The Ice Maze Read online

  ‘You should go to bed,’ Bily told him. ‘I made it up for you.’ He pointed.

  ‘You ought to go to bed, too, for Flugal said no watch is necessary here,’ Zluty told him.

  ‘I am not sleepy,’ Bily told him. ‘I will sit by the fire until the embers burn out.’

  After Zluty had gone, Bily waited until all the rustlings and murmurings of the others fell silent, and there was only the soft crackle of the fire, then he took out his brush from his pack, shrugged off his cloak and slowly began to brush himself. It was wonderfully soothing to feel the tug of the brush.

  The mist about him continued to thicken so that before long he was surrounded by white. It was very eerie. He might have been all alone in the world, but for his little pack and the dying fire. This was how it had been for Zluty whenever he travelled to the Northern Forest, Bily thought, and shivered. Putting his brush back into his pack, he pulled his cloak around his shoulders again and sat gazing into the embers.

  He told himself he ought to go to bed. It was so cold now that his breath came out in little puffs of cloud, and the thought of cuddling up to the warm bulk of the Monster was lovely. But he did not get up.

  ‘Soon,’ he told himself, gazing into the dying heart of the fire.

  Zluty woke to a thick white icy mist pressing lightly on his face. He threw off his blanket and, standing up, took a step out from under the awning. His foot slipped out from under him and he sat down hard in the midst of his bedding. Puzzled, he reached out to touch the ground only to discover it was hard and cold and smooth. The water-soaked earth had frozen solid.

  He groped for his staff and used it to help him stay upright as he made his careful way to the wagon door. The sun would soon rise, he reassured himself, and even if they could not see it, the world would brighten and warm and melt the ice underfoot.

  He resolved to light a fire and then wake Bily and the diggers, but by the time he was getting a few firenuts from the net, several of the diggers were up and folding their blankets, carrying them into the mist in the direction of the sleds.

  ‘Bring a ball of firemoss down to me and then wake Bily,’ he told Semmel when she poked her head over the run of the wagon. He added the digger gesture that meant please. She nodded and withdrew.

  Kneeling to pile fresh firenuts on top of the ashes of the previous night’s fire, Zluty thought of what the Monster had said to Bily about not going into the Velvet City because there were strict rules about comings and goings. It occurred to him that the Monster itself had broken the rules by leaving.

  Zluty wondered what happened when you broke the rules of the Velvet City. Nothing good, probably, hence the Monster’s warning.

  Was it just curiosity that made him want to go there? Certainly his curiosity had got him in trouble before. Look what had happened when he left the digger camp because he was curious about the Monks. He had ended up being captured by them, and if not for Bily and the diggers he would have had his head emptied. As it was, he still wore one of the Monks’ metal devices on his head. The diggers had tried to remove it after he escaped, but one bit of it went inside him and they had not known how to get it out without hurting him. They had assured him the metal would not give the Makers power over him because he did not have Makers metal inside him. It seemed the Makers machine could only bind a creature by linking outside Makers metal to inside Makers metal.

  He had got used to the feel of the metal on his head and sometimes he quite forgot about it; other times he would touch his head or brush his fur and feel it and long to be free of it. It had occurred to him that there might be a way to get free of it in the Velvet City, but that was not the only reason, nor indeed the most important reason, he wanted to go there.

  The main reason was to learn more about the Makers and their plan because he believed he and Bily would need that knowledge to protect themselves and their friends. If the Monster answered his questions about the Makers, he might not feel the need to go to the Velvet City. But even after all the distance they had travelled together, it had told them very little, and now it was clear there were secrets the Monster did not know about the relationship between its people and the Makers.

  ‘I do not like secrets,’ Zluty muttered to himself, startling Semmel who had just emerged from the mist. He helped her break open the ball of firemoss and tip some embers onto the pile of firenuts. They began to smoulder at once.

  Semmel looked at him through the smudge of smoke and said softly, ‘Some secrets are needful, Zchloo-tee. The she fire lizard makes a secret of its nest to protect its babies from the he fire lizard who would eat them if he found the eggs or the younglings.’

