‘We should get inside,’ Finnla said.
‘I must go to the Monster!’ Bily cried.
‘Very well then, ride and I will run!’ Finnla said, and there was a wildness in her smile as she caught him up and swung him onto her back. Bidding him hold tight, she dropped to all fours and began to run, moving at an astonishing speed through the swirling white world between rows of domed huts and over small bridges strung with swinging chains of lanterns.
When they reached the mist-swathed Temple pool, Finnla stopped at the steps and lifted Bily down. He thanked her, noticing to his surprise that the pool was now crowded with Monks of all ages.
‘As I told you, when the ice blizzards come, most prefer to take to the hot pools for company as well as warmth,’ Finnla said. ‘I will bathe myself, now that I have got you here.’
‘Aren’t you coming in with me?’ Bily asked.
‘I was not asked and no one enters the Makers Temple who has not been summoned with the knowledge and permission of the wise,’ she said. ‘Ishla will be waiting inside.’
Bily mounted the long wide steps. He felt suddenly reluctant to go into the Temple, though he could not have said why. Perhaps it was simply that, because of the mist, he could not see the top until he reached it, and then he saw that the four great pillars holding up the roof ran up into further whorls of mist. Peering through the columns, Bily saw an enormous doorway. He looked back down the steps, but could see nothing. It was as if he had entered some strange world lost inside the mist.
Bily gathered his courage and passed between the pillars, but he stopped on the threshold of the doorway. It was bigger than the biggest Monk would need, and he wondered if it was built for Makers. The thought frightened him so much that he had to force himself to go through it. The hall he entered was dark and curved out of sight, but there was light somewhere ahead. He padded along the hall towards it, passing more enormous open doorways leading to darkened rooms either side. It was very quiet and terribly cold and when he looked back, he could no longer see the front door, though he could still hear the muted keening of the wind outside.
‘Bily!’ Ishla’s voice boomed, making his heart jump with fright.
The big she Monk was standing just ahead, holding a lantern. Bily quickened his pace, noticing that the healer was wrapped in a thick cloak. It was no wonder, for it seemed to Bily that it was colder inside the Temple than outside. Approaching her, he saw there was another dark doorway beside her.
‘Finnla said the Monster is awake,’ Bily said.
‘I am sorry,’ Ishla replied. ‘The Broken Prince did wake, but he fell back to sleep. The wise were able to speak to him, and assure themselves that he truly is the Broken Prince. He asked for you.’
‘I got muddled coming back from the Long Pool,’ Bily said. ‘What did the Monster say about changing its . . . his metal?’
‘He said he would allow it, but first he wanted to speak with you. That may be because there is no telling what effect it will have on him.’
‘I don’t understand,’ Bily said. ‘You said it would stop him having to obey the Makers commands when he went back to the Velvet City.’
Ishla gave Bily a long look.
‘What the wise would attempt is no small thing, little healer. It is dangerous, and they have made sure the Broken Prince knows that.’
‘But he won’t die?’ Bily said.
‘Unlikely,’ Ishla agreed. ‘You see, it is his mind they will be dealing with. That is where the Makers metal is embedded, and a mind can be hurt while the body stays healthy.’
‘Hurt,’ Bily echoed.
‘In order to reach the Makers metal, the Makers machine must be guided on a delicate journey through the brain of the Broken Prince. If they make a mistake, he may forget some things, or everything, for a time or forever, and he might be affected physically, because it is the mind that moves the body. He might be unable to speak, or his sight may be affected, or he might be unable to walk.’
Bily felt sick, but he only asked, ‘Can I see the Monster?’
‘I will take you to him,’ said the healer, gesturing to the darkened doorway. ‘Perhaps your presence will rouse him again, or at least let him sleep more serenely.’
‘He is sleeping badly?’ Bily asked, following the healer through the empty room and into another very large room lit by a number of dim lanterns. This too was empty save for a round mattress upon which lay the Monster. Ishla went across to him and held the lantern up so that they could peer into his face.
