The City of Ice

by K. M. McKinley

  Rel raised his sword, marking the one he would kill first.

  There was a flurry of noise. A monstrous lowing. A hoop of light opened in the night. Three modalmen sprang through a hole in the air atop giant, multi-limbed mounts, barbarously shouting. The hounds’ masters had come. Rel’s fear returned. At least death at the teeth of the hounds would have been quick.

  There was a yelp, barking, snarling.

  A modalman on his giant steed swept up the hill and charged into the hounds, transfixing one on a long spear. More hounds spilled down through the hoop of light after the modalmen and ran up the hill, slamming into the beasts closing on Rel. They snapped and reared, fighting insanely, their staccato snarling echoing over the desert. The modalmen galloped around the circle of hounds. Rel kept his eyes on them, they were the bigger threat. They were so huge, nothing he had been told prepared him for that. They did not attack, they were intent on the fighting hounds, slaying those that escaped their own beasts. Rel lowered his sword in confusion. The markings on the modalmen, their mounts, and their hounds were different in pattern and colour to those of the hounds that had chased him—a shifting red and blue rather than pink, gold and green.

  A modalman drew his great bow and aimed an arrow long as a light spear at Rel. So they mean to kill me anyway, he thought.

  The arrow sped towards him and past. A piercing yelp had Rel spinning around to find a rearing hound skewered by the arrow. It snapped its beak, and fell onto Rel, knocking him off his feet. He tried to shift the dead beast and could not. All he could think was how cold the sand was under his back.

  The slaughter was done in moments. A giant hand gripped the hound’s carcass and cast it aside, and Rel saw a modalman towering over him, its head lost in the stars. Whorls of red light played over its chest and four arms, slowly shifting to blue and back. In the upper pair of hands it held a spear. The shaft was eight feet long, but such was the modalman’s stature it was a short weapon to him. Rel stared, mute, paralysed by anticipation of the worst. He could not fight this thing.

  The modalman turned and called out to its comrades. The voice was profoundly, boneshakingly deep, its speech unlike any in the kingdoms.

  The modalman sheathed its spear in a leather tube across its back and reached out its lower hands to Rel.

  “If you wish to see the dawn,” it said in rumbling, accented Maceriyan, “you will come with me.”

  Rel stared, unmoving.

  The modalman’s companions shouted at him. Horns sounded in the distance.

  “We must ride. We cannot leap the light so soon. Now! The magecraft of your friend revealed your location. They are coming.” The modalman’s head was broad. His lips long and mobile, extending further round his head than on a man. His eyes gleamed with an inner light, like the hounds’, but dimmer. He wore a leather harness which supported a metal breastplate and a sheet of mail for its stomach, short trousers and boots whose furry tops stopped short of the knee. All his life Rel had heard stories of the modalmen, though they scarcely held credibility in the far Isles of Karsa. The reality was different to the tales, far more human and more alien at the same time.

  “Who is coming?” said Rel. He got to his feet. His sword was still in his hand. It was a useless weapon to fight the creature with, but he would not put it away.

  “Those who wish to end you time on this Earth.”

  “Modalmen? Like you? You are killers, all of you!”

  “And all the nations of your lands are the same?” The modalman blew out a disdainful raspberry, a curiously childish sound. “They are a different clan to mine. We do not kill the Forgetful, it is not our way. Forgive me, time runs swiftly, and we must go.”

  “F... find my mount, I will return to my company,” Rel stammered.

  “If you wish. Fifteen days hard ride to the west, through the worst parts of the sands. You can try. You will fail. We track those that you followed, before they chased you away. We fight the same battle. Come with us. If you will live, ride with me. If not, you may die here in a manner of your choosing.”

  Through his astonishment, Rel realised the modalman was asking his permission.

  “Very well.” He sheathed his sabre.

  The giant plucked Rel from the ground in two hands, easy as a mother would pick up a baby from the floor. It ululated, and its mount thundered up to its side. This was enormous, big as the largest dracon cattle, though lacking the frill and horns of those beasts. Like a dracon, like its masters and the hounds, it had six limbs. The head was similarly shaped to the modalhounds, if blunter and lacking a toothed beak; instead it had a lipless mouth. In further contrast to the smaller animals, the glowing eyes seemed tiny, and it had a crest of stiff red fur that ran down the back and split to cover the upper parts of its limbs.

