The Ice House

by Tim Clare

  ‘Who are you?’ said Delphine.

  She regretted the words instantly.

  The girl narrowed her eyes. ‘Where are you from, child?’

  Butler had explicitly told her not to speak.

  Footsteps coming up the stairs. Alice.

  The girl sidestepped and put a finger to her lips. Alice was on the landing, creeping towards the door. Delphine glanced at the girl. The girl shook her head.

  The footsteps stopped. The doorknob began to turn.

  ‘Run!’ yelled Delphine.

  The girl slapped down a bar latch. The smoked-glass doorknob shook.

  ‘Delphine?’

  Her cry seemed to distract the girl. Delphine reached into her robes and pulled her machine pistol.

  The girl saw the gun and froze. Delphine’s finger quivered on the trigger. One squeeze and they would have an easy exit. The desire to kill rose in her like lust.

  The door shook as Alice pounded the other side.

  Delphine fired at a glass ornament bracketed to the wall. It blew apart with an almighty report. While the girl was still reeling, she hauled herself onto the desk. She tried the rope, and started climbing.

  Splinters of glass dug into her palms. She gritted her teeth and dragged herself upwards. The rope shook; the girl was trying to make her fall. Fear and pain drove Delphine higher.

  The evening smelt of bonfires and red meat. She clawed at the warm tiles and hauled herself onto the roof. A sharp metal strut caught her stomach. Her robes tore; she cried out as it broke skin. She kept pulling; her holster snagged and bent the strut back on itself. She got a knee onto the window frame and was out.

  From here she could see everything: the spire, dark streets mazing down into the bay, a galaxy of lanterns burning all across the stilt city, the jungle, the ocean, the last sliver of sun blooding the horizon.

  The roof sloped gently. There was blood on her hands. Her stomach throbbed. She saw the rope trailing across the alley to the rooftop opposite. Needs must.

  Minutes later she was on the adjacent row of buildings, shuddering with adrenaline. She had just kicked the girl’s grappling hook loose from where it had been attached to a little stone statue. The roof’s hipped end dropped two storeys to the cobbles. The whole world felt spongy and dayglo.

  She had to get away. Gritting her teeth, she shuffled on her backside down the esplanade side of the roof. She peered over the guttering. A sheer drop to the street below.

  She clambered back up to the roof ridge and worked her way down the seaward side. A block and tackle hung from a wrought-iron bracket. The street was deserted, the drop substantial.

  She tucked her robes around her and pulled her hood down. She felt her belly lurch as she rolled onto her front and began lowering her legs off the roof onto the bracket. Gingerly, she straddled it, letting it taking her full weight. It held. She raised the running block and hook. Dismounting the bracket sent another blast of adrenaline through her. With the hook as a foothold, she grasped the rope and lowered herself all the way down to the street.

  She jumped the final few feet to the cobbles. Her hands were smeared with blood and grease. Without thinking she wiped them on her crushed silk robes. Ah well, her disguise had served its purpose anyway. She pulled the robes down over her shoulders, fabric ripping, and let them fall to the ground.

  She began making her way up the street, back towards the esplanade. Hopefully she had provided enough of a distraction for Alice to get out. They could signal to Butler to bail on his date.

  The houses here were all semi-timbered, the upper storeys leaning over the street on jetties. A candle flickered in a bottle on a sill. She stopped to check her reflection in the window.

  It was very queer – she could see the old her gazing out from beneath the squashed, pink, features. This bland, unstoried doorknob of a face.

  She removed her machine pistol from its holster, ejected the magazine and stuffed both down the front of her shirt. This was an uncomfortable arrangement, but she didn’t want to carry it about in public. She adjusted her hood, poking strands of grey hair back underneath. Her hands stung – she had cut herself badly – and the cut in her stomach pulsed with a cold ache. Jangles and bangs echoed down the street.

  As she turned from the window, a crowd of revellers rounded the corner, dressed in masks and furs and feathers. Torches dripped with fire, bell-cuffs jangled, giant painted heads thrashed side to side as feet stamped in time to the drumbeat. At the head of the procession, a great barrel of burning tar rolled over the cobbles, garlanded in orange flame, sending up a river of sparks.

