Iron Gods

by Andrew Bannister

It also meant that the pod was making its last journey. She would worry about that if she lived. She would have a lot to worry about if she lived.

  The vibration mounted until she felt her teeth rattle, and the pod was filled with the roar of atmosphere being battered out of the way. Something was crushing her against the couch, as if the pod was accelerating faster than local gravity. She took a breath, and shouted.

  ‘Merish? I’m going down. I think something’s pulling me in. The pod systems are dead but it’s in crash mode. I’m going to survive this, Merish, and you are going to find me.’ Her lungs were empty; she filled them just once more. ‘Because if you don’t, I’m going to have to come and find you. You’d better not fucking make me!’

  And then the roaring and shaking and the pressure were too much for her to breathe any more, and the cloud layer had whipped past the pod and she was looking at a craggy snowy landscape that was expanding fast.

  Very fast.

  She had promised herself she wouldn’t, but at the last second she shut her eyes.

  Seldyan woke to unremitting pain, so bad that she was astonished that she could ever have slept, so bad that sweat started on her forehead, so bad that sleeping ever again seemed impossible. She would be awake for ever, and her waking days and nights would be full of this hot angry stabbing in her ribs and her leg.

  There was something else too: a sharp stinging in her upper arm, as if some insect had bitten deep and was refusing to let go. She reached up weakly to swat the place and her fingers found a thick pad of something wrapped around her biceps like a cuff.

  Her mind supplied the word. Autodoc. For some reason the damn thing had decided to wake her. She didn’t feel very grateful.

  Then the cuff tightened briefly and she felt it burr gently against her skin. Another, then a third, spaced a breath apart. She didn’t need to recall training on that one – it was universal autodoc language.

  It meant ‘brace yourself’.

  As far as her restraints allowed, she braced herself.

  The stinging intensified. Then hot agony surged into her upper arm and spread through her shoulder into her chest. It felt as if every particle of her flesh was being attacked from the inside by white-hot insects. She would have arched in outrage but she couldn’t move, so she made do with roaring until she was sure that her throat must be peeled. The sound sank into the pillowed walls of the pod and died.

  Then, as fast as it had arrived, the pain stopped. Even as she noted that she knew it for a lie. The pain must have been the ’doc pumping an infusion of smart nano into her; it must have followed it up with a massive dose of analgesic. That meant she still hurt. She just couldn’t feel it.

  She became warm and drowsy. It hadn’t just been painkillers, then.

  She wanted to try to call the ship. She wanted to speak to Merish, even just to hear him, to know he was okay (as if I am? she thought), but the sleepiness was too much.

  She slept.

  She awoke to the sound of someone hammering on the pod – a sharp, purposeful impact that came every couple of seconds. About the length of time it would take a human holding a hammer to draw it back and have another go.

  Seldyan shelved the thought. There was no way that anyone would get into the pod with hand tools. The worst they could do was to give her a headache, and if they had then the analgesic was still doing its work. She didn’t seem to hurt at all, in fact. She wondered how long she had been asleep, but there was no way of knowing. The pod instruments were dead, the display was blank.

  She took an audit. The ribs and the leg seemed fine – not just pain-free but functional, which meant that the nano must have done its healing work. She could move, too, because the impact pillows had deflated. Her audit completed, she undid herself, all the time doing her best to ignore the hammering which seemed to be getting more insistent. Something else seemed insistent too, now she had enough skin bared to notice it – it was getting cold.

  She shrugged herself back into her coverall, hoping it was as smart as it was supposed to be. The cold was getting worse, and she remembered the snowy landscape she had crashed into.

  The hammering had intensified even more. It was time to go, and once the pod had crash-landed there was only one way to open it. The control was similar to the one that had opened the braking flaps, but on the other side of the console in a position where you were very unlikely to find it by accident.

  She yanked it, jammed her hands over her ears and began to count. She hoped the external warning broadcast was working – and that whoever was hammering would understand it.

  As she got to five there was a sharp crack and the pod jumped a little. There was a brief swirl of white, acrid-smelling smoke, which was whipped away by a sudden icy cold breeze.

