Chapter 174
Miles of clear ice. In the middle, steam pouring from a hole where the Cult's great iron brazier hangs on chains, lowered deep, glowing red through the ice. Spreading out round it, the ice is cracking into floes.
lit red by the brazier: a vast white shape as big as the town on the hill, lying in the dark water like a sleeping hill. And one enormous closed eye, the size of a barn door.
at the lake's edge, whispering.
eyes gold, staring down through the ice.
The crew runs out onto the lake. Thaw-Brothers meet them, heat-lances stabbing into the ice, melting cracks, breaking the lake into floes that tip and slide.
Smurjan leaps from floe to floe, the Triple Pulse knocking Thaw-Brothers into the slush.
Öde runs with grass springing under every step, giving her grip on the wet ice.
Kompis fires Fru Gnista, and a burst of gold fireworks blinds a whole squad.
on a big solid floe, planting her bare feet. Taking a breath. Not letting it out.
The whole horizon stops. Not just what she's looking at: the entire lake, the town on the hill, the frozen sea beyond, the sky. Every Thaw-Brother, every floe, every falling chip of ice, frozen. The panel borders frost thick and white.
landing beside her at a run, slapping their hands on her shoulders, gasping. Vigolas crawling across the ice toward the hole at syrup speed.
hanging in the air in front of Mingus's nose. He looks at it. He snaps at it. It doesn't move. He sneezes at it. His sneeze-puff hangs in the air too, right in front of his own nose. He stares at it, cross-eyed. He snaps at the sneeze.
The corner of her mouth twitches.
(Thought, frost-edged:) …don't. don't. don't. don't.
chasing his own frozen sneeze in a circle round Isa's feet, tail whacking her shins.
A snort escapes her. A tiny, one-beat-late laugh.
(The whole horizon lurches back into motion. A dozen Thaw-Brothers stagger mid-step.)
No time. Isa plants her feet and holds again, …ba—, the horizon stopping, harder this time, her eyes narrowed in concentration, the Backlog of the first hold still hammering inside her.
And across the stopped lake, one figure moves: Tövind, walking toward the hole, touching his chest every step. Tick. Step. Tick. Step. The age-line on his right arm creeping up past the elbow.
crawling across the ice in the syrup of the hold toward Tövind, every inch an agony.
Isa, Kompis, Rougeina, Öde. They can't leave her. If they let go, they freeze.
at the steaming hole, looking down. Under the water, by the great closed eye, in the clear ice: two long brass clock-hands, frozen side by side, a dozen yards down.
kneeling at the rim of the hole, laying his old palm flat on the ice.
(The ice beneath his hand melts, a funnel melting down through it toward the hands, as the ice catches up on every spring it skipped.)
On the shore behind the chain, a squad of Thaw-Brothers who were out of Isa's sight-line, behind her, run out onto the ice with a brazier and set it down right behind her floe. The ice under Isa's bare heels begins to sweat. Meltwater runs between her toes.
The violet frost-script glowing on her soles. Her heel sliding, a hair.
slipping on the wet ice. A movement.
The hold breaks. The whole lake lurches into motion. Isa falls to her knees in the meltwater, the Backlog of two holds slamming through her chest, ba-dum ba-dum ba-dum ba-dum. Öde lunges to throw grass under her.
The brazier's heat has thawed the water round the great whale, and she wakes. The lake ice shatters upward across half a mile as Grandmother Vinter rises: a white ice-whale the size of a village, her back breaking the surface like a new island, ice sliding off her sides in sheets, barnacles of frost, ancient scars, one huge pale eye opening for the first time in a year.
Floes tip. Thaw-Brothers tumble into the water. The crew clings to the ice.
And she sings: one note, so low and vast it shakes the frozen sea for miles, rattling the whale-bone houses on the hill.
In the corner, on the hill's edge, Isa's mother, singing her eleven-year note, which suddenly fits: it's the harmony. She has been holding the other half of the song for eleven years, waiting for this.
on her knees on Öde's grass, tears hanging frozen on her lashes, staring up at the whale and back at her mother.
still singing, and her slow smile is now three-quarters made.
On Grandmother Vinter's rising flank, clinging to the ice-crusted skin, Tövind, soaked, up to his elbow in the melted funnel. The whale's movement nearly throws him off.
sprinting across the tipping floes toward him, Lilla Ulv in hand. He fires. The bullet bounces off a floe and off the whale's frosted flank toward Tövind's arm…
(The bullet ages, rusts, and crumbles to red dust in mid-air.)
getting up, staggering, screaming across the ice for the first time in the series, her soft voice cracking:
sliding out of the funnel in the ice, dripping, old to the shoulder now, the age-line past his collarbone. And in his trembling old fist: two long brass clock-hands, an hour hand and a minute hand, cold and bright.
Tövind standing on the back of the ancient whale, coat streaming, holding the hands up against the sky as Grandmother Vinter's vast song rolls out over the lake, and the crew staring up from the broken ice.