Chill

Chapter 17

The household of the Madrullian mansion was tiny compared with the size of the building. Originally designed to hold both local officials and a squadron of guards there was enough space to house up to a hundred inmates.

The lowest of the four levels were treated as store rooms so that living quarters began on the next floor. The sloping nature of the ground upon which the great stone edifice was built added its own complexity to the interior so that many of the suites of rooms were on staggered levels.

Tam and Maena had managed to sneak the great trunk of equipment past both Falma, busy in her beloved kitchen space, and the professor in his study, by means of back way ramps and little used corridors that led in dim cold pathways next the mountainside to the third level of the building and beyond.

Here were the more private quarters of the family, personal spaces such as bedrooms and bathrooms and those intimate little corners where privacy was paramount. Yet even here there was emptiness, especially on the higher stepped floors that led naturally to the cramped roof space where valuable stores were concealed among foodstuffs and unwanted property. An obscure storeroom with a dull unpolished floor was an ideal spot to thoroughly examine and experiment with the contents of the trunk.

Sealed off from the most used part of the house by a winding corridor and at least one suite of storage rooms for clothes and bedding, the chosen space became a chaotic mess of blinking and beeping gadgets as Tam went through with Maena the various devices the hermit had explained to him earlier that day. She had already donned the tight fitting silvery survival suit and her lithe form shimmered in the half light provided by overhead glowspots as she danced around the room wielding a lethal flash whip.

Tam looked impressed and alarmed in equal measure.

"Listen, I've got work this evening," he said, reminding the girl his father expected him at the inn as usual. "We'll get together again tomorrow and practice some more on how these things work, okay?"

"Sure," Maena said breathlessly, pausing in her exotic dance. She had tied some ribbons to her limbs and looked every bit like some offworld performer usually only seen on flicker screens not up close in living breathing reality. Tam gulped at the sight of her thin, almost boyish body, gleaming beneath the lights. He nodded briefly at her wide excited smile and departed in haste, worried the girl was getting too excited again and might black out. What damage could she do when wielding a flash whip during one of her fits? He needed to coach her carefully, keep the excitement levels to a minimum somehow, and hope the headaches did not worsen up among the glacial valleys of the High Peaks. Or better yet, give her the slip and leave her behind.

Late that night Tam ran through his various options regarding the hunt for the Ice Maiden. He knew it would need to be done in daylight so an early morning start was necessary. Fallow and others regularly went on patrols for elk and to do their own searches for the mysterious being although only half-heartedly for not all believed in the strange creatures glimpsed by the northerner and none but he could penetrate so far as Turnoe Hollow where he insisted he had seen the Ice Maiden and her guardian beasts.

Tam had kept his ears open for any sightings or clues as to her whereabouts but no tracks were found. Only the eviscerated carcass of a bull elk now and again suggested there were other predators on the mountainside.

As the patrols were widely advertised for safety's sake Tam was able to plan around them and avoid their activities. He had already begun thinking of the mission as a solo effort and plotted paths among clefts choked with snow and rock faces slippery with ice. The equipment the hermit had provided included climbing equipment and Tam knew he had several ledges to traverse beyond the Hollow which even in fine weather were tricky enough. The location of the hotspot was mapped precisely although the professor's notes suggested it sometimes moved as if someone deliberately relocated it on occasion for whatever mysterious reason.

Tam resolved to keep practising using the equipment with Maena for several days until he felt comfortable and then he would sneak in overnight, don the suit and hide the other so Maena could not follow him. There was no way she should go so far up among the High Peaks when clearly as she herself had said greater altitude made her ill. Thus he felt less compunction in abandoning her for it was in her own best interests to stay behind. He would search the slopes, find the Ice Maiden and talk to her as the hermit suggested, or determine the reason for the hotspot. Perhaps he might even be able to bring it back, or end the chill and be a hero, saving Upper Maeven and Troy besides. End the curse, as Paterion would have it.

