The Icefire Trilogy

by Patty Jansen

  * * *

  TO SADY, the afternoon session of the doga—the important debate to discuss the vital tightening and re-distribution of the budget—felt like stepping in tar. As soon as you thought you’d crossed it safely, it turned out there was some sticky residue on the sole of your shoe that kept leaving its mark all over the floor.

  Sady seemed to have stepped in a patch of northern railways and had so far been unable to wipe the contamination from the afternoon’s debate.

  Yes, the north would support spending on distributing suits to the southern regions, if the promised expansion of the northern railway remained unaffected by the budget cuts. Yes, they would sign for the injection of non-existent funds into the balloon industry, if the old trains got new carriages. Yes, they would vote with the central regions in favour of Sady’s proposals, providing that—you guessed it.

  An eastern senator summed up Sady’s feeling. “And I would like my honourable colleague to elaborate on how we are going to finance this railway.”

  Unlike the other senators, Sady couldn’t show yell and shout, and he wanted to, because with every hour that passed, he discovered more financial mess. The latest disaster he had uncovered was that someone appeared to have taken a number of the doga’s finance record books from the treasury office, and not only didn’t anyone know where they were, but no one had missed them.

  The doga was wasting valuable time with this kind of nonsense, time they should have spent discussing what to do about the unfolding crisis in the south.

  And Destran, at the back of the hall, looked like he was enjoying himself. The debate about railways went around in circles, and Sady kept glancing at the door, wondering what held up General Finnisius, who was meant to address the doga on the progress made by the army on the balloons, and was running late. The general had always been very punctual in previous meetings.

  The thought clawed at the edges of his mind, something has happened. It was about the time that the trains from Fairlight would be expected back, and he hoped that the majority of Fairlight’s citizens had taken the warning to get on.

  And then this stupid meeting . . . Sady leafed through his documents, which detailed the agenda for the meeting that wasn’t happening in any orderly fashion, but which he couldn’t steer because the proctor was not allowed to interfere in the debate; the speaker was meant to be doing that, except the speaker was a central senator who had voted for Destran, and was obviously still sore about that. Every time someone mentioned an important point, he ever-so-subtly allowed senators to derail it with trivialities, like the stupid northern railway.

  Sady had the documents with measurements from his trip to the border towns all done up, but there had already been some rumbles about who funded his trip, because he’d had to declare Lady Armaine’s sponsorship, and this was causing all sorts of political spotfires, about southern spies, about her loyalty and about whether or not she could possibly be called Chevakian. And that was just amongst his own office staff.

  Never, ever, trust this woman.

  Sady hadn’t seen her since his trip and now wished he’d had nothing to do with her. Nothing of what she’d said about the south had been verified through other channels.

  The scout he had sent with the peasant woman to Solmeni sent an alarming report from Twin Bridges this morning. The town’s lines to the south were all out. The town was shrouded in smoke from forest fires, but it was unseasonably cold.

  A vicious storm, Viki said, and showed him the crowded isobar lines having made their way into southern Chevakia.

  Sady had asked Viki to contact the border stations on the telegraph, but he had received no new data. He wasn’t sure Viki knew how to get most out of the automated barygraph network, and wished he could do it himself, but writing new code for the machine took time, which he no longer had, having to discuss railways to the north instead.

  And he hoped Viki would have the sense to keep trying. If his awful premonition was true and the barrier had shattered, sonorics in the city wouldn’t increase for a number of days. Those days were crucial, since they could find out how far the menace would travel and how strong it would be. The city did have some defences. There were guidelines, a plan to keep people indoors, and in necessary, an evacuation.

  But he needed data to justify taking those measures.

  No one knew what had happened. Not a word from the City of Glass, although Sady had made sure that messengers had finally been despatched. His trip to Milleus to seek out his wartime experience had been in vain, and none of the data he had gathered could convince the doga of the urgency of the threat. His support margin was too small to allow him to push through hard decisions. He was a leader without a real mandate.

  Milleus, old goat, you let us down when we needed you.

  Someone tapped Sady on the shoulder.

  “Proctor?”

  He turned to see his office boy behind him.

  He mouthed, “What?” The office staff didn’t usually come into the doga hall. His heart skipped with the nervousness that had never left him these last few days.

  “There’s a soldier in the office, Proctor. He insists that you come with him.”

  “We’re in the middle of a session. Can it wait?”

  The boy shook his head. “He said it’s urgent.”

  “Is the message from General Finnisius?”

  “He says the general has a problem. Please, Proctor, he was most insistent.”

  Sady heaved himself out of his chair. Senators fell quiet even before he hit the dais with the hammer. “You are going to have to excuse me. I have to adjourn the session. Something has come up.”

  There was some unhappy grumbling in the hall, mainly from northern senators.

  At the back of the hall, Destran said, loud enough for him to hear, “Adjourning the session won’t save your arse.”

  Some senators laughed.

  Sady gathered up his documents and left, feeling chilled. His term would be a short one, he feared, having achieved nothing, and leaving the doga in more upheaval than it had been when he came to power—was that only a week ago?