  The top half of the pod was gone, blown away from the base by the same sort of explosive bolts that had fired the flaps an atmosphere ago. She poked her head out.

  The first impression was just white. The pod had landed in snow, but it was shallow enough, or hard-packed enough, that the impact had not buried it. If she stood upright, her neck was level with the surface. It was a surface that went on for a long way; she was facing roughly downhill, and downhill went on for as far as her eyes could resolve – endless undulating snowfields under a freezing mist.

  Endless perhaps, but not uniform, she realized. Something imposed itself on the landscape, some kind of regular structure that marched dead straight down the rolling snow. It looked like a line strung between slender towers, but it was too far away to be distinct and, besides, there was the rest of the new world to think about. Someone had been hammering. She shuffled her feet so that her body began to rotate.

  Half a turn in she stopped, and her body tensed like a metal wire.

  Her first impression was that he was on his own, but she wasn’t ready to trust first impressions. Then she corrected herself, almost amused at her assumption. Her first impression had been that the person was male.

  It probably was, though. The figure rising slowly from what looked like a recent depression in the snow was thickly wrapped in crude-looking fabrics, but the face that craned forward from the big hood was blunt-jawed and bearded. On most planets that still meant male.

  She raised both hands, palms outwards. ‘Hello?’

  The figure raised an arm, and gave a lopsided grin. ‘Yes. Hello. Your machine. It is,’ and he made an explosive noise through pursed lips.

  She looked back at the pod, and then to where the separated upper section lay, where the bolt charges had blown it, on its side in the snow.

  ‘Yes, it is.’ And, with a stab of guilt, ‘Did it hurt you?’

  The grin widened. ‘Not I. Used to ice-crack, to snow-fall. Now used to metal warning words and machine-bang. New skill!’

  She laughed, and then gasped as the vicious cold caught at her lungs. His face clouded.

  ‘Not used to high-cold?’

  It was a good description. She shook her head.

  ‘Follow.’ He turned and began to climb up out of the impression of his own body shape.

  She tried to follow, but immediately found herself floundering helplessly; the snow was thigh-deep, bone-dry and at once engulfingly soft and surprisingly heavy. She hadn’t even completed one step before she was stuck. She drew in a lungful of air so cold it felt like a weight in her chest.

  ‘Hey!’

  He looked back. ‘Difficult?’

  ‘Yes, difficult!’ She had wanted to swear but she wasn’t sure how he would take it, and she needed this strange creature with his ability to live in this frozen desert.

  He followed her gaze towards his feet. ‘Ah. You think shoes?’

  She bit back a tart comment. ‘I think something. I can’t walk on this. How do you do it?’

  ‘Same as always. One foot, next foot.’ He walked towards her as if to demonstrate.

  She wasn’t sure what she had expected to see – some kind of snow shoes, or something to spread his weight. Shoes, at least
. Not just feet. They weren’t even particularly hairy.

  She must have looked surprised because he grinned. ‘Built for snow, me. Not you! Take you to warm, then explain. Not far. Follow as quick as able.’ And he turned and walked off over the surface of the snow.

  She floundered after him, swearing. To her relief he was right; they had covered only a couple of hundred metres before he dropped from sight as if the snow had swallowed him. She cursed under her breath and speeded up as best she could, the acerbically cold air rasping in her throat. She crested a low ridge, looked down, and grinned with sheer relief.

  The depression was more or less crater-shaped, maybe a hundred paces across at the top with smoothly sloped sides leading down to a flat base less than half that. It was just deep enough to hide the plain little hut that nestled in it, and Seldyan wondered for a second if that was an accident. But only for a second. She was too cold to wait. She took a dragging step over the crest, tripped forwards from the weight of her own snow-bound legs and fell down the slope in a mess of limbs.

  The bottom of the slope seemed unreasonably hard. She shook her head and tried to stand up. Moments later she was sitting on her bottom.

  ‘Shit!’

  It was hard because it was ice. She let out an irritated breath, and then looked up sharply.

