by Jamie Smith
She bent to pick up the object, heart in her mouth. Though it was missing limbs and half-destroyed by exposure, Sabira still recognized it as a child’s toy ash-cat. She would have known it anywhere. Kyran had held it last.
Her eyes stung with tears as she held the evidence of her brother’s passing. Why had he been here? Most assumed that, because of his leg, he had fallen from the bonding path into one of its many chasms, his body never to be found, but Sabira had always guessed that Kyran had made it to the Tears of Aderast and been rejected by the glacier. He never got the training that she’d had on how to bond, after all. Opinions varied as to what that did to a person, but none of them sounded pleasant and death was a common guess. Now it seemed likely that she had been right.
Why—and how—had he come all the way to the monastery? Where had he gone from here? What had happened to him? Nothing good, that was for sure—he had never come home, after all.
BEST TO LET IT GO.
Maybe. But while it was painful knowing that Kyran had come so far, only to fail, it also gave her an odd sense of clarity. She would not follow in his footsteps, she vowed, slipping the broken toy into a pocket, holding it close as if it was a talisman. She slumped down, head in her hands, fighting the urge to cry. She didn’t want to be that person. She wanted to be like the heroes in tales, able to push on no matter what. Grief threatened to drown her, though, and even the constant presence of the frostsliver did nothing to help her forget how alone she was.
Sleep did not come easily, and when it did, it was full of bad dreams.
* * *
Sabira woke in the night, certain she was being watched from beyond her small campfire. The shapes of the ruins looked strange in the darkness, and there was something moving in the shadows. She stood quietly. If danger was out there, she refused to sit and wait for it to fall upon her.
CAREFUL.
Creeping through the darkness with only the dancing fire at her back, she strained her eyes at the undulating motion that had caught her attention. Only steps away, it occurred to her that there might be more than one snow-spine on the mountain—and if this was one of them, she was dead. For a long, skipped heartbeat, Sabira couldn’t help but see the twisting shape as a striking tendril, and her hand clenched, ready to swing the frostsliver, already transformed into a hunting knife.
Then, as her eyes adjusted, she saw the ancient, raggedy remains of a prayer flag, flapping in the wind. Sabira shivered and went back to her fire. There was nothing here, she told herself, nothing except bones and ice. She should try to get some much-needed sleep.
She did her best, but she kept waking, the fire closer to being burned out each time, eventually no more than embers in the dark. Each time she turned over and drifted back into blackness. Then, through the haze of a dream, a glass-sharp word cut into her rest.
SABIRA.
For a moment, her bleary brain didn’t understand what was going on, or where she was. Shouldn’t she be in bed, with its fur covers and its view over the city? The frostsliver’s voice sounded again, this time more urgently.
SABIRA! WAKE UP.
“What? Why?” she asked, still only half-awake. Sabira cracked open her eyelids to darkness and frost, but no understanding. The frostsliver grew more urgent.
HIDE, SABIRA! SOMETHING IS COMING.
No, that couldn’t be right. She was still on the mountain, in the deserted ruins. She had to be dreaming. The frostsliver began to ding loudly in her head.
THIS IS NO NIGHTMARE. FOR BOTH OUR SAKES, MOVE!
She bounded up, unbalanced but awake, seeking about for the source of danger and seeing none.
IT’S COMING!
Hastily, Sabira kicked snow over her fire’s embers, extinguishing the last of its light. She held still for a moment, watching nervously—more so since she could feel the frostsliver’s own anxiety through the bond.
There was something moving out there. Not a prayer flag either. This shadow was too large, too slow. Sabira’s heart jumped into her mouth as she realized that it was coming closer.
She backed away and slipped out of an opening on the opposite side of the building, doing her best to blend in with the shadows. She couldn’t run, not in this darkness, on icy ground—not if she wanted to avoid breaking her neck.
IT IS GETTING CLOSER!
