Chill

Chapter 20

"Does my mother love me?"

Maena stared at the glowing whisper cube before her as she sat cross-legged on the bed. She was alone in her room, the door locked from the outside and Falma tucked away sadly with her own grief in the suite next door.

The cube muttered to itself as if considering the question. Then it fell silent and Maena looked away in frustration. She was about to put the cube back on its shelf when its familiar warning sounded in the darkness.

"Psst," the cube said, as if needing to attract her attention. She froze and waited, biting a fingernail nervously. "This is no secret, this is known," it insisted in a sing-song voice, teasing. There was no capacity within the cube's workings for human sympathy, only a mischievous toying with the thoughts and emotions of those who consulted it. "Your mother wants to love you, if she could, if she was able."

"Thank you," Maena quietly replied, her lips trembling, eyes bright with tears. It was all she wanted to know.

She slept fitfully that night in a house full of armed guards who did not know what to do with her. She did not dream, only relived past memories and wove images of what might have been if the events of eighty years ago had not happened the way they did.

"I should have been born sooner," she muttered into her tear damp pillow.

"And then we would never have met."

Maena sat up quickly as a shadowy form moved stealthily around the room before sitting on the edge of her bed. No ghost this, but a solid living being.

"Tam?"

It took a lot of courage to sneak into the Madrullian mansion when so full of Lumos agents and their detection gadgets. Maena's affinity charmlet had been confiscated as soon as she had returned home but as it was programmed to her own bio-signature it could not be used by anyone else. Still the agents would have other means at their disposal to detect life signs that were unaccountable. If it were not for the crazy mineral matrix that laced the crust of Troy and seeped through from the very core of the colonial meta-world.

"When I heard," the dark silhouette continued, "I thought you might need more friendly company right now. What are they saying about how your grandfather died?"

In reply Maena flicked on a light. She could see Tam was fully geared up for survival against the worst the chill could throw at him. From somewhere he had obtained a flash rifle and looked every inch of him an adventurer. No longer a teenage schoolboy studying for summer exams.

"My father," Maena gulped.

"He's here?" Tam responded, raising his voice a notch, not realising what she meant by the correction. "He came when he heard?"

"My father is dead."

"He does not love you, not at--"

"Shut up Kyoobee!" Maena commanded, her eyes fixed on Tam as she spoke. Her words, her manner, gave a clue to the truth.

"The professor was your father all along?" he said, astonished. "Maena, I'm so sorry." Amid the sadness he wanted to ask why. Why the subterfuge, the pretending? Now it was too late. Maena guessed his thoughts from the way the boy hunched and twisted his shoulders and she endeavoured to unravel the mystery from her perspective.

"I think he was trying to protect me," she said tearfully. "Not just from the Crystal Lumos, as a child of the victim of their abandoned mission, but from others too. From Paterion, perhaps, from the Pioneers. A generation gap would deflect from too close a scrutiny and the age difference between us helped the ruse I suppose." She shrugged, not feeling the explanation adequate.

"The name, Madrullian. It was famous once. Wouldn't that set Lumos or Pioneer alarm bells ringing? A Madrullian living on Troy," Tam said quickly, wrapped up in the puzzle he also wished to solve. His interest in this girl and her story had intensified over the days and weeks of the chill. There was a growing ache inside him he found difficult to understand. All they had gone through together seemed to deepen the bond between them and shaped all his thoughts and feelings toward this vulnerable and incredibly beautiful girl into something more than just friendship.

"He could not hide from them. They owned him yet he controlled them too in some ways for of course he knew the full story. I was just a silly little girl to them. Did I ever tell you I was once interviewed for a Pioneer place? Not here on Troy. I was only twelve. They asked me all sorts of questions, some very personal, even about love. Of course I told them I loved my parents, be they alive or dead, and my grandfather, and Jake Smouldron."

"Jake Smouldron?"

"The hero of at least a dozen Rosy Love Romances. He would never blow himself up to spite his heart. He was a rescuer, a handsome, brave adventurer who would stop at nothing to secure his lady love. At twelve I could think of nothing more beautiful than his bronze hair and dark eyes." She glanced down, blushing. "The Pioneers thought this just a little too mushy for their pure and sanctifying needs so they dashed a line through my application."

"You applied, to be a Pioneer!"

Maena nodded.

"Secretly," she confessed. "When I heard my mother sacrificed her life for the Pioneers, could I do any less? Only, Tam, she didn't sacrifice herself. She's still alive and she's out there, now, calling for me with all her heart."