  Still gripping Rel in its lower hands, the modalman pulled itself into the high saddle and deposited Rel before itself, enfolding him in its warmth and sharp scent, surprisingly like fresh human sweat. The two other modalmen cantered to flank him. One of them had found Aramaz, and led him on a long line held in one hand. The modalman said something to Rel, offering the leash. His ally, his captor, waved his follower away.

  “Ha! HA! HA!” Rel’s modalman roared. The markings on its body flared. It clapped its upper hands loudly and flicked the reins with the lower. The mount lowed and turned hard right. The Modalman dug in his heels, forcing the beast into a ponderous gallop.

  They fled into the night, carrying Rel away from his pursuers.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Temptation of Kyreen Asteria

  THE GODHOME GLARED with the light of the White Moon. A canted plate thousand of yards across, forged of perishless Morfaan steel, the Godhome’s silver underside acted as a gigantic mirror, doubling the moonlight and painting the rooftops it loomed over in reflected pewters and hard shadows black as coal. Atop the spires and ridges of Perus it was light enough to read. Down below was another matter. Perus had earned its other name of Umbra with reason; its labyrinthine, multi-layered streets and bottomless cavernas were thick with the dark.

  Through this darkness Adamanka Shrane came, the Iron Mage, last member of the Iron Church, messiah to a forgotten people, herald to ancient gods.

  A roseate hue seeped into the cold light of the White Moon as the Red Moon hurried up from the Earth, fleeing some celestial terror that mortals could only guess at. Though smaller, the Red Moon was brighter, and its ruddy light coloured the White Moon’s illumination a deep pink in profound but brief influence. Only a few hours after emerging from the horizon, it would rush behind the high lip of the Godhome, taking its bloody tinge with it.

  We of the Earth are the Red Moon, racing forever from the pursuit of death, thought Shrane. Death is tireless, it does not matter how fast we run. There is a night for us all when we dip below the horizon, and we never return.

  Shrane had lived a long time. She had seen the Godhome when it floated serenely over Perus. A city in the clouds, still home to the weakling Maceriyan gods, before Res Iapetus had driven them away, and ushered in the age of reason. Two hundred years had gone since then. She had watched them go. Thanks to the power of the Iron Fane, she returned to youth over and over, yet she had no illusions concerning her immortality. She had a little more time than others, that was all. Death’s mastery was as great over her as it was over anyone else. She would die, perhaps soon. Already her latest flush of youth was leaving her, and it went faster every time. The magics she had wrought these last eleven months hurried her ageing, pushing a cruel decrepitude on her. The skin of her neck was loosening. Crowsfeet gathered at the corners of her eyes. The vertical wrinkles around her forehead and mouth faded slowly when she changed expression. Grey marred her lustrous hair. A pain had developed in her left hip that only magic might assuage, and that was a fool’s road to travel. Expending magic to ease the pains of age would only quicken the ageing that brought them. She was locked upon a circular path. It was magic that sustained her, and magic that took
its toll on her, body and soul.

  The pain was worse since she had split, for two Adamanka Shranes walked the Earth, one in Perus, the other bound for the pole in the company of Vardeuche Persin. Each half was a diminished whole. This magic, she knew, would kill her.

  Such things she did for the Iron Gods. She was glad to serve, despite the pain they brought. More, she was proud. To have a calling was worth more than a thousand meaningless lifetimes. Her death would come in service to mighty gods, iron in spirit and body, not like the banished fools evicted from their palace in the sky by a single man. Millennia her kind had waited, hundreds of priests and priestesses living out their days, praying for the call. At last, it had been made. So many worthy vehicles for the masters’ return, but it was she who had been chosen, the last of the Iron Church. She was to be the instrument of return. She, the last of the last, had been chosen. The privilege lightened her spirit even as the pain of it wrapped tight steel fingers around her body.

