The Ice Maze Read online

  About the Book

  Bily and Zluty, the injured Monster and two diggers journey into a land of ice and darkness. Here they find a secret settlement and learn more about the mysterious Makers plan. But the Monster must make a dreadful choice…

  A magical adventure series for younger readers from the award-winning author of Little Fur.

  CONTENTS

  One: The Flyway

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  Two: The Coldway

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  Three: The Longful Night

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  This book is for my dear friend Nan McNab,

  warm and ever-welcoming wayside refuge

  for this weary wanderer.

  Redwing floated like an ember against the pale grey sky, the great scarlet and black sweep of her wings so beautiful that it seemed to Bily that a hand reached into his chest and squeezed his heart. Yet he wished she had not taken flight. It was a reminder that, all too soon, she would leave them, winging her way West through the high mountain passage the diggers called the flyway.

  Without wings, he, Zluty, the injured Monster and the little diggers accompanying them had no choice but to continue along the feet of the great jagged line of mountains until they reached the end. Only then could they too turn West.

  Seeing Zluty striding along with Flugal, bending his head to listen to the he digger, Bily thought about when they first met the diggers. Zluty had been unable to quieten his mind enough to hear the meaning of their words, let alone to understand and use the gestures that were part of their language. Now they were so accustomed to using digger words and gestures that they often spoke to one another that way.

  Bily admired Zluty’s yellow fur, that shone so boldly bright and warm in a world turned chill and colourless.

  It was strange that the desert they had crossed to reach the mountains had been white, yet the dazzling sunlight and blue sky had contrived to turn shadows pooled in the lee of the dunes, deepest indigo and blue and violet, and at sunset, the white dune tips blushed pink and red and gold. Even the moon-shadows had been shifty greens and blues.

  But the stone-studded black plain that stretched along the mountain range seemed to swallow the light rather than reflect it, and the sky was always cast over with a milky veil that never let them get a glimpse of the blue beyond. At night it hid the moon and stars, so that they had been unable to travel except in daylight. This slowed them badly, because the days had grown shorter since they’d left the digger settlement.

  On the plain where they had lived in their cottage, the days got shorter in Winter, too, but the sky had been blue and the sun shone down, even if it lacked warmth. Here, at the foot of the mountains, day was no more than the time it took the veiled sun to rise a little way above the horizon, move in a short flat arc from East to West, and sink from sight again. Semmel said the days would go on getting shorter until there was no day at all. Only night.

  ‘The Longful Night,’ she said, adding in gesture that the dark was needful because from it would be born the world’s dream.

  Bily had no idea what the world’s dream was. He and Zluty called the smaller blue moon that appeared and trailed after the moon for part of the year, the Moon’s Dream, so perhaps the diggers meant the first rising of the Moon’s Dream after the Winter.

  Bily had dreamed of the Moon’s Dream the night before, but the small moon had been grey. He had been dreaming strange, colourless dreams ever since leaving the digger settlement to travel North. Sometimes he heard the voice of the egg that had spoken inside his head when he and Zluty had first hatched. He could never remember what it had said when he woke, but the colourless dreams unsettled him. He did not like the idea that he might have to endure more of them. Yet what choice did he have? They must go North in order to get around the mountains, and maybe his dreams would be like that until they turned West.

  He would not have minded if he had not been so hungry for colour. The world was all black and white and grey now, save for the brightness of Zluty’s yellow fur, the flash of Redwing’s scarlet feathers, the crimson canopy of the wagon, when it was not covered in cold fluffs or sodden to darkness. He missed the multitude of colours in his garden, the many hues of feather of the birds that had visited the cottage. Sometimes he opened his feather collection just to remember how many colours there were in the world.

  It was a pity his fur and the digger pelts were the same colourless hues as the land and sky. Even the Monster, whose pelt was a lovely deep purple-brown at the paw and tail and ear tips, the rest of it a warm creamy colour, had been turned to shades of grey by the thin, cold light.

  Bily looked down at his fur and thought the light made it look grubby, too. Then he frowned.

  ‘What is it, Bee-lee?’ Semmel asked, making the little twitching gesture towards him with her paw that meant ‘you who are not part of the Makers plan’.

  ‘It is my fur,’ Bily told her. ‘I think it is getting thicker.’

  The digger nodded calmly. ‘That is happening when fur is getting too much coldness,’ she said.

  Bily studied Zluty, whose fur was shorter and coarser than his own, and was sure it had got thicker, too. He wondered if their fur would go on thickening the whole time they travelled into the frozen North. If so, he would end up being a giant fluff ball! The thought would have made him laugh, except it was very odd to think of his pelt growing all by itself without him having anything to say about it, just as if it had a mind of its own.

  He glanced backwards, wondering what would have happened if they had followed the mountains in the other direction, towards the hot South. Would his fur have decided there was no need for itself at all, and fallen out? How very strange he and Zluty would look all bare and pink. Though Flugal had said their fur would singe if they went anywhere near the burning lakes in the South. Even the steaming smoke that came from them was poisonous to breathe.