  Zluty stared at her, but before he could say anything she padded away into the roiling mist in the direction of the sleds. He turned back to the firepit and took a pinch of his fur from the pouch where he kept soft wads of fur from various brushings and other tiny bits and pieces that would catch fire easily. He dropped the fur onto the smouldering firenuts. There was a bright, satisfying flare of flame as they caught and began to crackle. Staring into the flame, he thought how Bily had always been content for the world to keep its secrets. But Zluty was not like that. Curiosity beat at his mind just like Redwing’s longing to fly into the West.

  ‘If Bily can accept the Monster’s secretive nature then he must accept my curiosity,’ Zluty muttered. ‘It is not as if curiosity is badness.’

  His curiosity had got him into trouble, but it had also led to important discoveries and useful knowledge. Yet the risk must be worth the gain. The Monster might be able to tell him enough for him to decide, if it would speak. It had woken now and seemed alert, and maybe he could convince it to tell him more about the Velvet City.

  The trouble was, Zluty did not completely trust the Monster, even after all they had endured together. It was a Listener and its people served the Makers and worked with the Monks, who served them too, and kept diggers as slaves. The Monster had warned Bily that they should not go to the Velvet City, presumably because it did not want them to come to harm. But Zluty felt in his heart and bones that their ignorance of the Makers and their plan might very well be the most dangerous thing of all.

  The Makers had shown themselves to be powerful and destructive. They used other creatures mercilessly, sending them through the sky crack to do their bidding knowing they might be damaged or killed. They had not minded what they destroyed when they sent the stone storm machine. In fact, that had been their purpose in sending it. They had sent the Monks to capture rebel diggers and empty their heads out, even though this rendered them unfit for anything but the simplest tasks, so they must also be vengeful.

  Zluty sighed and climbed into the wagon.

  Bily was almost invisible because the Monster had curled right around him, their pale pelts blending into one another. It took Zluty a moment to see that Bily was sleeping between the Monster’s paws, its long dangerous claws unsheathed across his chest. That didn’t frighten Zluty. No matter what the Monster thought of the rest of them, Zluty knew that it would do nothing to hurt Bily. Which must be why it had warned them away from the Velvet City.

  Zluty leaned over Bily and was startled when his brother opened his eyes and said in a scratchy, unhappy voice, ‘I don’t understand what I am to do.’

  ‘Hush, you are dreaming,’ Zluty told him.

  But Bily said fretfully, ‘No! The voice . . . The egg . . . It keeps telling me there is something I must do but I don’t understand what . . .’ His eyes fell closed again.

  Zluty stared at his brother in uneasy wonderment. Had he really dreamed of the egg voice too? His own first memory was of that voice, urging him to find food and water on the plain, and later, telling him how to make the egg into a shelter. When they had grown and the egg shelter had got too small, it had instructed him to build a proper cottage. The voice had grown fainter after that, as if dismantling the egg had weakened it. But when the food from the plain ran out, the voice had spoken again, sending Zluty in search of
the Northern Forest, where he could get more food. By the time they had finished the cottage and he had turned a remnant of the egg into a wagon to carry things, the voice had fallen silent.

  He heard it now only in rare dreams. The last time had been in a nightmare on his last trip to the Northern Forest. The voice had urged him to hurry home before it was too late. Zluty had obeyed, arriving at the ruined cottage just in time to save Bily and the Monster from being drowned in the flooded cellar. And now Bily was dreaming of the voice.

  Zluty patted Bily’s cheek insistently.

  This time, Bily opened his eyes wide and sat up at once, his expression alert, anxious. ‘What is it, Zluty? What is wrong?’

  ‘Hush,’ Zluty soothed. ‘Nothing is wrong. Only it’s nearly dawn and I’ve made a fire. If you want to cook breakfast for the diggers, you must do it now. They are all up and Flugal says they mean to go as soon as the sun rises.’