The frostsliver sounded almost panicked. Sabira crept faster across the snow, wincing at the crunch of her footsteps, looking for something to conceal her. A handful of paces away was a flat-roofed structure that might once have been a large shed. It was partly open to the elements now, but the roof seemed intact and, crucially, it was tall enough that she couldn’t see onto it. She made her way over as quickly as she dared, grabbed the first promising handhold, and started up.
She scaled the small building quickly, driven by fear. Soon she lay stomach-down on the building’s cold, flat roof. Without looking up, no one would have a hope of finding her, and if they did, she might still be able to scoot away from the edge before being spotted. Doing that now would probably be wiser, but she had to see what was out there.
A minute passed with nothing except the wind for company, and Sabira was starting to hope that she and the frostsliver had been mistaken when she saw something stump into the space beneath her in the gloom. The moment she caught sight of it, Sabira pressed herself even harder into the rooftop, trying to make herself part of it, her heart racing in terror.
That was no human. The form was all wrong, bulkier and harder somehow. There was none of the fuzzy outline that cold-weather furs provided, and it didn’t move like someone chilled by the mountain. It stood easily, looking at home in the bitterly cold weather and, Sabira saw, there was a faint shimmer to it, giving the thing an unearthly look.
Starlight was not enough to fully make it out, and for that Sabira was glad. If she could see it properly, it might see her. She didn’t breathe as she watched, and feared her heart was beating loud enough that anyone could hear it, let alone this thing. Its head turned this way and that, and Sabira had the horrible feeling it had sensed something. She silently prayed that it was not her.
Her eyes tracked the shape as it moved, not daring to shift her head in case the motion was enough to attract its attention. Only when it turned—agonizingly slowly—and strode away did Sabira’s muscles relax. She rolled back onto the roof and allowed herself a quiet gasp of air. Minutes passed in silence. She listened. Listened. Nothing.
What had it been?
A YETI?
Sabira shook her head in disbelief. Some said the yeti were the mountain’s guardians, disposing of those Aderast deemed unworthy. Some said they were remnants of Aderast’s Nightmare, like the snow-spines. Some said both—but all agreed that the yeti were dangerous monsters. Monsters that ate human flesh. She gulped. Well, it was gone now, and good riddance. Sabira was happy for it to remain a mystery, so long as she didn’t ever have to see the thing again. It would be just another tale of mysterious yeti on the mountain, if she could make it back to civilization. If Aderast’s defenders wanted her to leave, she was happy to oblige.
“How did you know it was there?” she asked the frostsliver. It didn’t have eyes of its own, after all.
I SENSED ITS APPROACH. IT FELT … WRONG.
Sabira didn’t know what that meant, but she was glad that the frostsliver had been able to warn her. She prepared to ask the obvious question, but the frostsliver got there first.
I DON’T SENSE IT ANYMORE. AS FAR AS I KNOW, WE ARE SAFE.
Sabira didn’t believe that for a second. Aderast seemed to want her dead, and if the mountain wanted her blood, what could stop it? There was nothing in the world that was going to get her to move off this roof for the rest of the night. Not with the yeti still out there somewhere, stalking unseen.
THE MORNING BROKE with a nasty crack.
For a frightening moment, Sabira thought that the monster had returned to devour her and begun by breaking her bones. Then she saw the fallen piece of ic
e nearby, broken off under the heat of the morning light. She relaxed slightly and climbed carefully down from her hiding place. As she went to collect her things back at the camp, the frostsliver demanded, ARE YOU STILL DETERMINED TO GO INSIDE THE MOUNTAIN?
“How else are we going to get home?” Sabira retorted. “Mihnir needs us to do this.”
The frostsliver made a noise like breath over a glass—a huff of displeasure, Sabira thought. She ignored it and moved on, mentally cataloging her remaining supplies as she headed toward the mountain face. She knew she had enough food for a few days at least, but there were other worries too.
How long could her water reserves last down in the darkness? There is always the glacier, she thought wryly as she walked beside it. However, not only would that be wrong, but it also seemed pretty unwise. Who knew what that notice would do to her insides?
I COULD SHOW YOU.
“Show me?” she asked dubiously. The frostsliver shifted its position slightly, indicating a move toward Sabira’s face—and her mouth.
