Rebellion

CHAPTER 31

“It’s going to rain, then freeze,” said Holm, studying the sky. “If we’re to survive the night, we’ll need a cave, though I don’t think we’re going to find one.”

Shock had finally set in and Tali was shivering in spasms. “We’d better look right away. It’ll be dark in half an hour.”

Fog closed around them, cold and dank, as they trudged along. The iceberg was a hundred yards long and shaped like a ragged, stretched-out pentangle. At the end where they had landed, a jagged peak rose steeply to sixty feet, then sloped away to only a few feet above the sea at the other end.

“No cave,” said Tali, when they returned to the gear. “There’s not even a crevasse or a hollow to break the wind. What are we going to do?”

Holm sat on a blanket and stared into the fog.

Had he gone into a decline because of the loss of his boat? Was it all up to her? Well, the lesson that had been reinforced many times in her eighteen years was that those who never gave up, those who kept searching for a way out to the very end, sometimes did survive against all odds.

Her head throbbed. Heatstone always had that effect on her. She moved a couple of yards further away from the wrapped slabs and sat down again. Then scrambled to her feet.

“Heatstone!” said Tali.

“What about it?”

“It’s the answer.”

Tali put on a pair of heavy gloves and picked up one of the slabs, which was the size of a brick sliced in two along its length. Even through the leather her skin tingled and prickled, she had put up with the effects before and could do so again.

She walked up the slope, wondering where to begin. Which way was the wind blowing? No, which way was it likely to blow hardest and longest and coldest? She spent several minutes wrestling with the question before realising that it was irrelevant. If the iceberg turned as it drifted, it would expose all sides to the prevailing wind.

Above her, the ice rose almost sheer in the lower part of the peak. If she started there, she would have less to remove. She picked a spot, held the edge of the heatstone to the ice, and pushed. Ssssss. It began to melt its way in. Her head gave a sickening throb. She closed her eyes and continued.

“That’ll never work,” said Holm sourly. “You’ll use all the heat in an hour or two, and what will it have gained you?”

“Shows how much you know about heatstone,” she muttered.

“Beg pardon?”

“In Cython we often talked about heatstone — where it came from, and what the source could be that gave it such peculiar properties.”

“What peculiar properties?”

“For one, you can’t cool it. It gives off the same amount of heat no matter what.”

“Is that so?”

“You mean there’s something the great Holm doesn’t know?” she said sarcastically.

“There’s no need to be like that.”

“Sorry. Heatstone makes my head ache.”

Tali pushed harder and the heatstone melted its way in, faster. She withdrew it.

“Feel the edge. It’s as hot as it ever was. Melting all that ice hasn’t cooled it one bit. It keeps on heating whatever is around it for years, until one day it goes dead in a few seconds.”

“I wonder why?” said Holm.

“No one knows whether the heat comes from within the heatstone itself, or whether it draws heat from somewhere else.”

“You’ve convinced me.”

Holm fetched another stove slab and pressed it into the ice a yard away from Tali. After ten minutes they had made a series of crisscrossing channels. With hammer and chisel, Holm cut away the ice in between and they began again.

Night closed in. The fog thickened until visibility was only a few yards, and their hair and eyebrows were dripping. They continued working by the subtle scintillations from the heatstone. It was slow and tiring, and Tali’s head was throbbing mercilessly, but at least it was warm work.

At eight o’clock it started to rain, though by then they were sheltered by the cavity, kneeling side by side working at the ice face four feet inside the iceberg. By ten o’clock they had excavated a cave eight feet long, three wide and high enough to sit up in.

“That’ll do for now,” said Holm. “Let’s get dinner.”

They carried their gear in and stacked it at the front to break the wind. Holm reassembled the stove and began to cook a stew from smoked fish, dried vegetables, and copious amounts of spices. Tali sat at the back with her head in her hands, enduring the pain.

“Something the matter?” he asked, half an hour later.

“Ever since I dropped the sunstone down the shaft at Cython, and it imploded, heatstone makes my head feel strange and gives me terrible headaches. And each time I go near it, it’s worse.”

“I wonder why?” said Holm.

Tali had a fair idea why — because the sunstone implosion had woken the master pearl inside her and briefly liberated her recalcitrant gift for magery — but she dared not say anything that would make him think about ebony pearls and where they came from. Or who had been killed for them and how they were related to her.

She shrugged. “I should have known better than to use it for so long.”

“Have some stew. Life always looks better after fish-head stew.”

“You’re really weird, Holm.”

He chuckled.

She did not see how it could do anything for her ailment, but ate a bowlful then bedded down on the oilskin. After wrapping all her winter clothing around her, Tali closed her eyes.

When she finally clawed her way up from the deepest sleep she could remember, Holm was working at the back of the cave.

“What are you doing?” she said, yawning under her covers.

