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‘Snow,’ said the Wizard. He was shouting, to be heard over the rush of air. ‘Ice. You’ve surely not seen them before.’

‘Galioshe had a refrigerator, in the village,’ Tighe replied, calling loudly to be heard. ‘I’ve seen ice. Never so much though. Wizard – is that truly the top of the wall?’

‘What?’

‘Is that truly the top of the wall?’

The Wizard shook his head. ‘Can’t hear you. Hearing not what it should be’

‘I said – can that truly be the
top
of the
wall
?’

‘Go and find out,’ he said, ‘then I’ll show you what I’ve come for. Come to the very end of the earth for; quite apart from wishing to escape from my Lover.’

He stepped forward and Tighe gasped. There was no ledge on which to step, not even a slender crag. But instead of falling, Tighe saw glinting filaments of silver snake out of the Wizard’s palms and feet and anchor into the sheer curving wall of ice. He started moving up and west, like a bug on the wall. ‘Come along,’ he called.

With his throat contracted and his chest pulsing with excitement, Tighe stepped forward off the Wizard’s craft. Threads flew out from his gloves and from the boots of his outfit. The next thing he knew, he was fixed to the side of the wall, the ice close enough to chill his nose and eyes. He shouted
out with joy. When he twitched his arm muscles to move, the filaments adjusted, and he shifted to the side.

‘Easy, isn’t it,’ called the Wizard, pulling himself past Tighe a little below with easy motions of arm and leg.

‘I’ll go to the top of the wall,’ shouted Tighe, joyfully. He thought of adding
I’ll escape from you, for at the top of the wall I will see God
. But there was no point in prolonging his dealings with the Wizard. If there were unanswered questions, God would answer them for him. If there was no God on the top of the wall, then at least he would know.

He began hauling himself up and sang out in pure delight at the speed with which he started up the wall. Craning his neck back, he couldn’t judge just how far he had to climb. There was a sense of the wall curving back away from him. He had always expected the top to be a clear, flat edge; a right angle away from the rest of the wall. But it made a kind of sense that the wall did not have such a sawn-off look, but rather curved over.

He hurried upwards, expecting at any time for the sheer face to start to curve over to the flat. After a few minutes something came into view; a shining beacon of some kind. Snow flurried around him briefly and the ice made the end of his nose go numb. But surely the beacon was a marker that the top of the world was near-by.

As he approached, he saw that it was another silver craft, just like the one possessed by the Wizard. He shimmied up past the spindly legs and the bulging hourglass shape of the body. Then he saw another human being. With a sense of dislocation, mixed in with a sort of disappointment, he saw that this was the Wizard.

‘How did you get here?’ he shouted, breathless with the effort of the climb. ‘How did you get here so quickly?’

‘But I’ve not moved,’ said the Wizard. ‘You have – you’ve climbed right round the world. I thought you said you understood my explanation.’

‘The top of the wall,’ insisted Tighe. ‘It’s just up there – it’s almost within our reach. I’ll go again!’

‘No, no,’ said the Wizard, ‘we have not got all of the day. My Lover is near-by and I don’t like being away from my craft when he’s prowling through the air. Come: I’ll show you why I came here.’

It was so cold that he looked absurd in his skimpy clothes. But he didn’t seem to mind the chill. He pushed with one hand and a crag emerged from the ice wall like a board of wood. It was white, but seemed to be made of metal rather than ice. The Wizard stepped on to it.

‘Be careful,’ he said. ‘It’s slippy. Frosty.’

Uncertain, Tighe stepped on to the platform. The Wizard was fiddling with a panel that had emerged, and suddenly a man-sized hole irised into existence.

‘Well,’ said the Wizard, looking briefly at Tighe. ‘Come through, then.’

He stepped through. Tighe looked around him. The silver bulge of the Wizard’s craft stood out briefly against the bright blue sky and then a grainy mist of fluttering snow obscured it. He reached up and rubbed the chilled end of his nose with the palm of his gloves. The cloth felt warm to the touch; that must be how he was being kept warm in the chill of the ice world.

Then he stepped through.

He emerged into a hollow space, groined with metal and – apart from the flat metal floor – arched and circular. It was perhaps fifty yards from side to side and twice that in length. Along the sides near the entrance were parcels; many almost as large as Tighe himself. Further along the metal floor was bare. The Wizard himself was fishing in an open metal box on the right, bringing out an assortment of things.

