The Ice House

by Tim Clare

  —and surfaced in a rush of noise and cold, the pressure around her dropping instantly.

  She surged backwards into the air; tendrils whipped her rightside up and deposited her, staggering, back on her feet.

  She was in a musty chamber of granite blocks, lit by oil lamps. A generator hummed in a corner. Radio equipment stood heaped on a wooden crate against one wall. The air was cool and tasted of cement.

  Standing in front of her was a short woman in a white cotton dress hitched up to her knees. A long blond Dutch braid snaked several times around her body. One of her arms branched into a thicket of fleshy, threshing limbs. Their eyes met.

  ‘Good afternoon,’ said Patience.

  Delphine stepped forward and punched her.

  CHAPTER 12

  THE BEGINNING OF SORROWS

  (Seventy-five years before the inauguration)

  Hagar pressed the scalpel to the middle of Anwen’s belly and slit downwards. She cut from the navel to the pubic bone, maintaining a firm, even pressure. The skin yielded easily under the nib, yellow fat blooming through the incision. The body wanted to undo itself, to give up its secrets.

  Anwen’s valet, Mr Cox, howled through his gag. His screams were growing hoarse; the muffled blasphemy had turned to pleading. Anwen, meanwhile, watched the process with detached fascination. Her bed had been specially lowered so Hagar could reach across it.

  Hagar wiped the scalpel then returned to the top of the incision, this time slicing through the subcutaneous fat. She licked her lips. Her throat burned with a fierce thirst. The ship’s cabin was roasting, lamps and candles burning everywhere to give her light to work.

  She set the scalpel down on a silver tray, then pushed two fingers of each hand into the wound and drew the layer of yellow fat aside. Mr Cox roared, straining against the bonds securing him to his bed. He had asked to stay awake during the procedure. Well, he had got his wish.

  ‘Retractors.’

  A vesperi assistant clad in headscarf, gloves and butcher’s apron swivelled a horizontal steel arm over Anwen’s abdomen. Two curved metal paddles, like coal tongs, were fixed to the bar via wingnuts. Hagar loosened the nuts, then with the assistant’s help spent a few moments tucking the paddles over the peeled-back fat, holding it in place. Already the top of the cut was beginning to heal, skin and fat oozing together, crusting, repairing. She was moving too slowly.

  ‘Scissors.’

  The assistant ran round to Hagar’s side of the bed, jogging the table and making the surgical implements clatter. Hagar suppressed the impulse to slap the girl round the head. It was not her fault – Cox and Anwen had refused Hagar the three trained assistants she had asked for. They were obsessed with secrecy, even if it cost their child’s life.

  Hagar picked up her scalpel and recut the mending tissue. Beneath the opened fat was a shiny, fibrous white membrane. She put a nick in it with the tip of the blade, then held out her palm for the scissors. It took a second or so for the assistant to comply, and Hagar felt another flash of irritation. She had honed her abilities in stinking battlefield tents, working on soldier after soldier in an environment where a moment’s delay could mean the difference between recovery and agonising death.

  Working as fast as she could, she cut up and down the membrane, exposing the red curve of the abdominal muscles. When she pressed her fingertips into the midline to separate them, Cox bucked and thrashed. One of his restraints snapped with a bang. Even through his padded gag, which Hagar had insisted on to stop him biting through his tongue, she could clearly hear him telling her to stop, threatening, begging, delirious with pain.

  As she clamped the abdominal muscles aside, the fascia above was repairing itself, sealing up. An exposed roll of bowel began retreating under a shrivelled white caul resembling damp muslin.

  Normally, from this point on, Hagar would have worked cautiously, taking care not to perforate the bowel or bladder, but Anwen’s waters had broken, and still the child had not come. If it was not dead already, it was certainly in grave peril.

  Hagar hooked the scissors into the stretchy pink membrane beneath the abdominal muscle and began snipping. A simple incision was not enough; she chopped a wide oval out of it, so it would take time to close.

  And there was the womb, bulging through the layers of skin and fat and muscle, a lurid fuchsia. Hagar began cutting through a final membrane. The metal retractors shuddered; Anwen’s stomach muscles were pulling together, trying to reconnect. Hagar raked aside flesh with her fingertips. Cox was gurgling, thrashing.

