Shadow of the Seer

by Michael Scott Rohan

  One, whom Savi had known all her life, had begun to cough and grown feverish and delirious, and the guards had cut her loose lest she infect anyone else. Probably she had been left dying on the brown hills. Another had seemed well enough, though silent; but around the time the sliver of brown beyond the flapping canvas turned gradually to snowy grey, she had begun, very quietly, to injure herself, on the wagon side, the ropes, once on Savi’s sword and finally on anything else she could reach. They had had to bind her wrists and ankles. In the end she seemed to grow reconciled, promised to stop; and that night bit through her tongue and bled to death. They had thrown out as much of the bloody straw as possible, but it still seemed to be adding its sickly smell to all the rest. Her body was dumped in the snow-sprinkled barrens that had depressed her so much.

  In such a time Savi was grateful for the princess Ulie, whose head now seemed almost impossible to upset. Even her prissy habits, her pathetic attempts at neatness and polite behaviour, became virtues, because they were surprisingly good defences against the ugliness around them. Savi took to following her poise and her speech, when she could, and coaxed her to tell tales of her life at court. She was only too eager, and her stories let Savi imagine herself among lords and ladies and their intrigues – although, reading between the lines, the court was evidently a shadow of past glories, and its nobles not so different from ordinary villagers with their little jealousies and scandals. The Princess, in turn, began to ask about the Citadel, and seemed to take equal delight in the idea of living a simple rustic existence, as she put it. She and Savi set the tone for the rest, and were their leaders in all things. When they laughed, fear lifted a little from the others, and they hardly dared be seen to falter or weep. That was a burden indeed, and the Princess bore it better than she.

  So it had been for long weeks now, of slow jolting along stony roads and rutted trails, an increasingly snowy landscape. The wagon had become viciously cold, though the guards gave them warmer rags and even tattered, greasy old grey cloaks which added another smell to the cart. They huddled together at night. Then, one bitter blowy afternoon, they felt the road start to slope beneath them, and the ironbound wheels had begun to crunch and furrow something other than stony earth. A wholly different sound they made, a popping, squeaking noise that somehow caught at one’s guts; and the wagon ploughed this way and that. There were always black-clad guards following along close to heave at the wheels, now wound in rope for traction, or lever the wagon along when it began to skid. A desperate cold crept around the cart, that bit through rags and straw, so the women’s only defence was to huddle close, almost in a heap; and only those at the centre were warm.

  They could see little, still, save through the tiny gaps in the cover, the open flap behind. But they knew then, the women, that they had come at last to the fortress and fastness of the forces that had overshadowed all their lives, the fear that had hung over them all, high and low, all their lives. They were crossing the surface of a glacier; and who had not heard that the glaciers were the Walls of Winter, the realm and palace and home of the ancient Powers of the Ice?

  That had been just as the last moon shrank to nothing; and last night the new moon had glittered fiercely between the flaps of the cart, blotting out the dying campfires outside. Their guards had allowed them only a few minutes to exercise and answer nature, then bundled them unceremoniously back in. The air was so still it seemed to drink sound, until they heard the vast sobbing cry of some unimaginable beast echoing across the wastes. Savi had slept clasping that sword so tightly she had nicked herself a little between arm and breast, and woke with a sticky trickle of blood across it. The princess’s sharp eyes caught it at once, and widened in alarm.

  ‘An accident!’ Savi whispered. ‘Fear not, I’m not going the way of the other. I’d sooner make a few raiders bleed, and most of all the brute that’s had us dragged here!’

  The princess smiled wearily. ‘May I live to see it! May we all!’

  The other girls were stretching, complaining, accusing one another of stealing a crust of dinner or breaking wind overmuch in the night, a mild familiar squabble that was almost comforting. They waited for their brief release, for their dish of scraps in hot broth; and when neither appeared, and the wagon simply jolted into motion, the protest turned into screaming confusion. Guards ran up, flung open the rear and started screaming too, which helped not at all. The dawn air that flooded in was cold beyond belief, and so utterly dry it bit at eyes and nose and throat, sucking out the moisture. Beyond them the background was blotted out completely, white, featureless, so that the cart seemed to dangle in terrifying emptiness. The women gave back, their throats drying out; and finally the princess quelled the uproar. Savi, careful to remind the guards of her sword, angrily demanded food and release.