“What would happen?”
TO ME? NOTHING MUCH. I AM IMMUNE TO A LITTLE STOMACH ACID.
Sabira let the obvious question spin around her head for the frostsliver to hear.
YOU WOULD BE ALL RIGHT. FOR A WHILE. I THINK.
She was starting to think that comments like that were the frostsliver’s idea of a joke. An almost inaudible tinkle in her mind seemed to confirm it, and Sabira smiled in response.
The rubble of the main monastery squatted over the glacier, which still flowed from the bowels of the mountain, unimpeded by the tons of stone that had come down on it.
In bright daylight, Sabira could see that the destruction had not been total. The great entrance was not intact, but a dark crack was visible in the debris: a way in. Whatever had destroyed the ancient structure had started inside, for that was where the collapse was most severe.
Sabira hesitated before entering. She knew that this might be the last time she saw the sky.
She took one long look back to the rest of the Aderasti mountain range spiking up into the distance and to where, far away, the ash clouds of the huge Ignatian geysers rose, looking like the smoke of campfires from this distance.
There was more out there too. There were the plains nations, and other mountain ranges beyond them. Fanciful stories from Ignata said that, farther away, there was a great sea that no one dared try to cross—but who knew for sure? The world was vast, and—she realized with regret—she would never see it all.
EVEN TSERAH DIDN’T SEE IT ALL.
That thought brought Sabira down. It was the shadow of her fears, her worry that she might never return to the surface.
YOU HAVE OPTIONS. YOU COULD STAY HERE, AS PACKMAN MIHNIR SUGGESTED. BUILD A FIRE, SIGNAL FOR RESCUE.
“No,” said Sabira. “There aren’t any options. If we stay here, the rescuers will never reach Mihnir in time. I won’t leave him to die.”
IF YOU’RE SURE …
She touched the model ash-cat in her pocket, hoping it would bring her more luck than it had brought her brother. With a heavy heart, she turned away from the light and went on into shadow.
* * *
The glacier seemed to motion her along as she walked beside it, swallowed in the shadow of the ruined entrance. Sabira found a passageway near the center. She assumed it must once have been flanked by giant statues of robed monks, because pieces of the monuments littered her way and made a space barely large enough for her to fit through. Giant feet poked from under the destruction, their huge, crumbling snow boots draped with the chipped hems of robes. Head bowed, Sabira picked her way past, feeling like an insect scuttling through a crack into a house.
The passage opened into a grand entry hall, where there were more broken corpses of sculptures and statues. At the hall’s rear, wide steps that might have been scarlet sank deep into the mountain. Fallen rock and stonework had stemmed the staircase off entirely, centuries-old stone rent by some unnatural power. This wasn’t time’s work.
NO. IT WASN’T.
Sabira stared at the blackened pattern of the blast that had destroyed the stairs, smelled the acrid stench in the air. She knew that scent too well, though she had only known it once before. Hatred and horror built in her heart, along with understanding. She knew how it had happened.
This was where the destruction had started. Here, with the massive bang she had heard after she’d cut her frostsliver. She knew what had caused the avalanche. She knew why the monastery was strewn with recent rubbish. She knew for sure what she had only half suspected last night. It had not been the mountain that tried to kill her. It had been men—Ignatians—and their blasting powder.
They had beaten her mother and scared Sabira half to death, and now they were here to finish the job. Her eyes stayed fixed on the rubble. Had they done that to seal the way behind them, or out of contempt for the sacred places of the Aderasti?
Either way, the Ignatians had to be down there, locked off by stone. She had almost put it together the last night, with the tracks and wreckage, but her tiredness had robbed her of certainty. What could they be doing? Surely nothing good.
Something lit within Sabira. Where she had been cold, resigned to her fate, now she felt hot anger, and she was not alone. The frostsliver burned with rage against these people who had murdered its lifelong companion, Tserah.
“How dare they?” Sabira whispered. “How dare you?” she yelled at the cold stone, the words echoing pointlessly.
