The Ice House Read online

  Cordially,

  Ms Delphine Venner

  She went through her address book and dropped every name that wasn’t a business into the BCC box. She checked her spelling. She hesitated. She clicked Send.

  Delphine sagged back into her chair. A thrill prickled the nape of her neck, as if she had just turned a launch key. It wouldn’t achieve anything, of course. She had received similar emails herself, full of code words: Agenda 21, HAARP, Majestic 12, Nibiru, Derro, Project Grudge. It was like calling out across the sea for a drowned lover – not because you expected a response, but just to hear their name.

  Delphine blinked and lifted her head. Her mobile phone lay on the desk. She groped about for her spectacles, which were folded up in her breast pocket. She must have dozed off. She still had her coat on. Had she been wearing it in the front room?

  Her eyes were watering. God, how long had she been out for?

  She found Martha in the kitchen, sitting in her converted high-chair, watching News 24 with the sound off. It was already dark outside.

  ‘You all right there, old girl?’

  Martha shuffled round to look. Her complicated mouthparts rippled with the slow precision of a loom.

  Rik-ik-ik.

  ‘I was wondering . . . I mean, we don’t have to, but I thought . . . you know, because of everything. Would you like to shoot some faeries?’

  Martha held out her fist. She rapped the table twice. Emphatic yes.

  A hint of wing flashed in the beam of the infra-red lamp. Through the night vision scope, the treetops were a spectral, underwater green, blooming like weird coral.

  The night was moonless, the meadow a wilderness of waist-high, fragrant grasses. Their sweetness tickled her nostrils as her finger settled on the trigger. She swivelled the rifle on its mount, easing the crosshairs towards the tiny figure perched in the old hornbeam.

  The faery stood on tiptoes halfway along a branch, back arched coquettishly, delicate butterfly wings spread.

  ‘I’ve found one,’ Delphine whispered.

  She let the sights settle on the upturned head. Using the monopod felt a bit like cheating, but she hadn’t the strength to hold a rifle straight for more than a few seconds, especially with the scope and the IR lamp. Anyway, her degrading fine motor control added enough of a tremor to make things sporting. The faery’s eyes and wingtips winked.

  In the old serials, snipers became one with their guns. They tasted the wind, waiting, then squeezed the trigger between heartbeats. She tried listening to her heart. She couldn’t feel it, had a crazy panic that it had stopped.

  No, there it was: the angry pounding, the old habit, the boiler room. She was surprised at its vigour. Each heartbeat roared in her ears.

  Martha sat beside her on the mobility scooter. Delphine focused on the T-shaped outline trembling in the breeze.

  The faery fluttered, its eyes burning impossibly green-white. The crosshairs dipped to its thigh then rose towards the face.

  The air rifle kicked gently – ptfff – as the CO2 canister discharged. The sound was like someone spitting into a gutter.

  The faery stayed poised, unsullied, glinting where she and Martha had hot-glued acrylic gemstones from the hobby shop. They had scanned and printed dozens of them from a charity shop deck of faery cards, backing them with cardboard during one of their long autumn crafternoons. She was surprised how many had survived the winter. After a storm she usually found a couple facedown in the dirt, the colour leached from their translucent dresses, their faces a Munchian smear.

  ‘Now just look at that.’ She lowered the rifle. The booze was making her head tingly. With the shush of the trees and the heavy smell of wild grass it could have been any time in the last fifty years.

