14

Quell

Qwella?” Quell asked again, losing the certainty that had gripped him. She must be another phantom of his delirium. Like the iron table that became a dog.

“Yes,” she answered, glancing once at the knife bedded in his side. “You’re Ictha. Do you know me?”

“It’s me! Quell!” He tried to sit, and failed once more.

A veined white face thrust in between them, dark eyes narrow and furious. “You’ve destroyed it all.” Priest Valak swung an arm at the destruction around them, the floor scattered with bright shards of antique glassware. “You stupid . . . ignorant . . . savage! Have you any idea what you’ve done here?”

“It wasn’t me.” Quell croaked out his protest, wanting to explain about the metal cube that opened out into something doglike. “I—”

Qwella pushed the priest aside. “You can see he’s too weak to crawl. Someone else did it. Now give me some space or I won’t be able to save him. He’s pretty far gone.” She flexed her elbows, driving Valak further back. The priest let his arms fall, his attention captured once more by the ruins of his collection.

“Qwella . . .” Quell managed to clasp her hand with his. Their eyes met. Hers widened.

“Quell? Little Quell? My Quell?” A widening smile. “No?”

Quell nodded. His throat too tight for words, ashamed that he had almost forgotten her, ashamed that she had become a ghost, haunting the fringes of his memory.

“Not so little now!” She shook her head. “My own brother . . . This will take some getting used to!” Her face became serious and she turned her attention to the knife. A soft cry of dismay reached them from across the room where Valak was crouched, sifting through the wreckage of what had so recently been heartbreakingly beautiful and unknowably old works of the Missing.

“How—” Quell gasped as her fingers probed the rigid muscle around the wound. “How are you here? Hardly changed?”

“Ah, well . . . I sleep a lot.” Qwella made a small smile. A warmth spread from where her fingertips touched his flesh. “They wake me up when they need me. Each time I think it’s to be the war, but no, it’s Valak has broken his toe, Sequa has frostbite, Mekka cut herself slicing fish.” As she spoke the warmth beneath her fingers became a tingling sensation that somehow both numbed like cold and thrilled like fire. She set a hand to the hilt of the knife and Quell winced, but in anticipation of pain rather than actual pain. “It will be fine.” Her smile now had the warmth he remembered as a child when she would pick him up in his hides and parade him along the line of the sled march.

“Sister . . .” He felt the steel being withdrawn but it was a distant thing. Instead of pain he felt love, the uncomplicated love that runs as an undercurrent through family. Behind the cutting edge the muscle tingled. Quell imagined that the sensation was his insides reknitting. He hoped that it was. “My sister.” It seemed impossible that where Yaz’s bond to her brother had pulled her down the pit, his with his sister had frayed into forgetfulness. But he’d been so young and the memories had become myth, a dream that haunted him through the years.

Qwella discarded the blade, letting it clatter to the floor. She pressed her palm to the wound.

“What war?” With the knife out of him Qwella’s words returned to his mind.

Glass crunched as Valak turned sharply towards them, paler than ever before, though Quell had not imagined that possible. “Don’t speak of it!”

Qwella frowned. “Quell is Ictha.” She said it as if that explained everything. And it did. There were no secrets among the Ictha. Betrayals and infighting were not luxuries that one could afford in the far north. There was only one enemy, though it bore many faces: call it hunger, call it cold, call it the wind or the ice . . . or just call it the north. “He’ll join us when we go to war. All the Ictha will.” She spoke with total conviction, though the Ictha did not make war. None of their people had died a violent death in generations. At least not above the ice. “We’re going to take the green lands. At least enough of them for us to live there with space to hunt and fish. It’s warm there, Quell. They have oceans that make our seas look like drops of water. They have animals on the land too. There’s no ice, just . . . green. Everywhere you look there’s food. You can just reach out and take it.”

“How do you know all this?”

Qwella smiled as if he were still her baby brother, a child asking a child’s questions. “We see it in our dreams. The Hidden God shows us what’s there, down in the south. And what we have to do to get it.”

“But aren’t there clans that live there already?” Quell asked.

Qwella frowned; she looked puzzled, as if trying to catch an elusive thought. Then she brightened. “That’s what the war is for.”

“You’d kill to take what’s theirs?” Quell tried to sit and found that this time he actually could. His side still hurt but the pain was no longer the crippling kind that demanded he obey. Now it was more by way of a strongly worded suggestion. “Before the last gathering I’d never met anyone who believed in the green world, and now days later you expect me to murder the people who live there so I can take their place?”

Qwella shook her head, troubled. “It’s not murder. It’s war. Our clans need to live, don’t they? You don’t see it, but we’re dying. The Black Rock has a longer memory. The priests keep records. Once, not so long ago, only the clan elders could watch the regulator do his work at the Pit of the Missing. There wasn’t room for any but the elders. Now all of us can fit on the crater rings.”

“It’s not the Ictha way.” Quell glanced across the room to see Valak watching their exchange intently, two jagged pieces of a large vase in his hands.

“In the north only the strong survive,” the priest said. “Isn’t that true?”

Quell shrugged. “We are all strong in the north.”