She reached out to him then and he did not hesitate to respond, to take her in his arms. They embraced silently a moment and he could feel her slender frame trembling with pent up emotion. They relaxed their hold to gaze at each other for what seemed an eternity. And then they kissed.

It was as if all the barriers of uncertainty had been broken down. Tam confessed he did not understand it all but knew this was it, the moment he had been waiting for, perhaps for his whole life. Without a thought for the world around them, the future and past merging into one ecstatic moment, they made love with a joy and understanding of each others' souls that few have ever experienced before or since. It was a perfect microcosmic moment in the endless arrow of time.

They lay there silently, embraced together, unwilling to let the moment go, and Maena's tears flowed in the darkness, mixing happiness with the sadness of reality. Tam had not at first fully understood the import of her words. Then as other feelings faded reflection cracked open the significance as associated ideas fell into place.

He rolled onto his side and looked at her.

"Your mother went through a Ghost Gate," he said. "Paterion described the Ice Maiden as a ghost, a long lost soul. Could that really be her?" A rush of excitement made them clutch hands together.

"Yes!" Maena said, "yes!" She so wanted to believe. Having suddenly lost one parent she desperately wanted to find the other. The Ice Maiden had to be her mother.

"You have pictures of her," Tam said, thinking through the details, trying to link up every fact like a detective.

"I know she had light hair and blue eyes, not silver like my father's," Maena said.

"And an ability to withstand extreme cold?"

"Pioneer training," she offered.

Tam shook his head. No amount of training could create a creature capable of withstanding cold like that. It was as if the Ice Maiden needed the cold to survive rather than the other way around.

"You know," he said quietly, determinedly, "we have got to go see her again." Maena nodded eagerly.

"I don't think I'll have any more headaches," she said with tearful glee and with that they both lay back to wait for dawn. It was lucky for them the first person to enter Maena's bedroom was the housekeeper. When she found them together, soundly sleeping, at peace with each other, she dared not waken them, not yet, and just stood there weeping silent tears. There was something so beautiful about young love. Knowing that at any moment as Myscenna's orange light was beginning to glow in the sky the Lumos agents assigned to guard the girl might take it upon themselves to look in upon her, Falma went back to her room and deliberately banged her door shut.

Tam was alert in an instant, reaching for his rifle. A quick survey to confirm the room was empty still and he nuzzled Maena awake. She yawned, stretched, realised she was naked and covered herself shyly. They smiled knowingly at each other, a shared intimate secret forever theirs, and then they quickly dressed. They had to steal some food and climb the frozen heights of the Peaks.

This time it was more than just fact finding, or mystery solving. It was a rescue mission. The Crystal Lumos had been responsible for the Ice Maiden perhaps and with the professor's revelations to them through the Petals, they became fully engaged in erasing the blot on their reputation as a safe and reliable revenue generating organisation. They had made one terrible mistake. They could not afford another. Tam and Maena became convinced the Lumos wanted to destroy the Ice Maiden for she represented a tangible witness to some wrong doing of the past that resulted in the tragedy of the Madrullian mission. They had to get to her first, persuade her to depart through whatever mysterious agency that had brought her to Troy, the Ghost Gate that brought her here.

Carefully making their way up the slope past the various buildings they found the Sorrell Wayfarer Inn was empty and shut. It was as Lick Sorrell had warned. The population of Upper Maeven had been incarcerated, except for those brave few who fled to the caves or hills in a bid to stay free. None of them had the survival suits donned by Maena and Tam as they traversed snowy wastes in the darkness of early morning. None except the Crystal Lumos agents of course.

Tam gripped his purloined rifle tighter as he surveyed the route up ahead. They avoided tracks in the snow and had kept to rocky outcrops to minimise their own telltale signs, just as Fallow had taught the innkeeper's son to do whenever they had chanced to talk in the drinking hall. The narrow chute the youngsters had ascended and descended several times, a route only they knew of, was choked with soft snow, but Maena's skimmer boots made them light as feathers as, defying gravity, they clambered over impossible rock faces with hooked gloves and spiked soles.

The valley of the nameless lake was now a scene of c*****e. The Crystal Lumos had been there before them in all their power and numbers and what had been shadows, fleeting and threatening beneath the flickers of purple lightning, now revealed themselves in their violent demise as man-shaped carcasses. Frost demons, dead and frozen in the snow.

Tam approached one in spite of Maena's terrified apprehensions, and gazed upon the lifeless beast. It was exactly as Fallow had described. A great, ape-like creature with heavy jaws and sharp teeth, dressed only in a white, glistening fur. Its eyes were open, reflecting the lightning above. They were blue eyes, Tam noted, and there seemed an intelligence in them that controverted the supposed animal ferocity of the creature's form. A man-beast, a hybrid that acted as a guardian to the Ice Maiden. This thought made him stand abruptly.

