The City of Ice

by K. M. McKinley

  The duke licked his lips at the display, exposing the whole row of teeth. They were all sharp. He touched the tip of each with his tongue. “Modesty will be a great hindrance to my plans. I will take that one. She displays herself properly in the face of her shame.”

  He pointed his cane at Madelyne. “She is fine featured, her body is superlative, she shows self-control, she has the will to do as she is told, and yet,” he strode over to her, passing his hands over her body without touching her. The unnatural heat from his hands brought forth goosebumps on her skin. “I sense an edge to her. Defiance, and... Yes, something else.” He laughed again. His breath was hot as fire.

  “Markos will pay you, Verralt.” He bowed low, took her hand and kissed it. “A pleasure, as always.” He bowed to Madelyne. “I will see you soon, girl.”

  He stooped under the door, and was gone. Madelyne let out a long shuddering breath, still keeping her eyes on the wall. She would suffer the duke’s attentions if she must, but she had no desire to taste Verralt’s sadism.

  A pallid, unkempt man came in from outside. His suit and tall hat were dirty and tattered. Over one arm he carried a fur-lined cloak, in his free hand he had a large purse, which he passed to the Medame.

  “For your continued service and discretion,” rasped the man. He came to Madelyne. His skin was unhealthy looking, very dry. She shook at the thought of those fingers touching her, but as he draped the cloak over her nakedness he was careful not to handle her. “I am Markos, the duke’s servant,” he said. Around his eye sockets the skin was deeply lined, his eyelids red, puffy and flaking, but his eyes were such a pale blue, clearer than the sky, and the whites brilliant as fresh snow.

  Verralt watched all this, running her eyes over Madelyne’s nakedness with relish, excited by the duke’s purchase of her.

  “You are very fine. I am sure he will enjoy you,” said Verralt to her lasciviously. “If you fail, I will buy you back and enjoy you myself.”

  “Hush now, Medame,” rebuked Markos. “She is no longer yours.”

  Markos guided her through the door. So small, how could the duke pass through it, Madelyne wondered. She was dazed. Success brought its own problems.

  “Pay no heed to the Medame,” said Markos softly. “You belong to the duke now. He is a fair master, if you please him.”

  Markos took her outside into the fog. A carriage awaited her, drawn by four jet-black drays. She half expected slavering jaws and glowing red eyes, and laughed nervously when they put out their pink tongues and wagged their tails in greeting.

  Markos helped her gently into the carriage and took her to her new home.

  Once there, she did not see the duke until three days later.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The Tower and the Hag

  DESPITE ITS NAME, in appearance the Neck was more akin to a dragon’s backbone. A long sinuous ridge that ran from Great Karsa to the shore of Macer Lesser, it cut the Karsan sea in two except at the very highest tides, when the gap at the Neck’s centre was inundated, and the two halves of the sea joined into one. At those times it was a magnificent sight, a razor of cliffs surrounded by surging waves, the whirlpools of Gorgoantha and Sryman churning either side.

  Most of the time it was a bleak ridge in a world of mud. Only the hardiest of plants made their homes upon it. The windblasted sandstones were grey with exposure, the nodules of quartz studding the grit scrubbed dull. Giant colonies of seabirds and draconbirds occupied the sides, constructing their higgledypiggledy nests more or less in peace. Their droppings streaked the rocks white and gathered in caves. This guano was harvested for its chemical content, providing a modest living for those who went to collect it. Otherwise there was precious little profit there. The stone of the neck was so friable and riven with cracks it had never been quarried. The seabirds nested in such inaccessible places and were so aggressive they were rarely troubled for their eggs or hunted for their meat. The neck’s flora was also undisturbed, for there were richer, easier pickings to be had on the landward cliffs. Nothing edible would grow in its thin soil, the sea was impossible to access from the clifftop, and so no sane man would live upon it. What rubbish swirled out from the cities either end rested only a while before being sucked out into the wider ocean. The railway necessitated viaducts and causeways of packed stone, but they had been artfully built, incorporating the elegant piers of the fallen Morfaan bridge over the Gap, and were regarded as an adornment to nature’s art. Therefore the Neck remained defiantly unspoiled, unformed by human hand despite being trapped between two populous lands, a band of wilderness throttled by mud.