  ‘No food!’ snapped the guard. ‘None left!’

  ‘Your moustache is still greasy!’ she snapped back.

  ‘We need! We work! We hurry! You just ride. Soon, ’fore sundown, we there. Then you eat! You wait, you shut up, we let you out when we rest!’

  They vanished, and the wagon lurched and heaved horribly.

  ‘If I have to piss over the side,’ fumed Savi, ‘I hope it’s when his shoulder’s to the wheel.’

  The girls shrieked. ‘Let’s all do it! One of us is bound to score!’

  ‘It’ll freeze and kill him!’

  Perhaps the guards overheard, for they were let out within the hour, briefly. Savi, with her feet wrapped in wisps of straw, stepped down gingerly, on to snow that squeaked and crunched like dry sand, and did not melt even for a moment. The guards lay about exhausted, and it took little effort to guess how murderous the ice track behind them must have been. As the women looked back they could still see nothing. A mist of sparkling ice hung in the air, so solid that moving bodies appeared to leave gaps and trails through it. Every movement seemed to suck the heat out, and stiffen the limbs, and the ground bit at their feet.

  ‘We hurry!’ remarked the princess quietly, wiping her face with a little powdery snow. Savi tried to wash herself with more, and yelped.

  ‘We’d better not be reduced to this for long! Pray to the Powers they do get us off this awful stuff before tonight!’

  The princess was not looking at her. ‘Before tonight? I would not waste your breath, my dear. Look! The mist is lifting!’

  Savi gulped, and the icy air in her lungs felt deadly. The fog rolled and billowed in a wispy breath of breeze, and it was as if the ice crystals condensed into a whole new world. Behind them, a slope of greenish-white, glittering ice, strangely rutted and scored, overlain with clean white snow in low drifts; save where, here and there, bare black rock broke through like a clean obsidian blade, shining with rime. To either side, the same; and ahead, more level, a plain of ice, almost free of snow, that shimmered dazzlingly all the way to the distant slopes where it met blue sky and white clouds.

  Every bit as bright and clear, these, as on a fine spring day at home; but here they were sharper, clearer, cruel, because all things were. This land was a threat to life itself, made solid. And Savi could clearly see that, early in the day as it was, there could be no way out of it before the light vanished.

  ‘Mustn’t tell the rest!’ was all she muttered; and the princess nodded. Their destination must surely be death on the ice, as sacrifices, perhaps, to who knew what; and she clutched at the sword that was her only hold on destiny. Should she sell her life dearly? Or kill the others, to save them from worse? The idea nearly broke her spirit. Even stripped of hope, she simply could not do that. But she would send a few raiders on ahead, to make a sacrifice of her own.

  If, that was, she still had the strength. She felt now how the journey had drained her, the imprisonment, the scanty exercise, the poor food, the continual jolting upon her body and her mind. And as always she thought of Alya. She had always believed she understood what his imprisonment had been like, in a ruined body and a place where he had no real home or family. She knew n
ow, a hundred times better; and she could not hold back her tears. She would never be able to tell him, now.

  But the chill wind both explained the tears and dried them, and she mounted the cart again stony-faced, glaring as hard as she could at the guards who had lied to her. Those two – any two she could reach – and then rest, and forgetting. There were worse prospects than that. She sank into black thoughts, and not even the princess dared disturb her, so much so that she hardly noticed the change that the afternoon brought.

  ‘We’re going downhill!’ she said suddenly, as she felt herself sliding to the end of the cart.

  ‘My dear, we have been for an hour at least,’ observed the princess mildly, examining a cracked nail. It’s just growing steeper. May I use the tip of your sword?’ She pared away the ragged edge gently. ‘That’s better. I believe the cold must make them brittle. Yes, this does seem more than just another ice-slope. Deeper.’