  She missed the recoil of her old break-barrel spring-piston rifle – the sureness of it. Her body still expected the kick of the mechanism, though the gun had long sat in useless pieces in the attic. She missed the whipcrack report of her Winchester over-and-under, the sweet bacon smell of the spent cartridges and the heat-shimmer rising from the barrels on cold days as she tracked a moving target. She missed collecting unbroken clays on the top field and the clanking, shifting sound they made as she carried them in a cardboard box back to The Pastures. She missed the rustle-click of knitting needles as a dozen wine-red scarabs sat beside their yarn balls, the silent shining pull and plunge of darning by firelight, the spinning and the measuring and the snipping of the thread. She missed Mother’s steady, affectionate gaze when she thought Delphine was not watching, the smell of woodsmoke in Mother’s hair after woofing the fire with the bellows, the way she closed her eyes whenever people sang in church. She missed the framed sketch above Mother’s last bed, Father’s characteristic stark, vibrant lines showing Mother watching Delphine paddle into the sea. She missed doing the crossword together and Mother scolding her if she asked for a word’s spelling (‘You know perfectly well. Just think for a moment.’), the feel of Mother’s hands, soft and slick from the ointment, so swollen that she had to wear her wedding ring on a silver chain round her neck (and she still wore it, right to the end), the smell of dried lavender and a hint of something like soured milk – yes, she missed even that. She missed the thumping in her chest after a long hike, the glowy torpor in her limbs and tingling skin after a sunrise dip in the ocean. She missed sleeping for eight hours at a stretch without having to get up to urinate – or worse, just to lie there with her churning thoughts. She missed watching Daddy smoke as he painted. She missed hot tea and log warmth with her dear lost Henry. She missed knowing what to hate and what to love, and loathed herself for wanting to, for caring, for the grubby futility of it all.

  Martha was staring, eye-glow frosting her crushpincer mandibles. Delphine took a moment, the rifle stock snug in the soft flesh beneath her shoulder.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I missed.’

  Martha took the air rifle. She pressed a huge domed eye to the scope. Her antennae shuddered, tasting the wind speed.

  Delphine unscrewed the cap on her hip flask and took a slug of brandy. ‘Oh, do get on with it. You’re not assassinating de Gaulle.’

  Ptfff. Martha lowered the rifle. She passed it back.

  Delphine peered through the scope. Every time she inhaled, she felt her diaphragm come up against an aching resistance in her solar plexus.

  ‘It’s no good. It’s not the same. Would you be a dear and get out the real one?’

  Martha unzipped the slipcase on the back of the scooter and took out the SMLE. Delphine took the vintage rifle tenderly, running her fingers over steel and English walnut. She put on her head torch and loaded the strip-clip with .303 British. ‘There.’ She handed the filled clip to Martha, who knelt in the long damp grass and pushed the rounds into the magazine. ‘Grab the torch.’ Delphine shoved the bolt forward, chambering a round. ‘Shine it on that tree.’

  The big torch threw a beam like a floodlight. The trees at the meadow’s end danced with a mesh of shadows. Amongst the hooked bare branches, faeries flashed and blazed.

  Delphine licked her lips. The beam wobbled, stabilised. She glanced at Martha. ‘Ready?’

  Martha bopped her fist.

  ‘Right.’ Delphine flipped the safety catch forwards from its little notch in the stock. She squinted at a vague glint in the trees. Lined up her sights. Squeezed.

  A thunderclap rang across the dark field.

  She chambered another round. Squeezed.

  The shot boomed flatly. She chambered another. Squeezed.

  She lowered the rifle.

  Martha shut off the torch and they took it in turns to look through the night vision scope.

  ‘I can’t find anything,’ said Delphine, her ears ringing. Hunting for a smouldering paper frock or a split branch’s raw pale marrow, she found her gaze drawn past the trees, to the bright blob of her house beyond. She imagined she was looking through a submarine periscope. She imagined the strange silent shape with its odd windows glowing spectral green wa
s an enemy battleship. She let the crosshairs centre on its heart.

  A light flickered in an upstairs room. Delphine blinked. The house was still.

  There it was again. Movement. Her bedroom.

  Someone was in the house.

  They parked the scooter a short way from the drive.

  Delphine’s heart was belting. The rosemary bushes smelt pungent and intoxicating.

  ‘Right,’ she whispered. ‘You head in, start switching on lights. That ought to put the willies up ’em. I’ll bring up the rear.’

  She hugged the rifle to her stomach. The gravel was soaked in faint light from the house. Someone was in there, rifling through her memories. Mother’s engagement ring. The little black poplar tortoise carved for her by Father.

  Her heart was doing that funny fluttery thing again. She took a few slow breaths in and out through her nostrils.

  Martha’s eyes pulsed softly. She began to blur and fade.

  ‘Be careful,’ Delphine whispered.

  Martha’s red armoured carapace was a blotchy watercolour, an afterimage. She lifted a black fist away from her smudging body, bopped it twice. A fading shape moved away across the gravel.

