At the next station, vendors boarded the carriage selling mugs of hot broth, and Yarrek gladly purchased one. Behind these vendors came others hawking thick clothing, serge pantaloons and padded jerkins, caps with ear flaps and things called gloves which you fitted over your hands to protect the fingers — according to the spiel of the vendors — from something called frostbite.
Yarrek ignored the vendors and opened the case his mother had packed. He dressed quickly, pulling thick garments over his old clothing. He felt at once constricted but snug, and wondered if he would ever become accustomed to being so lagged.
He settled down, more comfortable now, and stared in fascination through the window at the wonder of the passing world.
Two hours later Yarrek caught his first glimpse of Icefast.
If he had found the sight of the mountains a thing of wonder, then Icefast doubled his awe and sent his senses reeling. The engravings of his youth had done nothing to prepare him for either the scale of the city or the severity of its aspect.
Like the mountains, Icefast was grey, and like the mountains it reared stark and abrupt from the land. The uniformity of the tall grey buildings, the fact that constructions of such enormity had been planned and undertaken by his fellow man, made the sight of the serried facades all the more daunting.
Icefast filled the horizon between peaks as though the very mountains themselves had been found wanting and had been replaced. Yarrek made out ice-canals between the monolithic grey mansions, and on the canals the improbable sight of people skating back and forth, and others riding sleds drawn by teams of shaggy lox.
In due course the train slowed and entered a canyon of buildings. On the station platform Yarrek made out a thousand souls muffled to their ears, their breaths pluming in the cold. Strange cries and shouts came from the throng, vendors selling everything from cold cures to water-heated boots, mulled yail to grilled lox.
That morning, his father had given him instructions for his arrival in Icefast and directions to the House of the Inquisitors, where he would be given a bed in the apprentices’ dormitory. He would take a lox cart to the Avenue of Creation, and present himself to the porter at the House.
As he gathered his luggage and stepped from the carriage, his breath robbed by the severity of the cold that wrapped around him and invaded his lungs, he realised that his heart was pounding with both excitement and dread.
He hurried to a lox-cart stand, climbed aboard and gave his destination to a muffled dwarf of a jockey. The lox set off and he was gliding smoothly — no jolts on this ride — across the silvered canals of Icefast, and everything he beheld seemed new and wondrous. He saw nothing familiar, no fields of yail, or timber buildings, or kite-fish sailing around the sun. Instead all was drear and austere, the gaunt buildings hewn from great stone blocks, the thoroughfares filled with ice. It was the start of dimming, and while back home the air would still be bright with sunlight, this far away from the Hub the sun was but a distant disk. A strange twilight filled the air, and the city was illuminated by naked flames in great sconces set atop pillars flanking the ice-canals.
The cart slowed at last and halted before the tall, pillared entrance of the House of Inquisitors; Yarrek paid the jockey and climbed down. Keeping his footing with difficulty as he negotiated paving stones slick with ice, he stepped towards the ancient timber doors and passed inside.
He was met by a grim-faced porter, who escorted him without a word to a tiny cell furnished with a hard, narrow bed and a trunk for his clothing. He passed a fitful night, tossing and turning, and dreaming — when sleep came in the early hours — of home and sunlight and Yancy. At dawn, a loud rapping on the door of his cell awoke him, and the porter led Yarrek, along with a dozen other would-be Inquisitors, to the lecture halls overlooking the Avenue of Creation.
For the next ten brightenings — though this near the Edge the word was something of a misnomer, for a brightening never achieved much more than a pewter half-light — Yarrek rose early and hurried from his spartan cell to the lecture halls.
There, along with his fellow students, he pored over ancient manuscripts and studied more modern apologia. In the afternoons, after a short meal break during which he ate slabs of cold porridge and watered wine in a silent refectory, he returned to the lecture halls where he would listen, along with the other bored and nodding novices, to a different tutor every brightening who spoke at length on varying aspects of Church law and judiciary practice. At the end of the lessons he would sit a written exam on what he had learned so far, and he would have to dredge his memory for the arcane and abstruse tenets of ecclesiastical lore.
At dimming, after a substantial meal of meat broth and yailbread, he would retire to his cell and compose letters to Yancy and his family. To the latter he would paint a picture of diligence and interest, but to Yancy he would tell the truth; that he found his studies tedious, and life in Icefast at best alienating. He missed the warmth of all that was familiar, he wrote, but most of all he missed Yancy.
He made no friends among his fellow apprentices, for fraternisation was forbidden. Meals were taken in silence, and silence was the rule during study periods. At dimming, Church porters escorted the novices back to their cells, and, though their doors were not locked, Yarrek suspected that guards were posted at the end of the corridor to discourage nocturnal wanderings.
On his eleventh brightening in Icefast, the rules were relaxed. Nothing was stated overtly, but Yarrek noticed that whispers at mealtimes were not admonished, and the porters no longer escorted the novices from the lecture halls. He made friends with a fat youth from a city around the Edge of Sunworld, who pined for the flat ice-fields of home just as Yarrek pined for the sun-parched plains of the Hub.
Upon Yarrek’s fifteenth brightening as a novice, the lecturer announced that for the first time they would be allowed outside after lessons. That dimming Yarrek, along with his new-found friend, hired skates and for an hour attempted to remain upright along the Avenue of Creation, before the cold became too much to bear.
The following afternoon, in the great library, he consulted a gazetteer of the city, searching for the official building where he might find a listing of registered births. That evening after lessons he slipped out and skated shakily along the Avenue towards the House of Public Records
He came to the building, like all the others in the metropolis a sheer, towering construction with high slit windows and a massive entrance. He removed his skates and passed inside, only to discover that he had just thirty minutes before the records office closed. He hurried, sweating in the furnace heat of the building, to the room which housed the rows of mouldering ledgers containing the names of all who had been born, lived, and died in Icefast for the past five hundred cycles.
He knew, of course, that his name would not be among those listed, for he had been a third born, and thus an illegal issue. He hoped, however, to come across some clue that might help him in his search for his true parents. He reasoned that if he could find the names of all the families who had sired two children, and their addresses (for he knew his parents to be high-born, and assumed they would have lived in exclusive precincts) then he could furnish himself with a list of families who might possibly have birthed him against the law.