by Anthony Ryan
Lizanne struggled close enough to cover the wound with her mouth, fighting nausea as she sucked the blood down her throat, feeling Julesin die beneath her. The hot, iron-tinged flow slowed then stopped as the Blood-blessed gave a final twitch. Lizanne suppressed the reflexive need to vomit and raised her gaze to see Darkanis now standing over Makario. The musician flailed on the floor, arms moving in a spastic parody of combat. The constable had retrieved the knife and paused to laugh before he knelt, pressing the blade to Makario’s throat, his mantra coming in a soft whisper now. “Don’t ever try to fuck me over.”
Seeing little point in prolonging matters, Lizanne summoned the Black, finding she had imbibed more than enough to crush the constable’s head.
• • •
She used the last of the Black to free herself, finding she lacked the concentration to unravel the knots and settling for dismantling the chair. With the Black expended, she lay on the floor for a time, recovering strength enough to search Julesin’s person. He had all four vials, presumably smuggled in thanks to Constable Darkanis, each about three-quarters full. Lizanne sniffed each in turn until she found the Green, managing to restrain the urge to gulp half the contents and instead rationing herself to only two sips, just enough to get her on her feet.
Makario and Darkanis lay side by side, the musician liberally spattered with the gory debris left by the constable’s demise. Makario still moved his arms about, though with less energy, throwing feeble punches at nothing, an absent cast to his half-closed eyes. Lizanne knelt and lifted his head into her lap, checking to make sure Darkanis hadn’t managed to crack his skull. She smoothed a hand over the musician’s brow until some semblance of awareness returned to his gaze.
“Told you not to go out,” he murmured, a small smile playing over his lips.
“What did Darkanis promise you?” she asked.
Makario swallowed and licked his lips, shoulders moving in a shrug. “Release, what else? New name, new life, far away from here. Once Julesin was in charge and the silver started flowing. Also gave me the components I needed, for the pianola. Music always was the quickest way to my heart.”
They both winced in unison as a massive boom sounded from outside. It was perhaps the loudest explosion Lizanne had ever heard, louder even than the massed artillery at Carvenport. It must have been quite a sight, she thought, leaning over Makario as the building trembled, displacing a cloud of plaster and dust from the ceiling.
“What was that?” he asked.
Lizanne took the vial of Green and pressed it to his lips. “A chance at what you were promised,” she said. “But I can’t guarantee you’ll live to see it.”
CHAPTER 30
Hilemore
He stood on the walkway, frozen in the dark. The lights had disappeared only seconds after the platform began its plummet, leaving him alone in a pitch-black void, still staring down into the shaft even though there was nothing to see. Sigoral and the two younger Torcreeks gone in an instant. Hilemore clamped down on the rising swell of guilt and self-reproach. You will always lose people, his grandfather had told him once, sombre face veiled by pipe-smoke as he reclined behind his desk. No matter how skilled a sailor or competent an officer you become, lad. Whatever you do, you will always lose people.
They didn’t fall, Hilemore reminded himself. They may still be alive down there. Living souls can be rescued.
Very carefully, he crouched and unslung his pack from his shoulders, undoing the straps by feel. It took a few moments fumbling to find the lantern and several more to light it, his impatience sending a succession of matches into the void before he finally touched a flame to the wick. He cast the glow about, crouching to illuminate as much of the shaft as possible, though of course the bottom remained far out of reach. Hilemore began to call out, hearing only the echo of his own voice, when the walkway shuddered beneath him. The tremor possessed sufficient violence to send him sprawling, his torso hanging over the edge of the void before he managed to lever himself to safety.
The shaking seemed to increase as he regained his feet, arms held out wide to maintain balance. The perilousness of his position was underlined by a sudden and very loud crack from above, accompanied by a cascade of falling dust. Hilemore didn’t hesitate, keenly honed instincts acquired over the course of years at sea left little doubt in his mind that it was time to run.