  ‘Scalpel.’

  She gritted her teeth as she cut into the uterine wall. Too shallow, and it would heal before she got through. Too deep, and she risked cutting into the child’s soft, pliable head, slicing the fontanelle. Anwen felt no pain and could rapidly heal wounds, but the child – for all her notional talents – was as vulnerable to injury as any human.

  The retractor blades were bending. Hagar tried to keep the scalpel steady, remembering her work dissecting corpses – the satisfaction of a tidy incision, of preserving delicate blood vessels and nerves through skill and patience. As the wall of the womb separated, a wet, pale-pink sphere became visible. The baby’s head.

  The right rectus abdominus muscle slipped loose. It jogged her hand; the blade nicked the child’s scalp. Hagar cursed. A second later the other retractor gave with a clang; muscles closed around her wrist.

  Instantly tissue layers were regenerating, spreading like frost on a window. Hagar yanked but her wrist was stuck. She reached out with her free hand.

  ‘Scissors!’

  She drove them point-first into Anwen’s abdominal wall. The finesse of the mortuary slab was forgotten; Hagar tore and slashed, ripping out chunks of muscle and tossing them aside, digging for the baby. Cox screamed and screamed. Even Anwen wrinkled her nose, observing with distaste.

  Flecks of blood stung Hagar’s eyes. She recalled the words of Moses: Thou shalt beget sons and daughters, but thou shalt not enjoy them . . . The stranger that is within thee shall get up above thee very high; and thou shalt come down very low.

  Her fingers found the smooth roundness of the head, the soft curve of the jawbone. She pulled. For the first time since the operation had begun, Anwen let out a moan. The weight she had carried in her belly for months was finally shifting. Hagar’s fingers slipped. Anwen’s body clung to its prize.

  Hagar resisted the urge to fight, adjusted her grip, and pulled gently. The suction broke; the baby’s head crested easily from the long, ragged slit. The rest came like a snake shedding its skin. Anwen let out a sigh.

  The child was bluish and limp, smeared with blood and white grease. A girl. Hagar held her, shaking. She had encountered many newborns over the years. Some she had delivered, some she had dissected.

  Cox was murmuring something, over and over. Hagar could make out his words: Is she alive?

  The baby convulsed. Her toothless mouth dilated and she started crying – a thin, abrasive keening. Hagar held her under the armpits. The umbilical cord trailed down into an incision which was already closing.

  She handed the baby to her assistant and clamped off the cord. The child needed warmth, sustenance – things which, until a few seconds ago, it had never been without. No wonder we forget our true nature when we enter this world. Life is the beginning of lack. It is a machine for producing pain.

  Later, Hagar sat on a palm-rope hammock in a guest cabin, reading Deuteronomy.

  ‘Grandpapa’s a good man.’

  She looked up with a start.

  Arthur was standing beside the table, dabbling his slender fingers through the spout of a jug. He looked as he always had – as he always would: a slim young man, full brown hair swept into a side-parting, his eyes slightly too small perhaps, his ears slightly too large, features just peculiar enough to be distinctive, a gaze just sullen enough to be handsome. He wore a light cotton shirt with the sleeves rolled up to the elbows.

  ‘He bore all the pain just for
her.’ Arthur smiled. ‘Thoughtful of him.’

  Hagar felt the room closing in. Arthur was back. The angel had come.

  ‘Why are you here?’ she said.

  ‘No need to whisper. They won’t hear you. They’re busy with Auntie.’

  Behind him, through the wide diamond-shaped porthole, lay Fat Maw Bay. Afternoon sun scattered gleaming flakes amongst cutters, junks and low-roofed houseboats. A colony of heavily pregnant sea serpents had crawled up onto the curving breakwater of Lotan Reef, sunning their fat, scaled bellies. When gulls flew too close, the sea serpents lifted their broad, wedge-shaped heads and spat gouts of hot venom. Poison clouds hung in the sunshine, sparkling ruby, emerald.

  Hagar closed her Bible and wrapped it in a cloth. ‘I thought you’d abandoned me.’

  Arthur’s smile softened with cloying, proprietary pity. ‘Of course you did. You always do.’

