Solatium (Emanations, an urban fantasy series Book 2) (61 page)

Ghosteater nosed my hand. “The path to the place of the ice men, pup.”

I smiled and ruffled his ears.

We were standing in front of a small ligature — little bigger than a normal room doorway. Freezing air was howling out of it, scouring the ground with particles of ice. The Triassic plant life around us looked like it was doing its level best to crawl away and hide. Mostly, it was just dead.

The dragon was some ways back — the cold probably wasn’t to her liking, either.

She’d landed very gently, coming to a hover just above the ground and then lowering her legs. I’d heard timber breaking, but I’d hardly felt it.

Once she’d set us down and we’d moved away, she’d promptly lain down, crushing everything beneath her. All I could see clearly of her now was a stretch of her lower jaw — a sheer wall a hundred feet high. The rest was just a dark shape in the mist, stretching into the distance like some long, craggy ridge.

Maybe if she lay there long enough, that’s what she’d become. She’d get dusty, then dirty. Small plants would colonize her. Then a few trees. Give her a few thousand years, and she’d look a lot like Rib Mountain.

The thought made me shiver. Maybe there was a stratum where Rib Mountain was a dragon. Graham had said it existed in the S-Em too. Now that I understood this world better, I knew there were probably many versions of it. Who’s to say they were all the same?

“How far to the ice men’s citadel?” Williams said.

Ghosteater stepped into the ligature and lifted his nose, sniffing and tasting the wind. After a number of minutes, he turned back. “Not far. One day’s run.”

“As humans travel?”

The wolf cocked his head, thinking. “I do not know. Four days?”

I had a feeling he was underestimating.

Williams’s expression said he was thinking along the same lines. “Will the dragon stay while we prepare?”

“She will sleep for some time.”

“Days? Months? Years?”

“Days.”

Williams looked disappointed, but I couldn’t see why. Surely we wouldn’t need months to prepare, and I bet no other predator would come within miles of her. A thousand toothy things were probably running away through the underbrush that very minute.

When Williams glanced my way, I tipped my head toward the ligature and tapped my wrist, as though counting the seconds.

He stared at me for a long moment, brows knit. Then he turned away and began setting up camp.

My change of heart probably perplexed him.

Oh well
.

There wasn’t much I could do about it. Even if I could speak, I was oath-bound.

I grasped the loose skin at the nape of Ghosteater’s neck with both hands. His shoulder muscles bunched. Then, dark claws cutting down through the rocky scree as though it were sand, he pulled me up the last ten feet of the slope.

The crest of the hill had been blasted clear of snow.

Exhausted, I plopped down on a boulder and leaned over to nuzzle the wolf’s chin. Since I couldn’t speak, I had no other way to thank him.

Plus, his face was warm.

Williams trudged up, set down the small sled he was carrying, heaved off his pack, and sat down.

A minute or two passed in silence.

“There,” he said, pointing across the valley that lay before us. “See that glacier? The citadel’s at the top.”

The ice men built their capitol on a glacier?
That didn’t seem sensible. Glaciers move.

But there it was — a huge mound rising out of the glacier’s head, gleaming white in the moonlight.

“We’ll need to make it up the talus slope. Once we hit the ice, there’ll be a road.”

I nodded and carefully straightened out my aching right knee. I’d fallen the day before and given it a good whack on a rock. The more exhausted I became, the more I fell. Not good.

The journey through Fur hadn’t taken four days. We were at nine and counting.

Getting here in February was terrible luck. It might’ve been only a twenty-mile trip, but it was twenty miles of climbing and descending icy slopes, generally in temperatures well below zero and frequently in heavy snow. And we were only getting about six hours of light a day, much of it twilight, with the sun running just above the horizon. The moon often seemed to cast more light.

Thank god Williams had insisted we take a number of days to prepare in Eyry.

Ghosteater had hunted, dragging more game back for us than we could possibly eat.

Williams had set up a rack for sun-drying meat. He’d shown me how to butcher the unfamiliar animals. I’d spent hours cutting their leanest parts into precise strips while he dipped them in salted water and tied them to the rack.

The result was an extraordinary pile of food, which Williams packed onto a crude but sturdy sled he made out of branches, animal hide, and a discarded dragon tooth.

The mass quantity turned out to be a life-saver. The trip was taking so long, and we were burning a lot of calories. We could ask Ghosteater to hunt for us, true, but butchering animals and cooking fresh meat in this weather would be really hard. Just rehydrating and cooking the dried stuff in a pot over Williams’s tiny camp stove was a big production.

A production Williams wanted to undertake at that moment, apparently — he had opened his pack and was removing cooking gear.

I went over to him and tugged on his sleeve. When he looked up, I motioned that we should keep going. I mean, for god’s sake — we were almost there.

He shook his head. “You need rest.”

I made an impatient noise.

He ignored me.