  Vieyve-su-nare’s roots were Morfaan, set down in times no chronicle remembered. Atop ancient foundations were the lesser efforts of the High Maceriyans, and the inhabitants spoke a queer bastardised dialect of that language still. The flimsy buildings of the dark age following the Maceriyan Resplendency had not survived well, and so the progression of the town’s architecture took a giant leap across aeons. In places ancient walls, none higher than a woman’s waist, had been unearthed from the peaty earth and left on display. Bronze plaques spoke boastfully of secrets dragged out of time’s depths. But the true pride of the town was far more impressive, and it was no ruin.

  At the heart of Vieyve-su-nare was a slender tower many thousands of years old. It had outlived all else built around it by men or Morfaan. Vieyve-su-nare had undergone a spate of rapid building over recent decades. New hotels, a domed town hall and a train station designed by Per Allian himself early in his career rose over the crooked streets. The tower had yet to be eclipsed, and was more than twice as high as the tallest modern building. A tapering construction of surpassing beauty, three hundred feet around at the base, one hundred at its truncated top. The original crown had fallen away, the floors of the interior long gone. Still it stood, a reminder to the Karsans that greater beings than they had trodden these lands.

  Garten and Duke Abing toiled up a stair winding around the exposed walls of the interior. Stone was used in the construction of the tower, not the Morfaan building glass. The masonry was so finely fitted that even after eight millennia the joins were hard to see. Garten trailed his hand along the wall. Except where wind and rain had chewed at the windows, the stones were smooth, and in places maintained a marble’s lustre.

  “Damn delays!” grumbled Abing.

  “Your grace could demand the train press on. It is the ministry’s own train. We rush to meet the Morfaan, and their own mists blockade us. The train’s lamps will suffice to light the way. Why will they not move?”

  “The fog is up too thickly in Maceriya. The drivers insist we cannot cross at night,” said Abing.

  “For fear of creatures in the mist that do not exist. You are not afraid of old wives’ tales, your grace?”

  “I certainly am not. But the drivers will not drive. Every train that has tried to pass the Neck on nights of Morfaan mist, they say, has suffered some misfortune. Let us leave aside the fact that the Morfaan have come to Ruthnia three times in the eight decades since the railway was built, and that the misfortunes were nothing more serious than a scalding from an upset tea kettle. Goodmen and their superstitions! Still, they will not be moved, and we should not force them or we will have no driving crew to take us to Perus. We must wait.”

  “There is one consolation,” said Garten. “I have always wished to climb the tower.”

  “Your pet hag made it quite clear we were to meet her here. We have no choice in this either, your desire to clamber up these wet stones be damned.” Abing huffed up the stairs, his face red with the effort. Garten found the going easier physically, but less so psychologically. The drop down the hollow tower stump was dizzying. He put it to the back of his mind, determined not to let fear overrule his interest in the tower.

  Clouds of water vapour swirled around the open top. A thick mizzle beaded the velvet of their coats with shiny dewdrops. By the time they reached the summit, they were quite damp, though not yet soaked.

&nb
sp; The mayor of Vieyve-su-nare had installed a viewing platform at the top. Slippery green beams rested on ancient corbels. The stairs carried on through a cut-out in this new floor, ascended another ten feet, and stopped their ascent. The last step was a hopeless block against the white skies. The wall had been sheared off diagonally, as if by a sword cut. The wall to the east was higher than the wall to the west, which dropped so low a cast-iron guard rail had been installed to safeguard visitors. By this stood a slender figure, a woman in man’s clothing, wearing a long waxed drayman’s coat with short cape, a wide brimmed hat with a spray of dracon feathers in its band.

  “Countess! Countess Lucinia Vertisa?” called out Garten.

  The figure turned to them. She raised a gloved hand in greeting.

  “Garten Kressind?”