  In his office, he found that “the soldier” was the Proctor’s personal guard Deri, who was normally stationed in the guard’s post on the building’s ground floor, but performed other tasks while the Proctor was in the building.

  “What’s this about?” Sady asked.

  “Major Orsan asked me to come and get you. It’s an emergency. The escort’s down the corridor. Orsan says to bring your monitoring gear.”

  “But General Finnisius—”

  “Is already there, Proctor. Please.”

  “What is going on?”

  Deri didn’t know any more, except that it was an emergency. Orsan was not someone prone to theatrics and neither was Finnisius, so Sady collected his cloak and his field box of sonorics measuring gear and followed him into the corridor.

  A breeze came in through the open window, biting and cold.

  In the courtyard of the doga building, two lines of soldiers faced each other in a changing-of-the-guard ceremony. The tassels on their epaulettes flapped in the wind. Soft green leaves that had grown on the trees with the beginning of spring now lay on the ground.

  A young member of the city guard waited at the top of the stairs, his face anxious. He fell in step, taking up position on Sady’s other side.

  “Any report on what’s happening?” Sady asked him.

  “About mid-morning, a train with what appeared to be refugees has turned up at the station.”

  Mercy, the people from Fairlight. Finally.

  “Stationmaster needs your advice urgently on what he should do. Thinks that you should make a decision because they’re contaminated. Major Orsan is
there, trying to keep them under control. It’s not easy, Proctor. These people are in a bad way, and they’re angry. They’re not in the mood for being friendly, and we’re still trying to find someone to communicate with them.”

  “Communicate?” Rebelling refugees? Certainly not the citizens of Fairlight.

  “Yes. They’re all southerners, sir, and we haven’t found anyone who speaks Chevakian.”

  Sady turned to the man, his heart thudding. “Southerners?”

  “Yes, I thought you understood that.”

  “Surely, there must be some of the citizens of Fairlight on the train.”

  He shrugged. “If there are, we haven’t found them yet.”

  “How many people are there?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. The train was packed. Many of them. Many are injured. They look like they’ve been burnt. There’s dead people, too.”

  “Have you measured them for sonorics?” Sady felt his grasp on the situation slip from under him.

  “Off the scale, sir. Station’s been sealed off pending your advice.”

  Burn injuries meant extreme exposure to sonorics. Southern people, too, who were supposed to be resistant. The scale of this disaster made him feel numb. Was this what the Lady Armaine called rebellion?

  He forced himself to focus on immediate needs. He could not have these people loose in Tiverius contaminating everyone else. “How many injured?”

  The man shrugged, but he read the answer in his eyes. A lot.

  “Well, let’s see what we can do.” He certainly sounded a lot more confident than he felt.

  While they walked, he found some strands of reason. There was a field on the southeastern outskirts of the city that was used sometimes by travelling troupes of artistes or cheapskate merchants. He would ask the army to set up tents there. The only trouble was he would have to close the main road to Ensar because it went through the field, but they would have to set up diversions.

  The marketplace bustled with the normal kinds of activity that seemed surreal. A young man and his wife or sister pulled a heavy cart full of fresh glistening fish. The man interrupted his work for a cheerful, “Good afternoon, Proctor,” and other merchants echoed the greeting.

  Sady had the feeling that soon, all normality would be blasted out of everyone’s lives, that something was brewing the likes of which Chevakia had never seen.

  The station was on the other side of the marketplace. There were soldiers at the station entrance, blocking the way in. A few confused passengers carrying bags of shopping waited and argued with them.

  “But how can I get home?”

  “I paid for the ticket.”

  Beyond the blockade, the steps into the building were empty.

  The soldiers would not let Sady through until a man in a protective suit came down the stairs. He pushed up his hood. Orsan. His face glistened with sweat.

  “Sady, I’m glad that you’re here.”

  “How many people are in there?”

  “Hundreds. The train was crammed.”

  Sady glanced into the dark maw of the station building, where he saw no one, but heard the murmur of many voices. A breeze carried a stink such as Sady had never smelled in his life. He gasped. “What’s that awful smell?”

  “Sorry, sir,” said a man in station attendant uniform. “There was nothing we could do. We had to let them out of the trains. They’re all on the platform at the moment, but many of them were dead, and the wagons . . . The line master says there’s another three trains coming—” His eyes were haunted.

  They were the trains he’d sent all right.

  “Any citizens of Fairlight on the trains?”

  “Not that I’ve seen,” Orsan said. His eyes went distant.

  Sady shivered in a cool breeze. He had never seen Orsan dishevelled like this. “What happened to them?”

  “Your guess is as good as mine, sir, and at the moment I’m not sure I’ll like your guess any better than mine.”

  Dead. The barrier shattered.

  “Where is the stationmaster?”

  “In his office, sir, with the driver.” The station attendant continued, “What do you want us to do with these people, sir? They’re anxious and nervous and I don’t know how long we can keep them here. We need more guards.”

