

  Noroc glanced back. His spectacles were milky with condensation.

  ‘Tread carefully.’

  On the other side of the door was a wide chamber of polished green marble. Hagar entered, leaving Noroc behind. Black, helical trees twisted up through the floor, wrapping round glass pillars. A stream ran through the centre of the room, crossed by a little wooden bridge. Banks of gas jets blazed in glass wall sconces. The air was rank with the stink of clotting algae, sour ferrous notes and a faint undertang of sulphur.

  Intricate bas-relief friezes decorated the walls, depicting towns and villages populated by hundreds of little people
, all engaged in different tasks: a woman sowing seeds, an old man in a rooftop aviary tending to an owl, a young woman rising into the air, children walking into a lake. There were dogs the size of houses and lots of complicated waterways and waterfalls. To her right was an unfinished room, marble melting into bare rock and mounds of earth where the roof had collapsed.

  To the north was a perfectly circular tunnel. The temperature dropped as she followed it. Gooseflesh prickled her forearms. She passed a huge library protected by glass doors, a double bed on the white sand shore of an underground lake full of tiny luminous jellyfish, and a room with a table, chairs and a large stone fireplace.

  The tunnel opened out into a massive cavern. Below spread a valley of hunched, stark trees lit by hundreds of paper lanterns. On either side rose sheer walls of red quartzite. She followed a winding grit track downwards, past branches heavy with icicles. She could hear water bubbling over rocks. Here and there were squat statues in obsidian or pink marble, odd, expressionless figures with torch sconces set into their skulls and lumps of cinnabar for eyes.

  Her breath emerged in wisps. Her hair and underclothes were damp with sweat. As she approached the grove, she shivered. She pushed through a wall of black briars. Her boots crunched on frost.

  Four partially frozen streams flowed at compass points into an oval pool, surrounded by a dozen or more lanterns. Vapour coiled off the sweating ice. In the centre of the pool, a man floated naked, submerged up to his neck in turbid, steaming water.

  He was lean with bony shoulders. Steel-grey hair hung across his face in ratty tangles. Even with his eyes closed and his flesh intact, she could sense the fire within.

  ‘Gideon.’ She took a step towards the pool.

  A familiar crunch crunch crunch.

  She turned. From the mist stomped a huge armoured golem, as wide as it was tall – brass-coloured cuirass, domed helm sunken into the breastplate, stocky legs protected by inch-thick greaves, and disproportionately long arms that ended in jointed metal gauntlets. Its riveted shoulder pauldrons were edged with black metal trim. Sprung metal cleats left clawed hoofprints in the frosty earth. From its visor slit emanated a blue glow.

  It charged.

  Hagar took a step back; her boot skidded in a sludge of lichen. The golem clenched its armoured fist and wound up a right hook.

  ‘That’s enough, Judith.’

  The golem halted and slid, its chestplate stopping inches from Hagar’s face. It let its fist clank to the floor. For a moment, it was still, then it swung itself round and clumped back to the woman who had spoken.

  Sarai sat on a curved wicker chair at the pool’s edge. She wore a necklace of red beryl and an olive dress that sagged in the wet air. Her long hair was tied back with a ribbon. She closed the book in her lap and took off her spectacles.

  ‘Hullo, Hagar.’

  ‘Hello, Sarai.’

  She had aged. Odd how it was still a surprise. Since Hagar’s last visit, the last of Sarai’s hair had greyed, her features continuing their slow collapse. Hagar tried to recall the face as she had first seen it, on the day of Sarai’s birth. A heartbeat ago. There was so little time left.

  ‘Calix said you’d be visiting,’ she said. Hagar never heard anyone else refer to Dr Noroc by his first name. It unsettled her in ways she did not understand.

  ‘What are you doing all the way down here, languishing in the dark? It’s not healthy.’

  Sarai ran her fingertips over the raised letters on the book’s cover. ‘I was reading to Gideon.’

  ‘You need sunlight. What happened to the beautiful atrium you built?’

  ‘I undid it. Besides, I like it here. And I think Gideon’s calmer when I’m around.’

  Hagar caught the petulant edge to Sarai’s voice and decided not to argue. The girl seemed safe enough. That was the main thing.

  Hagar turned to Gideon. ‘Good afternoon.’

  He lifted a hand and scraped strands from his eyes. Each time his fingers brushed a hair, it curled and blackened.

  He peered at her. His gaze flicked to Sarai.

  ‘Is she real?’

  For all his dishevelment, his voice was soft as smoke. He reminded her of Nebuchadnezzar, lost in animal squalor yet sustained and protected by a strange inner majesty. And his body was wet with the dew of heaven, till his hairs were grown like eagles’ feathers. God held his honour and brightness in trust. He would return to the Kingdom after his time among the beasts. Back in the old world, he and Arthur had fought side by side in a great war. Gideon had believed Arthur slain. When Arthur appeared to him, the reunion had cost Gideon his reason.

  As Arthur, with all his foresight, must have known it would.

  Sarai stood and set the book on the chair. She walked over to Hagar. Up close, it was easy to see Sarai’s resemblance to her father in her high cheekbones and tucked jaw, blended with her mother’s subtle poise and large, appraising eyes. She raised a hand; her fingertips stroked the air an inch from Hagar’s cheek.

