With a sound that split the light, Lucy’s ice-razor stabbed into the Kazia’s eye. A crack jagged across her cheek. The rest of her face held still. Only her lips pulled back in a mocking smile as if she felt no pain. She took a step.
Lucy shrank back, terrified. But the crack kept growing across the Kazia’s face. It broke into smaller lines: a cobweb on her temple. Then a strand of hair snapped off and speared the floor. The Kazia jerked her head sideways, looking for what had made that sound. With the sudden movement, half her face broke off and smashed. With her one eye, the Kazia stared down at the litter of ice. Then she turned her ruined face and screamed.
The ice blast flung Lucy back. Half-blind, the Kazia had missed her by inches. Lucy heard the wall beside her crack. In her rage, the Kazia flung out one arm. Her icicle fingers slashed at Lucy’s chest. Lucy flung herself out the door, slipping over the first stairs. Ice shattered behind her. The Kazia had smashed the door. A fragment struck Lucy’s forehead. Warm darkness ran into her eye and she slipped. Pain stabbed into her knee and the light reeled.
She was falling. Out of the confusion of noise and terror, Fracta’s face loomed, unnaturally large. Her mouth was open. She was shouting. Lucy couldn’t hear. Fracta grabbed her shoulders and forced her up. The grey blur settled into definite shapes. They were not falling; they were skidding down air on a cloud board, wind-rush all around them, towards a rectangle of daylight.
The Kazia was blundering downstairs, flinging ice blasts with each breath. The steps held for a moment under the onslaught and then splintered off, falling around her.
‘Now!’ screamed Lucy, as they swept out the door into open sky. Almost before she had finished speaking, fire exploded at their backs. Its force spun the cloud board up, turning sky and flame together.
Lucy only realised the full force of that fire when they had landed and she stood beneath it on the plain. Terrible and exhilarating, it flung great scarlet fists at the black, slow smoke that drifted over it. Beneath its roar, she heard the whirr of its white heat, that almost invisible line along the plain where it changed liquid into fire.
Lucy thought of it as hunger, loosed from every living thing into its own existence. Though she couldn’t help cowering from its heat, something in her leapt up in response to it. While she watched it, she could not remember terror, or how the cold had eaten into her nerves. The fire filled her with its own exultation. She had escaped. More than that: they had won. She felt no fear – not even when she saw in the smoke’s veils the shadow-mongers’ darker forms. Whenever one broke from shelter, snow geese screeched towards it. Beating their wings, claws outstretched, they tore and harried it until it shivered back into the smoke. She could hardly believe this rage, this vast existence of fire, had burst from a little box of matches.
‘Daniel!’ she called and started searching. Everywhere she looked, a crowd of prisoners shuffled, blank-faced and silent. They pressed past each other and then paused, one foot half-raised, and started in another direction. Watching them, Lucy’s exultation faltered. Shielding her eyes, she turned and stumbled over a grimy heap, stranded in a puddle of melted ice.
‘Yes, yes,’ it said, in a tired voice. It was the Megalith from Alkazia. Lucy crouched in the puddle beside it. Parts of its flesh had burnt away, leaving it pitted with blisters. Where its paws had been, Lucy saw blunt remnants. Its eyes had melted down its face like plastic tears.
‘You saved me,’ she whispered.
The Megalith raised the shell of its face, searching for her, forgetting it could not see. ‘Protector,’ it rasped. ‘And the Kazia, ended?’
‘Trapped in the fire. She can’t get out.’ Lucy pressed her hands together, but still, shivers ran up her arms to her shoulders. Her eyes stung with tears but she couldn’t cry.
‘I was so cold,’ said the Megalith. ‘My thoughts, even. Then the Protector. It is warm now. I have climbed into the sun, I think.’
Someone tugged Lucy’s shoulder. It was Daniel. She stumbled as she rose to meet him. He caught her elbow. He was already scattering words. He didn’t notice the Megalith.
‘Fracta’s looking for you. Wist says the Varactor’s coming. We can’t find the albatross. And the Kazia: she keeps screaming. Fracta thinks she’s planning something . . .’
While he spoke, he dragged her away from the Megalith, through the wandering crowd of prisoners to where the Stratus waited, in two lines, behind Wist and Fracta. As Lucy reached them, Fracta raised her arm and pointed.
Slow, silent, the Kazia rose out of the flames. Around her, the shadow-mongers had gathered. With a perpetual rippling, they dragged her up through air. The Kazia’s legs had broken off. One of her arms was shattered at the shoulder, the other had melted into a flat-edged club. She was the colour of old marble, everywhere cracked and glossy with ice-melt. But her one eye, staring from her broken face, held a look of triumph.
Five snow geese wheeled and rushed at the shadow-mongers. Their cries sounded over the roar of fire. Lucy watched, not breathing, as the smooth half-mask of the Kazia’s face pulled back. She screamed once – the snow geese stopped in the middle of a wing beat. For one instant, they hung in air. Then they dropped, wing over wing, into the flames.
‘The Varactor will shelter the Kazia!’
Daniel grabbed Lucy’s arm and swept up his other hand to point at the sky. With the loose, swaying movement of something in water, the Varactor sank out of the high air, and the Kazia rose to meet it.