were clasped together inside a fur muff. Her breath smoked in front of her.
In the distance she saw a black dot. It gradually enlarged until eventually it resolved into a man rowing a kind of spindly frame across the ice. He didn't turn round to look at her, but stopped rowing some distance away and coasted to a halt level with her and about a stone's throw distant. He wore a thin, tight-fitting one-piece suit and a thin cap. He sat, still not looking at her, breathing hard and leaning forwards to rest on the claw-oars he held.
She looked down at her boots, which became ice skates. She glided over and stopped neatly, facing him.
He was middle-aged but fit-looking in a stocky, compact sort of way. There was a sculpted leanness hinted at in his face and his hair was thick and black. He looked slightly surprised. 'Who the hell are you?' he asked.
'Asura,' she said, nodding. 'And you?'
'Hortis,' he said. He turned and looked around and behind him. 'I thought I was alone here. They don't usually…' his voice trailed off as he looked back at her, eyes narrowed in suspicion. 'What do you want here?' he asked her.
'Nothing,' she said.
'They all want something,' he said, sounding bitter. 'You must, too. What is it?'
She shook her head. 'I don't know what I want,' she admitted. 'I wanted to be here, and I'm here.' She thought. 'I can't go anywhere else. They keep trying to make me answer questions. Apart from —'
'And you're not ill or sick or needing to be rescued?' he asked, a sneer on his face.
'No,' she told him, puzzled. 'Are you?'
'Only from this nonsense,' he said, not looking at her, but checking the angle of the claw-oars. He levered them back and flicked them down into the ice. 'Tell them nice try; at least they're getting more subtle.' He pulled on the claw-oars and the A-shaped frame rumbled off across the ice, gaining speed with each sweep of the oars the man made.
She hesitated, then set off after him, skating smoothly in his wake. He looked annoyed. He lengthened his stroke, trying to outdistance her, but she kept up with him. She loved the feel of the ice under the blades on her feet and the cold air on her face. Warmth spread from her legs as she pushed after the man in his strange, spindly craft. He was pulling quite hard now and she was struggling to keep up, but he didn't look comfortable with the pace he'd set either. His face grew more angry-looking.
She wanted to laugh, but did not.
'How long have you been here?' she asked him.
She thought he wasn't going to answer, but then he said, 'Too damn long.' He gave one explosive sigh and settled back to a more steady rowing rhythm, seemingly giving up his attempt to pull away from her.
'Why are you here?' she asked.
'I'll show you mine if you'll show me yours,' he said, smiling humourlessly, and shook his head as he watched his claw-oars flick and bite.
'Where did you come from?' she asked patiently.
Again, she thought he wasn't going to answer. It looked like he was thinking hard. Finally he said — suddenly looking straight at her —'The tower.'
She ceased to push after him and glided on for some time, skates parallel, then felt herself brake gently. The man had stopped rowing, though his own momentum was still drawing him further away over the ice from her. He was frowning.
She came to a stop.
'The tower,' she whispered to herself.
The man who had called himself Hortis slowed and stopped the fragile-looking ice-boat, some distance off. He was looking at her strangely, his head tipped to one side. Then he angled one oar behind him and the other in front and pulled them together to turn the craft and come back to her.
The small craft rumbled a length past her and stopped. He shipped the claw-oars, leaning forward and looking intently at her. He gazed at her for a while, then appeared to come to a decision.
'All right, then,' he said. 'Maybe I've been in here too long, or maybe I just can't resist a pretty face, but I suppose it can't do any harm.' He gave a small smile. 'I was one of a small group of scientists and mathematicians who opposed the Consistory. We believed their desire to hold on to power had entirely superseded any duty to govern for the general good; our conspiracy — which had started at university and never really been more than a secret club — became more serious when the Encroachment was discovered and we began to suspect that the Consistory — with the King as its puppet — was doing less than it might to find a solution to the emergency.
'We pursued many different courses. We tried to contact the Cryptosphere's chaotic levels, believing that at least part of the so-called chaos was in fact an AI nexus at odds with the Consistory's philosophy. We set up secret transmitters in an attempt to contact the deep-space monitoring system the Diaspora was supposed to have left in watch over us, and we tried to elicit some sort of response from the fast-tower, where rumours had it that either an uncorrupted crypt core existed, or, again, elements remained which were still in touch with the Diaspora.
'A couple of days ago, in base-time, we apparently received a signal from the heights of the fast-tower. It was… couched in slightly eccentric terms, but appeared to be genuine.
'The signal confirmed some of our suspicions concerning the Consistory's lack of sincerity in finding a way to defeat the Encroachment. It did not seem to indicate that it was in touch with whatever remains of our space- going ancestors, though it did talk of some system left behind by the Diaspora which might ensure the survival of all of us. The message — or at least its ramifications — led…' the man sighed, and looked sad, 'to our conspiracy being betrayed and me ending up here, and,' he said, looking straight into her eyes, 'it talked of another part of the crypt, some uncorrupted section which contained the key to the Diaspora-donated survival system. This key would be sent here, to Serehfa, and it would come in the form of something called an asura…' — he smiled, and in that smile she saw a kind of sadness, some defensive cynicism, and an unspoken hope —'… Asura,' he finished. He shrugged. 'Your turn.'
She looked down at him, while inside her mind what felt like great slabs of ice slipped and slotted, colliding, joining, fusing and interconnecting.
She took a deep breath.
2
'Chief Scientist Gadfia?'
The voice had come from the scrawny-necked bird squatting on the shoulders of the ape-human who in turn sat behind the head of the chimeric mammoth. The ape-human glared down at her, grinning inanely. The other mammoths to either side shuffled a little in the darkness, pale human faces looking down from each of them as well. She gulped. 'Well, sort of,' she said.
– Hello? she said, inside, trying to find her own voice, but within was only silence.
'All praise,' the bird said, its voice echoing in the complex of hidden tunnels and galleries around them. The creature hopped to and fro from one foot to the other. 'Love is god. Well met by darkness, truth-seeker Gadfia. For darkness gives birth to light. All here are hallowed, hallowed in hollow, the hollowness that supports, the centre that is the absence that gives strength, the hollow darkness that underlies supporting light, seeker-after- illumination Gadfia. Please (Hiddier: trunk!); come with us. There is work to do.'
The mammoth extended its trunk towards her; a giant, tapered hairy snake with a naked, glistening double orifice at the end from which a damp, subtly fetid gust of air issued.
She stared.
– Back.
– Thank goodness. Where did you-?
– I was snooping where I shouldn't have been and I was almost caught by Security. Cut me off for a while.
– Good grief. Do you know where-?