  Bily’s gaze shifted to the mountains. Sometimes they seemed to him a great forbidding wall that the land had thrown up to bar their way. They could have gone over the mountains using the Monk’s lifting device, but they would have had to go at once and very quickly, for ice blizzards plagued the mountains in Winter, the soft cold fluffs turning into hard, sharp little fragments of ice that flew in the wind like knives. No living creature could be outside and survive a bad ice blizzard.

  The main reason they had not crossed the mountains was that they would have had to leave their wagon behind, for beyond the Monk stronghold of Stonehouse was terrain where it could not be wheeled or dragged. And leaving the wagon would have meant leaving the Monster behind.

  Bily had desperately wanted Redwing to go the long way around with them so they could all stay together, but the diggers warned she would not survive the frozen Northland ahead. He comforted himself that as soon as they got around the end of the mountains, they would be able to travel back along the other side until they reached the place where the Western river flowed out, then follow it to the Vale of Bellflowers, where they would make a new home.

  The thought of a new cottage made Bily happy, but he wondered if Redwing would be waiting in the Vale of Bellflowers when they got there, or if the call to fly West would take her ever farther away. He could not bear to think that he might never see her again. If only the pass through the mountains had not
been blocked, they would be there already. But then Bily would not have met the terrible and sorrowful Cloud Monster, and he and Zluty would never have come to know Flugal and his clever digger clan; nor would they have learned about the Monks and their masters – the mysterious, malevolent Makers who dwelt on the other side of the sky crack.

  Bily looked up again. Redwing had flown out of sight, but he was not looking for her now. He was thinking about the sky crack. When the diggers had first mentioned it, he had thought they meant a crevice atop the mountains, close to the sky. It was only later that he understood they had meant there was a crack in the sky. He did not like to think of the sky being cracked, let alone talk of it, but Zluty was so very curious about it that, when he was not offering Bily his theories about how it had come to be cracked in the first place, he was constantly questioning the diggers about it.

  Zluty had also tried questioning the Monster about the sky crack, for its ancestors had also been sent through it, but the Monster had only woken twice since they left the digger encampment and both times its mind had been clouded with confusion. Of course, even when its mind was clear, it seldom answered questions.

  Zluty’s most recent theory was that the crack had occurred during whatever great upheaval had caused the land to lurch into mountains and the plain to crack into fissures and crevices. Bily could imagine the mountains heaving up so violently that one of them bumped into the sky, cracking it.

  He noticed thick, dark grey clouds beginning to spill over the jagged mountain peaks and roll down towards them. The colour meant that soon cold fluffs would begin to fall again. They had been falling on and off ever since they had left the digger settlement, but although they sometimes covered the ground, turning it white for a time, the cold fluffs quickly melted, leaving puddles and only a few deeper patches of white that stayed. The diggers called the fluffs coldwhites but the Monks had called them by a Maker word: snow.

  Bily liked to think of the Makers even less than he liked to think of the sky crack, for it was they who had sent the terrible stone storm machine that had destroyed their cottage. It was supposed to destroy everything because the Makers wanted nothing that was not of their own making when they came through the sky crack. If the diggers had not rebelled against their masters and damaged the machine, they would have got their wish. Neither the Monster nor the diggers had been able to say what a Maker looked like, save that they were too big to fit through the sky crack without it being made bigger. That was why they sent all the metal machines and devices and diggers and Monks and Monster’s people through – for some reason the sky crack could not be made bigger from their side.

  When Bily had nightmares about the Makers tearing open the sky, they always looked like the dreadful slish that had pursued Zluty in the crevice in the white desert when he had gone looking for water. He looked at the wagon for comfort. It was the closest thing they had to a home now, though it had begun as a humble means of hauling supplies back to the cottage. Zluty had made it out of a piece of the big silvery grey metal egg from which they had hatched. He had strengthened it to carry the injured Monster and their supplies when they set off in search of a new home after the stone storm crushed the cottage and poisoned their well – the same stone storm that had driven the Monster into the blackclaw nest and caused the rockfall that blocked the mountain pass.

  ‘Everything is linked to everything else,’ Bily murmured, and had the queer feeling he had heard the words somewhere before, perhaps in one of his dreams.

  He went back to admiring the wagon, which had got very splendid because of changes wrought by the diggers. Not only had they enlarged it by building a rim, they had created clever shelves and storage niches. They had even cut a door into the side, which they had decorated with tiny coloured tiles, and replaced the simple wooden frame with a light, strong metal frame. The new woven canopy had sections that could be rolled tightly and tied up or drop down either side, turning the wagon into a small cloth hut on wheels. Parts of the frame could fold out so that the cloth curtains could also be spread over them, offering shelter alongside the wagon. Bily and Zluty and the diggers laid their mattresses under the side canopies when they slept, so as not to wake covered in cold fluffs.

