Mitchell Smith - Moonrise

The last few steps – no longer Steps-Forever – Baj became worried for Nancy, a slip now seeming somehow more likely, so he gripped the hood of her parky as they went, Errol capering below them.

Then he saw Shrikes stumble down the way, saw them stagger at being on a level at last, so they stepped oddly for a distance.

… Eleven final steps counted, and he and Nancy and Richard did the same, stepped down and stumbled, their leg-muscles cramped – but cramps easing as they marched along on evenness at last through what seemed an ice-tunnel, a tunnel wide as a royal road. "Thank Frozen-Jesus," Richard said, "for being off those fucking stairs."

Then Patience, running from behind as fast as if she flew, coat flapping, called softly loud, "Leave them!"

The Shrikes, ahead, held still as she and the others caught up. Nancy reached to grip Errol's arm, keep him with her.

In warming light, in a steady draft of odorous air, Dolphus and the other Shrikes held javelin points to six brown-furred bulks clinging to the ice of the tunnel's wall. Baj saw great yellow incisors, small black-button eyes looking down at them, observant, apparently unafraid… There were clawed, black, thin-fingered hands, and splayed clawed feet, webbed, clinging to the tunnel's ice. Each strapped a leather sack and small steel adze from a rounded shoulder… There was a sharp and oily odor.

"Leave them!" Patience jostled the Shrikes aside. "They're Carver-Persons – they shape the town's ice, keep it proper."

"I've heard of these, but why let them live?" Dolphus kept his javelin-point at one Person's throat.

"Because…" Patience took hold of the javelin shaft, pushed it aside, "Because they are beaver-bred, and not for sense – only for chipping ice and removing what they've chipped. They don't speak… and will give no warnings."

"Still, why leave them, perhaps to come behind us?"

"They make and remake Boston, is why, Dolphus. Leave them."

Dolphus-Shrike sighed a small cloud of frost, said, "As you say, lady," and raised his javelin's point as the other tribesmen raised theirs.

Into growing brightness and richer-scented air – but air still freezing cold – they traveled the tunnel to a glittering blaze of light, then stopped, huddling there.

"North Gallery," Patience said. "Dolphus, move – move your people. There'll be no one. The gallery's for Change-of-Watchers… for Carvers."

The Shrikes stayed reluctant, shading their eyes from the light. Baj stepped past them… and walked out into openness, glitter, sparkle, so he squinted down the gallery – narrow, and vanishing into distance – and out past its carved-ice railing into a towering vaulted space, a brilliant dream of ice columns ranking away, ice ceilings past any bow-shot's reach, and reach again. And this apparently only the first in a succession of great chambers along a wide avenue of frosted ice – public spaces grand as any he'd seen in Island's stone.

"Lady Weather… !" Nancy come with Errol to stand beside him. "I never saw this. Only the Pens…"

It was impossible at first to look with open eyes into the gleam and glare of hundreds… perhaps thousands of great whale-oil lamps, each apparently backed by panels of mirror glass, and hung high in chain-looped chandeliers down those great halls, reflecting and re-reflecting off walls of polished clear ice, columns of ice shaded green or blue, roofs frosted a brilliant silver… The brightness flared, and seemed to chime, as if too much for sight alone. Beneath these clustered lamps, occasional great tethered banners – black and white, red and yellow, rippled out on a steady frigid wind, so a sky of blazing light and shifting color was made for Boston-town.

Baj had imagined the city – but not imagined well enough.

He raised a hand, as all the others except Patience raised their hands, to shade their eyes until they grew accustomed. But still he saw well enough, over a carved-ice balustrade, to make out Sunriser true-humans a bow-shot below – men, women, and children – some calling out in Patience's crisp accent exactly, and all hurrying along the ice-paved boulevard. Hurrying… and some, running.

"They know," Richard said. "They know the Guard has come to South Gate."

Many of the Boston people wore only colored-cloth skirts or trousers dyed in bright blues, yellows, and reds, so women's breasts and men's chests were bare; others – and all the children – were wrapped thick in furs, furs also brightly colored, many dyed in stripes to show like snow-tiger pelts… Most men and women seemed to wear their hair combed out long, to their shoulders – except that some young men wore a single thick braid, with colored ribbons knotted in it.

The near-naked were Warming-talented, Baj supposed; the furred, those who were not. And needed furs against the bitter breeze blowing down the gallery… blowing through the great high-ceilinged spaces and along the roadway below – the freezing guarantee of Boston's columned halls of ice despite lamp-warmth, and human warmth, beneath the great glacier's overbearing.

It was… as if a scene from dreaming, but brilliantly bright. Baj took off a mitten, and gripped the gallery's ice rail, so the shock of cold might wake him.

"Stand back," Patience said, and tugged at Baj's parky. "Back and out of sight from the boulevard. These Constables haven't yet marched south."

"And may not march south," Marcus-Shrike squatted by the gallery's ice wall with the other tribesmen, "if the Wolf-General has changed her mind about attacking."

As if to prove the possibility, Baj, crouching low, saw through thick-carved ice balusters a man come from a passageway below, to stand leaning on a halberd's staff. This man – pale, bearded, corded with muscle – was naked but for a bronze cuirass. He wore no boots, stood barefoot on ice in a city of ice.

"An officer, Baj," Patience stooped beside him, "- proving Warming-talent. A Formation commander at least, though I don't remember him… Well, perhaps Franklin Peabody, though he looks too young to be Franklin."

"Whoever," Richard had come on all fours to join them… Nancy close behind, gripping Errol's arm. "- he seems to be a worried Sunriser. Has heard of trouble coming."

"Which better come soon," Nancy said. "If one of these people Walk-in-air, they'll see us up here, call those Constables."

"No." Patience shook her head. "It isn't done to air-walk in town, unless in emergency or for lamp-tending. We're safe here for a while."

As she spoke, Baj saw her hand was trembling, saw she now seemed weary, older, matching her silver hair at last… Perhaps, he thought, from killing the Watchers down the Gate.

As he noticed, Nancy said, "Your wound, dear one," and opened Patience's colored coat. It was a seeing and knowing together that Baj had found more and more, is if he and Nancy were becoming a wiser, more observant creature than either was, alone.

"Nothing," Patience said, but held still.

"There now…" Nancy lifted clotted torn shirting away. "Runs along the rib."

"Little enough." Patience set Nancy's hand aside, drew her wool coat closed. "I'm alive."… Though her eyes, black and gleaming, seemed to Baj more than alive – as if the young Patience, tireless, still lay behind them.

They crawled back to settle against the wall with the Shrikes, who huddled in their furs against the cold flowing with the slow river of wind down the township's vaulted spaces.

The voices of the people passing below seemed to Baj oddly noisy – beyond their clipped accent – and high-pitched. "Frightened," he said.

Nancy leaned against him, soft beneath fur's softness. "And who is not?"