Page 6 of City of Stone and Silence

“I didn’t think it would be so soft,” she says. “It’s beautiful.”

“You’ve never seen snow before.” I hadn’t put that together until now.

“In Nimar it only snows up in the highest mountains,” she says. “When I was a girl, my father told me about getting caught in a blizzard on a hunting trip, and I didn’t believe him.” She turns to me and cocks her head. “Does it snow in Kahnzoka?”

“Not much. A few times a year.” I shrug, uncomfortably. Bone-deep memories rise from my years before, on the streets of the Sixteenth Ward. Snow didn’t mean beauty and wonder, it meant a real chance you’d freeze to death before morning. “In the city it just piles up and turns to brown slush.”

Somehow, she gets what I’m thinking. There are times when I wonder if Meroe is a Kindre adept. She takes my hand, and our cold fingers lace together.

Climbing the tower is considerably harder in the chill, the cold metal sucking the warmth from our hands. We wrap ourselves in the cloaks when we get to the top, and I stick my hands in my armpits, trying to coax some life back into them. Meroe’s precious instruments have already been moved safely inside the Garden, so the top of the tower is empty except for us. Meroe walks in a circle, trying to get her blood flowing, then delights at the crisp footprints she leaves in the fresh snow.

My attention is focused on what’s ahead of us. Soliton is still headed directly for the gray light, and I’ve had to revise my estimate of the thing’s size yet again. It has to be huge, a circular dome several miles in diameter and half a mile high. Not a ship at all, even a ship as big as Soliton, but more on the scale of a mountain. It dominates the view directly ahead of us, but to either side it’s still possible to see a snowy landscape stretching way into the gray distance. The water is crowded with icebergs, and they scrape and crash against the great ship’s hull, though they don’t impede its progress.

I can feel the currents of Eddica energy, more powerful than anything I’ve encountered aboard Soliton. It has a strained, hard quality, as though the magic were as frozen as the rest of this country.

“Nearly there,” Meroe says, joining me at the rail.

“Yeah.”

A few minutes, at most, before Soliton’s Bow touches the light. And then Blessed only knows. I stare at the top of the dome, as it gradually eclipses the cloudy sky overhead. My hands have gone tight on the cold metal rail, and I pry them loose with an effort. After a moment, Meroe’s fingers slip through mine again.

“Kiss me,” she says. “Just in case.”

The tip of Soliton’s Bow disappears into the solid wall of gray. I turn to Meroe hait Gevora Nimara, First Princess of Nimar, and kiss her as thoroughly as I know how, my body pressed close to hers as we slip into the unknown.

There’s a moment of pressure, and then release, the feeling of vast energies suddenly relaxing their grip. Then a gust of warm air, cutting the chill like the breath of a hot stove. Meroe pulls away from me with a gasp, and I reluctantly open my eyes.

The snowy landscape is gone. The clouds are gone, the icebergs are gone. All the gray has changed to gleaming blue—the sun bright and hot in a perfectly clear sky, the water a brilliant cyan. Steam rises from Soliton’s deck as the new hot wind blows across the cold metal, the ship’s coat of snow slumping rapidly into streams of clear water.

Ahead, there’s a shore, a riot of green that’s almost painful to look at after so long in the gray-on-gray world. Huge trees stretch skyward, trunks tangling into a dense forest canopy. To either side, rocky beaches curve outward as Soliton pulls into a vast bay, but directly ahead of us the forest is broken by a line of enormous structures. They look like walls made out of metal spiderweb, the tops taller than Soliton’s deck, arranged in a regular pattern—

I match Meroe’s gasp when I realize what I’m looking at. The huge things are docks, rectangular cradles stretching from the shore into the sea, built for a ship the size of Soliton. Not just built for—the titanic berths are lined up one beside the other, and several of them are occupied by gray leviathans. Not twins to Soliton—the shapes are different—but at least siblings.

I look at Meroe. Her eyes are shining, joyous. Her mind must be whirling away already, fitting all this into her theories about Soliton, who built it and why. There’s nothing she likes better than figuring things out. Looking back to the docks, I can’t help but feel more apprehensive.

The whole structure is clearly not in good shape. Soliton itself is full of holes, pitted with rust, in spite of the strength of its metallic construction. However bad it is, though, the docks are worse. Whole sections of the spiderweb-walls have collapsed, metal beams hundreds of feet long scattered in the surf like a child’s toys. And the other ships look … broken, their decks canted and collapsing, their towers shattered piles of rust. Looking closer, I can see vegetation growing across them, not just Soliton’s ubiquitous mushrooms but whole trees sprouting through openings in the metal, vines winding around the railings.

The dock to which Soliton is heading is clear, at least, a long trough of deep water with spidery gantries on either side. I can feel the ship start to slow as it approaches, for the first time since I’d come aboard.

I can feel something else, as well. Energy—Eddica energy, as I thought—is flowing out of Soliton on a huge scale, an invisible torrent of power rushing over us and out into the dock. In return, something reaches back to us, and I feel a hint of intention in the lines of magic beneath my feet. It feels like when I first met Hagan’s ghost, down in the Deeps, that same sense of converging power that drew me to the conduit chamber. The flow is so strong here that I don’t need a conduit. Hardly daring to breathe, I bend down and press my hand against the deck, thinking hard.

Hagan? Are you there? I didn’t realize, until that moment, how badly I wanted him to answer.

There’s no reply, at first. But something notices. Not Hagan—a new presence, sweeping into the ship. I feel it reaching out for me and, hesitantly, I answer, extending my mental grip. We make fleeting contact—

—a face, inches from mine, skin dried and pebbled into leather; a shock of wispy white hair; protruding, yellowed teeth; but most of all a pair of dark, empty holes where its eyes should be—

I don’t scream. I might have shouted.

Meroe takes me by the shoulders as I stagger against the rail. I blink rapidly, trying to focus on her.

“Isoka! Are you okay?”

“I—” I shake my head. “Yeah. Rot. I’m okay. I just saw something.…”

“They’re moving!”

“Who’s moving?” I blink again, and follow her pointing finger.