He sprinted along the walkway, managing not to stumble as the tremor continued. As he reached the passage there came the thudding boom of something very large and very heavy impacting on the walkway. Hilemore paused for a second to turn, catching a glimpse of a huge slab tottering on the edge of the walkway for a second before tumbling into the shaft. Living souls can be rescued, he thought, teeth clenched in impotent fury.
Another violent shudder convinced him that this wasn’t the time to indulge his guilt. He turned and raced along the passage, scrambling up the piled rubble and spending several frantic seconds navigating the gap Clay had created before tumbling out the other side. He fell repeatedly as he ran, the surface beneath his feet shifting with increasing energy. Finally he came to the great cog-like door, finding the rope still dangling from the narrow aperture they had used to gain entry. He cast the lantern aside and gripped the rope, hauling himself up as fast as the shaking would allow. Reaching the aperture and beginning to clamber out, managing to poke his head into the freezing air before another violent heave loosened his grip and he found himself slipping back inside.
“Captain!” Steelfine’s meaty hand clamped onto Hilemore’s forearm with a near-crushing force. The Islander heaved him through the opening, shouting with the effort, and Hilemore found himself lying winded at the bottom of the bowl-shaped crevasse they had blasted into the ice.
“Sir?” Steelfine crouched at his side as Hilemore dragged air into his lungs, momentarily unable to speak. The ice was shuddering too, he noticed, the energy released in the spire communicated to the surrounding sheet. He started at a sharp crack near by, gaze jerking towards the sight of a fissure opening in the ice a few feet from where he lay, white powder exploding upwards as the fissure snaked away. More cracks sounded all around, powdered ice rising in curtains to catch a rainbow from the sunlight.
“We . . .” Hilemore choked, forced more air into his lungs and got to his feet. “We have to get clear!”
They scrambled free of the crevasse and ran for the camp, Hilemore waving at the fur-covered figures rushing to meet him. “Back! Get back!”
“Where’s my daughter!” Braddon Torcreek demanded as Hilemore made the camp. He ignored the Contractor, ordering the men to pile supplies on the sleds. His instinct was to order them to run, get away from this place as fast as possible. But without supplies they wouldn’t last a day on the ice, regardless of what happened here. “Get your harnesses on! Quickly! “
“My daughter!” Braddon repeated, grabbing hold of Hilemore’s arm and jerking him around. “My nephew. Where are they?”
Hilemore stared into the man’s eyes, seeing fevered desperation and a burden of guilt that perhaps outweighed his own. “I believe them to be lost,” he told the Contractor simply, tone as gentle as urgency allowed. “I’m sorry.”
He tore his arm free and began to buckle on one of the harnesses. “We’re heading north with all speed!” he called out to the men scrambling to follow suit. “No stopping until—”
His words were drowned by another series of cracks, louder and more numerous than before. For a second all was rendered white by the upsurge of powder and when it cleared Hilemore saw that the ice-sheet had fragmented. A complex matrix of cracks expanded out from the spire in all directions, as far as he could see. Tall geysers of vapour ascended from the widest cracks, one close enough to engulf one of his crew, a rifleman who had stood beside him at the Battle of the Strait. Hilemore watched in wretched fascination as the man was swallowed by the geyser, his screams brief but still terrible t
o hear. When the vapour cleared Hilemore could see the crewman’s scalded red features amidst the swaddle of his furs before he fell into the crevasse left in the geyser’s wake. Steam, Hilemore realised. It’s not being shattered, it’s being melted.
The ice beneath them pitched like the deck of a ship in heavy seas, sending the entire party from their feet. Hilemore watched as another man, one of the cook’s assistants, slid across the angled surface, mitten-clad hands scrabbling and failing to find purchase on the ice before he slipped over the edge. Hilemore and the rest of the party might well have joined him had the ice not righted itself, heaving back and forth before settling into a more sedate rhythm.