  The Iron Gods were coming home. No balm or magic could ease her hurts more than that thought.

  Everything rested on her. There was no one else, not any longer. Her church had dwindled to one. If she failed, there would be none to take up her burden. Perhaps there were enough years left in her to train her successor, but in all probability she had left it too late to select an acolyte, train them in the magic of the masters and instruct them in the reading of the holy texts. Events had overtaken tradition. This was the last ministry of the Iron Church, she would not see it fail.

  Shrane went down an alleyway, her tall, iron staff clicking softly on slick cobbles. Five-storey buildings leaned at each other belligerently from opposite sides of the street, scowling gables crowding out the mixed, pink moonlight. The road was quiet, the windows dark, only the thin lines of light coming round the shutters showed that people dwelt there. Muted laughter and the strains of a hurdy-gurdy drifted from one house as she passed. A door opened, framing a man in soft candlelight and allowing a gush of steam ripe with cooking smells to escape, quickly gone when the man shook out a cloth and went back inside. A scavenging draconbird croaked and flapped off a garbage tun. Small signs of life in the dark. Perus seemed as dead as the ruins of the Red Expanse.

  She turned onto the Avenue Delforez, one of the few streets in the Scarlet Quarter wide and straight enough to permit the moon to light it properly, and everything changed.

  Of all the cities of the Hundred Kingdoms—of which there were a great number—Perus was commonly reckoned the first, by the Maceriyans. National pride demanded that the title was contested by other kingdoms. The Mohaci claimed the title for Mohacs-Gravo, but their city was too young and too diminished in power to contend. The even more youthful Karsa City nipped at Perus’s heels, the merchants there proclaiming their city’s pre-eminence as foreign trade swelled its coffers and workers for the new industries swelled its population. One day that might be so, for Karsa City had grown in size three times over in a little over one hundred years, gorging itself on the countryside and its inhabitants, lately reaching abroad for ever more inhabitants. For the time being it was yet to overtake Perus in importance and splendour. None could oppose Perus in the matter of venerability; its age was great, its roots deep, founded on stacked histories stretching all the way back to Morfaan times.

  Perus had not undergone the same drastic modernisation as Karsa City. The Maceriyan capital clung to its age pridefully, to its shambles and shanties, to the narrow streets laid down thousands of years ago, to all its deep wrinkles and sclerotic arterial ways.

  The Avenue Delforez was one place where change was making itself known. Modernity crept in in the form of glimmer lighting and huffing, multi-limbed charabancs, impatient to overtake the dogcarts that rattled in front of them. Newly constructed, strong houses occupied half the avenue’s length, haughty behind screens of shade-tolerant trees. But like every age before, the modern era was leaving the lightest touch. Only halfway along the street the mansions gave way to the high tenements in the Maceriyan central style; with steep roofs of scalloped tiles and draughty false turrets inhabited by starving romantics and draconbirds.

  In two hours, the White Moon would follow its red brother past the Godhome. Moonlight would pass from the city. True Umbran darkness would fall, blacker than any in the Hundred, stars and sky blocked by the Godhome, and the choking output of factory chimneys. But not yet. For now the Godhome hung precariously in the sky, one edge buried in the hills of the Royal Park, the other lofted skyward in defiance of gravity. To the city it was a tipped lid on a cauldron. But though it threatened daily to descend, the sky never did fall in. “When the cauldron closes”, they said in Maceriya, to mean something that would never happen. Perus was rich in ornaments from prior ages. The Godhome was its greatest.

  No human being had set foot within the god’s abode before Res Iapetus stormed it. None had since. The bones of those who had tried made mounds of shocking height around its base, so the stories went.

  Shrane had no interest in the Godhome. It was a dead thing, lacking potency to her even as a symbol. Her gods would not be so easily defeated. She kept her eyes forward, walking slowly, weakened by her rushing age. Passersby recognised her for a mage and crossed the street. None dared approach her. Pickpockets gave her a wide berth. Hucksters directed their shouts elsewhere. Her bearing was proud, and her metal-sheened eyes brooked no other’s gaze. Power clung to her as closely and brilliantly as the light of the moons did to the Godhome.

