The Frozen City

They didn't go after her at once. Wren wanted to run straight up the ice and into the city, and she stood below the Ice-Bridge in her bare feet with the snow burning them. Madoc had to pick her up bodily and carry her to the fire.

"Your feet," he said.

"I don't care about my feet."

"You will when they drop off." He knelt and took one of them in his hands. His hands were rough and very warm. He looked at her toes, and pressed them, and watched the color come back. "Nay. You've been lucky. Another minute and you'd not have been."

Across the fire Pip huddled by the wall with his arms around his knees. He had stopped crying, but his face was red and swollen and he was staring at nothing. Bracken sat beside him, close, not touching him, and looked at his hands. The rope had burned a raw red line across the right palm, and the fingers of the left were split at the tips from the iron pin.

Alder stood at the door with his back to them, looking out at the bridge in the growing light.

"She will take it to the Hall," he said. "She will go straight there. She is not a woman who wanders."

"We know where she's going," Wren said. "How do we get there?"

"By the front door, I suppose. Up the hill." Alder turned around. "In broad day, through a city of the dead, to knock on a door that whatever lives in that Hall is waiting behind."

"Then what?"

"I do not know. I am thinking."

"Think faster."

Pip said, "Drains."

They all looked at him. He didn't look up.

"Drains," he said again. His voice was thick and hoarse. "The Survey drains. There's a whole city under the city. Sir made me copy the plans. In the archive in Merrow, the old Survey drawings of Cael Meddan. Streets and walls and the Hall and the drains under it. Over and over, till I could do it with my eyes shut. I said what's the use, we're never going there, nobody's been there in three hundred years. And she said—" His mouth twisted. "Sir always said drains are the only honest map of a city. Anyone can lie about a street, she said. Nobody bothers to lie about a sewer."

"Can you do it with your eyes shut now?" Wren said.

Pip finally looked up at her.

"Yeah," he said. "I can."

He drew it for them in the ashes at the edge of the hearth with a burnt stick, fast, as Iyene had taught him, without stopping to think. He drew the river along the bottom, and the city wall, and the streets going up the hill in rings with the Hall on top in a circle. Then under all of it he drew the drains, running in long straight lines down the hill to the river, joining and branching like the veins on the back of a leaf.

"There's grates," he said. "In the streets. Big iron grates, where the water went in when it rained. Here." He stabbed the stick at a square near the foot of the Hall hill. "That's a big one. The Lamp Square. The main drain runs right under it, straight up to the Hall. And here—" He drew a mark on the circle of the Hall. "That's the water-door. Iron gate, in the foundations. That's where the drains go into the Hall. That's how the Survey men got down to mend them."

"Will it be open?" Alder said.

"How should I know? It's a map, Grandad. It's not a promise."

Alder, to Wren's surprise, laughed, a short rusty sound.

"Quite right," he said. "Quite right."

"There'll be water in them," Madoc said, frowning at the drawing. "Drains that size. Won't it be froze?"

"Not all of it," Pip said. "Sir said. The Hall hill's got springs under it, deep. Warm ones, warmish. That's why they built the Hall there. The water comes up under the hill and runs down the drains to the river. She said even if everything else froze, those might not." He rubbed his nose. "She said might, mind."

Bracken rose and stood in the doorway, looking out at the bridge, where the cut rope lay on the ice in two pieces.

"We go in by day," he said. "They're slow when they're standing, the dead ones, and I'd sooner see them coming. We go to this Lamp Square. We go down the grate. We walk up the drain and in at the back door." He turned around. "Then we get Dor."

"And the book," Wren said.

"And the book."

"And then what?" said Madoc.

No one had an answer. Bracken picked up his spear from beside the door, where he had leaned it after fetching it back off the ice, and looked at the edge of it.

"Then we'll see," he said.

They crossed the Ice-Bridge in the full light of the morning, with Madoc going first to re-pin the cut rope.

