Glacielle Frostweave's Arc

Chapter 4 of 15

Three days after Aflred took the letter, Glacielle went back to the canyon to keep building. She had four days before the scholar's answer arrived. Four days to close the joints she had left open on the upper terraces. She swam down through the dead coral door, pressed her palm to the first cold seam, and started work. She froze two joints before she heard the drone. It came from above, low and steady, the sound of hulls moving in formation. She stilled her hands. The water carried shadows across the canyon rim. Three boats, maybe four, sweeping the reef in a slow line. A surface patrol. She pressed flat against the stone. Her ice dress caught the filtered light and threw it back. From above, any freeze-joint would shine like a signal fire. The walls she had already sealed glimmered in a pale blue lattice across the coral. If a patrol diver dropped for a closer look, they would see the pattern in a heartbeat. Tide-law enforcers followed patrols like gulls followed boats. She could stop building. She could wait them out. But the scholar was coming in four days, and half the upper ring was still open water. An unfinished city was a dead city. She needed cover, and she needed it today. She surfaced at dusk and climbed the shore path again. Smoke still rose from the frostwood cabin. She knocked harder this time. The old dwarf opened the door with the sickle staff already in hand. He looked at her wet sleeves and the frost creeping up her collar. "Back early," Aflred said. "The letter's still walking." "I know. Patrols are sweeping the reef above the canyon. My joints shine. I can't keep building in the open." He leaned on the staff and thought. "You want a shroud." "I want something over the rim that reads as empty water from above. Silt, shadow, anything. I can't cast it myself. The freeze-joints are already taking everything I have." He was quiet a long moment. Then he tapped the ice blade twice against the doorframe. "A drift-veil," he said. "Cold layer above the canyon mouth. Bends light wrong. From a hull it looks like deep nothing. It holds two weeks, then it thins." "Two weeks is enough." "It costs. Not from you. From the water there. Fish will leave that stretch until it lifts." "Let them leave." He pulled his cloak from the hook. "Then we go now. Before the patrols come back at first light." They went down to the water together. Aflred waded to his knees and lowered the sickle blade until it touched the surface. The staff hummed. A pale sheet spread out from the shore and slid across the reef toward the canyon, low and slow, like fog underwater. By midnight the canyon rim read as black nothing from above. Glacielle went back down and picked up her work. She had bought two weeks. She had also emptied a stretch of reef of every living thing that swam in it, and Coralina would notice by morning.