  “You are here!” said Garten. She came across the slick wood to meet with him halfway. They shook hands, like men. “Might I introduce his grace the goodfellow Duke Abing of the Vestral, Minister of the Admiralty and Minister of Karsa-of-the-Hundred to his highness Prince Alfra?”

  “Gods protect his soul,” said the countess with a quirked smile. She held out her hand. Abing looked at it disbelievingly.

  “Go on then man, take it, I don’t bite. Well, not under these circumstances,” she said.

  That pierced Abing’s distrust. Sensing a character of similar will, he let out a cloud of steaming breath and smiled back. Garten looked on in disbelief as all the lines Abing’s face had accrued in saying hag this and hag that melted away. He grabbed her hand firmly, pumped her arm and said, “A pleasure, goodlady. I am glad to have some real blue blood with me. These new money fellows are all well and good but...” He cast a meaningful look at Garten. The countess let out a light, feminine laugh that belied both her reputation and her mannish look. Garten studied her face surreptitiously. She was no beauty, but nor was she the monster popular gossip had her to be.

  “Our fathers were acquainted rather well, so I understand, during their time in cabinet,” she said. “It is well to maintain the links between families such as ours.”

  “Indeed.” Abing kissed her hand. Garten was amazed at Abing’s fickleness, and not for the first time. On matters of import the duke was resolute, but on occasion what appeared to be deeply ingrained ways melted away like ice in the sun. He had thought this a weakness of character for a man with the duke’s duties, but he was beginning to think it was, in fact, not.

  “I believe you know my brother and sister, Guis and Katriona,” said Garten. His attempt to claw back the initiative proved clumsy. Her face clouded at Guis’s name.

  “Katriona is a fine goodlady. I know her but little, but I feel she and I could be dear friends, given a little time in one another’s company,” she said sincerely. She held Garten’s eyes and his hand a little too long. He cleared his throat and gestured to the railing. The three of them returned to where the countess had been standing.

  “Tell us why you chose to meet us here, goodlady,” Garten said. “I suspect it is not only because of the opportunity to visit such a historical building.”

  “You are right. I suppose I am being a little theatrical. I have many vices. Melodrama is but a small one. I am sure you can forgive me, but I arranged to see you here because I wished to make a point.”

  “About the Morfaan,” said Abing. They looked out over the view. The edges of Vieyve-su-nare at the tower’s feet were softened by the fog, the bustle of the town damped to nothing. Only the Neck and the tower seemed to have any solidity.

  “In part, but not only,” said the countess. “This tower demonstrates the power of the Morfaan, and it is a mighty edifice by the standards of this lesser era. Did you know, when he built his station, Per Allian spent more time drawing reconstructions of this building? The Prince’s father grew quite angry at the delays. The drawings are exquisite, beautiful studies in pen and ink. Some of them are a little fantastical, but the least extrapolation puts the original height of this tower—based on its proportions and the masonry Allian uncovered built into the later town—at double this height. Double! One could see clearly into Macer Lesser from the summit. And this is not their finest surviving work. It is a fragment, nothing compared to the city being uncovered by Arkadian Vand in the ash of the Three Sisters, or the indestructible fortress at the Gates of the World.”

  “My brother Rel is stationed at the Glass Fort,” said Garten.

  “He is lucky. The Glass Fort is one of the wonders of Ruthnia. I long to see it one day.”

  Garten’s mind went to Rel, sitting out his banishment in a drafty glass castle. Rel’s early letters had been optimistic, but Garten supposed whatever awe Rel had felt at the power of the ancients had worn off long since. Although far north, the gates were cold in winter.

  “The Morfaan were a truly remarkable people. Their dominion of the Earth persisted for untold ages,” the countess went on. “And yet their civilisation collapsed in little under a century. The why is what I have devoted my career to uncovering.”

  “They did not fall. They ruled and later advised the Maceriyans through their resplendency,” said Abing. “A matter of historical record.”

  “If you can call the legends that have survived to the present day ‘history’, then what you say is true. But the most generous reading of such ancient myths suggests those who oversaw the building of Old Maceriya were much diminished in number and power from those who came before. Do you know, the first signs of man’s habitation are found in layers of the ground only a little lower than the final rubble of the Morfaan’s world? This begs a number of questions in addition to why they fell.”