  Delphine gazed at the house. Her field of vision sparkled with queer, floating transparencies. She felt the weight of the rifle, the tremor in her knees. Maybe she had been mistaken.

  But she could hit a five-inch target, unscoped, at thirty yards. At night. She knew what she had seen.

  She rounded the mobility scooter and paused at the tangle of bramble bushes that marked the end of the drive. Wind rustled the bare aspens. The sound merged with the metallic warble of her tinnitus.

  She kept close to the hedge, using the rifle as a walking stick. Gravel crackled under her brogues. A good defensive measure, gravel – though she had always assumed that, in a siege, she would be the defender.

  A light was on in the kitchen, and one upstairs. She might have left them on – she usually did. The curtains were closed. She watched for movement, for shadows playing across the fabric. Nothing.

  She heard a noise behind her and glanced back down the drive. All she saw was a flat, shifting blackness. A dark blob seemed to retreat, merging with the bushes. Was she imagining it? Her bad eye made judging distances difficult.

  She reached the cottage’s stone wall and pressed herself against it. Her gaze kept flitting to the clotted blackness of the lane. Oh, pull yourself together. Of course things were moving in the dark. This was the bloody countryside.

  She edged towards the doorstep and peered round the corner.

  The door was ajar. Naturally – Martha had opened it to get in. Through the frosted glass, the hallway was flooded with a sour yellow wash.

  Delphine pressed a palm to her chest, waited for her heart to settle. Had she locked the War Room? Perspiration clung to her brow and top lip. She listened. The old drop-dial mahogany wall clock began striking midnight.

  A dull bang from the kitchen.

  She scrabbled to lift the rifle. Her chest swelled with indignation. How bloody dare they. She clambered onto the doorstep and shoved the door so it swung and crashed against the wall.

  ‘You have ten seconds to get out of my house!’

  She chambered a round and fired down the corridor. The far wall exploded in a shower of brick dust and plaster. She chambered another and stepped into the house. She felt the doormat slip.

  One leg slid out from under her. Her weight shifted onto her opposite leg and her knee gave out. The hallway swung. She threw an arm out. Her palm hit the oak parquet floor, her wrist bent back on itself and she landed on her stomach.

  For a moment, it was not quite real. The floor was a vertical line bisecting her vision. Light seeped down the hall from the kitchen, a smear of greased gold.

  I fell. I have had a fall.

  She breathed in; her ribs pressed against hard oak. Her left arm was pinned beneath her. She could feel her right ankle, snagged on the lip of the door. The rifle lay a few feet away.

  She burned with humiliation. You pathetic, stupid old thing. She tried using her free hand to push herself up, to roll over. A sharp pain flared in her hip.

  She thumped the floor, hard. No self-pity. Pain was just annoying, unsolicited advice. Her hip wasn’t broken, just stiff and bruised. She would have time to feel sorry for herself tomorrow.

  She groped for the rifle. A spasm racked her leg and she bit down, refusing to yield to it. She closed her fingers round the barrel.

  A boot pinned the gun to the floor.

  Footsteps clumped down the corridor. Strong arms dragged her to her feet.

  ‘I’ve phoned the police!’ She was yelling. She would bite them if she had to. ‘They’ll be here any second. There are cameras everywhere!’

  A figure stood in the doorway, tall, whip-thin, dressed in black. A plastic mask obscured their face.

  ‘Take her to the van,’ they said.

  CHAPTER 2

  SWEET AND BITTER WATER

  (One day before the inauguration)

  Just before dawn, Hagar climbed into the cemetery. She was shaking with fatigue. Sea mist clung clammy and grey among the burial mounds and tomb slabs, moistening the brows of horned and cloven-footed smokestone idols. Beyond the cemetery walls, the city of Fat Maw slept, drugged by a jungle swelter, oblivious to its impending ruin.

  She had contemplated the Grand-Duc’s death for nearly 400 years, ever since he had dragged her, shuddering and maggoty, from beneath a heap of corpses and cursed her with endless youth. She did not remember the moment the parasite had entered her body – the moment she became permanently joined to Morgellon, dependent on him. He had not asked if she wanted to receive the honours. She had just been lying there, like an egg in a nest, and Morgellon had plucked her out. With the angel’s guidance, she had taken steps to draw him out of his self-imposed exile. But now, the day before his royal clipper was due to arrive in Fat Maw, she was terrified she might fail to see it through.

