Iron Winter (Northland 3) (36 page)

The pain ebbed further. It wasn’t uncomfortable. He wished he was able to tell Doctor Ontin that; it would console his patients. It wasn’t painful if you just gave in to the cold.
Ah, but Ontin had fled before the winter locked in, fled south to Carthage, where Rina had gone . . .

There was ice in his mouth. Actually inside it. And on his eyes, he thought, he could no longer close them.

He listened to the deep, slowing beat of his heart, beat, beat. He thought he heard Rina, calling to him, and his children, Nelo and Alxa. And they became the three little mothers in their
shrine deep in his house, his proud house with the linen shop that fronted right on to the Wall Way.
Time to sleep now,
whispered the little mothers.
Time to sleep
.

Snug in the old cistern, Crimm tried not to doze off during the day. But there was nothing else to do for long hours. It was so comfortable to lie back, he could hear the soft
snores of the others around him . . .

He forced himself to sit up. Something was wrong. What?

It was dark. Too dark for the middle of the day. The cistern was lit only by the glow of the fire in the hearth. There should be light coming down the air vent. There was not. His chest dragged
as he tried to breathe. The air felt stuffy, thick, even more redolent of fishy farts than usual.

He got to his feet. He felt even worse when he stood up. He made his way across the room towards the vent, treading on people in the dark, and they squirmed and moaned and growled insults at
him. Nobody woke fully. It wasn’t usual for
everybody
to be asleep. There was generally some brat or other squalling. Something wrong. He got to the air vent and peered up. Nothing but
darkness, but, directly underneath it, water puddled. The vent was blocked, by snow or ice probably. It could have happened naturally. Maybe the snow had covered over the whole Wall by now.

Or somebody could have bunged up the vent with snowy handfuls on purpose. Ever since they’d lost Xree and Thaxa a few days ago – they’d seen traces of the struggle in the snow
– they’d been aware of being hunted. This would be a good way to flush them out, he thought, to stop off the air they breathed. He wished he’d thought of it.

Where was Ayto? Ayto, a difficult man to work with, but a clear thinker if you gave him the chance, he was the one who had come up with the idea of using this cistern, this fortress for the
winter . . . Ayto went missing a lot, though. Off on self-imposed missions, into the darkness of the Wall. Sometimes he went alone, sometimes with others. Often he came back bloodied. Once he came
back wearing a man’s
face
, like a bloody cap on his head. Crimm had made him hide it before he scared the children and women. But Crimm never asked him what he was doing out there. He
was doing what needed to be done, he always had, and Crimm trusted him that far.

The world greyed. He held onto the door, stood straight, shook his head. He could figure it out with Ayto. But Ayto had gone. Now he remembered. This time he’d picked one of the blocked
doors at the back of the warehouse, smashed it in, discovered a corridor, and gone looking to see where it led.

Seeking another way out. Now Crimm needed a way out too. He had no better idea but to follow Ayto.

He lit a candle at the fire, and made for the back of the warehouse.

The door Ayto had opened was ajar. Crimm pushed it wide. Beyond was a dark corridor, bitterly cold, the growstone slick with ice. But already the air was a bit fresher.

He needed a coat. To get his coat meant crossing the room again, and he wasn’t sure he’d make it without passing out. There was a heap of blankets by the door, good alpaca wool
shipped very expensively across the Western Ocean to Thaxa’s shop. He grabbed one, draped it over his shoulders, and walked down the corridor. Thinking more clearly, he tried to establish a
sense of direction. He was heading deeper into the Wall, away from the land-facing side, towards the ocean face. He didn’t know how thick the Wall was here.

He came to the end of the corridor, and a choice of doors, to left, right, straight on. Which way would Ayto go? There was a mark on the door straight ahead, a few concentric squiggles.
Ayto’s signature. This way then.

Another corridor, doors branching off, and then a fork, a narrower tunnel off to the right, a broader way straight on. Another scribble: straight on.

The latest corridor opened out into a larger chamber. It was warm, lit by a single oil lamp – and there was a stink of corruption that made Crimm recoil. Blankets and bodies on the floor,
a kind of liquid mess.