These pleasant thoughts helped Tam drift off to sleep that night and inevitably he dreamt of his journey through the glowing snow to where the Ice Maiden awaited him in all her seductive charms. Equally inevitably when he had located her and was about to rush into her arms she turned her chestnut hair framed face to him and smiled that wide Madrullian grin. Thus he awoke in a panic amid the gloom of early morning.

The day was finally set for the mission and the youngsters parted company that final night with very different thoughts.

Maena went to bed and hugged her pillow tightly, trembling in anticipation of the most exciting adventure she was ever likely to have, an adventure with the dreamy boy from the inn. As she was about to extinguish her light the whisper cube hissed at her. Overburdened thoughts had activated its mischievous brain.

"Psst!" it said with a greater than usual insistence. "Want to know a secret?"

"Sure Kyoobee," Maena sighed and rolled over in her bed to listen.

"What you want is above you, not below, not below at all," the tart voice said cryptically.

"What I want is Tam's strong arms wrapped around me, holding me tight," Maena responded without hesitation. And yes, he was above her, at the inn up the slope, and tomorrow they would be together, above everyone on the impossible slopes of the High Peaks. Two young pioneers venturing where no one had dared go before to face great danger. Together.

"Tomorrow," the cube continued, picking up the girl's thoughts in a fragmented way, "tomorrow you must look above you to fulfil your dream, make your dream come true."

"Oh I will Kyoobee, I will," Maena breathed. "G'night," and she switched the light off and curled up into a pleasant warm ball of tired contentment. The cube muttered, as if responding, and fell silent.

Maena's pleasant dreams of saving Tam from the evil Ice Maiden and receiving grateful kisses in the best Rosy Love happy ever after traditional ending were broken into by angry bleeping. The bracelet she normally wore and which now sat next to the whisper cube on a shelf, was winking an angry red. It was still dark and Maena puzzled over the warning signal.

"That little rat!" she said once her head had cleared enough for her to understand the readings. The red spark of Tam's proximity indicator showed him some way off, farther than the inn, farther north as if he was up in Arcadia Valley already.

Maena vaulted out of bed and raced to the secret training room. She threw the concealing blankets off the trunk and opened it in haste. Various gadgets and accessories lay nestled in their padded cushions at the bottom of the crate but the suits were gone. Both suits. Maena sat on the floor heavily, crushed by this betrayal. Tam had taken his with all its equipment and hidden hers so she could not follow him. He was out there now all alone ready to face the witch and her demons or whatever trap Paterion or the Lumos agents had laid for him and anyone else foolish enough to enter the frigid zone above the valleys.

Above.

Where she sat, Maena looked up at the dark ceiling of the large room. Above were storage bays in the roof space. The food was kept there, the heirlooms and credit safe for exchange and bartering on this backward world where ether coins were not viable. There were even old file boxes from the authority that first inhabited the fortress like place.

What had the whisper cube said? Look above to fulfil her dream.

"The rat!" Maena repeated and jumped to her feet. With cautious step so as not to awaken anyone else in the house, Falma being a notoriously light sleeper, Maena climbed the steep stairs into the cold roof space dressed only in her underwear. She did not feel the cold at all as barefooted she scampered intently from one bay to another looking for telltale signs of disturbed dust layers. To her puzzlement the dust was scattered and disturbed all around the floor from bay to bay, as if Tam or a multitude of Tams had been looking for something, searching for more than just a hiding place for the suit. In her wanderings she came across disturbed boxes that contained files, paper transcripts brittle with age. With deft touch she slid a tinted series of sheets from among the piles and read the title.

"Agency report, A9 zone, Gate anchors." There then followed a list of twenty five worlds, numbered not named for Myscenna. Two of the worlds were ticked, number nine and number thirteen. Maena counted off the planets in the Myscenna System with her fingers. The ninth planet from the sun was later named Troy, and the thirteenth Cimmeron. She knew enough about Gates to recognise an anchor meant a secondary location, a target destination for a Primary Gate being calibrated for through journeys. She checked the dates on the sheet and it showed the report was drawn up before Troy was ever visited. An attempt to read the document was thwarted as the paper was too brittle, sheets were stuck together and a lot of the text blurred by damp. All it suggested to her was that Troy was always meant to be colonised even before the Cimmeron disaster. The Crystal Lumos were planning ahead, as if anticipating a problem. Why did her grandfather have such sensitive documents though? Was he studying the activities of the Lumos, proving their concealed culpability over the death of her mother, or had he been among those who had drawn up the plans? There was no indicated authorship of the transcript.