  Hagar looked away, trying to hide her disgust. He was several centuries younger than her, yet already he carried himself with overfamiliar, smug avuncularity. But he was her only hope.

  Slyly she looked him up and down, noting the clothes he had selected, the age he had chosen to present himself as. She pictured him as he truly was. He claimed to be at peace, but the figure she saw was a masquerade. He was ashamed of his true form. And no marvel.

  ‘What will happen?’ she said.

  ‘Either they give the child away, or someone takes her. Maybe that someone is you. I only see glimpses, like light shining through holes in a tapestry.’

  ‘Do her powers work?’

  Arthur closed his fist around the jug’s narrow throat. ‘Yes. Not yet. But they will do.’ He squeezed; his fingers passed through. ‘They name her Sarai.’

  Hagar gave a short, mirthless laugh. ‘Of course. So you want me to . . .’ Hagar glanced at the wall, lowered her voice. ‘Should I take her into my custody?’

  Arthur glanced at his palm. He looked round at her.

  ‘I’m not your sergeant. I’m not here to give you orders. Do as you wish.’

  Her tolerance reached its limit. ‘Don’t pander to me, boy. My wish is for guidance, instruction. Without that, you’re no use at all.’

  Arthur seemed unperturbed by her outburst. Indeed, he seemed to enjoy how it threw his exaggerated serenity into greater relief.

  ‘I’m sorry.’ He beamed beatifically. ‘I must seem capricious, materialising and vanishing, dropping little half-clues and leaving you to do all the work. If I could control my gifts, I would.’ His smooth brow creased with affected worry. ‘I so wish I could hurry things along. The paths to victory are very narrow indeed. But I see them. They gleam like golden threads in the darkness. I don’t think anything can stop us.’

  ‘I could slit my wrists.’

  He laughed.

  ‘You could. But you don’t.’ His gaze shifted to the Bible in her lap. ‘You have free will, of course. You’re always choosing. Every action you take alters the course of history. Each decision ripples out through the system – it affects more people than you’d ever believe. We have incredible power, but we deny it. We’re terrified. It makes us complicit. The knowledge was too much for poor Gideon. He’s not yet ready. He didn’t understand.’ Arthur looked melancholy again. ‘How could he? How can you?’

  Teardrops gemmed in his eyes. Hagar did not know if he was really crying, deep in the pit where his true body lay, or if they were a staging choice. Perhaps he was sad. Certainly, he wanted her to think of him as sad.

  ‘I’m not a child,’ she said. ‘You of all people should know that appearances deceive.’

  ‘Of course.’ His eye pinched a little. ‘It’s just a shell, isn’t it?’ He hung his head. ‘I must seem very gauche to you. A very callow angel indeed.’

  ‘Just tell me what to do.’

  ‘Right.’ Arthur turned towards the cabin door. ‘I’m afraid Grandmama doesn’t trust you – quite wisely, as it will turn out. She knows how rare this birth is.’

  ‘It’s not rare. It’s unprecedented.’ Hagar touched her bottom lip.

  ‘That’s why she has no intention of letting you leave this ship alive.’

  Hagar felt a sick, spreading comprehension. She glanced at her belt and jacket, hanging above her boots from a varnished christwood peg.

  ‘How long have I got?’

  On the table sat a wooden breakfast trencher, covered in seeds and fruit rinds. Arthur held his fore and middle fingers above the scalloped edge and administered a sharp tap. The trencher shivered gently. He gave a little sigh of pleasure.

  ‘Oh, maybe five minutes. The guards in the corridor break your legs if you try to run.’

  ‘Help me escape.’

  ‘How? I’m barely here.’ He wafted his hands through a wooden support pillar. ‘And I don’t want Grandmama finding out I’m still alive. Not yet. You’ll find a way. You always do. You must. How else could you be there at the end?’ He was fading, the curve of his cheek turning to vapour. ‘Already? Oh blast.’

  ‘Wait.’

  ‘I can’t.’ Where sunlight struck his legs, they turned see-through, glistering with ice crystals. ‘I’m too weak. This is why I need you. Unshackle yourself from Morgellon. Use Sarai once she grows into her gifts. Find Gideon and Grandmama and bring them to me. She can use their suffering to end death.’

  ‘But what do I do now?’