"We've got to find her before the Lumos do. They're going to kill her!" he cried.

"I know where she is," Maena said. That strange rapport she had with the Ice Maiden, with her mother, was in force again. All the headaches and the blackouts were due to this. She had tried to fight it, not understanding, but now she had embraced it the pain was lifted. Instead there seemed a knowing assurance of the mysterious creature's presence, a nudging of her consciousness whenever she was near.

Maena led Tam to a natural stairway in the cliff face that previously they had tumbled over in their escape. They climbed upwards slowly, gasping in the thin cold air until they reached a level which overlooked the ice shrine where a casket of Petals once stood, love letters from a man now dead, to his wife, a ghostly maiden trapped on a frozen mountainside.

The damage wrought by Tam's vandalism had been removed without a trace and the pale hand that had lovingly fixed the beautiful decorations was at that very moment caressing icy flowers in deep thought as if unaware of the revolutions going on around her, the impending doom awaiting her. Tam could also see that doom as dark figures gathered at the foot of a sheer cliff directly below the level platform of the shrine.

Maena was transfixed.

"She is so beautiful," she whispered, her silver eyes glowing in the light of reflected glory. Convinced she was gazing upon the living image of her mother she could no longer harbour any angry thoughts regarding the Ice Maiden.

"Lumos," Tam gasped, tugging on the girl's sleeve to break her reverie. He indicated the climbing figures below, who were clearly endeavouring to make their way up the steep incline towards the Ice Maiden, the latter seemingly oblivious of her danger.

"We have to stop them, we have to warn her!" Maena declared.

"To warn her is to forewarn them," Tam replied grimly, thinking with furious intent. Wordlessly he raised his flash rifle but nothing happened. It was too cold. Maena's whip also sputtered ineffectually. She pondered the strands a moment.

"Make snowballs," she suddenly said.

"Too far even for you," Tam objected.

"Not with this," and she held up the dead whip, now merely a piece of synthetic rope. "If I can lash missiles against the snow shelf above the climbers I should be able to create an avalanche that should sweep them all away," she declared, as if the scattering of human lives was but a puzzle to solve in the quiet of a school room.

"Do it," Tam simply said and set about compacting tight balls of snow which the girl began experimentally looping behind her away from the intended target by way of practice. When she felt comfortable with the technique she stood up. She glanced briefly at the delicate young woman sat so peacefully among swirls of translucent ice like a princess on a throne, and then she wielded the whip with determined zeal.

The crack was audible across the high valleys and the first missile missed its mark. The dark sinister figures below looked up at where Maena stood, a white figure lined with silver, preparing a second shot. The Ice Maiden stood also and walked slowly forwards as a narrow path joined the shrine to the higher ridge.

Maena blinked back tears, knowing the eyes of her mother were upon her as she aimed the whip again. She did not fear the flash rifles levelled at her by the Lumos agents for they too could not get their weapons to work in the extreme cold. It was all that kept her alive.

The second missile hit its intended target, dislodging a six foot wedge of snow from an upper shelf. The mass thumped down on another ledge that crumbled in sympathy, scattering fragments large enough to multiply the severity of the avalanche. Maena watched the dark figures as they were dislodged en masse from their precarious holds and did not shut her ears from their screams as they disappeared into misty shadows below. She continued to gaze down upon her deadly handiwork when her brooding thoughts were interrupted.

"Who are you?"

The voice was soft, full of rich vibrant tones that touched her very soul and Maena turned to the figure standing but a few yards from her. The Ice Maiden paused in her approach, not wanting to come any closer, knowing her very presence could kill.

"Mother?" Maena said, her eyes glistening but the tears would not flow, not now, not when she was this close to the parent she thought she would never see.

Large eyes the colour of deep cave ice read the emotions of the teenage girl before her and seemed to understand.

"Is this real?" came the surprising question. "I have no daughter. I have shaped you from my imaginings, how the co-joining with Motar would look if we were to have a daughter." Her words were clipped and strangely accented as she spoke and she smiled at this thought. "Daughter of mine, flesh of my flesh, I love you."

"You don't know where you are?" Tam Sorrell stepped forward, then retreated a little for a billow of terrible cold reached him, a coldness of the deepest of deep space which no survival suit could withstand. The glittering ice eyes turned to him.

"You are not my son?"