THEY WILL PAY. TOGETHER, WE WILL MAKE THEM.
Sabira breathed, and breathed, and tore her eyes from the evidence of the crime against her, and against her people.
To make this right, she had to solve the problem—how would she descend into the mountain if not by the ruined stairs?
THE GLACIER. LOOK.
Sabira looked. In the center of the hall, the glacier boiled up from an enormous pit, like blood from a wound, before flowing out sideways in the direction she had entered.
The pit was ringed with stones, but Sabira guessed it was a natural formation, with the monastery built here because of it. When she craned over to look inside, she found the bottom was beyond sight, swallowed in blackness and drifting, thin vapor lit blue by the frostfire. It was like a horrible mouth, and Sabira had never seen anything more forbidding. No one in living memory had descended through the pit—but the legendary First Bonded had been here before the monastery or the stairs. They must have come this way. It must be possible.
* * *
The idea of climbing down the constantly-moving glacier seemed terrifyingly stupid, but Sabira saw that she had no choice. The rope was coiled tight around her, over her shoulder and between her legs, and tied securely to a nearby rock. The frostsliver had helped her. Tserah had climbed a lot, in her time. It didn’t feel safe, but the frostsliver assured her that if she kept a firm grip, it would be. If it wasn’t, at least the horror would be short.
DO NOT THINK—JUST DO.
Sabira nodded and backed toward the lip of the pit, hating every step. Then her boots touched the edge, and there was no more time for such thoughts. She was standing on a wall and not plunging to her death, after all.
Sabira held there for a moment. She wanted to stop, to remain a part of the surface world, but Aderast beckoned. The glacier moaned and cracked in encouragement, and Sabira took her first stride into the abyss.
For a handful of steps, Sabira was able to rappel down the rock with ease, before her feet met the moving surface of the glacier and she nearly slipped. A few seconds of near disaster passed before she was on the wall of ice, treading slowly and going nowhere as it tried to carry her back up. It was a weird sensation, but once she began letting out rope again, she felt steadier.
Looking back to check that she wasn’t walking into any obstructions, Sabira dropped lower and lower, the rope playing through her trembling hands. She kept her pace slow and deliberate, not wanting to risk making a mistake and fatally releasing her b
raking grip. It soon became a frustrating experience, since she couldn’t stop to rest, or the ice would carry her upward, wasting her efforts. She sweated through her furs, heating up uncomfortably despite the cold darkness.
Not being able to use the frostsliver to assist made things a lot harder too—if it touched the glacier, it would be absorbed back into it. She was forced to rely only on the strength of her fingers on the rope. It caused hot friction as it ran across Sabira’s gloves, so much that she worried it might burn into them.
DON’T WORRY. TSERAH USED TO DO THIS ALL THE TIME. SHE NEVER SET HER CLOTHES ON FIRE.
Sabira smiled weakly and carried on down. As she settled into a careful, unpleasant rhythm the whole thing began to feel like a dream, what with the strange motion under her and the ever-present glow of the glacier. Below the surface, there was no snowfall to blanket it, and the eerie blueness of the ice was almost as clear as crystal. The glacier was the only light now, and its frostfire filled her vision with hypnotic intensity.
Several times, Sabira worried that the glacier’s bulk would swell to take up the entire pit and cut off her way down, leaving her to be carried all the way back up the entire shaft.
Most bulges proved passable without too much effort, but one found her having to quickly shuffle all the way to one end of the pit to find a gap she could fit through. After an awkward wiggle, she squeezed past, her back scraping painfully against rock.
She would have felt relieved, except that she could see another ridge in the glacier coming up at her. She began sidling to one side, thinking that she would have to worm her way through again. She was right, but with another glance she saw that the only gap large enough for her was some distance away.
That didn’t seem like a problem until she was moving to line up with it. Sabira felt the rope try to pull her back the way she had come, and almost let go in shock.
The rope above her was a straight diagonal back to the last ridge she had slotted through, and as the glacier ground past on its unstoppable way upward, the line danced in her hand. Already too far committed, Sabira got in position and descended through the second hole.