The Ice Range

They made camp at the foot of the range in the last red light, in the lee of a boulder the size of a house.

Nobody spoke much. Crane's pack-dragon had to be coaxed down from the air, trembling, and tethered to a stake that it kept trying to pull out. The tents went up in silence. The fire, when Kieran finally got it going, burned low and blue, and gave no more warmth than a candle. The cold here was not the cold of the capital, which bit and passed. It sat on the skin and waited. It had patience.

And the sound did not stop.

Thum.

It came up through the ground, through the soles of her boots, through the rock at her back. It was very slow, perhaps one beat to every ten of her own, but it was so enormous that it did not need to be loud. She felt it in her jaw. She felt it in the water in the kettle, which shivered in rings every time it came. Soot had burrowed into her coat so deep that only the tip of his tail showed, and she could feel him trembling against her ribs.

"Does it frighten you?" said Kieran.

He had come to sit beside her on the log, wrapped in his cloak, a cup of something hot cradled in his hands. Firelight made hollows of his face.

"No," she said. And then, after a moment, because he would hear the lie: "A little. Not the sound. The sound is..." She hunted for the word. "It's the way it makes me feel when it stops. Between beats. I find myself holding my breath, waiting for the next one."

"Yes."

"You hear it too."

"I have heard it for two years. Since the first time I came north." His thumb moved on the rim of the cup. "At first I thought it was blood in my ears. Then I thought I was going mad, which, given my family's history, seemed the likelier explanation."

"Is that why you came back this time?"

"I came back because it stopped hurting."

She looked at him.

"The Hollow," he said. "I told you it lived in my hands. It does not live in my hands any longer. It lives in my skull, and my chest, and in a place behind my eyes where I cannot get at it. Every hour of every day, for two years, I have felt a cold thing there, pressing. A hand on the back of my head." He turned the cup. "The moment we crossed the last glacier this afternoon, it let go."

"Let go?"

"Entirely." His voice was almost wondering. "I do not feel it at all. For the first time since I was nineteen, I am only a man in a cold place, with a cup of tea."

She put out her hand. He took it without looking.

"Whatever is here," she said slowly, "it doesn't hate you."

"No. I think it is too large to hate."

"Then why does your dragon sing differently?"

"I beg your pardon?"

"Gron. He sang all the way here. Happy. And then at the foot of the range, he went quiet." She tilted her head toward the dark shape lying at the edge of the firelight, with his chin on his claws and his eyes closed. "It isn't fear. I can feel what fear is. It's more like..."

"Like a man entering a church."

She nodded, slowly.

Kieran was silent for a long time. When he spoke, it was so low she had to lean closer to hear.

"My grandfather's riders would not cross this range. They said the ice was haunted. My father forbade the name of the mountain at his table. And I have always supposed that this was fear." He drew a breath. "But I think now it was shame."

…

They went in at first light.

The glacier began where the tundra ended, a vast frozen river a mile wide, ridged and fissured and blue as a bruise. They left Gron at the edge, curled in the lee of a boulder with his head tucked under one wing, and went forward on foot, roped together, with spiked boots and long axes from Crane's pack. Soot rode inside Solaia's coat, grumbling. The pack-dragon stayed behind with a sulk.

It took the whole morning to reach the first ridge.

The ice made noises. Long groaning cracks that ran under their feet and echoed back from the walls. A high singing whine, as of wind in a wire, though there was no wind. Once something boomed deep beneath them, a sound like a door slamming in a very large house, and the whole surface shuddered, and Crane swore in a low steady voice for a full half-minute.

"It's settling," Kieran said.

"It is breathing, Majesty."

"Those are not mutually exclusive."

But Solaia was not listening. She had stopped.

She stood at the top of the ridge, her breath smoking, her axe loose in her hand, and looked at what lay ahead.

The glacier ran on in front of her for miles, rising in a long gentle slope toward a great wall of ice. But the wall was not a wall. As she looked, her eyes sorted it, the way they sort a face out of a pattern of leaves, and the shapes came clear. The ridgeline was a spine. The great curved buttresses were ribs. The cliff to the east, rising a mile sheer from the white, with two caves open in its face like nostrils, was a skull.

It was lying down. It had lain down, she thought, a very long time ago, on its side with its head upon its forelegs, and let the snow come down over it.

"The Sleeping Mountain," she whispered.

"Yes."

"It's real." She heard her own voice crack. "The song. The one in the book. The Mother will come. It isn't a story. It's a body."

"It is a grave," said Kieran quietly.

She turned.

He was standing a little behind her, with his axe hanging forgotten from his wrist, and there was a look on his face she had never seen. It was not fear and it was not awe. It was something much worse, quieter, and older: the look of a man who has walked a long way in the dark to a door, and has just understood, with absolute clarity, whose house it is.

"Kieran."

"My family's wealth is built on the northern mines," he said, to the mountain. "Black iron. Dragonbone. My great-grandfather opened the first shaft in the north face. I have a letter in my study from the Master of the Works, describing the quality of the ore. It is the finest in the world. It has a grain like polished horn." His mouth twisted. "I thought it a gift of the earth."

Crane, behind them, had gone gray.

"We can turn back," Solaia said.

"No."

"Kieran, you don't have to—"

"I do." He lifted his head. "I have not come all this way to look at a wall. I want to see its face."

…

There was a cave at the foot of the skull, and in the cave there was a door.

She knew it was a door the moment they saw it. Nothing in the world was so exactly placed. It stood at the back of a great domed chamber of blue ice, thirty feet high, carved straight into the living glacier and sealed with a slab of the same black stone she had seen in the pillar at the Measuring Hall. It had no handle, no hinge, no keyhole. Just a smooth dark face, lightly rimed with frost, and across it, in letters of silver so ancient that the ice had eaten half of them, a single line of script.

She did not need to be told what it said.

Here sleeps the one who will not wake until her child calls.

She put her hand on the stone.

It was warm. It had no business being warm, in a cave of ice at the end of the world, with her breath freezing in her lashes. But it was warm as skin, and under her palm, close now and enormous, slow as the tide, came the heartbeat. It went up her arm like a current. It filled her chest. She felt her own heart slow to match it, felt the cold fall away from her like a dropped cloak, and heard, from a vast distance, a voice she had not heard in all her waking life.

Little one.

"Solaia!"

Kieran's hand closed around her wrist.

She had not known she was swaying. The cave tilted. She looked down and found that her feet were four inches off the ice, and a pale white glow was running along her veins, up her arm and across her collarbones, and the door under her palm was beginning, very slowly, to light.

"Let go," he said. "Solaia. Let go."

"I can't."

"Then I will make you."

He wrapped both arms around her from behind and hauled. For a moment the stone held, warm and clinging, like a mouth. Then it released her all at once, and they fell backward onto the ice in a tangle of fur and rope, and the cave went dark and still, and the pale light on her skin faded like breath from a glass.

For a long moment nobody moved.

"It knew me," Solaia whispered.

"I know."

"It said... Kieran, it spoke. It called me little one."

"I know, my love." He had her face between his hands. His were shaking, and the eyes above them were wide and black and stripped bare. "I know. We are leaving. Now. We are going back to the camp."

"Not yet."

"Solaia—"

"It said something else." She caught his wrist. "Before you pulled me out. It said a name."

"Whose?"

"Yours."

He went absolutely still.

Behind them, in the dark of the ice-cave, with no one near it, the great black door gave a single, deep, shuddering sound. It was like the sound of a lock turning over in a very old house. And from somewhere beyond it, so faint that none of them could have sworn to hearing it, there came a low, drawn-out, weary sigh.