Hilemore got unsteadily to his feet, gazing around at their refashioned surroundings. The sheet was now a dense collection of flat-topped icebergs, drifting in apparent haphazard fashion dictated by the currents of the churned and steaming sea below. He watched as the berg they stood on began to shrink, chunks of ice falling away as the heated ocean gnawed at its edges. All the surviving members of the party clustered together in the centre of the berg, piling supplies and warily eyeing their quickly diminishing platform.
Braddon was the one exception. The Longrifles’ captain stood close to the berg’s edge, staring down at the roiling waters below in indifferent stillness. Skaggerhill and Preacher rushed forward to drag him back seconds before the patch of ice he stood on sublimed into the sea. Braddon shook off their restraining hands and slumped down amidst the mess of upturned sleds and disordered supplies, his face a picture in abject grief.
“Skipper,” Hilemore heard Scrimshine say in a tremulous whisper. He turned, following the smuggler’s pointed finger to find that the spire had begun to break apart. The great monolith’s pointed summit came loose amidst an explosion of dust as cracks appeared all over the spire’s surface. It fell to pieces all at once, great jagged slabs of material shattering yet more ice as they toppled into the sea, producing a series of tall waves that threatened to capsize their refuge. Then it was gone, vanished within the space of a few seconds, leaving them alone and adrift in a shattered world.
• • •
Eventually the steam faded, by which time their new island home had shrunk to a platform twenty feet across at its widest point. Not quite the smallest vessel I’ve yet commanded, Hilemore reflected without much humour. Yet still too small for even an eight-man crew.
“Perhaps twelve days, sir,” Steelfine reported in a quiet murmur, Hilemore having asked him to undertake a realistic appraisal of how long their remaining supplies might last. “Could stretch to fifteen, given we’re not expending so much energy now.”
“Thank you, Mr. Steelfine.” Hilemore adjusted the pointers on his sextant and raised the instrument to the sky. One advantage the southern extremes offered the sailor was the clarity of the sky at night. He couldn’t see even the slightest wisp of cloud from one end of the horizon to the other, making it fairly easy to gauge their heading from the stars.
“Two miles south of where we started,” Scrimshine called to Hilemore with a strangely cheerful grin. “Am I right, Skipper?”
“Two point eight,” Hilemore replied.
“I’m guessing all currents lead south at this latitude.” The smuggler drew his hood back to cast his gaze about, shaking his head a little in wonder. “Will you look at all this. Could be the ice is melted all the way to the pole.”
“It’s certainly a possibility.”
The gaps between the drifting bergs had increased considerably since the sea had stopped roiling, the nearest berg was at least fifty yards off and the distance showed no sign of lessening. Earlier he had risked dipping a hand into the sea, finding the water chilly but not numbing. He could only conclude that whatever processes had brought about this change were still continuing far below the surface. The kind of energies capable of returning so much of the ice-cap to the ocean in so short a space of time were far beyond both his comprehension and, he suspected, the comprehension of the finest scientific minds. The sight of the spire itself had been humbling enough but now he had an inkling of the vastness of the mystery they had come to investigate. We were children, he thought, his mind repeating the image of the platform taking Clay and the others into the depths of the shaft. Rousing a monster we could never understand.
“Reaching the pole would be something,” Scrimshine went on. “Never been done as far as I know. One for the history books, if we ever get to tell anyone, o’course.”
The man’s cheeriness was both aggravating and puzzling. Hilemore, in common with the rest of the party, viewed their current predicament with grim comprehension, but this former convict seemed to find it a cause for levity.
“Didn’t think I’d live to see anything else,” Scrimshine said, perhaps in response to Hilemore’s sour glance. “Besides the walls of my cell. Instead”—he spread his arms, baring his meagre teeth in a smile—“I got to see wonders. Can’t say it’s been an unfair shake of the rope.”