Pip wouldn't leave Barrow on the near bank. "If the bridge goes," he said, "he's stuck over here on his own, and we're stuck over there, and nobody's coming for him, ever." No one could argue with that. So Madoc went back over the ice with his hand-axe and cut a long ladder of notches up one side of the hump and down the other. Pip led the mule up them, talking to him the whole way in a low steady voice, and Bracken came behind with his shoulder against the mule's rump. Barrow went up the ice with his eyes rolling and his hooves slipping in the notches, and did not once pull back. At the top he stood trembling on the crown of the bridge. Then Pip clicked his tongue, and the mule went down the far side almost sitting on his haunches, and shook himself all over on the river ice.

"There," Pip said to him, breathless. "There, see? You're a good lad."

From the top of the bridge Wren could see the river valley laid out white under a white sky, and the city climbing up from the far bank. Nothing moved anywhere except the five of them and the mule on the ice. She could hear her breath inside her scarf, and the creak of the rope, and the scrape of Barrow's shoes, and there was no other sound.

The gap Iyene had gone through was the old east gate of the city, an arch in the river wall with its doors long gone. Beside it, outside the wall, stood the gatehouse stable. It had lost half its roof, but the other half still leaned against the wall over a manger and a drift of old hay.

Pip saw to Barrow himself and wouldn't let anyone help. He led the mule into the corner under the roof, where the snow hadn't drifted. He tied the halter to an iron ring in the wall with a rope long enough to reach the snowdrift in the doorway, so Barrow could eat snow for water. He piled the last of their fodder in the manger, which wasn't much, and put his blanket over the mule's back and tied it under his belly with string.

"You stay here," he told Barrow. "You don't eat the rope. You don't eat the blanket. You don't go wandering off after some mare, 'cause there isn't one, there's nothing in there but dead people and they'll have you for breakfast. You stay here and you wait. All right? You wait for me."

Barrow swung his long head round and lipped at Pip's collar.

"I'll be back," Pip said. "Tomorrow. Day after, maybe. I will."

He put his arms around Barrow's neck and hid his face in the mule's mane. Wren, in the doorway, turned away and let him.

When she turned back Madoc was standing beside her with her fiddle case on his back, where it had been since Scarrow. He hitched it round so she could see it.

"You want this back?" he said. "In there?"

She looked at it. The fiddle had been her mother's, and it had come from Fallowmere over the Stair and across the gorge, and she wanted it on her back more than she could say.

"No," she said. "Keep it. I'll want both hands."

"Aye. That's what I thought." He settled it again over his quiver and tightened the strap across his chest.

"If you drop it in a drain," Wren said, "I'll drown you in the same one."

"Aye," said Madoc. "I'd expect nothing less."

Inside the gate a flight of steps went up from the river, worn hollow in the middle by feet, and Iyene's tracks went up them, each boot-toe sharp in the snow.

They went up the steps into the city.

There were people everywhere. Wren had seen the figures from the bridge and thought she knew what to expect. But at the top of the steps a wide street curved away between tall houses of gray-white stone, and it was as full as the Bridge Inn on a harvest night.

They stood in the snow as they had been standing when the cold came down, and they hadn't moved since. A man with a handcart was bent over the handles, his cart heaped with snow. Two women stood face to face, one with her hand up as if she had been about to say something. A boy sat on a doorstep with his chin in his hands, and a dog lay curled beside him, white all over with frost.

Snow had built up on their heads and shoulders in little caps and drifted against their legs. They wore the clothes of the old kingdom, long coats with deep cuffs, hoods and aprons and wooden-soled shoes. Their faces were gray-blue under the rime, and their eyes were open, and every one of them had white eyes.

"Oh, gods," Wren whispered.

"Keep moving," Madoc said, very low. "Slow. Don't run. Don't stop. Don't touch anyone."

They went down the middle of the street in single file, with Madoc first and Bracken at the back. They kept as far from the figures on either side as they could, which wasn't far.

The first head turned as they passed the handcart.

Wren heard a little crackle, like frost breaking on a puddle, and looked, and the man with the handcart had turned his face toward them while the rest of him stayed bent over his cart. His white eyes were fixed on Alder.

"Keep walking," Madoc breathed.

They kept walking, and the man's head turned after them, slowly, crackling. Then one of the two women turned her head across the street, and the boy on the step lifted his chin out of his hands.

