Shattered: The Iron Druid Chronicles, Book Seven (14 page)

“The Olympians are engaged on our side. Had you acted earlier, they never would have been.”

“Are you saying you could not have recruited them on your own?”

“That is what I am saying. Again, human agency is required. For some actions we need a plea for intercession.”

“Forgive me, Inari, but that sounds faintly ridiculous. I now gather that you are part of a consortium of gods working together. Ganesha is one and I know there are others. At least one of them is omniscient and capable of finding me wherever I am, regardless of my cold iron aura.”

“Correct.”

“So then you
are
capable of acting together without human agency.”

“No.”

“Loki is hardly acting at the behest of humans. Nor is Lucifer or Iblis or any other deceptive deity you wish to name.”

“True, but that does not disprove my point. The darker powers are fundamentally different. They were conceived from the beginning as free agents to sow chaos and behave in their own self-interest. But about deities such as myself, humans believe differently. They believe that we follow rules and so it is true. Their faith is a fence we cannot climb. In the normal course of events we are confined to ministering to our own people. But, in this case, our collaboration was specifically urged by a singular human who has faith in us all. Someone you know.”

“Who?”

Inari tilted her head to one side and said, “Do you remember Rebecca Dane?”

Memories of warmth do nothing to combat the cold; they only distract me from the work that must be done to keep from freezing. Had Atticus not taught me the binding to elevate core temperature and do the same for Orlaith, we would have frozen to death by now.

The yeti are not in their cave when we arrive. Though we follow the directions Atticus provided, I have to locate the cave using magical sight, since the yeti have thrown up a veil of snow over the entrance. To the naked eye, there is nothing to the mountain but snow-covered rock, but Fae eyes reveal the whorl of magic around an entrance ten feet tall and at least as wide. It lets Orlaith and me pass through, and what greets us inside is not a natural cave; it is more of an indoor palace—not hewn, but obviously made by the Himalayan elemental in accordance with Manannan Mac Lir’s instructions. I discover this once I cast night vision and see the stone table against the left wall with three candles and matches on it. I light them all and then take one with me as I step deeper inside, all the while calling out in
Old Irish, “Hello? Anyone here? I brought you some bacon,” operating on the theory that there are few sentences more friendly than that.

The entrance opens onto a long rectangular hall with stone counters lining it on either side. These have plenty of additional candles on them, and I light them as I walk along the left wall. A rectangular fire pit, recessed in the ground but rimmed with a lip of stone, lies closest to the entrance. It has a spit crossed over it and various iron grills, pokers, and tongs arranged alongside. I would bet that those pieces were made by Goibhniu but Manannan never told him where they would be used.

On the counter opposite me, across the pit, five stone plates sit with a fine dusting of snow on them. There are also a couple of large serving bowls and a platter waiting to be filled with food. I see giant three-tined forks but no knives.

Proceeding deeper into the hall, lighting it as I go, I come to a beautiful five-sided oak table, carved with bindings of health and harmony around its edges. Creidhne’s work, no doubt. The high-backed chairs, too, are oak, no arms, but proportioned for very tall and very wide people. Something akin to a polished marble chess board sits in the middle of the table, but there are forty-nine squares instead of sixty-four. It’s a fidchell game, the old Irish version of chess, and the pieces are miniature ice sculptures of remarkable beauty. Parts of them are clear ice, parts are purposefully cloudy, swirling through the forms in thin ribbons, and parts on the surface are a frosted blue, creating additional depth and texture and reflecting light in unexpected ways.

Much larger sculptures of similar artistry sit on the long table lining the opposite wall. Five representations of the Tuatha Dé Danann, at least two feet tall and finely detailed, stare at me with—
ahem
—cold expressions. I recognize, from left to right, Flidais, Manannan Mac Lir, Brighid, the Morrigan, and the Dagda. An interesting selection of the pantheon: hunting, the sea, fire and creativity, the Chooser of the Slain, and a god of fertility. The Dagda’s inclusion is curious for a group supposedly incapable of reproducing. I theorize that the yeti are praying for
bounty elsewhere—amongst the animals they prey upon, perhaps. I wonder if the statues are unmelting and bound with water magic, like the ice knives, or if they are made of mundane ice. I smile at an idle thought: What would an unmelting ice sculpture of the Dagda, hand-carved by a yeti, bring at one of the New York auction houses? I suppose the identity of the artist would be most difficult to establish.

I wonder why their mother never taught them to worship the Æsir—or, if she did, when they converted.

A high arched passage beckons to more rooms beyond. I feel hesitant, however, to stick my head through it.

“What do you smell, Orlaith?” I ask.

“You mean like old people?”

“Huh.” The news worries me but fits with the thin coating of snow I see around the room, little lines of white powder tossed about by the odd circulation of air. It does circulate, somehow; there must be vents scattered about.

Leading with Scáthmhaide and triggering no ambush, I step carefully through the arch and discover a twisting hallway, which leads to the left and curls around clockwise. To the right is a door, barred closed with a plank of wood on a hinge, crossing the jamb and fitting into a bracket. Checking it out in the magical spectrum, I perceive no bindings that might be booby traps. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a mundane trap attached to it, though. The staff serves me well again; using the end of it, I flip up the plank from its slot and thereby free the door. It puffs out a smidge but doesn’t open, and nothing dangerous leaps out.

“Smell anything through there?” I ask Orlaith.