Maena was tempted to look deeper into the dusty files but realised time was short. She had to find the suit and rescue Tam from himself, again. Briefly she wondered if the enigmatic cube was giving her a clue to her mother's fate as she resumed her search. For the files too had been above her. Thankfully she did not have to rely on dusty tracks to find the thing she sought.

A silvery gleam and a strange humming sound just on the threshold of hearing drew the girl to the concealing location. With relief and joy she pulled the flowing garment from amidst a pile of dark blankets, letting a cloud of dust billow out around her. In a moment she was dressed in its tight warm fabric and making her way eagerly down the steps to assemble the rest of the costume. The final piece of equipment she donned was the radio goggles, a means to see in the darkest of nights or the heaviest of blizzards. It worked by short-wave radar and could pierce hollow drifts and traps and find hidden caves. She stood in front of the mirror and admired her tall, slender frame encased in protective gear. She looked too fragile to be climbing mountains in subzero temperatures and for some reason chose to put on her outer coat and hood as well. The normality of it made her feel more confident of what she was about to do. One glance at her charmlet, a comforting shift of her rucksack and she was gone.

Tam knew he did not have much time before his trick would be discovered and silently hoped as he waded through thick snow that the girl would give up any attempt to follow him. It would be madness, surely, without a survival suit.

He quickly got used to the radio goggles as a means of finding solid ice amid the deceptive landscape and made good progress with surer footing. The air he breathed was heated and purified, the oxygen content increased to compensate for the higher altitude, and he scaled slippery cliffs with hooked and barbed climbing tools.

At the upper edge of Turnoe Hollow Tam halted, partly to rest, but chiefly to take stock of what he was about to do. No one had gone beyond this point since the great chill had hit, not even Parthan Fallow. He looked back over his shoulder and saw the sweeping white terraces of Lammer Field and lower valleys, gradually disappearing in a hazy mist of ice crystals. Shapeless masses that were once trees and sheep folds surrounded where he stood. Here and there weird black shapes jutted up from the landscape, rocks cracked and split by the terrible cold.

Tam replaced his goggles and surveyed the slopes ahead. Dark rolling shadows of cloud burdened with unshed snow flowed silently above his head, turning in on themselves as they hit warmer air and then spilling heavy wet flakes down on the settlements below. Up this high the snowfall was less and an eerie blueness seemed to fill the air all around him. The silence was intense, all the more so when occasional thunder rolled down from the upper slopes of glistening granite.

It was a landscape which at the best of times was unfamiliar to Tam Sorrell for this was not grazing land. Up this high, nameless hollows carved by ancient glaciers that left gravel filled valley floors did not support much vegetation. Stunted elderwood and geo-birch, now killed by the frost, were the only things to see. He pondered the possibility of encountering an arctic elk, wishing he had a flash rifle or some similar device that would work in this extreme cold, and then remembered the glowing whip coiled at his hip. Fallow had said elk tended to cluster more in bad weather for mutual warmth and safety so if there were any lurking in side valleys they would by their sheer number be easy to spot. Yet up here, what was there for them to eat? Such a landscape was fit only for frost demons and the Ice Maiden.

Remembrance of why he was facing this terrible cold in the first place made Tam forge ahead and he mounted the first of several terraces that hid the next valley up, a valley where he knew a narrow lake once nestled amid barren rugged shores, now surely an iron hard sheet of solid ice. His goggles would enable him to spot it easily.

