‘The focus is coming.’ Zole pulled her to her feet.
The moon, already bright, was growing brighter by the moment.
‘I was sleeping,’ Nona complained, her voice weak and wavering.
‘We need the warmth,’ Zole said. ‘And to keep dry.’ She tugged Nona higher up the slope formed by the pressure ridge. The ice splintered around them as Zole used her water-work to make a flat platform. ‘Do not fall.’
The moon’s heat built around them. Nona sighed with pleasure, spreading her arms. Zole hung a damp shawl over each of the outstretched limbs, clothing she had not taxed herself to dry earlier. ‘Let them dry but put them under your coat when the mist rises.’
The heat built from a luxurious warmth towards something fierce. All around them the sound of dripping water started up. The ice began to melt beneath their feet, meltwater sheeting down the slope. A short while later the water stood an inch deep in places and started to steam.
‘Ancestor! I thought I’d never feel warm again!’ Nona screwed her eyes shut and opened her coat. The simple pleasure of not being cold made her want to cry. She gave silent thanks to whichever of her long-distant forebears had set their moon in her sky.
A mist rose above the steaming waters and Nona rolled Zole’s shawls beneath her tunic then closed her coat around them. She stood, first knee-deep, then chest-deep in the milky ocean rising about her. She met Zole’s gaze briefly and the white tide drowned them both.
From the inside the mists took on a bloody tinge. Nona stood, enjoying the heat though knowing that when the wind found its strength again and stripped the ice clear, her hair would freeze solid.
Eventually the focus began to pass and the brilliance paled. The steam flowed on a strengthening wind, a white sheet that began to tear, then tatter, then shred. For miles all around the ice stood like a dark mirror showing the firmament of crimson stars anew, a second moon fading in the reflected depths.
‘It’s like we’re standing on a lake.’ Even as Nona spoke she saw the first white threads of ice spreading out across the surface, frost-fingered. She doubted that the water stood much deeper than an inch anywhere. A distant gurgling reached her.
‘It will soon be as it was. We should get back into shelter.’ Zole brushed the frost from her hair then ducked back into the ice house they had made. Its walls were thinner now, but still good against the wind.
Nona stood watching a while longer as the tracery of frost spread across the water’s surface, growing from multiple sites now, with the furthest reaching tendrils joining hands. Soon the moon’s work would be undone.
‘Doesn’t it drain away?’ It seemed wrong somehow. So much heat wasted. So little impact. If the passage of the moon really did melt an inch from the ice sheet every night who knew what might be accomplished?
‘Some does. Most refreezes. We are nearly ten miles from the Corridor.’
Nona joined Zole in the shelter and pressed against her. They huddled around the embers in the fire-bowl. Even before sleep took Nona back no patch of open water remained. The ice had frozen again and the wind swept a thin dusting of snow back across its smoothness.
Nona woke to a deafening cracking and splintering.
‘What?’
‘The ridge is growing. We should move.’ Zole had almost completed her packing. In the east the sun was struggling to break free of the horizon. ‘Now.’ Shards of ice peppered the walls of their shelter, shattering away where new blocks lifted from the main sheet.
‘Do not look back.’ Zole left the shelter and strode away.
Nona followed. Chunks of ice hit the back of her coat with considerable force as she came into the open, others flying past and skittering on for hundreds of yards.
Once clear Nona and Zole halted, turning to face the way they had come. Beyond the line of the pressure ridge, and a second and third beyond that, the Grampains rose, implacable stone teeth shearing through the ice.
‘I don’t want to climb those.’ Nona felt cold just looking at the peaks. Her fingers and toes were numb already.
‘We will wait here.’ Zole folded her arms.
Nona sighed. ‘Come on then.’ She started to move off. Zole stayed where she was. ‘Good joke.’ She beckoned the novice on.
‘Joke?’
Nona trudged back. ‘Why would we wait here?’
‘I am meeting someone.’
Nona scanned the white expanse around them. ‘A snowman?’
Zole frowned. ‘I do not—’
‘It was a joke, Zole!’
Zole’s frown deepened. ‘Are jokes not supposed to make people—’
‘Just tell me who we’re meeting!’
Zole pursed her lips and squinted into the middle distance. ‘Tarkax Ice-Spear.’
‘Tarkax?’ Nona blinked.
‘Yes.’
‘Tarkax as in Tarkax who worked at the Caltess? Tarkax who was supposed to be protecting us when Raymel Tacsis came to kill me on the ranging?’ Nona supposed that the man was an ice-triber at least, but the idea of meeting anyone in this wilderness was hard to believe in, let alone someone she knew.
‘Yes.’
‘It doesn’t look as if he’s coming.’ Nona made a slow circle, calling on her clarity. ‘How would he find us in all this anyway?’
‘We have a shadow-link. He can locate us more easily if we remain in one place.’
‘Ah.’ Nona hadn’t seen Tarkax since the day she killed Raymel Tacsis. Clera had stuck Tarkax with a pin coated in lock-up venom. Nona guessed that the incident had been somewhat of a blot on the warrior’s reputation.
For a while only the wind spoke.
‘How long are we going to wait?’ Nona had grown steadily colder and she had been cold to start with. At least walking generated some heat.
‘Not long now.’
‘You can sense him?’
‘I can see them.’
‘Them?’ Nona followed the direction of Zole’s gaze. She saw nothing but white. Her clarity had introduced a few more shades into the icescape but it was still just a palette of ice and snow.
‘Wait.’
Nona waited, staring until her eyes began to swim. She still saw nothing. ‘I don’t—’
‘Hello, novices!’ A man’s voice calling from somewhere to her left.
Nona spun around. Tarkax was about fifty yards from her, approaching at the head of a group of five other tribesmen, all in white furs, near invisible even if Nona had been looking in the right direction. ‘You tricked me into looking the wrong way!’ Nona shot a scowl at Zole.
The girl shrugged. ‘I thought you should know what a joke was.’
‘Nona! The Caltess ring-fighter!’ Tarkax’s cry forestalled any reply to Zole.
Nona nodded a greeting. The tribesmen gathered around as Tarkax drew Zole into a hug which the girl tolerated with a long-suffering look. He released her and slapped her on the back before turning to Nona. ‘How are you enjoying the ice?’
‘I’m not dead yet.’
‘Ha!’ Tarkax punched her shoulder then returned his attention to Zole, unleashing a torrent of tribe-tongue. It sounded like a dozen questions all asked at once.
While Zole replied in the same guttural language Nona glanced around at the others. They stood impassive under her scrutiny, all with the same reddish skin tone and flat features that Tarkax and Zole displayed. In the Corridor a hundred shades mixed, remnants pressed together from all the lands and kingdoms that had once covered a whole world. On the ice, though, it seemed that the tribes had sprung from more singular sources, or that the harsh conditions whittled away at any not perfectly suited to survival. Nona noted that each carried a heavy pack and an array of tools hanging from their belts, fashioned from the black iron that the ice-tribes favoured for its reluctance to shatter when chilled. They returned her scrutiny with dark eyes, and Nona wondered how in the immensity of all this wilderness someone she and Zole both knew happened to be so very close …