  Bily nodded and, lifting the Monster’s paw, carefully unhooked a claw that had got caught in his thick fur. Edging free of its sleeping embrace, he stood up and began to rummage around in the shelves, muttering softly to himself.

  He seemed to have no memory of his nightmare and Zluty thought it better not to ask him about it.

  ‘Can I help?’ he asked instead, hiding a smile because Bily was so fluffy now that he really did look quite wild.

  Bily lifted the bowl of batter into Zluty’s arms, telling him to set it by the fire, and a little delegation of diggers carried off all the cooking things. Bily peeped into the bowl of berries as he picked them up, and saw with satisfaction that they had absorbed much of the water they had been soaking in and now shone, fat and glossy.

  Outside, the air was thick with mist. He could see nothing of the land or the mountains and only a smear of reddish light that must be the fire. As he stepped down, the diggers called out to him to take care because the ground was icy.

  Bily found that it was very slippery indeed. He did not like the slipperiness, but the mist, billowing wetly on all sides, made the world beautifully cosy. Since they had begun travelling, he had often felt overwhelmed by how big the world was.

  It did not take him long to cook up a pile of fluffy golden-brown pancakes. The diggers had come one by one to sit, and Bily had just cooked the berries into a sticky sweet syrup, when Zluty, Flugal and Semmel emerged from the mist.

  ‘They smell wonderful,’ Zluty said.

  For a time there was nothing but the sound of eating and the companionable crackle of the fire, and Bily glanced around at his companions with the warm, satisfied, safe feeling he always got when he had made some food and it was being eaten. For a little while, he forgot the strange, worrying nightmares that had made him sleep so restlessly.

  ‘What were you all humming before?’ Zluty asked Semmel, helping himself to another pancake.

  ‘We are making a song telling the flight of the Lastling through the flyway,’ Semmel said. ‘It is part of the telling of the journey that the diggers will take back to the clan.’

  ‘We will make a telling song of our own journeying when we return,’ Flugal said. ‘All telling songs overlap for greater truthfulness.’

  Bily was thinking how beautiful to think of stories told by overlapping songs, when Zluty said, ‘Your potion-maker told us Redwing was a sign. He did not say what she was a sign of.’

  ‘The coming of the Lastling is a sign that great change is coming,’ Flugal said gravely.

  ‘But what will change? Is it good or bad? Is it about the coming of the Makers?’

  ‘Nobody can knowing that,’ said Flugal.

  Zluty looked frustrated, but Bily thought he had not listened well enough. Zluty thought the digger meant that no one could say when the Makers would come. But Flugal’s gestures as he spoke added a layer of meaning that meant no one could say what was good or bad in change, because usually there was good and bad in any change.

  The mist had brightened and it was time for the diggers to leave. Bily wrapped the rest of the pancakes up for the diggers to take with them, and the digger he thought of as Speckledy accepted them and made a gesture that she wanted to speak. Of course, Speckledy was not really her name because it was not the custom among the diggers to name anyone except blood family and a mate. Speckledy bowed to Bily and delivered a brief but heartfelt speech, thanking him for his pancakes and for his gift of feathers and his soft fluffiness.

  All of the other diggers stood and bowed to him very solemnly.

  Abashed, Bily bowed back.

  Speckledy bowed to Zluty, who had come to stand beside him. She thanked him for his staffs and the shining stones and for his music. The other diggers bowed to him too, and Zluty bowed back, wishing them a swift and safe journey home to their settlement.

  ‘Let’s go and watch them leave,’ Zluty said to Bily as the diggers set off towards the sleds. They looked very strange now that they were upright, but they were not as awkward looking as Bily had thought they would be.

  Zluty, Flugal and Semmel carefully lifted each sled so the diggers who would carry it could get into place under it. Zluty examined the sleds and then shifted some of the packs and staffs.

  ‘Better,’ Flugal approved, and hung a lit lantern on each sled, then he shouted ‘Ra!’

  Semmel shouted ‘Ra!’, too, and the diggers set off, marching East.

