The Ice Runners
In a frozen world, water is everywhere. It stands underfoot for kilometres on end, grey and eternal. But that water is poison — the fallout has soaked into every snowflake over thousands of years, and whoever drinks surface ice ages wrong. Clean water exists only deep down, in old ice that froze before mankind pressed the reset button. They call it ancient ice, and it is paid for like wine: by the millennium, by its clarity, by the fact that it has killed no one in five thousand years.
And because ancient ice is the rarest thing in the world, it is also the most stolen.
Sevra was an ice-runner, as her mother had been, and her mother’s mother. Born into the wasteland tribes, she could cross Nullaterra without a monk’s protection — the corruption did not bite into her the way it bit into a city-dweller, who would have rotted and mutated on the first night of camp. This was the whole foundation of her trade. The city could not fetch the ice itself; its soft inhabitants did not survive the journey alive. So the city paid people like Sevra to bring it in.
The sleds ran on sail. Fuel was too precious to burn on mere movement — every spark of heat meant melted water, and water was worth more than the journey. So the ice-runners had learned from the wind everything the ancients had known of sailing, and a little more besides. Sevra’s caravan was six sleds: tall black sails, steel runners, and in each hold a cargo packed in ice and wrapped in insulating rags as tightly as a newborn. They glided across the frozen sea for days at a time, three hundred kilometres of open white, and the only sound was the slicing hiss of the runners and the wind howling in the lines.
On this run the cargo was unusual. A single block, whole, transparent as glass, quarried from deep in the heart of the northern glacier. Older than anything Sevra had ever hauled. And among the sleds travelled a monk — an archeomonk, silent and faceless beneath his robe — who had come to guarantee that the block was genuine and not counterfeit surface ice. The monk did not eat with them and did not speak, but when they passed the most corrupted valleys, where the air shimmered green, Sevra noticed that none of the crew fell ill. There was something in the monk’s presence that held the corruption at bay. Sevra asked nothing. An ice-runner does not question a monk.
The first two days went well. On the third a sail appeared on the horizon, behind them, and it did not fall back.
Raiders could be known by the track of a runner. Theirs were lighter sleds, less cargo, more sail, built for one purpose: to catch whoever carries something valuable. Renegades from the slums, escaped workers, whole families gone missing from some city sector — the wasteland gathered them all, and many lived by robbing those who knew how to run. A single block of pure ancient ice was more money than they would see in a lifetime, and they were willing to die for it, which made them dangerous.
Sevra ordered the caravan to fan out. On open ice there is no hiding; flight is the only defence, and six scattered targets are harder than one tight column. The raiders chose the outermost sled, the way a wolf chooses the flank. Sevra watched their grappling hooks fly and bite into the runners, watched two craft lock together with a terrible shriek of steel, and watched her driver — an old man named Korp — go at two of them at once with a knife. They lost that sled. Korp managed to leap, and Sevra took him aboard at full speed, but the cargo was gone. The raiders slowed to tear apart their prize, and Sevra let them, because the outermost sled had held no block. It had held ordinary ice. A cunning ice-runner always loads one sled as a false bait.
She thought she had got off cheaply.
She was wrong, but not because of the raiders.
They stopped. That was how Sevra knew.
The raiders, who had taken their prize and should have turned back laughing, ceased to move in the middle of the open ice. Their sails hung slack. And then a sled, a whole sled and the men in it, was dragged down — not toppled, but dragged down — through the ice as though it were not ice at all but water.
The old drivers spoke of it only in whispers. The tribes called it the frost-whale. No one knew whether there were many or only one, which had circled the frozen sea since the Cataclysm. It moved through solid ice the way a true whale moves through water, and it had no eyes, because it did not need them. It heard. It heard the slice of runners, the song of the lines, the beat of a heart through steel. The ice-runners’ only rule was this: move steadily and never stop, for a halted sled is a silent one, and in silence it finds you by the sound you cannot help making. The raiders had stopped in their greed, and the frost-whale had come following the noise their whole chase had made.
Sevra ordered the sails to full. She did not turn to look when the second raider sled vanished behind them, nor did she listen to the sounds carried from there. She drove straight and steady, and her crew held their breath as if it were a din, and the remnant of the caravan, three sleds, slid away to safety with the slow dread of a nightmare run.
The monk did not flinch. That was the worst of it. From beneath the faceless robe came, very quietly, something Sevra had never heard from a monk: a sound that was almost like singing, almost like the calling of a name. And the frost-whale, in the act of dragging down a third sled, turned away. It sank back into the deep. The monk’s voice fell silent. And no one asked anything, because an ice-runner does not question a monk, and now Sevra understood why the monk travelled with them — not to guarantee the ice, but to guarantee its arrival.
They drove through the night and the next day. Three sleds of six. The block whole in the middle one.
At the megacity gate Sevra was paid, and paid well. She had lost three sleds and five drivers, and still this one block was enough to cover everything and leave a surplus besides. That was how much one piece of old water was worth.
She asked — the one time, out of curiosity — where the block was bound. She assumed it would go to some table among the elite, poured for guests like thousand-year wine. The city’s agent laughed at her.
The block would not be drunk. It would be melted and frozen again. Once every five years the Golden League was played, the world championship, and its rink demanded a surface with no clouding from poison, not a single bubble, only perfect, transparent, ancient water. A block that had frozen before man had learned to split the atom, before the nuclear winter had descended, before all of that history — it would be melted and frozen again into a flat sheet, so that on top of it pucks and people could be beaten bloody.
Sevra thought of her five drivers, who had stayed behind on the frozen sea. She thought of the frost-whale, older than any city, and of the ancient ice, older than the whale. The oldest, purest, most untouched thing in the world, hauled at the cost of lives across the corrupted emptiness — and the reason was, in the end, the same as the reason for everything else in this world.
So that hockey could be played on top of it.
She took her money, turned her three sleds back into the wind, and drove for the wastelands. Spring — if it could be called spring — was coming, and in spring the ice was at its most treacherous, and treacherous ice was the only ice on which an ice-runner made a living. She kept the sail full and the runners steady and did not stop once, until she had to.