  In addition to the things the diggers had done to the wagon, they had also bestowed on the travellers food for their journey and many other useful gifts, including a large and mysterious device lashed to the side of the wagon, consisting of metal poles, flat planks and a complex web of thongs and cloth. The diggers had steadfastly refused to explain what it was, save to say that they would need it in the North.

  Bily was not sure how the diggers could know what would be needed in the North, since no living digger had travelled further than the flyway. Some of the first rebel diggers that destroyed the stone storm machine had fled North and had stayed there for some time before returning to build the current settlement. Strangely, these travellers had almost no memory of what had happened in the North, but they had brought back scent memories that yielded some information. To unlock the rest, the scent memories had to be carried North again.

  When he spoke of it to Zluty, his brother said sturdily that they only had to get to the end of the line of mountains and how difficult could that be anyway?

  But the scent memory picture he had seen in Semmel’s mind showed that the mountain range did not end neatly. It curved East in a low arc of broken white-capped hills and mist-wreathed ice mounds that stretched out into a vast expanse of water. They would have to get beyond the broken arc before they could go West, and he had the feeling they would need the guidance of the memory scents.

  ‘Do not be fearful,’ the she digger had soothed, no doubt smelling Bily’s anxiety. ‘As we go Northly, the memory scents will be giving up more and more of their secretiveness.’

  Suddenly, the wagon jerked to a halt. Bily trotted round the front after Zluty, only to see both front wheels were sunk in a furrow full of water. There was a little flurry of consternation from the diggers who had been pulling the towropes as they all came to look.

  Zluty knelt and felt around in the water, trying to ignore the horrible wetness seeping through his fur. He had feared one of the wheels had got trapped in a fissure, but he could not feel a crack. Indeed, the ground had got a good deal smoother now that they were moving North, which was why he had not been paying proper attention.

  ‘What is it?’ Bily asked worriedly. ‘Is a wheel broken?’

  Zluty sat back on his heels and looked up into his brother’s anxious face, marvelling how fluffy he had got in the misty air. ‘There is a layer of ice under the melted water and the wheels can’t get a grip when they turn. We need to lay down some stones.’

  At Flugal’s command, the diggers hastened away to search for small stones. Zluty got to his feet.

  ‘You are all wet,’ Bily said anxiously.

  ‘Only my legs and arms,’ Zluty replied, marvelling that Bily was fretting about him getting a bit wet when he had once dived his whole self under water. Bily would not agree that he had been brave, of course. He saw only that he had been very frightened but that what he had done had been needful.

  Yet surely being brave was doing what was needful even though you were frightened?

  The diggers returned with many small rocks, but none small enough, so they got out their little hammers and a flat, round metal plate and began to pound the small stones into smaller ones.

  ‘Shall I make something hot for us to drink while we wait?’ Bily asked. ‘Then you could use the rest of the water to wash the mud off.’

  Zluty hesitated. He knew it comforted his brother to prepare food but he did not want to stop so soon after they started. ‘I’ll brush the mud out later when it is dry,’ he said. ‘Flugal says that if we don’t hurry, we will not reach the flyway by dusk tomorrow, and Redwing would have to go through it in the dark.’

  ‘She could wait until morning,’ Bily said eagerly.

  ‘She would have to wait the whole night
and another day, for Flugal says dusk is the proper time to go through. That is when the light shines through the flyway from the West and the wind blows from the East.’ He hesitated, then added, ‘And you know, she might not be able to wait.’

  Bily’s face fell.

  ‘She can’t help going,’ Zluty said gently, patting his brother’s shoulder.

  ‘I know.’ Bily wrung his hands. ‘It’s only . . . I don’t know why she must go now. She never wanted to go with the other birds who always flew West from the cottage when Winter came, but now she wants so badly to go. Yet she does not know what calls her.’

  Zluty did not know what to say. It was true that Redwing had never flown far from the cottage when they had lived on the plain. Her longing to fly West had begun only after they left the ruined cottage, and it had got stronger every day they travelled. Now it was so powerful that it filled her mind, and when Zluty tried to talk to her, it beat against his mind, too, filling him with a strange urgent impatience.

  When the diggers had created enough grit stone, Zluty laid it in front of the wheels. Zluty did not admit he was worried that even with all of them helping they might not be able to get the wagon out of the furrow without first getting the Monster out. Aside from causing it discomfort, that would delay them, and Redwing’s flight was not the only reason Zluty was concerned about getting on as fast as they could.

  Flugal had warned him that the memory scents told that in Winter in the North, deadly ice blizzards came down from the mountains. They must get around the end of the range before the ice blizzard season began, or they would have to find shelter and wait until Winter ended before they could go on.

  Zluty had no idea where they would find shelter in the frozen North. And even if the memory scents did lead them to a cave where they could take refuge, they would soon run out of fuel to burn and food to eat. He scowled and pushed away the thought of being trapped in a cave and hungry, reminding himself that the diggers who rebelled against the Makers had fled North and survived. Even if the memory scents of those early diggers failed them, Zluty would find food and something to burn, just as he had always done.