  Delphine turned and ran the opposite way. Shadows flashed by. She heard the rat-a-tat of firecrackers behind her as she fled downhill.

  She was walking down the moonlit wharf when she realised someone was following her. She put her hand to her pistol, glanced back and the figure was gone.

  Someone tackled her from behind.

  Her head cracked off the boardwalk. The street went blurry. Someone was shouting her name. She groped for her gun.

  A hot sting in the meat beneath her shoulder. She caught hold of a wrist. Christ, it was the girl. Delphine elbowed her in the throat. What the hell was she doing here? Hadn’t that fall broken her legs?

  She tried to roll clear and there was a biting pain as the knife slipped deeper. She roared. It echoed off the cabins. She channelled all her anger into her arms and shoved. The girl was light; she went skidding backwards on her arse.

  Delphine stumbled to standing. She fled towards a heap of cages.

  A blow to the nape of her neck. Her head jerked upwards. Stars bled into white streaks. The clank-clatter of metal. She fell. The second blow was a crack—

  —she was sinking, drowning. Oh God, she was underwater.

  Her clothes clung in a sucking skin. She made powerful, cleaving strokes in the direction she hoped was up.

  The wound in her shoulder ached. The desire to breathe built to a desperate need, pale light spreading in the darkness behind her eyes.

  One hand broke the surface. Her fingertips brushed planks’ slimy undersides. With a final effort she clawed at them, caught hold of a joist, and hauled herself, gasping, spluttering, to the surface.

  She was clinging to a small wooden platform, somewhere in the gloom of the undercity. Shafts of moonlight broke through here and there, frosting the outlines of stone pilings. Some hundred yards away was the glow of the wharf. She must have fallen. A strong current dragged at her legs. The tide was coming in.

  She clambered onto the platform and knelt, shivering. Saltwater stung her shoulder wound. She touched it and her fingers came away bloody.

  She felt very cold. As she stood, something cracked beneath her shoe. She glanced down. Ice.

  ‘Hello, Delphine.’

  The voice came from no particular direction. It sinuated into the hollow of her ear, like a tongue.

  A chill on the nape of her neck. She turned.

  And there he was. Standing slightly askance in a shirt with the sleeves turned up, his hands by his sides.

  And she knew. Right away, she knew who he was.

  She took a second to find her voice.

  ‘Arthur.’

  ‘I’m afraid we haven’t much time,’ he said. ‘I must tell you everything.’

  CHAPTER 14

  MY SON WAS DEAD,

  AND IS ALIVE AGAIN

  (Ninety-one years before the inauguration)

  The rod cracked Hagar under the jaw, driving her spine-first into the bridge’s stone parapet. She pirouetted left and backflipped; the follow-up strike swished through the space where her skull had been. She landed in a wide stance, straddling two stone balusters, her back to the ravine.

  Canoness Limitless-Grace gritted her teeth against the sleet scything across the bridge. ‘Did it never occur to you, sister, that this body might be a blessing?’ She drew her rod back for another sacramental blow, snowflakes sticking to the shining ribs of its weighty iron head.


  The balusters were glassy with ice; Hagar felt her bare feet slipping on the frictionless surface. She spread her arms to balance herself, eyes watering. Behind her, the drop was almost a mile. Her fingers and toes pulsed with a crushing heat.

  ‘Form is burning,’ said Hagar. ‘Feeling is burning. Perception is burning.’

  The Canoness lunged, testing the proposition. Hagar allowed her soles to slide in opposite directions. Her body dropped sharply. The rod swung over her shaved head. She grabbed its christwood haft and let it whip her away from the precipice, back onto the bridge’s freezing grey flagstones. She spun out of range, one heel sliding back, arms rising up into fire stance.

  Canoness Limitless-Grace turned to face her, rolling the sleeves of her gown up over her thick shoulders, exposing her votary tattoos to the wind. The scars were deep trenches of rubbery keloid, a livid glossy blue-black against the dark brown of her triceps.

  ‘Through pain, we become disenchanted.’ She advanced, tossing her rod from palm to palm. ‘Through disenchantment, we become dispassionate.’