  Savi absorbed what she was saying. There might have been something they couldn’t see back there, some vale hidden among the white. She reached up to the endflap, dragging the others with her, and risked peering out. There was nothing but an ice-wall behind them, but it looked worked in places, as if cut away; and it shifted past them as they watched, exposing cliffs of cracked black rock. The cart was turning.

  ‘As it has once or twice already,’ remarked the princess. Savi nodded, imagining a road zigzagging down a steep hillside. It still did not sound good; but there might be something here. The wheels were biting into something harder than snow, and no longer skidding and slipping over ice.

  Then the cart shook and shuddered, and the girls clung together as they heard the rattle and swish of falling stones. Some drummed across the cart’s taut cover. The horses neighed, men cursed, and underlying it all was a deep rumble they felt as much as heard, the voice of a mountain grumbling. Even in the fetid cart a strange, rotting odour seemed to tinge the air.

  ‘Like some great beast!’ said one of the girls fearfully.

  ‘A dragon,’ whimpered another. The princess snorted her derision.

  But that was not the greatest strangeness. The rumbling stopped, and the voices outside did not seem more fearful or angry than before. But another noise grew over the trundling of the carts, low but different, a droning hum that changed constantly; the harder you listened the less clear it became. The slope beneath them was growing shallower all the time, and the wheels crunched in what might have been stony soil or gravel. The hum was growing in intensity swiftly, other sounds surging suddenly up out of it like fish leaping and falling back.

  The princess wrinkled her nose. ‘That sounds almost like …’

  ‘A village!’ exclaimed one of the girls. ‘A market day!’

  ‘A town, more like,’ said Savi. ‘But it’d be too big for that, even – and you’re forgetting where we are! Maybe a big waterfall or something …’

  They could see nothing through the back of the cart, save the grey-white hillside losing its gleam in the failing light. Yet here and there a different kind of light flickered faintly across it, like firelight on a wall; and the air felt almost warm. The noise was increasing, a roaring, a growing tumult. Savi sat feeling more and more uneasy, desperate to see what was out there, but afraid of what it would show her, making her fate too clear. She guessed the others felt the same; and that made her impatient.

  ‘I’m tired of seeing nothing but where I’ve been!’ she snapped, and stabbed her swordpoint through the taut cover. ‘Let’s have a really good look at whatever their devilry is!’

  Red confusion swirled across her eyes. She recoiled, startled; and then, so as not to make the others anxious, she pressed her eyes to the wide slit again.

  She was looking out into deep shadow. She could just see a strip of sky, pallid and dim now the sun had set behind the glacier slopes above. All below was a pool of gloom. But the shadow had light of its own, shades of many colours, flickering and leaping, a whirl of movement about her. She was surrounded by fire.

  By a host of fires. By innumerable spots and lines of light in the dark, whose very brightness concealed their source. Some might be bare hearths and firepits, maybe, peaks of leaping flames and beds of glowing coals. Others, like flashing gems coming and going in the dark, might be ovens and furnaces, with here and there a splash and trickle of flame, a shower of sparks. Lesser gleams might be lamps or braziers, sending up every kind and colour of flame, orange, blue, green, blazing red like the blood of the very earth itself, vibrant sunflower yellows, all mirrored and magnified by the wintry walls of the snowy ice-slopes looming above, over crags of black stone.

  No wonder the air felt warm; no wonder it stank of sulphurous smoke. No wonder it carried that low roar and mutter. Shapes were solidifying in that firelight as her eyes grew accustomed, shapes solid and huge, shapes moving, flickering, skeletal shadows passing to and fro, demonic in the red-gold light.

  Fire, within a killing chill. Life, within a deadly embrace, nestled many days deep within the steel-hard, snowbound heart of the Ice.

  ‘Well?’ shrilled the other girls, as she sat back.

  ‘It … it is a town,’ she said, shaking her head in wonder. ‘Like a town of fire and smoke, but real – huge, even … Rooftops above the murk, streets, people. A town. Here. But that’s impossible.’