"No ma'am. My name is Tam Sorrell, of the Wayfarer Inn, Upper Maeven, Troy. You are in the High Peaks of Maeven on Troy, a world of the Myscenna System."

The woman gasped and placed a delicate hand over her mouth a moment.

"I spoke to Afdal, or some likeness of him. I asked after Motar for I so wanted to see him, but every time it was Afdal, strangely distorted, who appeared to me."

"He lied ma'am, or he thought you were as much a ghost to him as you thought he was to you."

"He loved me once," and the Ice Maiden smiled at past memories of youthful flirtations. "But it was always Motar I loved. He was the one."

"He's dead," Maena choked out and the woman halted in her gentle pacings which she had begun as she pondered the past and the information provided by Tam, though not really registering what it actually meant, that she was on Troy.

"Dead? How long ago did he pass away child?" This information did not strike her as painful, only inevitable. There was sadness in her enquiry nonetheless.

"Yesterday. He was trying to get to you, with the last Petal he ever sent you, to return it perhaps."

The Ice Maiden's cool demeanour crumbled at this revelation.

"It was you who stole Motar's Petals!" she accused.

"Yes."

"And gave them to him..." Her manner softened again. "He was here, truly. And now he is gone." A light faded in her ice blue eyes and she remained still.

"You've been missing for eighty years, ma'am," Tam explained. "Now you're here we want to help you. The Crystal Lumos don't like you being here for some reason. Ma'am, I think they would kill you. You must go back, escape this frozen place."

"My name is Phileece Madrullian, born Daristyl," the woman addressed the curious boy before her. "The Crystal Lumos Agency hired me for a mission to Cimmeron, me and my poor fellow beasts who were my harmless helpmates, though ferocious enough when endangered. I hear them not and fear for them."

"Dead ma'am. Slaughtered by the Lumos. They would do the same to you."

"They could not. They have no weapons to harm me," the Ice Maiden responded in defiant fashion.

"What happened to you?" Maena said, her voice choked with emotion still as she gazed upon this extraordinary ethereal being dressed in a shimmering frock best worn on a blazing summer day yet surrounded by snowflakes that tumbled off her bare shoulders without melting.

"I believed too much in the ethos of the Pioneer Guild," she replied, waving a pale slender arm, catching a handful of snow that tinkled like shards of glass as she toyed with the pieces before releasing them again to rejoin their fellows in the swirling wind. "That was the deal. Explore to the edges of reality, discover the unseen and unseeable to the very verge of death. I breathed all that in. Motar and Afdal were in my class at the Guild, along with others of course, but they were my closest friends. I admired the one for his passion, but loved the other for his integrity. Yet neither could sway my decision to take the next step in Pioneer glory, to sacrifice my very humanity to reach untrod frontiers in the name of a visionary future."

"You let them change you," Tam said, "turning you into someone capable of withstanding extreme cold, someone who could explore the deadly world of Cimmeron safely." He remembered the death toll from the news reports since the failure of the Madrullian mission. Yet he could not credit the Crystal Lumos with the humanitarian desire of saving lives by creating the strange being stood before him.

"Gene-splicing in the Science Tongue," Phileece Madrullian replied knowingly. "It was illegal, ethically unsound but I let them do it. They said it was reversible, yet I've been waiting what, eighty years? And now it's too late..."

"The Gate you went through," Tam continued the story, dredging up facts from his memory yet astonished he was talking to the actual participant in the event, "it malfunctioned. Became a Ghost Gate they said."

"A Gate to nowhere," the Ice Maiden echoed Maena's words of weeks ago. "I've been trapped for eighty years? Yet it seems only days I've struggled on this mountain. This is real? The Gate has located me here, on Troy. I thought it a fiery place and set up a micro-climate to survive while waiting for rescue. Ghosts were all I ever seemed to see. A great bear of a man, lost and confused. Afdal so old and shrivelled, and now my... daughter?"

"Maena," the girl so addressed said faintly and smiled.

"You do look like your father. Maena was my mother's name. So Motar decided to bring you into being in remembrance of me when I was here all along, stuck on a mountainside, in some Gate time warp." She gazed upon the girl before her with increasing affection.

"If it was you ma'am, Mrs Madrullian I mean, who created the chill then you've only been here a couple of weeks. We should be in spring now but your cold killed off all the lambs," Tam said, trying to be helpful. He decided not to mention it effectively killed off everything.