  The hairs on the back of Hagar’s neck stood on end. Sarai let her hand drop, wrinkled her nose.

  ‘As you or I.’

  Gideon sighed and lay back in the pool, water fizzing and boiling off him as he let himself sink.

  Hagar and Sarai began walking down a little trail in the woods.

  ‘How have you been?’ she said.

  ‘Well.’

  ‘No aches and pains? Fevers? Tiredness?’

  The path was edged with clumps of black-lobed, semi-translucent shrubs. Sarai trod carefully, following her old footprints, affirming, deepening.

  ‘All of those things. I’m not as young as you. Not any more.’

  They passed a water feature – limestone shelves, shaped to look like natural formations, that channelled the stream through a series of cataracts. Icicles fringed twisting grottos. Red algae clung to the rocks.

  ‘Your skills have improved,’ said Hagar.

  ‘Gideon helps. It’s all from him – the heart of it. I just . . . give his feelings shape.’ She made slow horizontal passes with her hand and the rock tumoured, oozing open, ice shattering. A silver spire punched out of the summit, rising six or seven feet to a lancet tip.

  ‘Sarai.’ Hagar had to hurry to catch up with her.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I have something to tell you.’

  ‘I know.’ Sarai’s shoulders slumped a little. ‘You never come here unless you have to.’

  ‘In life there are few true obligations. I may come for selfish reasons, but they’re wants, not needs.’ Hagar sensed her evenhanded philosophising was coming off as indifference. She struggled to express affection – her few experiences of it had always been mixed with cruelty. ‘It pleases me to see you. I wish visiting was easier.’

  ‘Hmmph.’

  ‘I said one day, the time would come for you to leave this place.’

  Sarai stopped. ‘This is my home.’

  ‘It’s a prison, Sarai.’

  ‘To you, perhaps. To me, it’s paradise.’ She walked on, back towards the pool. The trail reshaped itself in front of her, straightening and widening, trees gnarling over it to form a tunnel of tangled black bowers. Paper lanterns scabbed over into smoking iron censers.

  ‘I don’t mean today. But soon. Very soon. It’s not safe for you here anymore.’

  ‘Judith will look after me.’

  Hagar could no longer see her hands in front of her face. She faltered after Sarai’s silhouette, towards the glow of the pool.

  ‘Judith can’t save you from sickness or old age.’

  ‘I don’t want to be saved. I know I can’t live forever.’

  Hagar’s toecap caught on a root and she stumbled. Her heart was pounding.

  ‘This isn’t the limit of your power. You can do so much more. It’s staying here that holds you back.’

  ‘I have all I need!’ Sarai threw her arms out and turned a slow circle, the branches above her braiding into a thick black knot. ‘Anyway, I don’t l
ike it out there. It’s too noisy. All those moods all . . . stirred together.’

  ‘Exactly! They need you, Sarai. You could give their feelings form.’

  ‘Their form would be hunger. Chaos.’

  ‘True. Even their suffering is tainted. But imagine if they felt as purely as Gideon. The world you could build. The transformations.’

  Sarai stopped on the edge of the pool. A column of steam rose from Gideon as he stood in the shallows, scooping up water and watching it boil away in his palms, over and over.

  ‘I could help them,’ said Sarai.

  ‘You could take them to paradise.’

  CHAPTER 11

  WARS AND RUMOURS OF WARS

  Butler sat up, coughing. His kaftan had holes in the chest, purple and sodden, with tacky dark scar tissue showing through.

  He spat tooth fragments and a stringy gobbet of blood.

  Delphine stared, her head spinning. Butler’s wounds were healing. He had the honours. He was a peer.

  He retched, hacking black sputum into his palm. He wiped it off with a handkerchief and held up something between thumb and forefinger: a bullet.

  ‘Oh, how unpleasant,’ he said.

  ‘So the rumours are true,’ said the girl who had called herself Agatha.

  ‘You shot me based on rumours?’

  ‘She shot you based on my orders,’ came a crackly voice. ‘Consider yourself relieved of duty.’

  ‘Ah.’ Butler laughed and scratched his neck. ‘I should’ve guessed. So nice to hear your voice again, dear leader!’

  A delay, then: ‘You’re a coward, Butler.’ Ms Rao’s words were coming from a speaker somewhere in the shadows. ‘Agatha – search the boat.’

  ‘Wait, wait, wait,’ said Butler. ‘What exactly am I accused of here?’

  Another delay. ‘Defecting.’

  ‘What?!’ He rose, flicking blood from his clothes. A dozen carbines swung to point at his head. Slowly, he raised both hands. ‘Steady now. I heard you the first time.’

  ‘If he moves from that spot, fire,’ said Agatha.

  ‘Look.’ Butler made a show of holding his arms frozen in the air. ‘I don’t deny I’ve concealed my identity from some of our newer team members.’ He glanced down at his chest, where already tufts of wet fur grew through the holes in his kaftan. ‘Obviously. I am . . . was a member of the perpetuum. I’m sure you appreciate why I might want to keep information like that a secret.’