‘What place is this?’ gasped Tighe.

‘My little storeroom,’ said the Wizard. ‘Impressive, isn’t it? I wish I could claim I had dug it all out myself, but the truth is I deposited some machines and they dug it for me whilst I travelled elsewhere. Still, you can enter it from either side – it goes right through the world! Imagine that!’

Tighe stepped forward and felt the odd sensations he had felt before, inside the Wizard’s craft, in strengthened form. He felt as if he were leaning backwards, bent in the middle. It was freakish: as if he were folded about his waist, with both his torso and his legs leaning sharply backwards. He kept looking down at himself to reassure himself that he wasn’t, but the sense of positioning was too strong. He hunched himself as far forward as he could, but it was difficult to walk.

‘How comical you look,’ exclaimed the Wizard. But his voice did not express much amusement.

‘What are you looking for?’ asked Tighe. He reached forward with each leg in turn, but the closer he got to the middle of the strange ice cave, the sharper the sense of being bent in the middle became.

‘Oh, supplies. Some electrical things. A bit of food. Need more food now, now that you’re here. This side of the cavern is food, don’t you see. That side is something else. I do believe my Lover has not yet discovered my little cache, which rather surprises me. But if he had I suppose he would have taken it all away.’

He looked up. ‘Go to the exact centre of the room. There are some delicious experiences there.’

Tighe couldn’t walk any further. He sat down, and began inching along on his behind. He felt wrong, queer inside. It flashed upon his brain that he was upside down, crawling along the ceiling. As he moved he got lighter and lighter. The floor, which seemed perfectly flat when he first came into
the space, now sloped down away from him. With a cry of fear, he turned to scrabble back to where he came from, but there was ice on the metal floor and suddenly he slipped.

Before he knew what was happening he was in the air. He fell. The room swung about his head. He saw the silver metal of the floor sweep past, missing his head. The white roof swept past. The floor again.

‘Wizard,’ he called out, scared, ‘what’s happening?’

‘You’re falling, young warrior,’ called the Wizard.

Tighe twisted in midair and got a better view of his position. He was circling through the air, following an arc that echoed the larger curve of the roof. The Wizard, upright against the silver floor, swept past and past his vision.

‘Try to control it,’ suggested the Wizard. Tighe couldn’t see if he was looking at him or not. It seemed that he was rummaging in another box. ‘Spread yourself and fly like a kite.’

‘But there’s no wind!’ Tighe complained. He followed the advice, though: putting his arms by his side and his legs together. His kite training was still there, inside himself. He tried to angle himself inwards. With a lurch, the angle of his spin tightened; he was now going round much faster, in a smaller circle. He felt sick. He abandoned himself and kicked furiously with his legs. There was another lurch and he felt the logic of the world – or gravity – redefine itself around his midriff. His legs felt dissociated from him.

He was still spinning, but now he was rotating about an axis that was his own belly-button, as if strapped to a circling wheel. The floor was several yards away from him, but it seemed an arbitrary point, not down. His head was up but so were his legs. ‘Help me, Wizard!’ he called.

‘You’re at the centre of the world,’ called the Wizard. ‘To all intents and purposes.’

‘Help me. I feel dizzy. I feel sick.’

Something thread-slender gripped his leg, and with a jerk Tighe was pulled away: it felt as if he were being pulled sharply up, but when he came to rest he was sitting on the strangely curved-but-flat metal floor at the Wizard’s feet. One of the filaments that came out of the Wizard’s palm was wrapped around his ankle.

The Wizard loosened his filament and drew it back inside his palm. ‘A nice adventure?’ he said flatly. ‘Do you understand my explanation now, young scholar that you are?’

Tighe shuffled along the floor away from the Wizard, towards the other side of the room. He felt profoundly disorientated. His stomach was still spinning. ‘What happened to me?’ he demanded.

The Wizard turned his attention back to the box through which he was
rummaging. ‘You can never find the one thing you want, can you?’ he said. ‘You think you know where it is, but you never know.’

For several minutes he searched through in silence. Tighe sat, trying to calm himself, to breathe slowly. He didn’t like the way his breath spored out of his mouth in puffy white clouds.

