Iron Winter

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.

THREE 48

The Third Year of the Longwinter: Spring Equinox

The ice spilled off the growing continental caps, and gathered in sheets over the open sea. From the mountains too the ice descended, the glaciers flowing down valleys gouged out by their predecessors millennia before. When they reached the lowland the glaciers spread out and flowed together, merging into sheets of ice that covered the ground, covering the traces of forests, farms, cities.

Across swathes of the northern continents, there were few people left to mark the latest equinox.

49

The woman was waiting for Sabela under the Gate of the God of Light.

Situated next to the Exaltation of the Sky Waters, a square-cut pyramid that was the greatest monument in Tiwanaku, the Gate was only nominally an entry to the city. Not attached to any wall, the Gate was the frame of a door that led nowhere. Yet this was traditionally where supplicants came to ask for residence in this holy city, the highest city in all the world, enclosed by its finely cut stone walls and surrounded by raised, carefully irrigated fields of maize.

This was the High Country. The day was bright, the lake, a day’s walk away, was a plane of brilliant blue under the sky, and the snow-capped mountains beyond gleamed. The city was a jewel set in the great mountain chain that stretched down the spine of this southern continent.

And here was this woman, round-shouldered, her clothes layers of grubby rags, a clutch of children around her, the oldest a boy who might have been fourteen, a couple of little girls, an infant in arms, all of them staring at Sabela. One of the girls was labouring, having trouble breathing. Sabela had no idea how old the woman was. Younger than she was, probably. Broken down from toil, child-rearing, and maybe years as a nestspill.

Sabela held out the note she had been sent, written on reed paper, scrawled in a soldier’s hasty hand. It had found her eventually at her mother’s home on the other side of the city, where she had been visiting with the twins. ‘You sent me this? Your name is — C’merr.’ The click in the back of the throat, characteristic of lowlander tongues, was alien to Sabela’s own language.

‘C’merr — yes. And you are Sabela, wife of Deraj.’

‘You claim we offered to take you in.’

The woman frowned, perhaps puzzling at her speech. ‘Yes. Not you. Husband, Deraj.’

Sabela found that hard to believe; Deraj, busy running a wool business that spanned swathes of the highlands and thousands of llamas and alpacas, was not given to making sentimental gestures to unfortunates like this nestspill. Especially not to a grubby, unprepossessing — ugly — woman like this one. Deraj, for better or worse, had always had an eye for beauty. ‘You understand that the city is crowded.’

‘Crowd — yes.’