Moonrise

Then Patience was away, running, bounding down the street. Baj, Nancy with him, galloped hard to catch up to her, with Richard, Errol, and the Shrikes coming up behind. The street lay empty and frost-white before them, its ice battered by the boots and bare feet of the crowd that had passed.

Coat-tails flapping, Patience reached the next intersection a little in the air… touched her left muk-boot to the ice, and spun to the right, leading away from the pursuers' tracks. Down a wider way, they ran walled high on either side by Boston's frozen apartments – shabby buildings, stained with rusty melt, their doorways, cornices, and corners blurred… poorly carved.

Someone threw something from a high window as they ran past. It smashed on the road. Then, more came down… and men appeared at the building entrances. Furred men, wool-clothed men, almost none naked. They had iron bars in their hands.

'Our windows are braced with iron.' Patience, in a conversational way, while traveling fast. '- or they sag and crack.' Baj, running almost beside, heard the 'Our,' felt the Our in her. However furious a lady for her stolen son, still Patience had come home. He heard it, saw in Nancy's sidelong glance that she had heard it too.

The men with iron bars began to come out as they passed. Baj and Nancy drew their swords… Women were screaming from the high windows… throwing things. A wooden stool cracked onto the ice beside Richard as he ducked aside. Pottery was coming down, smashing in the street. More men had gathered, came out with their iron bars – and Shrikes ran to meet them. Baj saw Marcus-Shrike leading.

Patience drew the rest of them on, leaving behind the cries of the impaled and dying, the grunts as brutal blows broke bones.

It seemed to Baj that soon there would not be enough of them left, even to murder women… And now came again the sound of many pounding feet – more pursuers – their distant voices a roaring and furious surf. The voices of Boston-in-the-Ice, a wonder, centuries old – and so long the source of sorrow for others. The Township, startlement over, was rising against them.

'We're almost… out of time.' Richard, panting as he lumbered on.

Baj – tiring again, despite their cellar rest – turned to look back as he ran, and saw others doing the same, looking back for the first crowding shadows of enraged thousands coming after, to drown them in blood.

Patience – ground-running now, head down, arms pumping so her scimitar's blade flashed and flashed – brought them to the end of ice buildings, of windowed apartments… though the sounds of screaming still followed them from the street left behind, as women there saw their men fighting, dying on Shrike javelins.

She led them into a park, or what seemed a park. There were trees – the first they'd seen since they'd climbed the Wall – hemlocks planted in great carved-ice tubs of dirt set out in rows. They stumbled, faces and hands numb with cold, into that shade and shadow, relieved of the reflected sparkle and glare of Boston's myriads of hanging lamps, constellations crowded as starshine.

The surf sound… the crowd was coming behind them.

Richard, a weary Errol holding onto his hand, caught his breath, and called, 'Patience-'

But she was already off, down a row of trees. There was a huge gate there – a true gate, it seemed to Baj, with bars of iron hinged and fixed into a low thick vault of ice. The ice-face had been sculpted into figures – seen clearer as they followed her – figures of a tree giving birth from its branches to a naked women… who, lying legs spread, gave birth to what seemed a goat, a goat presenting an egg on its out-thrust tongue. The- egg, by the gate's right base, cracking to birth what seemed a partridge, but with a weeping baby's head.

… A man in blue-striped furs had come to the gate carrying, like the Constables, a staff weapon, but this a heavy single-bladed partisan. A sentry-guard of some sort, though not half-armored as the Constables had been. He spoke with Patience through the gate, stared at Baj and the others as they came up, and shook his head.

Patience said, 'The Faculty's orders.' But the man shook his head again.

Patience swung her scimitar blurring out from behind her back, struck between the gate's iron bars, and took him in the throat with the point. Then she shoved to swing the iron open, but the sentry's body, still thrashing, blocked it until Richard reached her, hunched, and drove the gate wide.

… As they crowded in, Baj saw that beyond this, there was another entrance – or exit. A round pit, its edge polished, was set in stone flooring. – A hole in the ice introducing only darkness, it seemed a small replica of the immense crater they'd stepped down, around and around, to enter Boston from the north.

Patience wiped her scimitar's blade on her coat-tail, then sheathed it. 'Fall sliding,' she said, stepped into the ice hole and was gone.

'For God's sake…' Dolphus-Shrike, and a WT phrase that would have gotten him burned in the south, some years ago.

'Perhaps.' Baj scabbarded his sword. 'Richard, throw the dead man after us, and swing the gate closed before you all follow.'

'Yes.'

Baj reached to gather Nancy in – as she, scimitar sheathed, gathered Errol – then took them with him into the pit.

CHAPTER 27

They fell in darkness, tangled – arms, legs, scabbarded swords, and struggling Errol. They fell skidding, ice- sliding in swift sickening circles, Errol whining as they went swooping down and down.

'Be ready!' Baj called out – though ready for what he couldn't have said. They swung in such swift circles that he felt them floating for moments as they fell – floating, then a sickening pressure against slick ice as they flew round and round, so he swallowed vomit.

Finally, a long relieving slide straight – a blessing by Frozen-Jesus to be no longer spinning in circles – and a round of light growing before them.

'Be ready…!' The light grew and they slid into it and swiftly out along an ice incline, then stumbled and fell onto a frosted floor where low lamps were lit along a corridor.

Patience stood waiting with a dead man. He'd been furred, as the other sentry, in striped blue – now turned sticky crimson. A simple pole-arm, a glaive-gisarme, lay beside him, great blade and back-hook bright in lamplight.

'Get up,' Patience said to them; her voice was shaking. Baj and Nancy scrambled to their feet as Errol ran little widdershins circles, tongue-clicking, apparently unwinding from his slide.

'We're… at the base of the gallery bridge to the Pens,' Patience said – and a young man swung into the corridor down the way, and came sailing high off the ice floor, open blue coat fanning behind him. He called, 'Ah… our exile – and come with the reasons for the bell!' A handsome young man, pale, and with a fine mustache, he held a drawn scimitar in his hand. Patience had just time to turn and say, 'Jacob,' and he was on her with swift slashing strokes – driving her back and back to steel's music. Other sentries, furs striped blue, came running behind him with glaives balanced in their hands.

The young man parried a cut, kicked Patience into the corridor wall, said, 'Sad end for an Almost-Lodge,' and struck to put her sword aside, then kill her.

Baj, rapier drawn, lunged past a sentry to them as Patience fell to the side, the young man turned to finish her. Baj would not have reached him in time – but his sword did, and half a foot of steel slid through the young man's coat and into the small of his back.

He arched, frozen for a moment – and as Baj tugged his blade free, Patience thrust up into the man's belly and killed him. 'Jacob,' she said again, but sadly, after she'd done it.

Baj turned and struck at the sentry – certainly caught him with the edge – and saw Nancy backed along the corridor to the ice ramp they'd slid down, a glaive's blade-point riding in at her belly. She cut along the weapon's wooden shaft, caught the man's guiding hand there and severed fingers so the sentry recoiled, spattering blood – as the man Baj had slashed in passing turned, sliced face bleeding, and charged him, swinging his weapon's broad blade.

Baj ducked, and the sentry was on him, chopping. Too close for sword-work. Baj drove into him – struck weight