  “Already notified and on their way,” Orsan said.

  “Let me talk to the people,” Sady said.

  “No Sir. No one should go between them. These people are desperate. There’s hundreds of them. They’re hungry and sick. They’d rip you to pieces. They crackle with sonorics, all of them, and I don’t know that any speak Chevakian.”

  Sady breathed in deeply as a waft carried fresh air across the marketplace. He scoured in his pocket. Found a handkerchief and pressed it over his nose. “Then find me a suit. I’m going to talk to the stationmaster.”

  What else could he do? He had to get this mob out of here somehow, in a way that didn’t make them more angry than they already were, and after a three-day train ride from Fairlight in that stench, he guessed that would be pretty angry. “Where is General Finnisius?”

  “Gone to mobilise the troops, Sir.”

  Good. At least someone was getting a measure of what the situation required.

  Someone handed him a suit. Sady pulled it on over his clothes. He hadn’t worn a suit for a while, and the musty smell reminded him of his trips to the City of Glass. But even while the weather was unusually cold, Tiverius was much warmer than the City of Glass, and he was sweating inside the suit as soon as he’d done up the helmet.

  “Come,” he said, keen to get out of the suit again as soon as possible, because a proctor fainted with heat stress was no good to anyone.

  A heavily armed guard of four accompanied Sady up the stairs.

  People crammed on the platform behind a barrier of armed guards in protective suits.

  They were clearly southern people, with a dominance of dark hair, pale skin and blue eyes, and the latter were rare in Chevakia. Many carried packs and blankets of dirty fur. The people were dirty, too, sweaty, greasy-haired, red-faced.

  Even through the suit, the stench was incredible. Sweat, dirt, vomit, excrement and overriding all that, the all-pervasive smell of decaying flesh.

  A woman screamed and tried to run past the guards. The crowd surged and pushed. Soldiers struggled to keep them on the platform, guns levelled at the people. Civilians, all. Frightened out of their senses. Hungry, desperate. Contaminated. They had despair in their eyes, weeping sores on exposed skin. Horrific injuries.

  Three more trains. Mercy, what were they going to do with them all? There were at least . . . he let his eyes roam the heaving crowd . . . at least a thousand people here, if not more. Yes, probably far more than that. Three more trains?

  Sady swallowed nausea.

  Then, in the middle of the seething crowd and between the suited bodies of two guards, his eyes met those of a woman sitting serenely quiet. She wasn’t exactly young—early middle age—but she was hideously pregnant. She wore a plain brown dress and had a mass of black curly hair tied at the nape of her neck. Her face was pale, her cheeks red and incredibly alive. She saw him, and her gaze held his. Her expression didn’t radiate despair; it radiated hot anger. A woman having fled for her life, crowded onto a train, a woman proud and dignified even after all this hardship. A woman who didn’t deserve this.

  Just a moment, and then he’d lost sight of her.

  The guards led him up the stairs to the stationmaster’s office, which overlooked the platform.

  The stationmaster stood at the receiver behind his desk, talking to the mayor. Both wore suits but no helmets. Sady entered the room, shut the door and lift
ed the helmet off his head. After exchanging greetings, he asked, “Someone told me the train driver was here?”

  “Gone,” the stationmaster sighed out. “Sat here not two counts and spewed all over the floor.”

  Yes, there was a wet patch, recently cleaned.

  “Sonorics illness?”

  The stationmaster shrugged, then handed Sady a print-out from the station’s sonorics reader. A wriggly line tracked over the paper, rising slowly, until it jumped off the edge of the paper. One hundred and fifty motes per cube. Mercy.

  The stationmaster pointed. “That was when the train came in.” The figures were clear enough. “Driver said the refugees were on the platform when he pulled into Fairlight, and there was nothing anyone could do about them boarding. The Fairlight station was completely overrun. None of them paid for their tickets. None of the train attendants could stop them coming in. The attendants are all amongst the dead, with their clothes soaked with shit and vomit, and blood running out of their eyes.” He didn’t need to say sonorics illness. “Story’s the same for the other trains.”

  “Where are those trains?”

  “We managed to stop them at Curly Loop. Waiting for your orders as to what to do with them, Sir.”

  What to do? What could they do? Send the army and shoot all the passengers?

  “Are there any citizens of Fairlight amongst them?”

  He shrugged again. “Driver said he didn’t see any, but he said that there was a lot of smoke in the area, and shortly before he entered Fairlight, there was a bang loud enough to shake the ground.”

  That bang would have been the shattering of the barrier, and the locals couldn’t flee—because they were dead. If they had somehow survived and made it onto the train, they would have died on the way. How many people lived in the Fairlight region? He hardly dare add up the numbers. Thousands dead. Tens of thousands. All people Chevakia needed for food production.

  Then another horrible thought: Milleus. Some of those towns down Ensar way hadn’t responded recently either. He wiped sweat off his forehead. When he had a moment, he must make more of an effort get onto Milleus, brotherly grudges be damned.