Nobody moving. He was tempted to back out immediately, just shut the door. But there was an Ayto mark on the far wall; this was the way he had come, and evidently out through a door on the far
side.

Crimm forced himself to follow, crossing the floor, trying not to touch the dead, their filthy blankets and clothes. Everything was covered with dried-up shit and vomit. Somebody had had the
same idea he and Ayto had, to ride out the winter in the belly of the Wall. But one or more of them had come in here sick, and it had spread between the people, and got onto their clothes and their
blankets and spread even more. It would have been much worse in here, he thought, if not for the cold, the lack of flies to attack the bodies.

The room itself was smarter than Thaxa’s cistern – smaller, the walls better cut, presumably older. Halfway along the wall there was a kind of shrine, cut into the growstone,
supporting two urns, side by side. Writing was neatly etched into plaster around the alcove with the urns, and Crimm, despite the bodies all around him, lifted his candle to see. These were the
remains of Milaqa and Qirum, he read.
Doomed by love and ambition . . . Milaqa was a heroine as great as Ana or Prokyid, but none must ever know the truth of their story . . .
Milaqa. He
remembered something about that name. The Black Crime. Oddly, in a room full of corpses, the etched words made him shiver. The Wall was very big and very old and none knew all its secrets. He
hurried on.

Beyond the far door was a corridor, then another door marked with Ayto’s sign, and still another corridor. He was heading almost directly away from the Wall’s landward face, as far
as he could tell. Ayto had been unimaginative and dogged in his choice of directions. But this corridor ended in a rectangle of blue light, pale, cold, clearly daylight. Crimm hurried on. The air
grew increasingly cold, and there was slick ice on the growstone under his feet.

He reached the exit. A door, heavy, very ancient, its outer surface crusted with long-dead barnacles, lay open, revealing brilliant light that dazzled his dark-adapted eyes. He stepped forward
cautiously, under a pale blue sky. He was outside the Wall, in its shadow. He was standing on a rough ledge of growstone, matted with green-brown fronds of dead seaweed, coated with ice. The Wall
towered above him, a rough-finished surface deeply pitted and shining with rime. The sea lapped at the growstone ledge, covered with sheet ice that spread to a knife-sharp horizon, crisp and white.
There were ice blocks piled up at the sea’s edge, perhaps a relic of the tides.

Somebody sat on the ice, cross-legged, beside a disc of dark blue, a hole in the ice. There was an animal beside him, inert, the head blood-splashed: a seal.

Crimm stepped forward carefully, and found himself standing on sea ice that creaked, a little ominously, reminding him of the end of the
Sabet
. He saw a place where the ice looked a
little darker, a little bluer – older. He stepped that way. Rope sections had been fixed to the soles of his boots, and he could walk without slipping, if he didn’t rush.

He stepped out of the shadow and into direct sunlight, the first sunlight on his face for many days. He turned, hand raised. The Wall was silhouetted. He saw complex sculptures cut into the
upper surface – docks, he realised, quays and piers cut into the growstone and now stranded far above the water level. And above that the light towers stood proud, blind, and the great heads
of dead Annids looked out at a frozen sea. The cold was bitter. Crimm pulled the flimsy blanket tighter around his body.

The man on the ice was, of course, Ayto. He held a hand up when Crimm’s creaking footsteps got too close. He didn’t move, didn’t so much as look around. Crimm waited
obediently.

A pale shadow passed through the water.

When it had gone, Ayto relaxed. ‘Ah, you scared him off.’

‘You might have come back. We’re choking in there.’

Ayto glanced around. ‘And you might have put a coat on, you’ll freeze.’

‘This is the ocean side of the Wall.’

‘Obviously.’

‘It’s all exposed. The sea can’t be much higher than the level of the land on the other side.’ Crimm found it hard to think that through; the fresh air was making him
groggy. ‘How did the sea get so low? Ah. Because all the water is heaped up as ice on the land.’

‘Just think, these are stretches of the Wall’s face nobody’s seen for generations.’

‘What do you think we should do? With everybody in the cistern, I mean. The vents are blocked. We can’t really stay there if that’s going to happen.’

