But now he heard an ominous groan from the Wall’s sea-facing surface. A sharp crack. A hiss of escaping steam. Something new, then.
He scrambled across the growstone, crouching in the wind. Facing north, he lay on his belly, holding his hood to protect his face from the blasting wind, and looked down by the light of his lantern. The Wall face itself was caked with ice. And there was a broken pipe venting steam, just beneath the edge of the roof. The pipes here, stitching in and out of the growstone surface, were part of the radiator system; the steam would pass through these exposed sections and lose a little heat in the open air before being drawn back into the closed cycles of the engine. Now, Thux could see, even though the radiator pipes were usually blistering hot, the cold had won. The pipes had become coated with thick masses of ice, flowing forms that must have melted and refrozen as the heat battled the snow, and the fluid in one section of the pipe must have frozen and, expanding, split the pipe wide open. The engine was bleeding steam pressure, and, worse, if the radiator wasn’t working the engine would soon be overheating too.
It wasn’t an impossible job. The system, already centuries old, had evolved with time for ease of repair. Lying flat, he could reach down to the broken section. He checked that his rope harness was fixed securely to a stout rung, and then dug out a wrench and a short length of brass sleeve that he would use to join the broken ends of pipe to make a temporary fix. The welders could come up here and make the joint good when the weather relented. He flipped back his mittens’ lids to expose his fingers, taking care not to touch the still-hot pipes, and grabbed the broken section with his right hand.
As his hand closed around the freezing metal he knew immediately he’d made a horrible mistake.
The agonising cold sank into his fingers and palm. When he tried to loosen his fingers he found the flesh was glued firmly to the metal surface. He tried harder, and he could feel the flesh tear, and blood oozed out onto the metal where it froze immediately, a glistening crimson. He was stuck. Lying here face down on the growstone, his right arm outstretched down the Wall, he couldn’t even reach the locked right hand with his left. Be careful, his mother had always said. One mistake out there — that’s all it will take. And she’d been right. This had been that one mistake, for him.
He could feel the cold penetrating through his hand, up his arm. The wind picked up again and blew back his hood from his head, so his face and scalp were exposed to the driving snow. The flakes were heavier now, harder, and they stung as they slapped at his skin. He could feel ice on his face, below his eyes. He couldn’t tell if he was crying or not. He was going to die out here, he realised. It wasn’t just that he’d messed up the job. He would freeze to death, trapped like an idiot up on this Wall. He tried again to force open his fingers, but again he felt flesh rip, and what felt like a web of muscles beneath the skin tearing. The pain was astounding. He slumped back, exhausted, defeated, agonised. He yelled into the wind: ‘How could I be so stupid?’
‘Good question!’ It was his mother’s voice. Kia was lying face down by his right-hand side, bundled up in her own furs.
‘You shouldn’t be up here.’ His teeth were chattering.
‘No, I shouldn’t. And I shouldn’t have given birth to an idiot like you. But one thing follows the other, doesn’t it?’ She pulled his hood back over his head, and kissed him on an exposed bit of forehead. ‘Now hold still or you’ll pull that hand to bits.’ She dug her own bare fingers into a pot of oil and reached down and began to massage the fingers and palm of his locked hand.
‘What is that?’
‘Sperm-whale oil. Had it in the store for years. Old Coldlander trick, although they say seal oil is the best. It’ll take a little time but we’ll get you free. Leave it to Mother.’
Thux rested his face on the fur of his hood, with the cold growstone beneath. He seemed to be falling asleep, his thoughts receding into the warmth of his own skull. It was almost comforting to lie here, in the care of his mother as she worked at his damaged hand. He couldn’t even feel the cold any more.
But there was something missing.
He forced his head up. ‘Mother. Can you hear that?’
‘What?’
‘The engine.’
She lay there for a moment, silent and still as the wind howled around them.
The pumping heartbeat of the engine had stopped, and the growstone beneath them was as inert as a corpse.
17
It was Mago who spotted the first cracked pane in the roof.
By now it was the dead of night. Nelo had been working flat out, like everybody else, since he’d first come here to the Hall of Annids, and he had no precise idea of the time. Doctor Ontin had got his emergency hospital running pretty quickly. Mago and Nelo had been used as spare muscle in Ontin’s scheme to sort out the continuing trickle of injured and ill as they kept arriving through the night. Ontin himself, with other surgeons and nurses, was working hard on the more serious injuries, the broken limbs and crushing wounds, the frostbite, the cases of exhaustion, even a couple of heart attacks.
Things had got steadily worse. The heating had been off for hours, and the running hot water. Then even the cold water supply had failed, then the gas supply that fed the lanterns. Ontin, bossy, exasperated, had coped with all this as it had unfolded, barking out commands to anybody who would listen, including Ywa Annid of Annids, who made sure that what he wanted got done. Soon the Hall was studded with candles, and open fires blazed in antique hearths unused for a century. Clogged chimneys trapped smoke and the ash, and there wasn’t much to burn save smashed-up furniture — it was very expensive firewood — but the fires gave out enough heat to keep them all from freezing altogether.
But all through the night Nelo and Mago, remembering their adventure with the awning, had kept an eye on that roof, a great glass lid over them all, that had been covered with snow thick enough to block out the daylight even before the sun had set. In the dark it was easy to forget about, you couldn’t even see it in the flickering light of the candles. Nelo had tried a couple of times to warn Ywa about the problem, but she hadn’t really listened, and he understood; you couldn’t deal with everything at once. But the two of them had kept watching, and listening.
It was Mago who heard the first pane crack, even over the noise of the hospital, the cries of the injured, the squalls of babies, the general susurrus of conversation. He grabbed Nelo’s arm, almost making the Northlander drop the bundle of blankets he’d been carrying. ‘Look,’ he snapped in Greek. ‘Up there. . near the centre. .’
The roof was barely visible in the candlelight. But Nelo, squinting, made out the latticework of iron strips that held the panes in place, and the panes themselves grey with snow. And there, yes, in the centre, he saw a spiderweb of cracks.
‘I don’t know what’s holding it up,’ Mago said. ‘If one pane fails-’
‘The rest will follow.’
‘It’s just like that accursed awning again.’ He shook Nelo’s shoulder. ‘Come on, Northlander. These are your people. Make them listen!’
And then another pane cracked, more loudly. All around them people looked up.
Nelo dropped his blankets and ran to Ywa. His urgency finally got through. She barked out commands, and with impressive speed the evacuation of the makeshift hospital began. All the doors were flung open, including the big ceremonial entrance through which the Annids would process into the room for the Water Council meetings and other great occasions of state. Soon folk were streaming out into the corridors outside, tunnels dug through the ancient growstone of the Wall.