Iron Winter

47

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.