"It's the warm," Madoc whispered. "They smell the warm. So long as we keep moving they'll not wake proper. They'll just look. Keep walking. Don't stop."

Wren kept her eyes on the back of Pip's hood. Behind her she could hear Alder breathing short and quick, and the crackle of heads turning, and turning, all the way down the street.

Pip led them up through the city, and he never hesitated. At every corner he looked once, left and right, and then went on, as if he had walked these streets all his life. They climbed a long stair between houses, and crossed a little square where a woman stood frozen at a well with the rope in her hands. They passed a street of shops with their shutters open and their goods laid out under the snow, a cobbler's with a row of shoes, a chandler's with candles in the window. In a baker's window there were loaves on a tray, round and brown under a skin of frost, exactly like the loaves in the Bridge Inn kitchen.

"Tanners' Row," Pip whispered at one corner. "Then the Salt Stair. Then the Lamp Square's at the top."

"How do you know?" Wren breathed.

"'Cause I drew it till my hand fell off, that's how."

The dead stood in doorways and at windows. Three men sat at a table in the open front of a tavern, leaning together over their cups as if one of them had just told a joke. A child stood in a gateway with her hand raised, waving at someone long gone. As the company passed, the heads turned one after another and followed them, crackling.

On the Salt Stair a woman took one step down toward them off her doorstep, and stopped, and Wren's heart nearly stopped with her. But the woman stood where she was, one foot on the step and one on the street, and only her head went on turning after them as they climbed.

"It's getting worse," Wren whispered.

"Aye," said Madoc. "We're getting warmer. It's hard walking. Keep on."

Then Alder stumbled. At the top of the Salt Stair, where the steps were worn and the snow lay over ice, his staff slipped and his foot went out, and he fell to one knee with a grunt. Wren caught his arm and Bracken came up on his other side, and between them they got him up.

It took a few breaths, and for those breaths they were stopped, close to a doorway. In the doorway stood a big man in a leather jerkin and a long apron, with a heavy hammer in one hand. A smith, Wren thought, and she thought of Perrin Cole with his hammer at the Fallowmere gate. Then the smith's head came round, and his white eyes fixed on Alder, and his mouth opened.

He was fast, as they always were once they woke. His free hand came out of the doorway and closed on Alder's sleeve, and the brown cloth whitened and stiffened under his fingers. Alder gasped. The smith pulled, and Alder came half off his feet toward the doorway.

Madoc had a fire-arrow on the string. Bracken's hand closed over the arrowhead.

"No," Bracken breathed. "No fire. They scream."

He let go of the arrow and stepped in past Alder and drove the boar-spear into the smith's chest with his whole weight behind it. The iron head went through the leather apron and through the man and into the wooden door behind him, and pinned him there. The crossbar stopped a hand's width from his ribs.

The smith didn't make a sound. He let go of Alder's sleeve and took hold of the spear-shaft with both hands. The ash wood whitened under his grip, and he began to pull himself down it toward Bracken, hand over hand.

"Madoc," Bracken said, very quietly.

Madoc had his iron hand-axe out. He stepped up beside the door and swung it at the smith's neck.

It made a dull chunk, iron into frozen meat. The smith's head rocked, and he kept pulling himself down the spear. Madoc swung again. The frozen flesh split and showed gray, not red, and the hammer fell out of the smith's hand and rang on the doorstep, loud as a bell.

All along the street, every head turned.

They turned together, on both sides of the street and the whole length of it, and the crackle went down the street like fire in dry grass. Dozens of white eyes were looking at the doorway.

Madoc hit the smith a third time. The head came off and fell into the snow on the doorstep, and lay there with its eyes open and its mouth moving.

The body kept its grip on the spear.

Bracken put his boot against the door and wrenched the spear free. The body fell forward on its face in the snow, clawing slower and slower, until Madoc hacked at the arms and they stopped.

Then all down the street the dead stood with their heads turned toward the doorway, and none of them had taken a step. They were waiting; Wren could feel them waiting. The cold of them lay on her skin. She felt the company's warmth going out into the frozen air like the smell of bread from a bakehouse door.

