Maximum Ice (31 page)

The woman walked forward, her cape whipping in the breeze. Her expression was alert and bemused. She was prettier than Kellian had expected.

Mother Superior Solange Arnaud looked at Kellian from a daunting arm’s length away. “Done what, postulant?”

“Worked on the nodes, Sister… Mother Sister… Mother Superior…” She bit her cheeks for making a fool of herself.

“Mother Solange will do, my dear.”

Kellian nodded, a feeling of exhilaration infusing her. This was Mother Superior, indeed.

Mother Superior turned to Sister Patricia Margaret. “Lamenting, are we?”

“Oh, yes, Mother,” the sister replied. “I have quite a lot of lamentation to do. I thought I might do it up here without disturbance.”

Mother Superior’s voice was clear and rich. “One sister’s disturbance upsets us all.”

Sister Patricia Margaret’s face was unreadable, carefully civil.

Solange turned to Kellian. “So. What is it that you’ve done on the nodes?”

The wind blew, chilling her shaved head. It seemed to blow her sense away. She was going to tell Mother Superior. Tell of her disobedience and her great discovery. It was so terribly foolish. But the blue eyes were waiting, and Kellian might never have another chance to speak to Mother Superior like this, in relative privacy

“I sent Ice my diaries.”

Sister Patricia Margaret closed her eyes. When she opened them, she was shaking her head.

“Diaries?” Mother Solange cocked her head. “You brought diaries among us?” Her tone put Kellian in a sudden dread. She was very close to the edge of the parapet. Mother Superior
could push her off just for looking cross-eyed, much less breaking the rules.

But then Solange laughed. The laugh wasn’t as nice as her speaking voice.

“The mighty Hilde couldn’t keep her dormitory in line? You must tell me where you hid the file. Most entertaining.”

As Sister Patricia Margaret turned ashen, Kellian blurted, “In my hair at first. Then in the latrine.”

Mother Solange said, “And it’s been a long time since Hilde scrubbed a latrine, I’ve no doubt.”

Kellian had to grin at that.

“So you loaded your diary into Ice. And did it work?”

“I don’t know. Ice hasn’t responded yet. To that.”

Mother Solange exchanged looks with Sister Patricia Margaret. “But Ice has responded to other things?”

“My obo program. Ice asked me… who I was.”

Sister Patricia Margaret intervened. “She’s given to flights of fancy, Mother. Pay her no heed.”

“In what sort of language?” Mother Superior asked.

“In English.”

“That’s convenient. You must be a very special girl.”

Kellian didn’t like the sound of that.

Mother Superior continued, “So your obo program is downloaded into our system? My, what a mess we’ve made. And now
Ice
wishes to get to know you personally.”

Mocking. She was mocking her. “I don’t know…”

“What? Don’t know? After all that you
do
know? Such humility!”

Kellian would have objected, but she found that Sister Patricia Margaret was standing rather heavily on one of her feet.

Mother Superior was speaking. “I came up here because I was concerned to see how you fared, Sister. I see that this postulant provides some diversion for you. Very good. I know how
you wish for Verna’s company once more. I’m sure she’ll have many stories to tell you when she returns. Don’t anticipate the worst. These journeys often strengthen the sisters in ways we cannot know.”

Preparing to leave, Mother Superior held out her hand, and Sister Patricia Margaret bent low to kiss it.

Then she draped her hand in front of Kellian. A large, ruby ring was asking for obeisance.

She hadn’t expected this. It occasioned an awkward pause.

Kellian bowed low, but not low enough to touch the ring.

The white hand and the vermilion stone. She knew what to do, what she
must
do.

But the moment was passing, when kissing the ring would have worked. The two nuns were staring at her.

Kellian straightened. The moment had fled. She’d let it get away, pausing just long enough, and then she was stuck with what she’d done. But damned if she would kiss that ring.

The hand snapped back. Vivid blue eyes slashed across Kellian’s face.

And then Mother Solange stalked off, cape billowing behind her like a thunder cloud.

Sister Patricia Margaret was already gazing out westward, calm, resigned, or deadened. She murmured, “Well, I said we might sink together.”

Kellian left the nun to her detachment. She hardly cared that she might fall from favor—with or without her mentor. It hardly mattered.

She made her way down the stone steps. Ice would be waiting for her.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The glow stood on the horizon, burning through the snowy air like the sun stuck at dawn. It was Error’s Rock. It seemed to Zoya that they had been traveling for hours, never getting any closer. They were headed out onto the Paz, past the Olom Mountains to the south, their peaks reaching up through the semiglacier like teeth erupting in the maw of earth. There, between headlands, lay a featureless, flat valley, growing enormously flatter as they headed west.

Their progress was slow. The sled strained against the snowdrifts, and Wolf stopped often to brush snow from the solar collectors and check for Angel’s footprints.

Zoya stood next to Wolf on the sled, behind the windshield, sharing body heat with him. Wolf had let her sleep into the morning, and when they set out, she nursed a bad headache and a bruised temple. Despite that, she knew she’d gotten off lightly. It occurred to her that Angel had liked her diamonds. Next time she could have them.

They passed the last headland of the continent. The ship’s science team said that Ice was thinner on the Pacific Shelf, only fifty meters deep. It didn’t displace the ocean’s water, it rested upon it. Despite Ice’s geographic scale, it wasn’t dense. And for all its vaunted close tiling, the centers of the atomic-scale pentagons were open. The techs said it was how Ice grew itself, by driving water through those open centers, forcing the
crustal materials into solution and transforming it all to Ice. Lieutenant Mirran reported those discoveries to her with the high excitement of scientific breakthrough.