Valak set the pieces down, one hand bloody, and came towards them. “That’s what the ice does. It grinds us together and only the strong survive. That is the Ictha way.”

Quell said nothing. The priest talked as if he lived among them, but though he might venture onto the ice from time to time the priest lived here, in the warm. He knew no more of the Ictha than a man staring at the waves knows of the depths of the sea.

“And soon the ice will grind us against the people of the green lands and once more the strong will survive.” Valak gave his blood-smeared hand a sour look. “Go back to your vigil, Qwella.”

“But . . .” Qwella’s face fell. “Quell will need more treatment. I could stay with him awhile.”

“He’ll do fine.”

“He’s my brother. Couldn’t I—”

“Go back!” Valak raised his voice and the red star on Qwella’s chest pulsed with each of his words.

Qwella’s eyes lost focus and without replying or saying goodbye she turned to go.

“Wait!” Quell didn’t want to lose her a second time. He tried to stand but the pain defeated him.

Qwella left without a backwards glance. Valak stood looking down on Quell with dark, unreadable eyes. “It’s unfortunate that she told you so much. Regulator Kazik had hoped that you would be able to return to your people, but that will no longer be possible.”

“But I . . .” Quell realized how feeble his promise not to speak of the priests’ war would sound. His first duty was to his clan. Valak knew that. “You could have stopped her!”

Malice flashed in Valak’s eyes. “I was too distracted by the wreckage of my collection. Those vases were thousands of years old. Tens of thousands maybe. They were the artistry of a vanished people whose ruins dwarf our—”

“What’s to become of me?” Quell got to his feet using the wall, teeth gritted against the pain, sweating, panting.

“I’m trying to decide if spending the rest of your days labouring in the coal mines is a fitting punishment, or if it wouldn’t just be easier if you died trying to escape after your destructive rampage.” Valak’s blossoming rage trembled in his hands.

Quell staggered back a few steps. He couldn’t run and he wouldn’t beg. “That table behind you. That cube of iron. It came to life and did it.”

Valak glanced back at it without really looking. “That was there when I was assigned this chamber fifteen years ago. It’s a lump of metal.”

Quell was half-inclined to believe the priest. It had seemed like a dream at the time—more so now. “Why would I tell such a lie?”

Valak twisted his mouth in a snarl. Then his face went blank, as if all emotion had drained from him in an instant, just as Qwella’s face had lost expression when he ordered her away. Quell had seen it before, the calm before the storm when Yaz unleashed the awful power she had access to. Valak closed his eyes.

Three thuds reverberated through Quell. If it weren’t for the fact they shook the room too, Quell might have imagined them to be the pounding of his heart. A loud scraping creak accompanied them, as if perhaps the mountain itself were breaking and the ceiling might descend in a rush of shattered rock.

Valak’s eyes snapped open, full of a terrible light, fiercer and less kind than the sun’s. To touch him now would mean incineration; the air rippled around him, stirred by invisible fire. A shadow moved behind the man and he shuddered, not like a person but as the whole world does when your head hits the ice too hard. He shook, as if the power he had taken were too much for him to contain. But, just as Yaz had, he began to master it. Soon it would be his to do with as he chose, and Quell knew that the priest’s choice would see him decorate the far wall.

Quell commended his essence to the Gods in the Sea and stood straight. He would die on his feet like an Ictha, defiant until the last.

Sparks began to arc between Valak’s outstretched fingers. And suddenly the man was falling backwards with a startled cry. The priest crashed down onto both shoulders as the blunt iron head of the dog-thing emerged between his legs, shortly followed by the rest of it, lumbering forward at a fair pace. Where it had touched the priest the dog’s iron skin glowed with a red heat.

Valak’s cry had become a sound that wasn’t intended to issue from a human mouth. He continued to shudder and the sparks became crackling snakes of white energy that writhed about him, searing all they touched.

The metal creature continued on, aiming for the tunnel that led away. Even in the depth of his amazement Quell could feel the building danger. The interruption had clearly caused Valak to lose control and something very bad was about to happen—very soon.

Quell decided that perhaps he could run after all, despite his healing wound. He overtook the lumbering dog in the tunnel outside. Behind them the light got brighter and brighter, illuminating the way ahead, launching their shadows before them. Quell threw himself around a corner into a side passage. The detonation behind him happened in the same instant. Quell landed on his good side, looking back, and had a fleeting impression of a dark shape, which must have been the iron dog, hurtling past the mouth of the passageway amid a swirling storm of fire. Enough of the conflagration rounded the corner to wash over Quell as he folded his arms before his face. The heat scorched across him and blew itself out.

“Gods in the Sea . . .” His voice sounded distant and muffled, competing with a high ringing in both ears. Quell sat and slapped at his smouldering hair with scorched hands. The air stank of acrid char. The light swayed this way and that with the stars swinging in their iron cages. He shook his head and used the wall to help him gain his feet. Still dazed, he looked down the passage, wondering where in the hells he should go now.

A scraping sound and a heavy thud brought his gaze back to the corner he’d thrown himself around. The blunt head of the dog edged into view, smoking gently. Two dark and solemn eyes regarded him.