  Hagar vacillated between breaking right and trying for a strike at the windpipe. She knew this slow approach was a trick, but she could not decide which mistake the Canoness was trying to goad her into. Damn the woman’s stolid, doctrinaire self-confidence. Hagar broke right.

  The Canoness did not react. It was as if she had not noticed. Hagar found herself on an exposed flank with a chance to go for a kidney, an ankle, the back of the skull. No. It had to be a trap.

  The Canoness turned. ‘Through dispassion, we are liberated.’ She opened her arms. Her callused fingers relaxed, the rod dropping to the bridge with a decisive clunk.

  Hagar could not help herself. The smugness was too much. She darted in, feinting low with a kick to the shin while driving her palm into the Canoness’s face. Her hand connected with that full, self-satisfied jowl, then kept going as the Canoness twisted with the strike. The Canoness grabbed Hagar’s wrist. Hagar tried to counter with a flat-palmed thrust from her opposite hand but the Canoness spun, pivoting at the waist and ankle, flipping Hagar head-over-heels and slamming her belly-first into the opposite parapet.

  Hagar twisted her wrist free and staggered back towards the centre of the bridge. The impact had knocked the wind out of her. The Canoness came in with a blur of punches. Hagar sidestepped, turned one aside with the hard bone of her wrist, jinked within her billowing robes so the Canoness struck empty cloth, ducked, then came up inside the Canoness’s guard with a two-fingered strike to the soft palate behind the jaw. The Canoness flung her head back; Hagar’s fingers struck taut muscle, buckled.

  Hagar pulled her hand away just in time to see the rod’s iron head arcing towards her. How had she had time to pick it back up? It smote her cleanly across the temple. The world spun – sky, mountains, the grey bastions of the abbey – then the Canoness sweep-kicked Hagar’s legs out.

  Hagar fell from the bridge, dropping through cold air.

  A wrenching pain across her sternum. The line securing her to the Canoness jerked tight. She swung into the shadow of the great weathered masonry arch that held the bridge aloft, the ravine rushing by sickeningly below, then back out. The rope creaked as she swayed to a halt.

  Canoness Limitless-Grace leaned over the parapet and began hauling the line back in. As Hagar reached the top, the Canoness held out a rough, warm palm for her to take.

  Hagar felt nauseous from the blow to her skull. The flagstones seemed to tilt beneath her feet. When she looked up, the Canoness was smiling.

  ‘Good,’ she said, rubbing her throat. ‘Your rebuttals grow more convincing by the week.’

  Hagar bowed. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Remember, the kata aren’t truths to be defended. They’re organising principles to be compared and exploited. They are, by their nature, incomplete. If you fail to recognise this, your training will remain very limited.’

  ‘I will contemplate your words.’

  ‘The purpose of these drills, our chanting, our repetition, is not to instil dogma, but to alert us to the rote, arbitrary, automatic nature of normal existence. I applaud your discipline, dear sister, but we expect you to rebel – indeed, we’re counting upon it.’ She socked the rod into her palm. ‘And don’t scorn the physical world. Its challenges are a chance to act with true virtue – to choose kindness in spite of our experiences, to choose kindness though it may not be rewarded. It’s easy to be compassionate in paradise. I suggest you reflect upon that.’

  Back in her little dormitory, Hagar cleaned her cuts with water from the abbey spring and rubbed balm into her bruises. A weak glow emanated from a nook in the stone wall. The nook contained a shallow depression filled with oil, of which each sister received a small ration each month.

  Theological debates left her restive. There was something oddly bloodless about each thrust and counter-thrust, as if the result did not really matter. She did not mind the harsh mountain winters, the hardship, the repetition. She had retreated to the Sciamachian Order to chastise herself, to prevent her weakness inflicting more suffering upon the world. The sisters followed a syncretic creed derived from a mix of old world religions, and in their blending of physical discipline with intellection and long periods of solitary repose, Hagar had found a measure of meaning, if not solace.

  But lately, doubt had begun creeping into her prayers, the way water seeped into cracks in the abbey walls, freezing and refreezing over successive winters till ancient stone blocks split. She contemplated what the Canoness had said regarding paradise. They were safe up here. But were they serving a higher purpose?