"I'm so sorry. I didn't know," the woman apologised. Then she looked earnestly at Maena, who trembled at her gaze. "It was you," she said with real feeling. "It was you that brought me here. I know it was so. Gates are hungry things. They need human lives to operate but the Lumos alterations to my metabolism messed with the function of the Gate on Atherbridge Nine. It did not send me to Cimmeron as planned for it did not recognise the anchor sent ahead with my signature for by the time I passed through the Gate I was a different person." She began pacing again as she spoke and pondered the mechanics of the past and present. Every time her circuit of the shrine brought her closer to where Tam stood he could feel waves of cold emanate from her slender form and he gritted his teeth at the discomfort. Maena was so wrapped up in this unreal effigy of her lost mother she did not appear to feel the cold herself. The woman paused in front of Maena to emphasise her point.

"It was you," she repeated, not unkindly, "your signature that brought me here. The Gate searched and searched for eighty years, trying to find a piece of me elsewhere in the Myscenna System, and it found you." Then more softly, "you truly are my daughter." She made to embrace her but thought better of it. A pained expression touched her features a moment, frustration at being unable to show how much she loved this unexpected child. Her brow cleared when she fixed her gaze on the handsome young face of Tam Sorrell.

"Is he your sweetheart?" she asked. "No, don't answer that. I know it is true. I sense it," and she glanced again at Maena whose eyes bashfully fell to the snowy floor of the shrine. It was the first time she had been able to take her eyes off the vision of loveliness before her. "You have my blessing. If I could I would place your hands together, binding you for all eternity. Do not make the mistake I made and let ambition separate you. I have lost Motar forever now," and she shook her head bitterly.

"Ma'am," Tam cut in, wanting to change the subject. "The Crystal Lumos will be closing in. We got rid of them temporarily but there are hundreds of them. I suppose they don't want the truth to be known about what they did to you to pursue their greedy aims. It might destroy them. You've got to go back, into the Gate," he begged, worrying for this mysterious creature.

She shook her silvery white locks dejectedly.

"There is no going back. The Gate ceased to be when it anchored here. I'm trapped, in this ice body, in this wilderness, surrounded as you say by enemies who wish I had never truly existed. I am a ghost indeed, with no right to be in the normal world. That was my sacrifice, allowing myself to be exploited for gain, altered illegally into something other than human. An abomination in the eyes of science. My love is dead. I cannot even embrace a daughter I did not know existed but moments before." She spread her arms wide as if willing to try. Then she hugged herself.

"But if we can get you off this mountain, into some cold lock, perhaps," Maena said desperately, "perhaps someone would be able to find a way to turn you back again?"

A look of hope vaguely floated across the woman's vision a moment. It could work, she seemed to be saying to herself. But did she deserve such consideration, having betrayed and abandoned the man she loved?

"I'll speak to the Lumos," Maena pursued, then remembered the professor's begging words and the sneering half-hearted response of Agent Master Draevenk.

"Oh," the Ice Maiden suddenly said. "I feel hot."

It was as if she was experiencing one of Maena's blackouts and Tam looked around him trying to puzzle out what was wrong. Then he noticed something. The snow had stopped falling.

"What's happening?" he said as clouds above whitened and began thinning out rapidly. The thunder ceased to roll and purple lightning faded away. A drizzle briefly passed over which sent Phileece cowering under the shelter of the ice shrine, but that was dripping too.

"Mother!" Maena cried, alarmed for her apparent distress. Then the woman straightened up, her demeanour changed and she looked hard across the valley to where dark caves became visible as mists lifted.

"The Crystal Lumos have found my climate regulator," she said solemnly, "and have destroyed it." She looked at Tam. "Be kind to her, she is the only daughter I have, with the man I knew and loved for too brief a time. This should be spring you say? I think spring is about to return," and as if on cue a break in the clouds brought the warm orange glow of Myscenna down on the High Peaks for the first time in weeks.

A shaft of warm sunshine slid across the glistening rocks as clouds shifted and broke, a beam of deadly heat to the strange forlorn creature trapped on the mountainside. She watched it approach calmly and then it was upon them all. Maena buried her face in Tam's chest as she felt the glowing light surround them, but he watched on, fascinated and horrified both by what was transpiring before his eyes.

The womanly form of a living breathing human being shrivelled and shrunk rapidly, crumbling into dark shards like old burnt wood, and then dissolved into moist dust that mingled and flowed with the melting snow, draining into withered grass and unlocked soil. The Ice Maiden was no more.

The chill was finally at an end. Spring was returning in all its glory to the High Peaks above the Wilds of Maeven and a young couple drew together amid the tragic beauty of such star spanning, time-encompassing love and the mysterious destiny that had entwined their hearts on an obscure colony world called Troy.

The End