On the other side of the room were square and hexagonal boxes. On Tighe’s side the parcels were lumpy, bulgy, like sacks filled with vegetables and frozen solid. Tighe turned and examined the one nearest him. With a start, he realised that it was a human being. He reached up and with the warmth of his palm he cleared the layer of frost from a face. A blue-white set of features revealed itself: clenched lips, shut eyes. There was a black dribble from one nostril.

‘Wizard!’ he squealed. ‘Wizard!’

‘What?’

‘These are people! Dead people, all frozen, over here.’

‘Yes,’ said the Wizard, and chuckled his raspy high-pitched chuckle. ‘That was what I wanted to show you. A fair number of people have visited the East Pole, but few have visited it and lived.’

Tighe, alarmed, tried to stand up, but the weirdness of this odd room was too much for him and he staggered, overbalanced and fell again. He managed to get himself up to a sitting position, and in that posture he shuffled over to another individual. It didn’t take long to clear the frost from this one’s dead face. It turned out to be a pale-skinned woman. Or at least Tighe thought she was a woman.

‘Who are these people?’ he asked.

‘They? Some are family, so to speak. Others are just people. Only people. Nothing to worry about.’

‘Family?’ hissed Tighe, horrified. ‘People?’

‘Well, yes. Harvest, so to speak. They grew what was required and it didn’t work out, or there was some problem. But I was able to salvage something worthwhile from many of them. The others – well, assorted individuals. One or two are explorers; people who made their way further east than anybody else.’

‘You killed them?’

‘Well,’ said the Wizard, scratching his leather face, ‘I can’t take the credit for all of them. Many just died of the cold. Without that suit I’ve given you, my precious, you’d die too. But, yes, some of them. They’re only people, my ice-prince. Only family. None of them are actually
us;
none of them are Lovers.’

‘Lovers,’ echoed Tighe, looking around in horror.

‘Talking of which,’ said the Wizard, turning his attention to his box, ‘we can’t spend all day here.’ He continued speaking over his shoulder. ‘I hoped
you’d be impressed. One of the advantages of the material I put in your head is that you won’t be as disabled by conscience as many would be. Think of the freedom I have given you! I impress myself, actually. It usually only results in a more or less severe series of mood swings and disorders. But you seem perfectly level, perfectly placid. I’ve perfected things sooner than even I thought I would.’

Tighe, listening to the Wizard without really understanding what he was saying, moved amongst the frozen bodies. He found one with a skin as dark as his own. His eyes were open, but the eyeballs were pure blank whiteness, like eyes of ice. Tighe saw that he was clutching something in his lap.

‘One or two were more problematic,’ said the Wizard, still rattling on as he searched through his box. ‘Others were perfectly acquiescent. Funny that. Still, they didn’t die in vain, that’s the important thing. Each step brings us closer to undoing the disaster that has afflicted humanity.’

Rubbing with his glove, Tighe saw that the dead man was clutching a small rifle; one of the compact, short-barrelled rifles that could be held in one hand, the sort that Tighe had seen the Otre carry about. He glanced over his shoulder, but the Wizard’s attention was elsewhere.

‘How do we do that, Master?’ he asked, hoping to keep the Wizard distracted. His mind felt clear.

‘Well, it’s a complicated business, more complicated than your uneducated mind could comprehend, I fear. But we must lay the wall flat! We must lay the wall flat for humanity to be able to grow. That is my plan. My Lover wants the same thing. If we could work together, we could achieve marvels. But he doesn’t trust me, that is the thing. He doesn’t trust me.’

‘What did you put in my head, Wizard?’ Tighe asked. The handheld rifle had almost come free from the ice that held it. Tighe rubbed with the warmth of his gloves.

‘Eh? What? What did I put in your head? Well, I hope you can see how impressive my achievement has been. I hope you can understand it.’

The gun came free and Tighe pulled it out. It was black, with a short barrel and a handle like a horn. There was a trigger like a nipple tucked in at the junction of handle and shaft. Tighe had seen soldiers shoot such devices. He knew what to do.

‘When you were born, a year old or so, I came by your village and inserted my equipment. I put in several things, in a complex of pollenmachine polymers. Think of it this way: I planted my seed, my metal seed, at the base of your head, a little above your neck. That is where your strength comes from, your mental strength. But, like any seed, it takes time to grow, and with something as complex as the integration into a whole living cortex – well, it’s impossible to predict success.’