  ‘No, it isn’t!’ remarked the princess quietly. ‘Listen to them! Listen to the voices. Like a waterfall, indeed – a torrent of them. And all the other sounds …’

  The torrent seemed to envelop them even as they listened. Loud voices, shrill voices, screaming voices, rising above the general roar. Sudden sharp explosions of shouting outside, as if their guards were exchanging insults with people passing The harsh blare of a trumpet, a rattle of feet on hard ground, running past. Whips cracking, children wailing, dogs barking, beasts bellowing – oxen, probably, though no kind she knew. What sounded like loud drumming in the distance, ferocious and frenzied. Flashes of wailing chants, squabbles, a little harsh laughter. Bellows wheezing, hammering and clanging, the spitting hiss of quenched metal, wheels that rumbled and squeaked worse than the carts – all familiar sounds, and yet a whole dimension larger, louder, more insistent.

  Savi thought her head was going to split. The waft of odours didn’t help; she had thought the cart stank, but the air carried in a greasy stink of humanity hardly washed and poorly drained, overladen with unimaginable fumes and smokes. Her lungs laboured, and she thrust the others away from the slit again, desperate for freer air. It was only a little better. She could taste the stench, even, and it made her feel sick. They were passing some kind of log palisade, heavy but crude, and stacked against it, little surprise, was a stinking midden—

  Savi fell back in shock, shivering. The others clustered around her, clamouring, but she would only sit there, shaking her head, sweating. There had been rats running over it, and she hated rats, but what they were running over …

  By the time she could look again, it was long past. They were going by walls, few of them high yet rough and ugly, little more than heaps of some kind of ashy-looking porous stone, clumsily slathered in crumbling mortar. Others were just log-walls, similarly sealed with mortar or something rougher, mud or dung maybe. Windows were small and high and always shuttered tight; small wonder, as strange wisps of mist continually flowed around them, emanations perhaps from the ways below, glistening with filth and puddles into which the cart was constantly lurching. Here and there at the base of a wall a grille flashed and flickered with the continual firelight, and darker smokes boiled up. Around these a few weeds had sprung up. Nothing else grew, that she could see, anywhere; and nothing lived, save the odd diseased dog or rat slinking through the narrow alleys, and hurrying humanity. Always hurrying, whether it was riders on horseback or hobbling crones, wild-looking children or chained files of slaves with their drivers lashing at their legs. The perpetual firelight had more lasting life in it.

  But behind the crest of one wall she caught a brief g
leam of something startlingly different, something that did not fit at all, rising above this sink of flame and turmoil like a stark reproach. The cart turned again, and it was hidden; but she clung to the opening in the cover, hungering to catch just one more glimpse among all this undreamed-of ugliness. For there at its heart and summit, rose a vision equally unexpected. It was more than beautiful; it seemed to purify the very light that welled up around it, and reflect it like a towering jewel. That much she had seen, no more. She flung herself across the cart, overturning the others, eagerly stabbing at the cover on the other side; but it showed her only more bleak walls.

  ‘What was it you saw?’ asked the princess urgently, but Savi could only gesture helplessly. Her life had never needed words for any such vision.

  ‘There was something else, too …’ insisted the princess.

  ‘That was horrible, yes. On a midden … bones. Almost; burned, roasted even. Small limbs, a head still with the hair …’

  The princess seemed to shrink into herself, folding her tall frame, hugging her knees desperately. ‘We are near the end,’ she whispered. ‘For better or worse …’

  ‘There are folk out there,’ said Savi. ‘If they live, so may we.’

  The princess sighed. But will we want to?’

  Savi said nothing. She had to catch her balance. The angle of the cart had changed again. It was climbing a slope.

  The two of them sat watching the slits in the cover. The other girls sat watching them. Neither wished to move. For all their hunger their stomachs were leaden, and Savi tasted a tang of sickness. And then the ground levelled off suddenly. The cart plodded forward, but just as Savi reached desperately for her spyhole, she was thrown flat among the stinking straw. The cart stopped dead.