“Very well.” He spoke the words so trustingly that they nearly broke my heart.
I would have welcomed one of our snow poles, but there was no guessing where they were buried now. So, the Fool held his little box of light out in front of us, and we groped our way forward.
We encountered nothing. If we stood still and held our breaths, we could hear water dripping and the bone-deep slow breath of the ice around us. Under our feet, the ice was gritty. We could not see a ceiling above us. We were in a starless night, and our only contact with the world was the solidity under our feet and each other. We did not even see the blackness of a wall before us until we blundered against it.
We both stood touching it for a time, saying nothing. In that stillness, I became aware of the Fool shivering and the shuddering of his breath. “Why didn’t you tell me you were that cold?” I demanded of him. He sniffed, and then laughed weakly. “Aren’t you? It seemed a useless thing to speak of it.” He dragged in another chattering breath and asked, “Is that ice or rock?”
“Lift the light.” He did. I peered at it. “I still can’t tell. But it’s something we can’t pass. Let’s follow it.”
“It may take us right back to where we came.”
“It may, and there’s no help for that if it does. If we go all the way round and come right back to here again, at least we’ll know there is no way out. Here. A moment.” I set my hand to shoulder height on the wall, and then reached for my belt knife. It was gone. Of course. The Fool still had his, and I borrowed it to scratch a rough mark on the wall. It seemed a futile gesture.
“Left or right?” I asked him. I had no sense at all of north or south.
“Left,” he said, flapping a hand vaguely in that direction.
“A moment,” I said gruffly, and unfastened my cloak. He tried to fend me off when I put it around his shoulders.
“You’ll get cold!” he protested.
“I’m already cold. But my body has always warmed itself better than yours. And if you drop from cold, it will not benefit either of us. Don’t worry. If I need it back, I’ll let you know. Just wear it for now.” I only realized how cold he was when he immediately surrendered. He dropped his pack to the floor and handed me the Elderling light while he fastened the cloak. He was shaking as he held it close around him. I lifted the box and decided it was not just the greenish light that made him such an odd color. He gave me a very small smile. “It’s still warm from your body. Thank you, Fitz.”
“Thank yourself. That’s the one you gave me when I was acting as your servant. Come on. Let’s get moving.” I lifted his pack before he could. “What else is in here?”
“Nothing of much use, I’m afraid. Only a few personal things I wouldn’t wish ever to lose. There’s a little flask of brandy in the bottom. And I think a few honey cakes. I brought them for an emergency, or perhaps a treat for Thick.” He gave a strangled laugh. “Emergency. But not this. Even so, I think we should save them as long as we can.”
“Likely you’re right. Let’s go.”
He did not move to take the light, but kept his arms wrapped around his body. So I held the light and led the way as we followed the black wall beside us. I could tell by the way he walked that his feet were going numb.
Despair threatened to engulf me. Then the wolf in me dismissed it. We were still alive and moving. There was hope.
We trudged on. Endlessly. Time became motion, steps taken in the dark. Sometimes I closed my eyes to rest them from the unnatural light, but even then, I seemed to see it. At such a moment, the Fool asked shakily, “What’s that?”
I opened my eyes. “What’s what?” I asked him. Blue afterglows danced before my vision. I blinked. They didn’t go away.
“That. Isn’t that light? Shut the box. See if it’s still there or if it’s some sort of reflection.”
It was hard to get the box to shut. My fingers were cold, and my one unbooted foot was a cold aching lump at the end of my leg. But when the box was closed, a blue shard of light still beckoned to us. It was irregularly shaped and oddly edgeless. I squinted at it, trying to make it assume some familiar aspect.
“It’s very strange, isn’t it? Let’s go toward it.”
“And leave the wall?” I asked, oddly reluctant. “There’s no way to tell how far away that is.”
“Light has to come from somewhere,” the Fool pointed out. I took a breath.
“Very well.”
We set out toward it. It did not seem to grow larger. The floor became uneven and our pace more shuffling as we groped ahead with numbed feet. Then, in the space of a few steps, our perspective on it changed. A wall to our left had been blocking our view, allowing us to see only a reflection in an icy wall. As we moved past that projection, the blue gleam opened out and became a beckoning corridor of blue and white ice. Hopes renewed, we increased our pace. We hurried around a bend in our black chamber, and suddenly a luminous vista spread before us. The closer we approached, the more my eyes could resolve what we saw. As we angled back toward the illumination, it increased, and after a narrowing in the passage, we emerged into a world of light-suffused ice.
The beam seemed sourceless, as if it had wandered through windows and mirrors and prisms of ice before it found us. We entered into a strange maze of cracks and chasms in a world of palely gleaming walls. Sometimes our way was narrow and sometimes broad. The floor under our feet was never level. Sometimes it seemed we walked in a sharp crack in the ice that had happened yesterday and sometimes it looked as if melting water had slowly sculpted the wandering path we followed. When we came to ways where the passage branched, we always tried to choose the larger way. Often enough, it narrowed shortly after we had made our choice. I did not say to the Fool what I feared; we followed random crackings in the ice of the glacier. There was no reason to expect that any of them led to anything.
The first signs I saw that others had passed this way were subtle. I thought I tricked myself into hope; there seemed to be a scattering of sand where the floor of the passageway was slick. Then, that perhaps the walls had been squared off. My nose caught the scent first: fresh human excrement. In the same instant I was sure of it, the Fool said, “It looks as if steps have been cut into the floor ahead of us.”
I nodded. We were definitely ascending, and broad shallow steps had been cut in the icy floor. A dozen steps later, we passed a chamber cut into the ice to our right. A natural fissure had been enlarged into a waste pit, a place to throw rubbish and dump chamber pots. And a grave for the ignominious dead. I saw a naked foot, obscenely pale and bony, projecting from the midden. Another body sprawled facedown upon it, ribs showing through tattered rags. Only the cold made the stench bearable. I halted and asked the Fool in a whisper, “Do you think we should go on?”
“It is the only path,” he said tremulously. “We have to follow it.”
He stared and stared at the discarded body. He was shaking again. “Are you still cold?” I asked. The passages we were in seemed slightly warmer to me than when we had been in darkness. Light seemed to come from within them.
He gave me a ghastly smile. “I’m scared.” He closed his eyes for an instant, squeezing unshed tears onto his golden lashes. Then, “On we go,” he said more firmly. He stepped past me to take the lead and I followed him, full of dread.
Whoever was responsible for dumping the slops and chamber pots was a careless fellow. Splotches and splashes marred the icy walls and mottled the ice underfoot. The farther we went, the more obviously man-made or at least hand-modified the passages became. The source of the blue light was revealed when we passed an exposed pale globe that was anchored to the wall overhead. It was larger than a pumpkin, and gave off light but not heat. I halted, staring up at it. Then, as I reached toward it with curious fingers, the Fool caught at my cuff and dragged my hand back down. He shook his head in silent warning. “What is it?” I asked in a whisper.