I watched him use his hatchet to cut a long strip of frozen jerky into smaller pieces. I honestly wasn’t hungry. Having my destination finally within reach was tying my stomach in knots.

Inside me, my gift shifted, rubbing and scraping like something that didn’t quite fit. It felt huge. The thought of using it frightened me.

I looked out across the valley that stretched before us. The snow was deep, and there’d be ice underneath — frozen run-off from the glacier. The talus slope beneath the glacier’s toe was steep and snowy. We both had crampons and ice axes, and Williams had climbing rope — the amount of stuff he’d been carrying was amazing. Still, getting up would be dangerous.

Above the talus slope, the glacier lay like a wide gray tongue between two peaks. The one to the left was unremarkable, but the one to the right was dramatic — a sheer cliff rising some thousands of feet from the valley floor.

I sat there, looking at it, taking in its deep, shadowy stillness.

The right dragon had been inconceivably ancient, but the bones of the earth itself made dragons look young.

“In the first world, it’s called Mount Thor,” Williams said.

I wanted to ask how old it was. I wanted to ask if everything in a stratum that was only a million years old would be that age or the age it was in the F-Em. I wanted to ask if he’d been here before. All I could do was look at him. The no-speech thing was frustrating.

It’ll come back
.

He returned my gaze for a few moments, then pressed a cup of meat and broth into my hands.

“Eat.”

I nodded, intending to do nothing of the kind.

“Now,” he growled.

I nodded again and looked back out over the valley. It was all grays and shadows under the twilit sky.

We reached the glacier late the next afternoon. Williams was right: steps had been cut into it. We climbed until we found a relatively flat spot to camp. Fortunately, it wasn’t far. Each step was almost knee-high, for me — sized for the ice men, no doubt.

I sat down on a rock and unpacked the stove.

Williams set up the shelter. It was a mountaineering tent, and it weighed a ton. Well, not really. But I was glad I didn’t have to carry it.

I cut chunks of meat into the pot, stopping every ten seconds to tuck my hands inside my suit for a warm-up. I couldn’t handle the knife in my mittens, but the liners I wore underneath were way too thin for this kind of cold.

When the food was ready, we ate in silence — his, as usual, a matter of choice; mine imposed. I tried not to let it bother me too much. The ice mothers would have healers. If, after a time, it seemed like I wasn’t going to recover any more of the dragon’s message, they could fix me. Probably.

That night, sleep was elusive.

I nestled deeper into my bag and scooted back against Williams. He seemed to take up a lot more than half of a three-person tent. Our first night in Fur, it had annoyed me. Then I figured out he was a good source of warmth.

My thoughts went to my family. What was my brother doing right now? It wouldn’t be all that late, there. He might still be up. Maybe he and Tiffany were watching TV together. She’d told me he was letting her stay up ’til 9:00, these days. What would they be watching? Reruns of some bad sitcom, probably. I tried to make the image concrete in my mind, but it wouldn’t quite gel.

I sighed.

I was confident in my decision to go to the library. That didn’t mean it wasn’t hard — hard to know that I was choosing to stay here, alone, so far away from people who loved and needed me.

I hope it’s worth it, in the end.

I hope I make it home.

I pulled my left hand out of my sleeping bag. The slender blue band of Eye of the Heavens stuff gleamed around my wrist. For the thousandth time, I ran a finger along it. It felt weird — neither hard nor soft, neither shifting nor still.

“Do you want me to take it back to Cordus?” Williams said.

I startled badly and rolled away from him. I’d thought he was asleep.

He propped himself up on an elbow and turned on the camp lantern.

I studied his face. It was still and calm.

My heart rate began to slow a bit.

I shook my head.

He didn’t argue, but he didn’t look happy, either.

It stood to reason, I realized. When Cordus heard what had happened, he’d be livid at being cut out of the action. Of course Williams would want to take the piece back to his boss.

Why hadn’t I thought of that?

I pulled my water skin out of my sleeping bag, uncapped it, and dipped my finger inside.

“My job to help Eye of the Heavens,” I wrote on the floor of the tent. “Dragon said.”

The watery letters iced instantly. I brushed away the frost.

He looked perplexed. “Why?”

I shrugged. Beat the hell out of me.

“Do you know what you’re supposed to do?”

I shook my head.

He thought about it. “So you’re going to look in the library?”

I nodded.

His mouth quirked. Maybe he saw the same irony I had.

He turned off the light and lay back down.

I lay there tensely until his breathing evened out into sleep.

Is that really it? He’s not going to take it from me?

Maybe he’d try when I was sleeping, or during the next day’s hike.

Or maybe he was afraid to try. He’d seen the scorched area on the floor of the wrong dragon’s den. He had to have guessed where that came from.

Or maybe Cordus’s orders were so far from covering something like this that Williams was free to make his own choice. He probably hated Cordus enough to take advantage of a chance to shaft him.