The Monster writhed and growled softly, but did not wake.
‘It is dreaming,’ Bily said. He, Bily reminded himself, and suddenly he could not see for tears.
‘His dreams torment him,’ Ishla agreed, when the Monster’s paw twitched and twitched again.
‘Can I sit with him?’ Bily asked.
‘Yes, little healer,’ said Ishla, laying a big, gentle hand on his shoulder. ‘I think it will comfort him to have you close by, for his first waking thought was of you. That interested the wise, for as a rule Listeners care only for their own kind and for the Makers. It seems to us that the love the Prince has for you grew in the broken place. I will return in a while.’
Bily climbed onto the round bed and, when Ishla had gone, he put his arms around the Monster, kissing his head and loving him, because that was all he could do.
Somone tapped Zluty hard on the cheek with a cold finger and he opened his eyes.
It was dark and he was lying flat on his back on the frozen ground. The air was chilly and damp with mist he could not see. There was another hard tap, this time on his forehead, and he winced even as another struck his neck. Belatedly, he realised frozen coldwhites were beginning to fall.
That alarmed him, though he could not quite think why. His head hurt terribly and that made it hard to think. He tried to remember where he was and what had happened, but his last clear memory was of sitting in a coldwhite cave listening to the blizzard roar and keen. But even as this thought came to him, he had a fleeting memory of racing directly towards the mountains, hauling the vessel behind him. Had that happened or was it a dream?
He forced himself to sit, and groaned as a spike of pain shot through his head. His arm hung limp and hurt horribly. He knew at once that he had broken it, but how had it had happened? Had he fallen running and broken his arm?
Getting to his feet, he tried to hold his arm so it would not swing. His head spun and he staggered slightly, dizzy and sick to his stomach. But when he straightened, relief washed over him at the sight of the vessel standing a little distance away. A lantern hung between the tattered remnants of the wing portions, giving out a soft halo of light. There had been another lantern hung on the broken pole sticking out the front, but that had gone.
Zluty limped to the vessel, only to find that it had run up against a great chunk of Makers metal half covered in ice. The collision had stove in the front of the hull and buckled the rim so that it was cracked open. This had sent other cracks spidering around both sides of the vessel and under it. One of the staves had been splintered, too.
Judging from the position he had woken in and the bump at the back of his head, Zluty guessed the vessel had smashed into the Makers device when he was pulling it, wrenching him off his feet. He had fallen hard, breaking his arm and knocking himself unconscious. It seemed impossible that the ice blizzard had turned away at the last minute, and yet it must have done, for he was alive.
He bent to look at the hull more closely, thinking that he could still pull the vessel along carefully if he could get the staves off. Then he realised he could not possibly manage it alone with a broken arm. Bending over had made his head spin and he had to hold onto the vessel to steady himself.
He thought of the diggers then, and a horrible, cold finger of dread ran right down his spine to the tip of his tail. They always rode at the front of the vessel, but there was no sign of them. He went around to open the door and get inside, and the feeling of dread deepe
ned.
They had vanished, just as Bily and the Monster had done. Was it possible the giant beast that had taken Bily and the Monster had returned to take the diggers? But if so, why leave him behind?
He shook his head and the pain made him stagger. He sat down hastily, fearing he would faint, and a fleeting memory came to him of Flugal desperately calling his name. Then there was another awful memory of being trapped in the ground, but that could not be real.
As to the diggers, the most likely thing was that they had awoken and gone looking for the ice chasm the memory scents had shown them. It made perfect sense, and yet he could not believe they would simply leave him lying on the ground. Unless they had not seen him.
He forced himself to his feet and looked out of the vessel to see if he could see the dark bulk of the mountains. He knew they must be close because of the fleeting memory of running towards them, but the mist was so dense and hard coldwhites were falling ever more thickly. He got his staff to steady him, climbed out of the vessel and walked around it in widening circles, trying to find the diggers’ tracks before the falling coldwhites covered them.