The climb was punishing and Tam stood upon a ridge that swept down into a misty valley which glowed with a winding glacier. His eyes traced the massive snake of ice up to one of the High Peaks, curling round its massive flanks and disappearing in a layer of heavy dark cloud. Purple light flickered, sending strange moving shadows across the landscape and Tam gasped, for momentarily it seemed as if something scurried ahead of him and off into the distance. The flickering abruptly ceased and a darkness fell again on the valley. The lake showed itself as a dark crooked finger spread out to one side, overshadowed by cliffs jagged with icicles and wind sculpted snow.

Whatever shadowy thing he had glimpsed was to his left and the frozen lake was an easier route. He needed to cross this hollow and reach a network of glacial valleys on the other side of the mountain peak for this was where the satellite guide had placed the mysterious hotspot.

In an instant Tam was balanced on his skimmer board and gliding rapidly through a soft wall of ice crystals that fogged his goggles and clung to the fabric of his outer coat. He dove towards the lake and under the jagged teeth of ice that overhung the flat surface spread before him. More flickering lightning distracted him and again seeming living shadows raced this way and that ahead and behind him. A trick of the light. His own shadow was being cast on the frosty air by the lightning, animated by the moving sources of light in multiple directions.

One figure though did not behave like the other fleeting wraiths. It stood there on the edge of the lake before him, a white figure that defied the winds and the snow and persisted even when the purple lightning died down. Tam swerved in shock, skidded into a wall of icicles that shattered on impact, sending a shower of glass like fragments down onto him as he halted against more solid rock.

In panic he looked to where the figure had stood but there was no one. Then laughter floated on the high winds, shrill and distant, before a missile exploded above his head. Tam recognised the mode of attack.

"Maena," he muttered under his breath. She had found the costume, and in double quick time had found him, using her skimmer boots and the affinity charmlet Paterion had warned him of.

"Need a hand?" her sarcastic voice cut through the misty blueness around him. Tam ignored the question and scrambled to his feet. He pulled the tether of his skimmer and retrieved it from the ice shards around him. They tinkled like broken glass and he could see the fabric of his coat was partly shredded by the sharp edges.

"You could have killed me," Tam accused the shadowy figure hovering on the other side of the lake. For answer Maena skimmed effortlessly across the smooth glassy surface of the lake, barely touching it, an ice dancer amid frosty skies. She halted before him, a look of anger on her face.

"Stupid to try this on your own," she said. "Thought I'm a girl and can't take it?" Maena's anger made her fall into abrupt offworld speech. "Whatever's up here has made an effort to scare everyone off. Frost demons, ice maidens. Whatever the Crystal Lumos can come up with to keep their secrets. Stealth we need, not just going full on straight to where they know we're headed." Her goggles gleamed with tinted lenses as she gesticulated before the silent boy, lecturing him unexpectedly.

"Crystal Lumos?"

"Of course. This is all their doing. I think grandfather knows about it, not just why. One of their missions has gone wrong again and they're trying to cover up."

Tam pondered this a moment. Paterion's words contradicted Maena's theories. She was of course obsessed with the Lumos and their underhand activities since they were directly responsible for the death of her mother. Yet the hermit seemed to have his own theories. The Ice Maiden? Was she a product of the Lumos, an unforeseen outcome, or an avenging angel cursing all who had dealings with the agency?

"Well," he said eventually. "Sorry for leaving you behind. As you're here now we may as well continue. We're only here to observe, find out what the chill is about, and then return." With her being present his glorious ambition had to be curtailed.

"Exactly," Maena huffed, mollified not at all by Tam's apology.

They agreed as per Maena's suggestion, to skirt the upper lake and approach a cave complex that was known to exist near where the hotspot was located, choosing a circuitous route which occasionally left them exposed to severe winds. Cloud banks obscured their vision at times but as they climbed higher strange glowing lights could be seen piercing the gloom.

A break in the clouds left them in no doubt about the terrors of the place for there were shadows that behaved independently of the flickering lightning moving ahead of them, blotting out the colourful glows up above their heads.