Her nose is on target, for it turns out to be a room full of firewood, oak and birch and juniper—hauled up from who knows where, since we are above the tree line. Cords of it, stacked and waiting, fuel for the fire pit in the other room. Where is the food? Another door, through the fuel depot, provides the answer.

The room is bigger than the dining hall we first entered, and it might be the world’s largest natural walk-in freezer. Carcasses of boar, yak, and musk deer hang from hooks—hooks made of solid ice, which droop from the ceiling like frozen scorpion tails. A butchering station, notable for its lack of anything sharp, offers evidence of past activity but shows no signs of recent use. A hole in the floor, presumably for refuse, tells me nothing except to watch my step.

I scan the room in the magical spectrum to make sure I’m not missing something important, but fail to see anything beyond the impressive provisions. There are no other doors, so we retrace our steps back through the wood storeroom and out into the hallway. I follow its curling path, asking Orlaith to report on anything she hears or smells that would indicate we are not alone here. While I am still worried about possible traps, I no longer think the yeti are home. I hope, however, that I will find an ice knife somewhere that I can borrow.

The hallway reveals five bedrooms and a sixth room that serves as a bathroom. There’s no plumbing, of course; it’s simply a hole in the mountain. But the bedrooms reveal a bit more about the yeti. The rooms themselves are simple cubes of space where solid rock used to be, but the furnishings—a bed, table, and chair—are crafted entirely of ice. Furs are piled high on each of the beds, and more rest on the seat of each chair. But the styles of the furniture vary widely. Four of the yeti have tried to outdo one another with whorls and patterns in the ice, but one of them must value simplicity or feel incapable of competing against the others, for everything is of the clearest, most translucent ice I’ve ever seen.

Each room also contains three rectangular blocks of ice attached to the walls like paint canvases. These have been carved or etched or bound in breathtaking fashion, revealing new surprises depending on what angle you look at them from. The exception is the canvases of the Zen yeti: One ice painting is entirely pale-blue frost, another is clear with a cloudy white circle off-center to the right and a smaller blue circle nestled inside
of that, and the last is a white expanse with nothing but a clear horizontal stripe running across it about a third of the way down from the top.

And in the midst of this wonderful dwelling made of rock, water, iron, and wood, the one thing that does not belong is the iPad sitting in the middle of the Zen yeti’s bedroom table. It’s an old model, but the gray plastic and silicone rectangle is an artifact of our time, our world, an anachronism in a place that shows no other sign of technology beyond the Iron Age. Somehow its presence is sinister to me, a tumor ready to metastasize and attack all life. That’s a silly notion, of course, for the only life here is my hound and me, and a single iPad is unlikely to turn into Skynet all by itself, especially without WiFi or a source of electricity.

I check the iPad and am unsurprised to discover that it’s dead, its battery drained and no method available to recharge it. What did the yeti see before the device died? Could that explain their absence somehow? More likely the yeti took it from a human mountain climber as a curiosity and its presence is of no significance.

“Whichever yeti calls this room her own,” I tell Orlaith, “she seeks peace. I hope we meet her first. If we meet them at all, that is. I’m sorry to find it empty.”

“And mystery. Where have the yeti gone and when are they coming back?”

“It’s a hierarchy of need, isn’t it?”

I smile down at my hound. The concept of a hierarchy does not translate well into emotions or images without a need to worry about one’s place in it, and the word is meaningless to her.

“Yes, I suppose we might as well have a bite since we have to wait.”

“I hope not.” I’m already worried that I’ll never find them. “Are any of the smells more recent in here?”

The problem with Orlaith’s assessment is that she, like Oberon, has tremendous difficulty with concepts of time and numbers. Old, to her, might mean anything from years to a matter of days. The point might be moot—what I really need to know is when or even if the yeti will return—but I want to have a more accurate idea regardless. I set my weapons and the package of bacon on the table, strip out of my clothes—shivering despite my raised core temperature—and bind my shape to a black jaguar.

After a sneeze, I smell something like ape and woman and honeydew, frosted flowers floating brittle over old resentments and bones of frustration, gnawed on and discarded but not forgotten. I smell the furs and the tanning oils used to make them, and, more faintly, I note wood smoke and ash from fires put out days ago and lingering scents of cooked meat and grease.

Leaving the Zen room and padding down the hallway to the main hall, I intend to take a good sniff around the fire pit and try to figure out how long ago it was last used. Orlaith follows me, tail wagging.

I answer her mentally in the jaguar form, idly wondering if I sound different to her this way.

Though I’m no expert, my best guess is that the pit was used a couple of days ago, not a very long time at all. Orlaith must think
old
means anything past a nap or two. But if they were here a couple of days ago, the yeti’s absence is easily explained by a hunting trip or … I don’t know, maybe they ski? Or thought they could use a vegetable side dish and went down the mountain to get some broccoli?

Shifted and dressed, I haul wood out of the storage area, along with some kindling, and use a candle to ignite it in the pit. A wide, yawning hole in the ceiling above the pit—unnoticed before, while I was more worried about what might be waiting in the hallway—acts as a chimney, and no doubt its egress is well disguised on the mountaintop.

I grab a musk deer carcass from the freezer and then thank all the gods below that Atticus isn’t around to see me try to spit it. We cooked a lot of things over open flames during my apprenticeship, but we never actually put anything on a spit. It’s an awkward business, and I realize that the movies never show you the spitting of raw meat. They always show it to you when the job has already been done and it’s almost ready to eat. Orlaith, sensing that I’m upset about my flailing incompetence, is so sweet that she tries to make me feel better.