Then he heard the distant eerie howl that he had come to think of as the hunting call of the ice blizzard. Every instinct screamed at him to leave the vessel and get to the mountains or die. He forced himself to be calm, and went back inside the vessel to push the firemoss into his big forage bag. Carefully, he slung it over his head and positioned it to hang under his injured arm. He pushed the bee urn into it, then lifted his broken arm and rested it atop the urn. Finally, he took up his staff in his good hand and got out of the vessel.
Trying not to panic, he squinted into the windy darkness. He could see nothing. He did the only thing he could do. He set off in the direction the vessel was pointing, pulling his hood about his face to protect it from the falling coldwhites, which were beginning to mingle with sharp ice flowers.
He longed to run every time he heard the muted shriek of the ice blizzard, but he would likely have fainted. He was hungry and cold and his head pounded with pain and fear for the diggers and for Bily and the Monster. But in the end, all of these things, even the grinding pain in his arm that had moved up into his shoulder, were nothing to the torment of growing thirst, for he had forgotten to bring water. After a time, he could think of nothing but getting a drink.
He stopped to scoop up some coldwhites into his mouth and his mind cleared. He realised he ought to have reached the mountains long ago if he had been going in the right direction. Too late, he had a vision of the vessel spinning sideways when it hit the ice chunk.
He stood up, the pieces of ice he had put into his mouth like cold, dry pebbles on his tongue as he turned in a slow circle. A sick dread crept into his heart, for there was no way to know which way to go. Thick white mist swirled on all sides. For all he knew he had been walking in circles from the moment he left the vessel. He ought to have stayed with it. Jammed against the Makers device, it would have offered some protection from the ice blizzard.
He tried to think what to do now, but his head hurt so much. He heard a strange vibrating sound and a deeper snarling whine. It was louder than before. Closer. He broke into a staggering run, ignoring the pain.
O Bily, he thought. Help me.
He stumbled over something in the ice, and that was what saved him. He fell hard to his knees, and cried out as the impact jarred his broken arm. For a moment, there was such a blaze of pain the world turned red and fiery, then a strong gust of wind swirled, and the icy coldwhites and the mist parted. He saw by the soft glow of the skystone on his fallen staff that it was sticking out over the edge of a cliff!
Zluty shuffled forward on his knees to the staff, grasped it and stood up. The wind gusted violently, and Zluty saw that he was not on a cliff, but on an icy ledge overlooking a vast white swath of cracked ice floating on a sea of darkness. And he understood. ‘I have come to the end of the land,’ he whispered, and knew that he was doomed, for the ice blizzard was behind him and there was nowhere to hide.
‘Bily!’ he whispered as he heard the roar of the ice blizzard and waited to feel its claws.
The mist swirled and parted again and through it he saw shining green eyes coming towards him out of the flying whirl of darkness, from beyond the edge of the world.
Bily was dreaming of someone screaming when Ishla shook him awake, saying Seshla and the Great One had returned.
‘Zluty?’ Bily had asked, rubbing his eyes.
‘They found him, but he is hurt,’ Ishla said, glancing at the Monster.
Bily felt as if ice water had been thrown over him. He kissed the sleeping Monster, who had shown no sign of waking, and leapt to his feet. ‘Where is he?’
‘Finnla said Seshla took him to the healing hut,’ Ishla said. ‘We ought not to be moving about while the ice blizzard . . .’
‘I have to go to him,’ Bily said firmly. ‘I can find the way.’
‘Don’t be a fool,’ Ishla said gruffly. ‘I will go with you, but it will take us time.’
As they made their way through the Temple, the healer explained that they would need to feel their way along ropes that had been strung out along all of the paths, in case anyone needed to move around the settlement. One look at the white maelstrom outside the Temple doors was enough to tell Bily why ropes were needed and why they must wear special thickly padded cloaks to avoid being hurt by the sharp-edged ice flakes.
It seemed to take forever to reach the healing hut, but at last he was inside, and there, exactly where the Monster had lain, was Zluty, looking small and pale. His arm lay at a horrible angle, but other than that Bily could not see any injury.