“A creditable attitude, Mr. Scrimshine.” Hilemore glanced over to where Braddon sat close to the edge of the berg, hunched and apparently indifferent to the bleakly concerned face of the stocky harvester who stood near by. “Even so,” Hilemore said, turning back to Scrimshine. “I doubt anyone would take it amiss if you saw fit to once again beseech your ancestors on our behalf.”
The smuggler pondered the notion for a moment before shrugging. “I think old Last Look may well have used up all my credit on that account, Skipper. But it can’t hurt to ask.”
Hilemore saw Skaggerhill hug himself tight and retreat from his captain. “Much appreciated, Mr. Scrimshine.”
Braddon didn’t turn as Hilemore approached, continuing to sit with his hood drawn back from his weathered features, staring out at the current-churned waters. Hilemore sank down next to him, drawing back his own hood. He didn’t say anything. Commiserations would be redundant, as would apologies. However, if the fellow wanted to vent his anger at a man who fully deserved it, Hilemore wasn’t about to stand in his way.
When the words came from Braddon’s mouth, however, there was no anger in them, only faint curiosity. “Do you have a family, Mr. Hilemore?”
“I have a mother and two brothers,” Hilemore replied.
“No. I meant a wife, children.”
“No, sir. I was engaged until recently but fate decided the marriage wasn’t to be.”
“Fate, huh? In my experience it ain’t fate that breaks a couple apart.”
Hilemore gave a tight smile, acknowledging the point. “Very true. My fiancée is . . . was a lady of profound convictions and heart-felt principles. She considered my continued employment with the Protectorate to be incompatible with these beliefs.”
“Gave you a choice, did she? Her or the Protectorate.”
“Actually no. I don’t imagine you know a great deal about the Dalcian Emergency, since Ironship’s friends in the press were skilled in obscuring the details. Suffice to say that the reality of war rarely matches the image portrayed in the news-sheets. Lewella, however, has her own sources of information. I’ll not pretend to have emerged from the Emergency with completely clean hands, but I was at least at ease with my own conscience. Lewella was not.”
“Think she’ll ever know about all this? You coming such a long way to die for no good reason.”
“We had a good reason, Captain Torcreek. Perhaps Lewella would never have known my fate. Perhaps she would have found another man more suited to her outlook and forgotten me in time. I would be content to be forgotten if it meant she remained alive long enough to do so.”
“My Freda would never forget. And she’s lost more than just a husband. Turns out I’m a coward, Mr. Hilemore. Y’see, ain’t nothing scares me more than the prospect of looking into my wife’s eyes when I tell her I lost our daughter.”
• • •
Hilemore didn’t bother to institute rationing. T
he farther south they drifted it became clear that the cold would most likely claim their lives before starvation set in. So the crew occupied themselves with eating their way through the remaining supplies in between stomping about their limited environs in an effort to stave off the cold. Although the sea had warmed, the air was as chilled as ever. It had become an all-consuming presence now, adding a painful edge to every breath and a razor-like caress to exposed skin. Hilemore could see the beginnings of frost-bite on the men’s faces, reddish patches appearing on noses and cheeks that grew more inflamed as the days passed.
Braddon Torcreek remained a mostly still and silent figure, eating only when Skaggerhill pressed him to it and then partaking of a scant few mouthfuls at a time. Hilemore couldn’t help but be reminded of the man they had found frozen to death in the tunnels at Kraghurst Station. Tends to happen when a fella loses all hope of deliverance, Scrimshine had said. Braddon, Hilemore knew, could find no deliverance from his guilt.
They drifted for three full days, Hilemore diligently plotting their course with the sextant and estimating they had covered a distance of twenty-three miles from the spire. “Only another hundred or so to the pole then,” Scrimshine observed. “We got a flag to plant?”
“Sadly, I was remiss in not bringing one,” Hilemore replied, finding he truly did regret the oversight. It would have been good to leave some monument to the most southerly journey human beings had ever undertaken, albeit inadvertently.