  She tested a bruise with her thumb and winced. She was probably just cross at having lost the debate. The new Canoness Umbra Prime invested the theodic kata with a dizzying spontaneity, each argument flowing naturally from the last. Hagar examined her soul and found more than a little envy. To know what to do, moment by moment. To be so sure.

  A horn sounded throughout the abbey, low and resonant. Hagar unrolled her prayer mat and knelt at the foot of her wooden bunk to begin evening prayer.

  As she lowered her head, she felt a frosty prickle across her fingers. New draughts were constantly finding routes into the dormitories, insinuating through gaps in the storied grey stone. Another breach to find and plug up with whatever she could scavenge.

  Her nostrils twitched. A sharp, unfamiliar fragrance. Incense was strictly forbidden in the dormitories. Was Sister Ragarda still making clandestine offerings to her village’s ancestral spirits? Hadn’t she learned from her last rebuke?

  Hagar was trying to swallow her irritation and return to contemplation of the ineffable when she heard a gasp and opened her eyes to see, for the first time, the angel.

  He lay facedown on the stone floor – a man, by the look of it barely into his twenties. Slim, his brown hair ruffled. His whole body faintly luminous.

  He lifted his head. ‘Am I . . .’ He glanced around with jerky, hunted movements. His skin was deathly pale. He wore strange foreign clothes.

  On reflex, Hagar threw herself into one of the core stances: the querent. She glanced at the door. Still locked and bolted.

  The man rose to his hands and knees. His outline was curling at the edges, licking back on itself like smoke.

  ‘Wait,’ he said. He touched the floor. His fingers sank into the flagstone as if it were quicksand. She realised his body was not quite flush with the floor. He appeared to be suspended one or two inches above it.

  Hagar held herself utterly still. Was this a vision? She had heard of sisters hallucinating whilst in ecstatic states. Was this divine?

  Something in his manner tempered her awe. He did not fit her idea of a celestial herald. He seemed bewildered.

  She dropped her arms and took a step forward. ‘Who are you?’

  He looked up. ‘Hagar?’

  She had not told him her name.

  He rose, not as a human would, but flowing upwards like a gas, until his image reformed in
the semblance of a man standing. Where he had touched the stones, they were crusted with ice.

  ‘What happened to your hair?’ he said. He glanced around. ‘How long has it been? Did it work?’ He took a deep breath. ‘My mind’s a damn blank.’

  ‘Who are you?’ she said.

  ‘You are you, aren’t you?’ His eye twitched. ‘Hagar Ingery?’

  His accent and his peculiar clothes, long mud-brown trousers and a brown waistcoat over a white shirt and black tie – they reminded her irresistibly of the other lands.

  ‘You’re English,’ she said.

  His mouth broke into a smile. ‘Are you teasing?’ He looked around. ‘What is this place? Have you gone back to the convent?’

  A crawling sensation spread down her spine. She thrust a palm forward and dropped her body into an aggressive stance: the inquisitor.

  ‘Tell me your name. I command you!’

  ‘Do you really not recognise me?’ He pressed a palm to his chest, eyes widening. ‘However long can it have been? It’s me. Arthur.’

  The name meant nothing to her.

  His smile began fading, replaced by a look of concern. ‘You came with Grandmama and dear Gideon.’ He took a step towards her, vapour wafting from his shoulders. ‘I was awake. I saw it.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘None of it? Fat Maw, burning? Morgellon, weeping at your feet?’

  A cold thrill washed over her heart. ‘What do you know of my master?’

  The man frowned. ‘You have no master.’

  Hagar felt strangely unmoored – poised upon the brink of something too momentous to comprehend. The expression on the young man’s face suggested he too was groping for meaning.

  ‘What do you think you saw?’ she said. Every pore across her body tingled. She could hear the soft lapping of flames in oil.

  ‘You freed yourself.’ He smoothed a palm over the buttons of his waistcoat. ‘Wait . . . how old are you?’

  ‘I couldn’t say, exactly. Around three hundred.’

  He touched a thumb and forefinger to his closed eyelids. ‘It hasn’t happened yet.’