“Did you do that?” Mikel asked.
“No. I did not.”
There was a palpable feeling of something dreadful in the vast ice fields around them. It was more than the vibration, more than the faint glow. It was a sense of something enormous.
“Big drop in air pressure,” Dr. Cummins said.
“Yeah. Like something drained it away.”
The winds died and there was only the cricketing sound of the surface ice snapping.
“Dr. Jasso, talk to me,” the woman said. “Spitball. Give me something to think about.” Dr. Cummins’s voice was without fear or reproach. But there was concern in her movements as she tried to restart the vehicle, then went from button to button trying to activate something… anything. “Nothing,” she said. “This vehicle is dead.”
Mikel turned back to the pit. The melted ice was still dripping down. There was no steam now, so no heat. The radiance was definitely something other than dying flame. He looked across the horizon. The silence seemed almost to have weight. It was as if someone—something—were approaching. It was not something moldy and gray and dead like the spirits he’d seen below, nor a flaming demon like Enzo. This was—
An explosion of life was all that came to mind. Something was rolling across the Antarctic expanse, possibly across time itself, filling the empty spaces with something tangible yet still elusive.
“Dr. Jasso?” Dr. Cummins said quietly.
He looked back at her, saw her pointing ahead, near the pit. He turned wordlessly.
Something was moving. It was something hazy and indistinct, like sea spray, but moving along a very narrow path, as if it were inside a tunnel. It unrolled toward them; at least, it was coming in their direction. Mikel could not be sure that they or the truck was a destination.
Nonetheless, Dr. Cummins popped the door and got out. “I don’t like this,” she said.
“I don’t either, but it’s here,” he replied.
He watched as the misty droplets that comprised the shape darkened.
“Smoke from the pit?” Dr. Cummins asked, stepping to one side. “Is the fire still burning?”
The object seemed to widen, to expand, to include her new position. She did not bother to move again.
“I don’t think it’s smoke,” Mikel said, stepping toward it.
“Dr. Jasso, what are you doing?”
“It’s going to reach us eventually,” he said, and sniffed. “I don’t smell anything. If it were from magma or a fire, there should be some kind of noxious content.”
“And if it’s not? You talked about something burning below.”
“She didn’t smoke,” he said.
Mikel was about forty yards from the pit with the forward end of the mist about half that distance away. He stopped and studied the new phenomenon. As the shape moved, he saw that the ice softened beneath it: a slick gloss covered the surface wherever it moved.
“There’s something sentient in that, isn’t there?” Dr. Cummins asked.
“Why do you say that?”
“Didn’t you see it move when I did?”
“Any number of things could cause that,” Mikel said. “My guess is it’s moving toward the distant light. You happened to block it.”
“What makes you think that?” Dr. Cummins asked.
“Because there’s another one forming on the other side of the pit,” Mikel replied.
Dr. Cummins spun her head in that direction. “They’re both heading toward the distant glows.”
“And I’m willing to bet there are clouds heading from there to meet them.”
“Christ, what have we opened here?” Dr. Cummins asked. It was the first time she had lost her scientific detachment.
“Not us,” he said. “We were just the witnesses.”
Dr. Cummins got back in the cab of the truck and tried the engine, then the radio, then the computer. Everything stayed dead. The mist was still moving forward, a slowly surging, narrow wave. About five feet in diameter the shape was becoming round, like a pipe, yet it undulated forward almost like a worm. It continued to darken but the sunlight played against it oddly: amid the charcoal gray that comprised it were pinpoint facets of light, rippling like sun on the ocean.
Mikel resumed his slow walk toward the shape. He heard his boots crunch, then he did not. He looked down and noticed that the ice was now liquefying ahead of the object. Maybe that was just residual heat from the fire he’d set… or, he wondered, could those tiny facets of light be producing their own heat?
The front of the “smoke” was now ten feet away. Despite what Mikel had said to Dr. Cummins, he too had the sense that there was something conscious inside, something doing more than just blindly, instinctively seeking something.
“Dr. Jasso!”
The woman had cracked the door and was leaning out. Mikel turned at the glaciologist’s cry. It was far more alarmed than before. He turned, squinted, thrust his goggles back in front of his eyes.
And then, finally, he was afraid.
Each trail of smoke suddenly exploded with light, as though skin had been shed and a radiance released. The glittering facets remained, diamonds amid the golden glow, causing even more melting across the surface of the ice.
His legs weak, his boots failing to find traction, Mikel half walked, half slid across the ice back to the truck. However, he did not hurry. There was no reason and there was no need. Fear was replaced by fascination, which was replaced by certainty.
Mikel Jasso knew he was meant to see this.
CHAPTER 20
Zell was a difficult, quarrelsome man.
He knew it. His lovers had always said so, even when he was young and just starting out on his chosen path. His first had been a woman who made adornments from bird feathers and sold them in the market. Though he was fascinated with the dyes Palu created, he didn’t understand why anyone would wear such things.
“They are lively,” she said.
“They are dead,” Zell had pointed out. “And who wants an ascended bird, if such there is, to come pecking at them?”
His last had been Atak, a man who made charts of the designs in the olivine tiles, claiming that the serpentine patterns had prophetic meaning. He expounded on those in scroll after scroll. Zell didn’t understand how Atak could only study the surface when the bulk of the design was within.
“For the same reason vessels remain on the surface of the sea,” he had replied. “It is what we were meant to see.”
“Meant? By whom?” Zell had asked.
“By the Candescents,” Atak had affirmed.
“Why would they want to keep us stupid?” Zell had queried with attitude.
Lovers and friends and birth partners made no sense, so Zell had given up having them. Minerals and leaves, oils and waters, blood and lava—these behaved rationally, predictably, even when combined. Their uses could be understood, repeated, and the results were enlightening. The natural world made sense to him, and Zell had no reservations about saying so.
His patients frequently resented his brusqueness, his incessant probing, and his argumentative nature, which is why he moved to a situation where there was no choice in the selection of a galdani. Even Standor Qala occasionally had to walk away from him when he grew “insistent,” which was her diplomatic way of saying “stubborn as a flendro.” Zell had always considered that a ridiculous analogy, since he was physically quite different from the burly mountain bulls that were harnessed to liberate fresh lands from beneath ancient ice.
But whatever else could be said about him, Zell was undeniably a master of empathetic energy. He believed that this talent was really what put people off: he tore easily through what they themselves knew—or had to suspect—was weak, merely comfortable reasoning. That was why they got so angry at him.