  She halted before a tall building, brightly lit by oil and glimmerlamps, indifferent to the well-dressed Messires and Medames who spilled laughing down the steps. The club was called Marentant—“Now!” in the Perusan vernacular. A pretentious name, but the norm in a city in thrall as much to the vagaries of fashion as it was to the past. The uppermost floors contained apartments, the lower three comprised the club. The ground floor was fronted by a long run of tall casements, shop windows for vanity through which the fashionable and popular, dressed in the most expensive finery, could be viewed drinking their coffee and their wine.

  The first and second floors had equally large windows, all curtained, concealing private rooms and halls for dining, business meetings, and more intimate assignations.

  Kyreen Asteria had been frequenting Club Now with monotonous predictability for two months.

  Shrane cast her hood back, revealing a curiously inhuman face whose beauty shone through the thin mask of age. Taking a tighter grip on her staff she mounted the steps leading up to ornate glass doors.

  Liveried footmen in high, purple wigs immediately barred her way, gloved hands held up.

  “No admittance to unaccompanied non-members.” They did not ask her for her name, it was an establishment where the patrons were all known, and no manners were spared for the unwelcome.

  “I am here to see a friend,” said Shrane equably. “Kyreen Asteria.”

  The lefthand footman—his senior status denoted by the extravagant piping on his lapels—pulled a condescending face, cracking his pancake of make-up.

  “We have not been informed, Medame, of any visitors for Medame Asteria. You are not permitted entrance. Good evening.”

  “Step aside,” she said. Her eyes flared, her staff warmed in her hand, the contact between iron and magic needling her palm. The pain in her hip stabbed.

  The footmen sagged in their costumes and blinked in confusion at one another. They looked at her anew, seeing her for the first time.

  “Good... good evening Medame. Might we be of assistance?” said the senior.

  “You will allow me within.”

  “Why certainly, Medame. Please.” They bowed extravagantly and opened the door for her.

  The beauty of an establishment as exclusive as Club Now was that if one could pass the doormen, then one would not be challenged again. Such places lived and died by the laws of discretion and servility.

  At the cloakroom she handed her cloak to an attendant. No name was asked for, and she did not o
ffer it. Her staff she kept. A uniformed waiter with bright rouge spots for cheeks and a moustache painted onto his smoothly shaved face came to her assistance.

  “I am Hauvame, Medame. I see this is your first visit to our establishment. I bid you welcome, and enquire, how might I be of assistance?”

  “I have an appointment with Medame Kyreen Asteria,” she informed him.

  The man frowned. “I was not informed.”

  “A surprise. We are old friends.”

  He paused. Shrane fanned the coal of magic that glowed in place of her heart, ready to cloud his mind. She did not need to. Hauvame bowed and led her through a wall of stained glass into the main hall of the club, a large space divided up cleverly into intimate booths by foldable screens. The lights were flatteringly low, a warm orange that smoothed out wrinkles and lent a maiden’s youth to the haggard. A haze of narcotic smoke drifted over the patrons, all of whom were making a show of having a delightful time.

  Hauvame led Shrane on a weaving path past a dozen tables to one against the wall. The lone occupant was Kyreen Asteria, a woman in her late twenties in finely tailored clothes. They were men’s clothes, cut for the female shape and prettified with lace and rounded edges, finished in a delicate turquoise, but a daring outfit nonetheless, masculine enough to make a statement, feminine enough to titillate without bringing opprobrium down on the wearer. There was a trend for such outfits that year in Perus, inspired by the shocking antics of the Countess of Mogawn of Karsa.

  Fashion or a desire for scandal had little to answer for Asteria’s choice of daywear. Dresses were simply not suitable attire for a duellist.

  Hauvame again bowed, a lesser version of the doormen’s pompous display. With a flourish of his gloved hands, he indicated Kyreen Asteria and withdrew.

  Asteria pointedly ignored him. She rocked a half-full wine bottle back and forth on its base with one finger, apathetically watching the liquid slosh around the bottom.