  They vanished from sight almost at once, leaving Bily, Zluty, Flugal and Semmel staring into the swirling white mist. For a long moment Bily strained his ears to hear the footfalls of the departing diggers, but then there was only the mist and the silence.

  ‘We ought to go, too,’ Zluty said.

  Flugal began gathering up tools and bits of rope left over from preparing the sleds and Semmel went to get a thick net she had woven, which she explained they must put around the wheels of the wagon to enable them to turn on the icy ground. Impressed with her forethought and her cleverness, Zluty helped to stretch the nets around the wheels and fasten them in place, while Bily boiled a bit of water on the dying fire to wash the plates.

  As he oiled the black pan and slotted it into its place, Bily marvelled at how much room there was in the wagon now that the returning diggers had taken their collection of Maker devices. He had not noticed how many had been gathered as they’d travelled, but now that it was possible to walk around rather than climbing over things, he began to think how everything might be arranged more tidily.

  Noticing the Monster was awake, he offered it a pancake he had set aside. It ate without much interest and Bily wondered what Listeners liked to eat, for though it was always grateful, the Monster had never eaten anything with much pleasure. It seemed distracted and he wondered if it was muddled again. He did not think it could be sad that most of the diggers had gone, for it had paid little attention to them, and sure enough, it made no comment when Bily said most of the diggers had left. Bily missed them already.

  ‘I do not like saying goodbye,’ he told Zluty a little later, as he helped to roll up the sides of the canopy and tie them in place.

  ‘They might visit us someday,’ his brother said cheerfully, slamming the little hinged door closed and going to take up the lead towrope. Flugal and Semmel remained inside at Zluty’s suggestion, wrapped in their cloaks and seated at the front of the wagon. Bily took up the side rope that enabled the wagon to be steered.

  Zluty shouted to him to pull, and Bily obeyed with a last glance in the direction of the mountain beside them where Redwing had flown into the flyway. The mountain was only just visible as a great bulk of shadow rising up beside them in the mist.

  The ground beyond their makeshift camp was so slippery that Bily fell over almost at once, and could not get to his feet without help.

  Semmel produced woven nets for their feet that she had fashioned from the same stuff as the wheel nets, saying they would be able to walk without slipping over in them. Bily pulled on the pair he had been given and tied them at the top, then walked about to test them, but Zluty said he would u
se his staff to steady himself.

  Neither the iciness nor the white mist lessened as the day wore on, for there was not a breath of wind to stir the air. The stillness made Zluty uneasy. They had been walking a good while before he realised that it was not the stillness that bothered him. He had the feeling something was watching them. He told himself it was silly because the mist that hid everything would hide them from any watcher as well.

  When they stopped to rest at midday, they brought the wagon closer to the mountains so he could get water from the stream, and he was able to see some way up the nearest dark slope. Zluty studied the glistening flank of the mountain as he lowered the water urns using the nets and levers set up by the diggers, but he saw no movement.

  Telling himself he was imagining things, he rolled the urns to the bank of the stream and poured water into them with a jug. There was a little crust of ice along the edges of the stream, but the fast-running current had kept it from freezing over. The water was so cold that it made his hands ache. By the time he finished, his fingers were white and numb.

  He had put the fingers of one hand into his mouth to get the blood flowing when he heard the sound of a boulder crashing down the mountainside. It smashed into a jutting outcrop part way down the face of the mountain not far from where he stood. A little avalanche of stone and rubble fell, as the boulder bounced up and then fell the rest of the way to the ground, breaking into pieces.

  Heart hammering, Zluty hurriedly dragged the heavy urns back from the edge of the stream and rolled them back to the wagon. Then he turned to peer at what he could see of the mountains, wondering what had dislodged the boulder.

  ‘What was that?’ Bily came running to ask.

  ‘Just a boulder falling,’ Zluty said, turning to smile at his brother. ‘Help me get the urns back in place, will you?’ he added, more to distract Bily than because help was needed.