"Walk," Madoc breathed. "Walk. Slow. Now."

They walked. Alder was shaking, holding his left arm against his chest with the sleeve stiff and white to the elbow. They went slowly up the street away from the doorway in single file without looking back, while the heads crackled round to follow. Wren waited to hear a footstep all the way to the end of the street, and none came.

At the corner Alder leaned against the wall and shut his eyes. Wren pushed back the frozen sleeve. The skin of his forearm was white in four long stripes where the fingers had been, but it hadn't blistered, because the cloth had taken most of it.

"I am quite well," he said. "Go on. Do not stop for me."

"You fell over."

"I am seventy-one years old. I fall over." He opened his eyes. "Go on."

The Lamp Square was at the top of the next street, and it was no use at all.

They saw that from the corner. Beyond the square rose the Hall hill, packed with hundreds of the dead standing close together. Their faces were turned up toward the great shut doors, as if they had come up the hill to be written on the Roll and been stopped there. The grate lay in the middle of the square, a round dip in the snow with a ring of iron at its edge, full to the brim with black ice as hard as rock. Three of the dead stood in it with their feet frozen in.

"It's froze," Pip said. "It's froze solid."

"I have Opening," Alder said, very low.

"And it'd still be full of ice," Wren said, "and we'd be stood in the square in front of all of them. Keep it."

Pip's face crumpled, and she was sure he would cry again. Instead he shut his eyes tight, and his lips moved, and she saw he was walking the map behind his eyes, street by street, down the hill.

"Water's got to come out," he said suddenly, and opened his eyes. "If the springs are running, it's got to go somewhere. The main drain from the Hall doesn't come up here. It goes down, under the Salt Stair and the tanneries and out under the river wall. There's a big arch. Outfall of the Hall, it says on the plan." His voice cracked. "Under the west end of the Ice-Bridge. We walked straight over it."

Bracken put one big hand on the back of Pip's neck, very briefly, and took it away.

"Right," he said. "Back down, then."

The dead had been woken once and did not sleep again. Every head was already turned when they came back down past the smith's doorway, where the smith's head lay in the snow and its eyes followed them. On Tanners' Row a man stepped out and followed them for a dozen paces before he stopped. Wren's legs wanted to run so badly they shook, and she did not let them.

It was the middle of the afternoon when they came out at last through the east gate. They went past Barrow's stable onto the river ice, and along under the river wall to the west end of the Ice-Bridge.

Where the bridge came down onto the city bank in a long hump of blue ice, the river under it looked different. The ice there was thin and gray, and in the gray was a black place where it had never closed. Water showed there, dark and slow and moving, with a thin mist hanging over it. The water was steaming.

Behind the black water, half hidden under the overhang of the bridge, was an arch in the river wall. It was taller than Bracken and twice as wide as a cart, built of great fitted stones, and dark inside. The black water came out of it and ran across the gray ice in a slow dark tongue.

Pip let his breath go in a long white cloud.

"Outfall of the Hall," he said.

Wren put her mitten into the water at the edge. It was bitterly cold, cold enough to make her fingers ache, but it was water, and it was running.

"Warmish," Madoc said. "Lad was right."

"Sir was right," said Pip.

They climbed down off the thin ice into the mouth of the arch one at a time. The water came up over Wren's boots to her knees, and its cold bit so hard she gasped. The tunnel went back into the dark, straight and level, with a stone walkway along one side just under the water, and it smelled of wet rock and old iron. Bracken came in last, stooping.

Madoc struck a light and lit a torch. The flame jumped and doubled in the black water, and the arched roof leaped out of the dark over their heads.

And behind them, out across the frozen city, a bell rang.

It rang once, a huge deep slow bronze sound that rolled out over the roofs and the dead in the streets. It came down to the river and into the mouth of the tunnel. The water round Wren's knees shivered with it, and it went on humming and fading for a long time before it stopped.

Nobody moved. Wren looked back out through the arch at the white river and the gray sky.

"That is the Hall," Alder whispered. "That is the Hall bell. It has not rung since—"

"Aye," said Madoc. He shifted the fiddle case on his back and lifted the torch. "Someone's expecting company."