  Her companion was laughing. She glared at him, and he nearly stopped. ‘Sorry! Not used to people. Mostly alone in the snow. Go careful. Here.’ He walked up to her, reached out a hand, uncovered like his feet, and she took it gingerly. It was cool and dry. She expected him to pull, but instead he moved closer to her and braced his legs in a triangle. She felt his arm tensing, and he jerked his head upwards.

  She pushed down on the hand, and was upright. She tested her stability carefully, and then let go of his hand.

  She could stand, just.

  He watched her for a second, then nodded and turned away. ‘Follow slow. No more make me laugh.’

  She bit back her response, and followed slow.

  The hut was better on the inside. For a start it was, well, not warm exactly, but much less cold. She suspected her companion’s definition of comfortable temperature was a couple of tens of degrees below hers, but it was at least above freezing. A low mound in the middle of the single room gave off wisps of aromatic smoke that drifted up into a wide funnel-shaped hood.

  It was also much more attractive than the outside. The walls were hung with coarse rugs in muted colours, as if strong dyes weren’t an option. Light came from dozens of little flat lamps, each one giving off a tall, wavering blue-white flame.

  The man had been standing with his back to her, doing something to the fire. He moved aside and she saw orange sparks stream upwards from a hole in the top of the mound. He placed a sort of metal cradle over the hole, and balanced a wide, shallow black pot on the cradle. Then he spun round and shrugged off his coat.

  It turned out he had been mostly coat. He was the thinnest, slightest human she had ever seen. His chest, now bare, was no wider than the distance from her thumb to her little finger. His upper arm was perhaps three fingers across.

  She managed not to gasp, but she could feel her eyes widening.

  He grinned. ‘You fall from the sky in machine that explodes, and you think I odd?’

  She felt her face heating, and his grin broadened so that it was nearly wider than his body. ‘No more worry. I correct shape for snow. Light! Walk on powder. Name Hincc. Hincc of High People. You?’

  She collected herself. ‘Seldyan.’

  ‘Very good name, falling-from-sky person.’ He narrowed his eyes. ‘Story to tell, yes? Drink hot soon. Begin when ready.’

  There didn’t seem to be an alternative. Fair enough, she thought. I’d want to know, if I was him.

  She looked behind her, found a low stool, and sat on it, remembering too late to stop that it might have been made for someone a lot lighter than her. It creaked, but held.

  ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Story.’

  It took a long time.

  The pot was almost empty now. It had held a sweet, slightly spicy juice which she gathered had something to do with berries. She had done most of the talking but not all; Hincc had woven his own explanations around hers with a bardic skill which she suspected was born of long cold nights.

  They had been good explanations. The High People had lived above the snowline for hundreds of generations. They hunted small mammals for leather, fur and meat; they foraged down towards the snowline for dry firewood and wiry grasses for fuel, and for the few sweet little berries they could find. Towards the snowline but never across it; at some point so far in the past they had forgotten it, the High People had become so specialized that they could no longer exist off the snowfields.

  There was something else, too. It had made Hincc’s face cloud, and he had become monosyllabic.

  ‘Bad times.’

  ‘Bad? How?’

  ‘Very bad. Since the light?’

  ‘You can see it?’

  ‘Glow, on clear nights. Distant. From the Circle Lands. Perhaps tonight. Come, look.’

  They climbed up the slope. The land fell sharply on one side and more gently on the other. On the gentle side the line thing she had seen when she first looked out from the pod marched down the snowfield. The angle of fall was quite sharp; gentle was comparative.

  Hincc pointed. ‘See?’

  She did see. Right at the horizon, the snow was subtly green-lit, a soft sinister halo around the blue-white snow light, distinctly focused on a narrow quadrant of the horizon.

  She watched the soft light for a while. Then she turned to Hincc. ‘What happened?’

  He shrugged. ‘From here, see little. Light, then pause. Normal, ten days. I send ice – big blocks. Cool fish, cool people, yes? Ice go down, hooks come up. Then, three days, line stops.’

  ‘Is that usual?’