‘It is his head,’ Ishla said. ‘We think it is cracked. That is very dangerous. We cannot wake him.’
Bily hardly heard her for the roaring in his ears. He went to the side of the mattress and knelt to look into his brother’s dear face. Zluty’s cheeks were so white that it looked as if there was no blood in him, but when Bily bent to kiss him, Zluty’s eyes fluttered and opened.
He blinked and blinked as if he could not focus, and then his eyes fastened on Bily. He frowned. ‘Are you a dream?’ he asked.
‘I’m here,’ Bily said in a gasping sob, only realising as he spoke that he had been holding his breath. ‘You are safe now.’
He glanced up at Ishla who was beaming and nodded encouragingly.
Bily looked at Zluty. ‘I was so afraid for you.’
Zluty made a strangled sound. ‘You were . . . were taken by a beast and . . . you were afraid for me?’ Then his expression changed and his eyes widened, showing wonder and confusion and fear.
‘Bily . . . I came . . . to the edge of the world, and there was a . . . a black sea with ice floating on it, and a huge creature with green eyes came out of it . . . It opened its mouth and I thought it was going to eat me. But . . .’
‘It was the Nightbeast,’ Bily said. ‘It is a she, and she saved you. She was looking for you with her rider, Seshla. It was she who took the Monster. I could not let him be taken so I jumped after him.’
‘I was so . . . so frightened when I came back and you were gone,’ Zluty said, and now tears ran from his eyes to soak into his fur. ‘It was my fault, because I ought to have woken you and told you the diggers had figured out where the Raincage was. They said it was close . . . Oh Bily . . .’
Bily could hardly bear his hopeless jagged weeping. ‘Zluty, dear. What is it? What is the matter?’
‘The diggers . . .’ Zluty managed to say. ‘I don’t know what happened to them. I woke up and the vessel was broken and they were gone . . .’
Bily felt a stab of shame that he had not even thought of the diggers.
‘We will find them,’ he said.
‘How?’ Zluty asked. ‘There is an ice blizzard and there was no shelter. If only I could remember what happened . . .’
Bily stroked his ears and said firmly, ‘We found one another, didn’t we, and who would have imagined that was possi
ble? All the blizzards and the dark miles and the mountains and the ice maze, yet here we are, together again and safe.’
‘Like two hands,’ Zluty said, and for the first time, he managed a smile.
Zluty sat on a stone with his cloak wrapped around him, gazing into the dark waters of the Long Pool and thinking that you would never guess it was warm if not for the faint feathers of mist floating over its surface.
He was waiting for the Nightbeast to return. She had gone out again, riderless, to swim. The ice maze had become one vast sheet of ice, now, thick enough to support even her great gliding weight, save for the passage she kept open by swimming it. She had promised Zluty that she and Seshla would go to the mainland to search for the diggers as soon as it was safe. But though there was now a break in the ice blizzards, after they had come thick and fast one after the other for weeks on end, Ishla had explained that during this lull, which the she Monks called the Cold Eye, the sky crack lay directly overhead and the Makers had devices that would let them peer down into the Hidden Place. The Monks had to show themselves to be perfectly obedient to the Makers rules. He and Bily had to wear their cloaks with the hood drawn up at all times outside the huts so the Makers would think they were younglings. Zluty especially must be careful because of the brightness of his yellow fur.
‘For all of our sakes, we must not rouse the Makers suspicions,’ Ishla had warned.
Zluty had obeyed all of the rules and strictures of the she Monks, not only because there was good reason for them, but, as Bily said, it would have been churlish not to do so when they had rescued him from certain death. Zluty knew that he would have died if the Nightbeast had not spotted him from the water. It shamed him that he had fainted at the sight of it, though Bily insisted loyally that he had been exhausted and injured so it was no wonder.
Zluty could only marvel afresh at Bily’s courage, for he had not fainted in fear at the sight of the Nightbeast, but had leapt onto the paw of the Monster so that he had been carried away with it into the mountains.