Tundra

By the time we woke up, there were embers glowing in the fire, and the faraway stars had ceased to glow at all. The mammoth riders had already bundled away their tents and strapped them to the backs of the beasts, which staggered with the burden. I had survived the night tucked into my hood, shivering as the warmth died down, but Aais appeared to have forsaken sleep altogether. He sat rigid, staring into the disintegrating coals. As I stirred in the dust, he turned to me, his wide eyes transfixed.

‘I want us to talk to my elder,’ he said solemnly.

‘We don’t know how,’ I reminded him.

Beside me, Hackley sat up as if on cue, her cropped hair a mess of copper around her ears. She clutched a book, huge and leather-bound, that she had apparently been clutching like a pillow. ‘This arrived during the night.’ She handed the volume to me, and I turned it carefully in my hands, examining the gilt letters peeling off the spine– ‘On the Grate Beastes, Their Ways and Temperament’.

‘That Geomancer sent this?’ She nodded. ‘And you’ve read it already?’

‘Not all of it.’ She shuffled inside her own robes, trying to bury deeper in the folds and unearth some secret heat, as I was doing. ‘But there’s a bit in here about how certain giant squids communicate that I think we might be able to use.’

‘What do you have in mind?’ I asked, warily.

‘They have these patches of skin that change colour,’ Hackley explained, gesticulating wildly. ‘I was thinking we could set something up with a couple of luminescent runes to mimic that…’

‘But we don’t know what the colours mean.’

She smiled. ‘I thought of that, too. Aais tells me the elder will have a host of attendant creatures around it. We can watch how they communicate with it and pick up enough symbols and colours to work out the beginnings of a language.’

Aais nodded in slow comprehension. ‘This should work,’ he agreed.’ If it’s the same colours that coral uses, or something similar, we should be able to at least have a simple conversation with it.’

Grabbing Hackley roughly by the shoulder, I took her aside. ‘Did the two of you set this up?’ I asked, expecting remorse or at least an apology for going behind my back. Instead, I got excited boasting.

‘Mainly me,’ Hackley said, her hazel eyes glittering as though they had absorbed those missing embers. ‘Aais is still a little scared of his god, but he sees the necessity in what we’re doing.’

‘Why?’

She pursed her lips into a thin line, and folded her skinny, freckled arms. ‘I don’t trust a plan that comes from a demon,’ she said.

I raised an eyebrow. ‘You were the one who wanted to make a pact.’

‘I understand pacts,’ she told me.’ Pacts have rules, and are tightly constrained, and you can word them so that you’re safe. This has none of those protections.’

I couldn’t help but smile back, now. ‘Traditionally, Apprentices don’t undermine their Masters like this,’ I said, seriously.

‘That is true.’

I paused, taking a moment to consider the proposition. One the one hand, it was a novel plan, but on the other, it contained a lot of factors that were not accounted for to my mind. I would be trusting a fish-man and a teenage girl. I would also be throwing away the chance to walk into Mossen Grove in the near future. ‘Very well,’ I decreed, at last. ‘We can meet up with the mammoth people at Mossen Grove later.’

Leaving the mammoth riders behind, we trekked back towards the fissure which led to the underground, dank and dark and covered with ice like the arteries of a glacier. One thing was certain in this dimly glittering, freezing place. There had never been any embers here.