"Frost demons," Maena gasped, her goggles seeming to malfunction as she tried to get her bearings. She felt Tam's hand in hers. They watched the strange shadows above them a moment, hand in hand, silently waiting an opportunity to bypass the strange and ominous visions. A wince of pain made Maena release her grip.

"Are you okay?" Tam inevitably asked.

"I'm fine. Brain freeze," she smiled beneath her mask and goggles.

Maena was suffering increasing headaches as she had been climbing higher with Tam but remained silent about them, not wanting to alarm him. They had gone too far already to abandon the mission because of the pain she felt. Thus she grabbed the boy's hand again and they determined to press on, watching the distant shadows, but focusing on reaching a plateau that would let them skirt the eerie figures.

A howl close at hand just behind them and which was something other than the wind broke their resolve however and they tumbled over a ridge into a narrow crevasse, starting a small avalanche as they fell, still holding hands.

Once they stopped falling they realised they had somehow bypassed the terrifying obstacle of the demons, or so it seemed. They were in a clearing that appeared to have been carved out of solid ice. Sculptures of strange beauty reached out to them and twined amongst themselves in intricate weavings. Giant flower like shapes with bending petals and swirls of ice leaves grew out of the snow.

"What is this place?" Tam said, gazing around him.

"Like a shrine or something," Maena observed, noticing what appeared to be an altar of sorts at the end of a tunnel of glistening shapes. Something metallic sat amidst the frozen ice, dark and heavy, at odds with the ethereal lightness all around them. She went to it.

"A casket?" she said, and noticed it seemed to sit on a bed of giant glassy roses.

"Is that the power source?" Tam asked. Maena shook her head.

"It's freezing. No way of telling where we are. The fields here are so distorted by what's going on we're blind." In a sudden gesture she took up the casket. It was heavy but small enough to cradle. The howling suddenly increased, as if in response to her theft.

"We got to go!" Tam shouted.

"Which way," Maena called back over the increasing echoey cries that seemed to surround them.

Without caring for the beauty and delicacy of the ice sculptures Tam bulldozed his way through a glittering wall, guessing no one would expect them to go that way as it damaged the shrine. Maena followed blindly.

The direction led straight off a ledge and they tumbled once more down steep slopes with huge chunks of compacted snow as their companions. Glad to hear the screaming demons fading in the distance, they were in equal measure alarmed at their own possible fate.

Finally they halted at the base of a glacier. They had been squeezed between two walls of black granite, riding a narrow chute which deposited them back in the valley of the frozen lake, only this time on the other side where a terrace of rock overlooked the lower slopes.

They looked at the undulating terrain below them.

"Shall we?" Tam asked and Maena nodded briefly. Gloved hands intertwined and with a whoop of exhilaration they threw themselves over the edge, skimming at speed down the swaying and swooping valley sides. Clouds of snow spilled in their wake as they picked up speed and they crouched to better balance themselves against the pitching motion of their rapid journey.

A sweeping turn made smooth by wind scoured ice sent them shooting out across a familiar valley and they suddenly found themselves gliding along Lake Mirron's snow frosted surface and beyond. A rising wall of rock slowed their progress and they halted near the top before angling back down so that they could brake amid softer snow drifts near the Plighting Oak, now crushed into a shapeless mound by the weight of weeks of snowfall and relentless gales. Hidden roots sent them tumbling and Maena lost grip of the casket.

In an instant she was up and searching for it. The impact had loosened the lid and the box sprung open in her hands.

"Oh my gosh!" she cried as she looked at its glowing contents. "Oh-my-gosh."

"What is it?" Tam came up to her. "Priceless treasure?"

"More valuable than that," Maena snorted. "The souls of lost love, memories of past passion," she said exultantly.

"What?" Tam replied, looking at a cluster of pink soft shaped stones cushioned within the casket.

"Petals," Maena responded in scorn. "Can't you see? They're Petals!" and with a deft touch she held one of the curved things up in her gloved hand that seemed to glow with a warm pinkish light amid the frosty air.

To be continued...