Zoya hoped that his enthusiasm with quasi-crystal wouldn’t blind him to their need to destroy it. That was their purpose. As she looked at the tundra before her, she felt no compunctions.

The sullen landscape mirrored the glowering sky. They had left behind the luminous information stacks and the occasional streaks of geographic, glancing light. Ice was not talkative in this place. It seemed to brood, discontent with a lonely reign.

The geographical features of the Val Paz shrank behind them. Ahead, the terrain was uniformly flat, except for Error’s Rock. The place gave new meaning to
the middle of nowhere.

“It’s a dead land,” Zoya said to Wolf, raising her voice above the thrum of the motor.

Nodding at the bright horizon, Wolf said,
“That’s
not dead.”

Zoya didn’t question Wolf’s certainty that Angel was heading for the great outcropping. Any scat she might have left to identify herself was obscured in the snow, but she left another sign. Her footprints. The shallow depressions were mere wisps, as though she had walked on top of the snow, wraithlike. But they led the way. By that evidence, Angel was heading straight for Error’s Rock. And she’d been walking all night.

They swerved to miss a frozen upheaval, and Wolf’s arm came around Zoya to help her keep balance. It seemed only natural for them to stand thus, moving together with the sled’s rhythms. They were together, for better or worse, bound by Wolf’s quest. His story of Marja and her children had done the binding, as stories sometimes would.

To Zoya, Snow Angel had become more than a detour. Witches might be failed experiments, might talk to Ice. All she had were anecdotes, stories, and Wolf’s assumptions, colored by obsession, grounded in experience. But even the nuns
thought the witches knew Ice secrets. So cumulatively, she had more than stories. And she had her intuition.

Wolf was speaking to her, gazing at Error’s Rock. “In my lifetime, I’ve watched it grow,” he said “It’s bigger now. Much bigger.” Indeed, the formation was looming higher in the distance. For a moment it looked like a fairy castle, with many candles lit for a feast.

“Why does Angel go there?”

“Perhaps Ice calls her.”

“Why?”

He squinted into the snow-shot air. After a moment he answered, “Ice doesn’t want her killed.”

She let that lie. She was too close to personifying Ice herself, and didn’t want help. “Is there one witch who is—more powerful? Who is not so damaged?”

He squinted at her. “They are all damaged.”

“So no legends about a different sort of snow witch?”

“No, no stories.” Wolf stopped the sled and jumped down to the ground to dust snow off the solar collectors.

He paused in his chore, squinting up at her. “Not all the stories are dark, you know. The story of Queen Ria has a good ending.”

“Tell me,” Zoya said.

He nodded, but kept at his task. “It is foretold that when the Queen wins her victory, when she overcomes the Dark Prince, she will have pity on him and spare his life.” Opening the motor compartment, he checked the tension on the drive belt. He continued back to the cargo sled, checking ropes and clearing the rear set of solar cells.

As he worked, he said, “Because of this, he will fall in love with her, and she will accept him as her consort. They will return to earth together, and when the Queen thanks Winter for
her services, Old North will leave. As the Ice melts, Queen Ria will be reunited with her child.”

He clambered back onto the sled, stomping snow from his feet. “And here is the ending,” he said.

“The child Shinua is not immortal, because he had a mortal father. Knowing that, the Queen’s consort gives his lady a gift. With his star power, he grants Shinua the gift of foreverness. So that when it comes the boy’s time to die, as humans do, he will not be lost, but will rise up again, renewed, with the spring. And he will come back again and again with the season to gladden the Queen’s heart.”

As Wolf depressed the accelerator, the motor clicked on and hummed to life.

“That’s a fine story, Wolf,” Zoya said, as they got under way

“I always liked it best.”

Before them, Error’s Rock had grown in their view, now commanding the terrain, a mammoth plateau of flaring light. The snowfall gleamed golden in a wide nimbus around it. The sides appeared sheer, and the overall shape was geometric.

Wolf looked at her as she squinted over the windshield.

“It has five sides,” he said.

She was not surprised.

As Solange Arnaud trod down the hall of the west wing, heads bowed to her. She did not require that the sisters stop and turn, that would be a waste of time. Saving time was also the reason that she took her briefings as she walked, with Sister Helena at her side, consulting her activated scroll from time to time. It was an elegant trick Sister had mastered, to walk and read at the same time.

“Sister Loselle has just left Koma preserve, and is returning north, Reverend Mother.”

“Number of children?” Heads bowed to her, and she dipped her chin to each and every one. She held power over these sisters, and they in turn held power over her.

“Twenty-three so far.”

Solange smiled. Sister Loselle and five other nuns were her very best, and most loyal. They would get the job done. Then they would accompany the children to the ship, to assure a proper cultural transition. That transition might drag on, of course…

“And any word from our vigil?”

“No sled sighted yet, Mother.”

Of course there wasn’t. She would be informed the moment a speck was seen on the barrens.

They entered the rotunda, where wooden floors became marble, and the great doors faced each other, one to the north wing, one to the barrens. Leading off the rotunda, the respective doors to the Hall of Honors and the Hall of Horrors. It was Sister Helena’s duty to give the visitation record of the day