Karl Schroeder: Ashes of Candesce: Book Five of Virga

Then he cursed and ran inside, down two halls, and out to another stairway. His instinct was to hesitate, but he'd set a timer in his scry telling him exactly how long he had before the ice reached the slope below. So he tested the top steps and, when they held him, leaped down the rest recklessly, accompanied by a cloud of watchful eyes. Soon he was standing on the round parapet of a minaret, and in the upper right corner of his visual field, the timer was still ticking down. He went down this next staircase, but in the darkness it took much longer than he'd hoped. When he emerged from an outside doorway to stand on unworked rock, he was sure it was too late.

This slope lay in the shadow of Complication Hall's lights, but it wasn't completely dark. A faint red glow permeated the air from the far distance, and this gave just enough light for him to make out tumbled stones and a nearby goat path.

Here he made the mistake of looking up. With the help of the dragonflies he could plainly see a ceiling of white, kilometers wide, lowering toward the city.

He could see the strangers' lights--they were close at hand now--and, very close by, the entrance to a tunnel that doubtless ran into Brink's foundations. It was clear the people with the lanterns couldn't see that archway, because it lay above them and behind some tall boulders, and their little lights could only reach a few meters anyway.

"Heeeyy!" He jumped and waved his arms, but nobody noticed. The strangers were picking their way one step at a time, heads bent and focused on their task. Yet they must have heard the cataclysmic cracking of the ice sheet; must know that even now it was silently bearing down on them.

Now that he was close enough Keir tried to hail the newcomers through his scry. It didn't register them at all. And according to his timer the ice would be here in a matter of seconds.

He swore and began leaping down the rocks toward them.

Now the orange-lit ovals of their faces turned in his direction. They all stopped walking and he could see them talking--verbally--among themselves; there was a sudden flurry of movement and, just as he half-slid down the last few meters, four of them produced odd, compact handheld devices and pointed them at him. Keir's scry identified these as weapons--but the idea that they might threaten him more than what was approaching was simply laughable.

"Run!" He pointed in the direction of the entrance he'd spotted, which really was invisible from here. "Ruuuuun! There!"

One of them stepped forward. She was pale-skinned, her features oddly mis-composed, as though she'd never taken the effort to adjust her bone structure or skin type. "Who are you?"

"Never mind! Run!" And, because his timer had about fifteen seconds left to it, he bounded past them, making for that other entrance. "Come on!"

"Why?" she shouted after him. "Is it--"

"The ice!" Belatedly, they began to move. With eight seconds left, Keir made it to the archway. Two blind goats were cowering in the entrance, but beyond them, it ran back into indeterminate blackness.

Eleven seconds, and the first of the strangers reached the arch.

Thirteen, and the strange goat-railing creatures scrabbled up; one was carrying a man on its back.

Fifteen seconds and the rest of them were in. Nothing happened, and the last of the strangers--including the woman--were only meters away.

A new silhouette appeared in the doorway. It looked like a man, but when the woman saw it she screamed. One of the men raised something that looked like a primitive weapon and shouted, "Keep back!"

"Let me in!" shouted the stranger. "I just want to talk."

Keir jumped at a loud bang and the silhouette staggered back. The woman ducked her face in her hands, the others were standing, shouting, and--

Whump! The stranger disappeared behind a wall of white. The entire slope bowed under the impact of something gigantic. A roar beyond sound, a physical wall of noise, hit Keir. He was tossed about the tunnel, hitting wall and ceiling and floor as the thunder went on and on, and outside the cave mouth all that was visible was a churning chaos of grinding and hammering snow.

Gradually that vast cry, like the thunderous rage of a giant, dwindled to ordinary thunder, then to grumbling and sighs interspersed with pattering and sliding sounds. Though the floor still swayed and dipped beneath him, Keir staggered to the entrance to look out. Towering thunderheads reared to all sides, their bases rooted in the world's slope. Yet for a dozen or more meters to every side, the rocks were clear of ice.

Keir found he was trembling. He'd known the tunnel would survive the avalanche; the metropoloid that called itself Brink had built itself strong enough to withstand the occasional glacial fall. Yet it was terrifying to be so close to the avalanche that he could feel its wind on his face, and taste the flavor of ancient ice.

His ears were ringing and he was sure the others were half-deaf, too, but a little deafness wouldn't stop scry. As she picked herself up and dusted herself off, Keir tried pinging the woman again; when there was no response, he tried the others. There was no reply from the humans, but an icon cloud rose from the backs of the strange, trunk-to-tail-entwined guardrail goats. A glyph of men fencing appeared in the upper left corner of Keir's vision as his scry did a handshake with theirs. The humans remained dark to data; they didn't even seem to be able to see the data cloud he was emitting.

The shaking subsided; the thunder and hammering echoes rolled away and away, and a great slow sigh of icy air wafted into the tunnel, causing the survivors to huddle together.

"Thank you," shouted the woman. Keir barely heard her; his ears were still stunned.

He pointed at the entrance. "But why did you shoot that man?"

"That wasn't a man." She walked among her people, touching each in turn and speaking to them. Some nodded; some shook their heads. Keir estimated there were about a dozen of them, an impossibly tiny party to deploy for the purposes of scaling a world's wall.

She returned and now gave Keir a frank, head-to-toe appraisal. He wanted to ask more about the incident with the gun, but she spoke first. "Where did you come from?"

"I--I live here," he stammered; and in the pale light of the strangers' lanterns, he took in her archaic, hand-sewn apparel, the tightly drawn-back hair and her intriguing, imperfect features, and knew that his earlier guess had been right. "Are you from Virga ?"

She nodded, then shot him a suspicious look. "But you're not. Who are your people?" Then, in a somewhat dazed tone, "We saw lights."

"That's Complication Hall. Where I live."

Another man, red-faced and mustachioed, came to stand next to the woman. They exchanged a glance, and she shrugged. Behind him, several of the others were moving outside, presumably to look for the one they had shot. Keir knew it would be futile, that the ice would have scoured him away to nothing.

"Do you have water, and a place to sleep?" asked the red-faced man.

Keir shrugged wryly. "A whole city's worth of guest rooms. None ever slept in. I--"

"I'm not sure we can pay," she said quickly.

Keir thought through these words, and he had to smile. "Nobody's ever offered to 'pay' me for anything before," he said. "I think that would be ... amazing. What is it you pay with?"

"Forget I mentioned it," she said, frowning quizzically. She put out her hand and Keir gingerly took it in his own to shake. He'd never actually performed this particular ritual before, but again she didn't seem to notice.

"I'm Leal Maspeth," she said. It took him a moment to realize she'd given him her name, since the words were just a garble of sound buried in her accent. She swept an arm to indicate her companions. "We were stranded on the floor of Aethyr, some weeks ago. We're walking back to the axle of the world, so we can get back to Virga with some important information."