  Of course, there was the standard technical challenge of executing a peer. What she was attempting was officially impossible. Morgellon was a peer, and therefore immortal. Like any peer, he could regenerate injuries at a phenomenal rate. She had felt the tip of a parade sword scrape between his third and fourth ribs and puncture his heart during a boarding action near Cape Endurance, grapeshot perforate his gut when a cannon misfired at Namnetum, a ceremonial mace shatter his collarbone in some half-forgotten village during that long summer of burning. Each injury had slowed him down by mere minutes, so the standard prompt, humane methods of assassination were out. Even decapitation – which was rather more involved than the frigid autopsy tables of the Institute had led her to believe, particularly when the subject still lived – was insufficient in and of itself. Complete incineration, dissolution or dissection into fine particulates were the only known permanent measures. Mortifer Bechstein, the notorious ex-Lord Cambridge, had regrown from a severed calf left in a steel mantrap even as the rest of his body crumpled and carbonised atop a hastily constructed execution pyre.

  Secondly, despite years of squalid self-neglect, Morgellon was not weak. The talents that came with his arising had combined with a regal, questing paranoia to make him spectacularly adept at self-preservation.

  Within the perpetuum – a loose and often strained alliance of which all peers were members – he was one of the oldest and undoubtedly one of the best resourced, his territories encompassing the continents of Gallia and Albion as well as colonial possessions, of which this one, Avalonia, was undoubtedly the most valuable. He commanded armies and local garrisons, constabularies and networks of informants.

  His innermost circle of bodyguards served fixed one-year terms, drafted from barracks across his empire via a clandestine lottery system of Hagar’s devising. They were not told the nature of their posting until they arrived, kept isolated from the outside world throughout their service, and well-remunerated on discharge. The arrangement appealed not to their love of
the Grand-Duc, but to their pragmatic self-interest, and in this, Morgellon was wise. He had many enemies, both beyond and within the perpetuum. Open conflict did not suit the peers’ self-image as enlightened immortals, possessing, as it were, an unseemliness that belied their claims of divinity. On the other hand, proxy wars, assassinations, and all flavours of subterfuge were tacitly accepted (with the proviso that one must not get caught) as part of the natural order. After all, the best proof of one’s right to power was the ability to retain it. Loyalty was the most contemptible of the virtues, and the most easily counterfeited.

  Thirdly, any assassination attempt was complicated by her relationship to the Grand-Duc: Morgellon was a peer, and thus experienced no pain. She was his servant, and, like all handmaidens and valets, she felt pain on her master’s behalf. If she drove a dagger between his shoulder blades, she, not he, would feel its point parting skin and muscle. If she shot him through the head, she would experience a blinding white agony and lose consciousness, and when he recovered, her treachery would be exposed. If he died permanently, so would she. That was the beauty of the honours system. The servant could not live without the master. Treason was suicide.

  Still, formidable though these problems were, they were not the source of her fear. She had spent decades planning how to achieve the impossible. The Grand-Duc’s arrival tomorrow was her best, last chance to kill him.

  What gave her pause – what saw her trudging here now, amongst the stupas and bone-cluttered family vaults, reeling with doubt – was the thought that, in the critical moment, she might shrink from administering the decisive stroke. Even with so many lives at stake, she might blench, she might collapse, because in setting him free, she would lose him.

  The realisation came in a creeping, freezing wave. For so long, Morgellon’s death had driven her, but tomorrow, if all went to plan – if her nerve did not fail – it would be reality. She would have to live out the last days of the world without him.

  Hagar walked past row upon row of graves. Here was her old anatomy teacher, here was the captain of the guard next to his first and second husbands, here was the quartermaster of the Lady Vain who had chewed riverroot and licked her black teeth while looking at seacharts. Incised into each smooth marble ledger was a name: CHARLOTTE ABRAXIA, BRISH KILVAIN II, DERLETH SKARROWMERE.