Ayto looked around and sniffed the cold air. Crimm saw there was frost on his roughly cut beard. ‘Bring them out here. Or at least, find somewhere in the Wall closer to the ocean
face.’

‘Why?’

‘Because we can find food here.’ He patted his dead seal. ‘Seal, fish. Maybe other animals.’ He glanced at the sky. ‘Spring’s coming, it must be, but the
winter’s not done with us yet. Maybe it never will be. If the ice doesn’t clear, we won’t be able to use the wetlands, the forests. But out here . . .’

‘The Coldlanders survive, and it’s always winter where they live.’

‘That it is. Maybe folk from the other Districts will find a way out too, if any of them live through the sorting-out. Let them. But they can stay away from here; this is our bit of
coast.’ He looked around, at sea, ice, sky. ‘Different way of living, this will be. Makes you feel different just to think about it, doesn’t it?’ He glanced up at the Wall.
‘That’s all gone now.’

‘Civilisation?’

‘Yes. We’ve gone back to an older time, before Ana and the Wall. Back to the ice. That’s how it is here in the north, and soon it will be the same everywhere else. Maybe
we’ll have older thoughts. Ice thoughts.’ He poked at his own ribs. ‘Maybe we’ll all start to change shape. We’ll look like Pyxeas’ Coldlander runt. What was he
called?’

Crimm couldn’t remember. He found himself thinking of Ywa, months dead now, and he wondered what she would make of this conversation. Of what Ayto was becoming.

He remembered the others, with sharp urgency. ‘We’ve got to get back and sort out that air vent.’

‘Agreed. Come on.’

Arguing, bickering, speculating, they worked their way back into the deep shadow of the Wall.

THREE

The Third Year of the Longwinter: Spring Equinox

The ice spilled off the growing continental caps, and gathered in sheets over the open sea. From the mountains too the ice descended, the glaciers flowing down valleys
gouged out by their predecessors millennia before. When they reached the lowland the glaciers spread out and flowed together, merging into sheets of ice that covered the ground, covering the traces
of forests, farms, cities.

Across swathes of the northern continents, there were few people left to mark the latest equinox.

The woman was waiting for Sabela under the Gate of the God of Light.

Situated next to the Exaltation of the Sky Waters, a square-cut pyramid that was the greatest monument in Tiwanaku, the Gate was only nominally an entry to the city. Not attached to any wall,
the Gate was the frame of a door that led nowhere. Yet this was traditionally where supplicants came to ask for residence in this holy city, the highest city in all the world, enclosed by its
finely cut stone walls and surrounded by raised, carefully irrigated fields of maize.

This was the High Country. The day was bright, the lake, a day’s walk away, was a plane of brilliant blue under the sky, and the snow-capped mountains beyond gleamed. The city was a jewel
set in the great mountain chain that stretched down the spine of this southern continent.

And here was this woman, round-shouldered, her clothes layers of grubby rags, a clutch of children around her, the oldest a boy who might have been fourteen, a couple of little girls, an infant
in arms, all of them staring at Sabela. One of the girls was labouring, having trouble breathing. Sabela had no idea how old the woman was. Younger than she was, probably. Broken down from toil,
child-rearing, and maybe years as a nestspill.

Sabela held out the note she had been sent, written on reed paper, scrawled in a soldier’s hasty hand. It had found her eventually at her mother’s home on the other side of the city,
where she had been visiting with the twins. ‘You sent me this? Your name is – C’merr.’ The click in the back of the throat, characteristic of lowlander tongues, was alien to
Sabela’s own language.

‘C’merr – yes. And you are Sabela, wife of Deraj.’

‘You claim we offered to take you in.’

The woman frowned, perhaps puzzling at her speech. ‘Yes. Not you. Husband, Deraj.’

Sabela found that hard to believe; Deraj, busy running a wool business that spanned swathes of the highlands and thousands of llamas and alpacas, was not given to making sentimental gestures to
unfortunates like this nestspill. Especially not to a grubby, unprepossessing –
ugly
– woman like this one. Deraj, for better or worse, had always had an eye for beauty.
‘You understand that the city is crowded.’

‘Crowd – yes.’