“Making a right-angle bend to give us more protection from the wind.” He glanced up at the ice hanging above him, uneasily.

She looked out the entrance. Wind-driven snow, fine and hard, sandblasted her cheeks. All the gear was covered in powdery snow and drifts lay alongside her.

“What time is it?”

“Three in the afternoon.”

“What, tomorrow?”

He laughed, and so did she.

“You didn’t stir all night, or all day. How’s your head?”

“Almost normal. Normally the headache goes, but I suppose I’m too close to heatstone.”

He reinserted his slab into the stove and made a pot of tea. Holm drank at least six pots a day. She wondered how he fitted it all in.

“What’s going to become of us?” she asked.

“Depends where the iceberg goes,” he said, slurping his tea.

“Where’s it likely to go?”

“Depends on the winds and currents.”

“You’ve been sailing these waters for twenty years. You must have a fair idea.”

“Everything’s different now.”

“How so?”

“When the sea level dropped, it exposed the sea bed out for miles. Tens of miles in some places. That changed the currents. And the ice sheet creates its own wind.”

Tali sighed. Getting anything out of Holm was like prising open a barnacle. “If you had to guess, just to humour me, where would you guess this berg would drift?”

“More or less east.”

“And that will take us where?”

“If it goes a bit north of east, it’ll run aground in the shallows of Hightspall and stay there until enough ice melts that it can float away again in spring. If it drifts south of east, it’ll jam into the ice packs around the edge of the Suden ice sheet and freeze there until the spring. And we’ll starve when we run out of food.”

“What if it drifts due east?”

“Out of the straits into the ocean?” he said grimly.

“Yes.”

“We die.”

“Just like that? No chance?”

“Nope.”

He went back to his work, carrying his mug of tea. He kept checking the ice behind and above him, uneasily.

“Something the matter?” said Tali.

“Just wouldn’t want to be trapped in here, is all.”

“Looks pretty solid to me,” she smirked. “Old Holm doesn’t have a phobia, does he?”

“Mind your own business.”

Tali had some more fish-head stew, walked around the iceberg several times in the clinging fog and returned to the cave. Holm came out of the entrance, carrying a bucket of ice chippings which he put on the stove to melt for water.

Tali inspected his work. It ran for another six feet around the corner.

“That’s probably enough, don’t you think?”

“Depends how long we’re stuck here.” He thrust the heatstone slab in as far as it would go, ssssss.

“If we are stuck here, we can worry about it then.”

“I like to keep busy.”

“Have a break. Why don’t you tell me about your life?”

“I’ve told you all that’s worth hearing about.”

Her eye fell on the locked black bag. “What’s in the bag?”

“Two deaths on my conscience,” he said curtly, then picked up the bag, checked the lock and carried it around the corner to where he was working.

It did not help her state of mind.

Tali did not use heatstone again, and kept as far away from it as possible, and gradually the headache went away.

The day passed, then the next, and the one after. Holm was increasingly taciturn. He spent his time either fishing, sleeping, or enlarging the cave with heatstone. After creating two rooms around the corner, he had chipped a number of shards off one of the heatstones to make carving tools, and was carving intricate patterns into the ice around the doorways. The work seemed pointless to Tali, but if it kept him happy, what did it matter?

The fog did not lift, so there was no way of knowing where the iceberg was taking them. They took it in turns climbing to the top of the peak, which they were using as a lookout, but the only thing they could see was the fuzzy disc of the sun, rising and setting. There was little wind now, and no sense of movement. They might have been trapped in an endless sea and the rest of the world vanished.

It rained heavily that night, and after it stopped, everything froze. In the morning Tali climbed up to the lookout and, in a few steps, broke out of thick fog into clear air. It was a bright sunny day and she could see over the roiling fog banks to the horizon — north to the green landscape and snowy mountains of Hightspall, south to ice-capped Suden, east -

The dome of the sky tilted, her throat closed over in panic and terror overwhelmed her. Her world had been closed in for so long that she had forgotten her own phobia. And she had no hat; she had nothing to cut off the terrifying, rocking sky.

Tali choked and stumbled backwards, desperately trying to reach the shelter of the fog, only a few feet down. She stepped onto a frozen rainwater puddle, moving too quickly, for the surface was as slippery as oiled glass.

Her feet went from under her, she fell forwards and struck a jagged edge of ice where part of the berg had broken away. The edge sliced deep into her left shoulder and she felt the blood flooding out.

“Holm?” she called weakly. “Holm?”

If he was working in the back of the cave, tapping away with hammer and chisel, he would never hear her. She yelled a couple more times, then began to make her way down backwards, terrified of falling again and rolling all the way down, into the sea.

But then she lost sight completely, and a blackness was growing inside her, a horribly familiar dark. She tried to fight it but did not have the strength.