  “Nations fall all the time,” said Abing.

  “They do. But when one discerns a pattern to the rising and collapse of empires, should we not dig deeper?” said the Countess. “Goodfellows, I have performed a thorough investigation. My research these last months has taken me all over the near continent. I have read many volumes of the most obscure and venerable sort. The trip was not pleasurable. You can imagine how I, as a woman, fared in some of the less liberal kingdoms. But I had to do it, and I did it to put into context my calculations regarding the movement of the heavenly bodies, to whit the Twin and the two moons, Red and White. This is my hypothesis. Eight thousand years ago, the Morfaan’s empire sank into ruin after centuries, if not millennia. They were masters of this world, and yet they barely survived. A little while after, along come the Maceriyans.”

  “Their world, the Classical World, lasted five thousand years,” said Garten. He nodded at the duke encouragingly.

  “I am sure you are well educated enough to know it is not so simplistic, Goodfellow Kressind. There was the period of the Maceriyan Resplendency. The Turmoil finished it, seemingly at the empire’s height, afterwards followed by the period of Maceriya the Shadow. Finally, the Age of Ignorance, the curtain of which we ourselves only lifted some six hundred years ago, and which marks the beginning of our own civilisation. There is a pattern.” She slapped her hands together impatiently. “A cycle running over periods a little over four thousand years in length. Look into the ground burying the ruins of the Morfaan, and there is a band of charcoal one foot deep. Above it there is little new building. Dig down to the close of the Resplendency, and there are similar signs of upheaval. The civilisation that followed was much debased, and withered. The Maceriyan empire followed a similar track to that of the Morfaan—ascendancy, abrupt upheaval, slight recovery, then decline.”

  “And what has this to do with our current problems?” asked Abing.

  “She has a theory, Duke Abing,” said Garten. “This is why I wanted to bring her. Hear her out.”

  “It is the Twin, goodfellows. It is not the gods as the old scriptures tell. I do not proclaim this without basis. I have spent much time with Eliturion. He is evasive, but I am persistent. I have inferred that he is no more than five thousand years old.”

  Abing frowned at Garten.

  “You mean to say, the gods are younger
than the Morfaan?”

  “Much younger,” said the countess. “It has not been discovered yet simply because no one else knew what to ask, or how to interpret Eliturion’s blather. He openly says the gods were made. The remnants of the church have always dismissed this.” She made a derisive noise. “The words of their last god! The gods are young, the Twin is eternal. The Twin, I have mathematically proven, comes closest to the Earth on a repeating period of four thousand, one hundred and twenty two years, fourteen days. I have rolled my calculations backward into the past—”

  “And the fall of the Morfaan and the end of Maceriya’s Resplendency coincide with this celestial event,” said Garten.

  “Don’t interrupt the countess, Kressind,” rumbled Abing. “I will not have you treating her as anything but an equal. She might be a woman but she talks sense and is still a degree of class above you. Show some respect to the goodlady.”

  Garten nearly choked. “I am sorry, your grace.”

  “Do not be. I enjoy it when people grasp what I am saying, to have them leap to the chase with me. Hunting alone is tedious. Having to spell everything out becomes mightily dull. One shouldn’t douse the flames of another’s epiphany. You are correct, Goodfellow Kressind. What I do not know is how the catastrophe occurs, only that is has done so twice before, and that the third befalling is predictable. It will happen on the 33rd of Gannever, year 461 of the current era. A little over one year from this date.”

  “Hmmm,” rumbled Abing. “As long as you can convince the Three Comtes of Perus to stop listening to the damned pantheon revivalists, that’s all I care about. There’s a whiff of war. Gods and politics don’t mix; I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again until somebody bloody listens to me. You are, I trust willing to do this for Karsa and the Isles?”

  “I hear they write plays about me in Perus, and copy my clothes. It would be amusing to see them. Yes, I will do it.”

  “Good,” said Abing. “A fat duke, a new-money ladder climber and the most scandalous libertine in all the isles.” The countess bowed ironically. “A fine company to save the kingdoms.”