  He swatted at the air, his palm sloughing apart. ‘Grandpapa loves his daughter. Truly loves her. That’s his weak spot, if you’ve the stomach for it.’ She could hear Arthur’s grin, even as his features faded. ‘Don’t turn your back on Loosley. And take a deep breath.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to—’

  ‘Back soon, lovely. Ta-ta.’

  Even as she leapt from the hammock she knew it was useless. A faint wisp winked out and he was gone.

  Standing alone in the cabin, Hagar felt a churning heat in her belly. She had waited so long for him to guide her, countless nights when she had felt lost and lonely and hollow. Seeing him now hardened a conviction that had been building for a long time.

  She did not like the angel. She did not trust him.

  And when the time came, she would kill him too.

  Anwen Stokeham, Lady Dellapeste, sat on a high-backed bamboo chair, a blue silk blanket draped over her legs. Golden hair, combed straight, came down to the embroidered shoulders of an otherwise simple cream gown. A velvet mask obscured the upper part of her face. That was new.

  ‘I’ve named her Sarai.’

  Hagar shivered. It was Mr Cox who spoke. The valet sat on a padded seat to his mistress’s right, holding the swaddled baby, gazing at its scrunched, putty-coloured face. He was a wan, round-shouldered fellow who appeared to be in his late twenties physically, his chocolate-coloured hair uncombed and his jaw shaded with stubble. They had sent for her about five minutes after Arthur had disappeared, just as promised.

  Hagar glanced from Cox to his mistress, confused by his breach of etiquette. Lady Dellapeste smiled thinly. Again, it was Cox who spoke, in a hoarse, quavering voice:

  ‘Mr Cox is my herald. He now speaks on my behalf. Or perhaps it is more proper to say, I speak through him.’

  Hagar frowned. This was new too.

  She remembered the fraught young woman she first encountered in England decades ago, in secret meetings at Alderberen Hall. The trauma of her arising. How, upon receiving the honours, the young woman’s thoughts had blurred with her valet’s, driving both to the brink of madness.

  She seemed saner now. But it was always like this with the young ones. Pantomime vanity. A sudden obsession with etiquette. Anwen’s delusions had not disappeared – they had simply become less original. The molten lunacy of her first few weeks had cooled into the sanctified folly of tradition.

  Hagar made eye contact with the figure behind the mask. As she bowed, she pictured the roll of puce bowel inside Anwen’s stomach. Flesh-thing. Even you.

  ‘As you wish, Endlessness.’

  This see
med to please Lady Dellapeste greatly. Anwen made a show of sitting back in her chair, the lacquered bamboo creaking as she stroked her fingertips along the armrest. Nothing about her demeanour suggested she had given birth less than three hours ago – her relatively trivial injuries would have healed fully by now. Birth was just another kind of suffering to which peers were impervious.

  ‘Thank you for your assistance,’ she said, through Cox. ‘You understand why I was unable to divulge the precise nature of the work before you arrived.’

  ‘I was . . . surprised you entrusted me with such a responsibility, Endlessness.’ She had almost said ‘flattered’, but that would have been a lie.

  ‘You’re the most experienced surgeon in the world. Perhaps in history. I would have settled for no less.’

  Mindful of Arthur’s words, Hagar kept her eyes on the baby as she bowed. ‘I understand, Endlessness.’

  Cox adjusted his grip on little Sarai, softly dandling her. She was an improbable, goblinoid thing with catfish lips, her temples still smeared with waxy white traces of vernix. Hagar wondered where the wet nurse was – why Cox bothered touching the child at all.

  As she studied Cox’s expression, she realised Arthur was right. Perhaps Anwen and Cox had attempted the impossible – a child born to a peer and a servant – in the hope of harnessing her powers and expanding their empire. But all thoughts of conquest had gone from Cox’s face. He gazed down on his daughter with a look of meek incomprehension. The poor fool had fallen in love.

  He flexed his lips. Hagar wondered whether he interpreted broad sentiments, whether he heard Anwen’s voice in his head, or if she simply puppeted him.

  ‘Will you pass on news of the birth to your master?’ he said.

  ‘Lord Jejunus prefers to stay within the safety of his palace, these days,’ said Hagar, frankly. ‘I’ve not been welcome in Athanasia for some time.’