Chapter 173

A small town on a white hill: houses built from whale-bone arches roofed with pale baleen-thatch, frosted and glittering. At the top of the hill, a slim clock-tower of white stone, and on its face, where a clock should be, a round empty socket. In the streets, people: the Still Folk, in white whale-leather, standing in the middle of their errands like statues. One woman reaching for a door. A man carrying a bucket. A child mid-skip.

mid-skip, one foot in the air. Over the next three panels on this page, small in the corner, her foot comes down very, very slowly.

crouching nose to nose with the skipping child, waving his hand in front of her face. Her eyes are moving, slowly, toward him.

walking up the hill through the statue-street, past the people, and as she passes, she touches each one lightly on the arm, like a greeting. Good morning. Good morning. Good morning.

at the top of the town, beyond the clock-tower. Clear as glass, miles across. Standing at its edge, a tall woman in white with silver hair like Isa's, singing: one long, low note, her mouth open, her breath hanging in a cloud in front of her.

stopping beside the singing woman, very gently.

and at the corner of her mouth the beginning of a smile, starting, very slowly, as her eyes move toward her daughter.

A midwife kneeling by a whale-skin blanket where a newborn lies silent, eyes closed. No cry. No kick. The midwife counting on her fingers, frowning. One. …Two. Her fingers move once a minute.

The newborn's eyes open: frost-blue. She looks at the ceiling as if she were listening to something under the floor.

Isa at nine, small and barefoot on the frozen lake, ear pressed to the ice, listening. Under the ice, far below, a vast white shape, and the faint sound of a song.

A stranger on the clock-tower: a man from off the island in a heavy coat with a toolbag, standing on a ladder against the tower's face, holding up a pair of long brass clock-hands, about to fit them on.

Little Isa, running up the tower stairs at normal speed, the first time she ever hurried, prising the ice clock-face out of its socket with both hands while the stranger's back is turned, and running. The stranger turning, hands in his fist, shouting.

On the lake, the child stops in the middle of the ice with the face clutched to her chest, and goes still. Completely. For the first time. Her hair stops mid-swing. The stranger running after her across the lake stops mid-stride. The two brass hands fly out of his fist and hang in the air between them.

The hands, falling through a crack in the ice the moment she lets go. The crack freezing over. The stranger on his knees, staring at the ice, then shrugging, packing his bag, leaving on a boat.

present day, at the lake's edge, the ice disc in her hand.

silent.

looking at them, small and plain.

(She clearly isn't.)

Hissing. Steam. Shouts from the town below. The crew turns.

Thaw landing-parties, three of them, climbing the hill from the beach with braziers on poles, melting the street ice as they go. Water runs down the hill in rivulets. And in the street, the Still Folk: a man with a bucket, a woman at a door, the skipping child, unable to move faster than one step a minute, while Thaw-Brothers march toward them with heat-lances.

horrified, then planting her bare feet on the ice at the lake's edge.

The hillside stops. Blue-white. The braziers' flames frozen. The marching Thaw-Brothers frozen mid-step. …ba—

Kompis and Öde on her shoulders. Trollmage sits down behind her, leaning his back against hers, and closes his eyes.

at the chain's end, hand on Öde's shoulder, facing a frozen Thaw-Brother whose heat-lance is an inch from an old woman's back. Kompis's eyes go gold, then flicker, his pulse-line fracturing into slivers along the panel border.

A moment inside a moment: a dozen ghost-Kompises, each a different possible sliver, flickering round the frozen lance. In one of them the lance tip is turned aside by a fingertip, so it points at the brazier instead. That one. He takes it.

asleep against Isa's back, opening one eye. The violet glow round him is full.

MACRO : FROST = THEIR BRAZIERS

On release, —DUM: every Thaw brazier on the hillside frosts over at once, flames freezing solid and cracking, iron splitting. The Thaw-Brothers find themselves holding cracked, frozen poles, their lances pointing at their own coal-pans, and the Still Folk gone from the street.

The crew routs the landing-parties down the hill in a running fight. Isa, released, drops to one knee in the Backlog, ba-dum ba-dum ba-dum, and the ice under her bare feet, where the meltwater has run up from the town, is wet. She tries to stand, and slips.

on the wet ice as her heel slides. Revealed under her sole as the ice melts away: violet frost-script, glowing, the sentences climbing her ankles.

pulling Isa up by the arm, grass springing up round their feet over the wet ice and giving them both grip.

at the lake's edge, still singing her eleven-year note. Her slow smile has reached halfway.

Out in the middle of the miles of clear ice, a cluster of figures: Tövind and a dozen Thaw-Brothers who came round the far shore while the crew fought in the town. They have cut a hole in the ice and lowered a great iron brazier on chains down into it, glowing. Steam boils up. Beneath the ice, lit red by the brazier, a vast white shape, as big as the town, is slowly coming into view.

standing on Öde's grass at the lake's edge, staring at the hole, her face draining of colour.