  ‘Not unheard – when bad winter closes Circle. But very rare, very strange. Not so strange as what comes after. When line starts again.’

  Something in his voice made her look at his face. ‘What?’ she asked, dreading the answer.

  He looked at her for a moment, his face immobile. Then he sighed. ‘Follow. See. Be ready.’

  He led her under the motionless cables of the lift. Things hung beneath them: complex-looking expandable grabs. She pointed. ‘Are those for the ice?’

  ‘Mainly for the ice. Meant for the ice. Be ready.’ He didn’t look back, and the set of his shoulders discouraged further questions.

  She followed, more easily than she had feared. There was a hard track stamped on to the snow. It was wider than one set of feet would have needed. She wondered why.

  Then they crested a low ridge and she found herself looking down into the narrow head of a white valley that broadened quickly down the shallow, rolling snow slopes.

  White, but dotted with irregular shapes.

  She clenched her fists, and turned to Hincc. ‘How many?’

  His face was still rigid. ‘I count careful. Since two weeks after green light, eight elevens and seven. Then I stop the line. Never before, never, do we stop the line from here. But I, my father, his father, their fathers? We send ice down. Maybe writing to ask for something, always comes soon. Not this. Never this. Soon berry juice will not be sweet. Soon lift parts will not be replaced. Already ice doesn’t reach harbour. Does no one fish, or does fish rot?’

  She counted the shapes. Ninety-five. Almost a hundred corpses. Some of them looked incomplete – arms and legs were missing – but they all seemed to have heads. There were no bloodstains in the snow, and she supposed the bodies must have been frozen hard by the time they arrived. She let herself absorb the scene. Then she said, carefully, ‘Do you know why they were – sent?’

  He shrugged. ‘Only one thing. All wearing like this.’ He felt in his furs and drew out something. She held out her hand and he let it drop into her palm, but without letting go of the chain that pierced it. She turned it over; just a plain greyi
sh metal disc. One side was blank. The other was embossed with what looked like a random pattern of dots. No, not just dots. She looked closer. The snowglow was bright enough to show fine lines radiating from each dot, like a child’s drawing of a star.

  She tilted her palm to let the disc slide off it. Hincc caught it as it swung towards him on its chain. He let it drop into his own hand and slipped it back into his furs. ‘Anything to you, Sky Girl?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘No surprise. Something to me – all priest people. Seen before. Heard, a little. Priest people watch the sky, count things. Perhaps green light means priest people must die.’

  ‘Why?’

  He turned his face away, but looked at her from the corner of his eyes. ‘Who knows? What do all priest people say? Do this thing, do that thing, and tomorrow is like yesterday and sun always shines. All safe. But suddenly tomorrow is not like yesterday; tomorrow is green light – and maybe people say, why do we do this thing and that thing?’ He smiled sourly. ‘Especially, why do we feed these priest people who give us orders and do not go fishing?’

  She nodded.

  ‘So, you go and see?’

  The question caught her off balance. ‘I don’t know.’

  His sour grin became a real one. ‘Okay, fine, stay here. Chew salt meat, eat berries. I start the line again, maybe you count priest bodies, maybe other bodies when they run out of priests. That what you came for, Sky Girl?’

  She found herself smiling back. ‘No. Not what I came for.’

  ‘Good. So go discover.’

  She nodded. ‘How do I go?’

  ‘Tomorrow, I show. Now come. Dark, cold. Time for fire. Time for sleep.’

  He was right. The sky was black, and even in her ship suit the cold was aching. She stared upwards. ‘Hincc? Are there ever any stars?’

  He shook his head. ‘Only in stories.’

  She nodded and followed him down the slope towards the hut. Then she stopped. ‘Stories? But you know what a star is?’

  And watched him.

  ‘Only in stories.’ They were the same words but the tone had changed. The first time he had used them they had sounded like closing down. Now they sounded – different. She held the sound close to her as she followed him through the entrance of the hut. She held on to it as she watched Hincc shrugging off his layers of clothing, and as she followed suit. She held on to it as they sat down, little cups of steaming juice warming their hands and the glow of the fire pit stinging their feet.