Revelations: Horror Writers for Climate Action

REVELATIONS

Horror Writers for Climate Action

Edited by Seán O’Connor

Dead Sky Publishing

DEAD SKY PUBLISHING

Miami Beach, Florida

www.deadskypublishing.com

Copyright © 2023

All Rights Reserved

The stories included in this publication are a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of each author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Interior Design by Kenneth W. Cain

For Earth

There is no going back — no matter what we do now, it’s too late to avoid climate change and the poorest, the most vulnerable, those with the least security, are now certain to suffer.

—Sir David Attenborough,

February 2021

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

Sadie Hartmann

1.FIELDS OF ICE

1. Gemma Amor

2.THE WOOD ON THE HILL

2. Clive Barker

3.FEAR SUN

3. Laird Barron

4.NO STORY IN IT

4. Ramsey Campbell

5.THE TOWER

5. Richard Chizmar

6.CARRIERS

6. Tananarive Due

7.THE GUARDIAN

7. Philip Fracassi

8.LOW HANGING CLOUDS

8. T.E. Grau

9.DEAD-WOOD

9. Joe Hill

10.JUDE CONFRONTS GLOBAL WARMING

10. Joe Hill

11.SUMMER THUNDER

11. Stephen King

12.THE MAID FROM THE ASH: A LIFE IN PICTURES

12. Gwendolyn Kiste

13.INUNDATION

13. John Langan

14.LOVE PERVERTS

14. Sarah Langan

15.IN THE COLD, DARK TIME

15. Joe R. Lansdale

16.THE EVOLUTIONARY

16. Tim Lebbon

17.TEENAGE GRAVEYARD WATCHMAN

17. Josh Malerman

18.CALL THE NAME

18. Adam L.G. Nevill

19.BLACK QUEEN

19. Nuzo Onoh

20.SNOW ANGELS

20. Sarah Pinborough

21.MAW

21. Priya Sharma

22.MEAN TIME

22. Paul Tremblay

AFTERWORD

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

COPYRIGHT & PUBLICATION HISTORY

ABOUT CLIMATE OUTREACH

INTRODUCTION

The authors you’ll see in the Table of Contents for Revelations need no introduction. I was invited to do just that by the editor and my friend, Seán O’Connor. How do I introduce Ramsey Campbell to horror fans? Clive Barker anyone? Ever heard of him? How about this, Tananarive Due? I heard that Stephen King guy can write his way out of a paper bag.

This is a joke I could easily run into the ground, and I think I’ve made my point. The table of contents is a guest list like no other and I am incredibly honored to be typing these words. I’ve enjoyed hours and hours of reading words penned by this lot; visited many fictional worlds from their imaginations and fell in love with the characters they have created.

Between them all, I’m sure every literary award you could think of has been won – more than once. So, what I will attempt to do is set the stage for the purpose of this anthology and then introduce the stories represented here by doing what I do best,

Sharing my thoughts, pulling quotes, and urging other readers to join me.

I thought a lot about this introduction sitting in a wicker chair on the porch of a beach house called Wit’s End. When I was a kid, my parents booked a week in this house every year for our family’s one vacation. My sisters and I used to talk about how our classmates and friends took family trips to Yellowstone or Disneyland and how our family just went to Dillon Beach, California every year but honestly, I don’t think we missed out on anything.

This year, my sister and I left our own families at home to crash our parent’s vacation at Wit’s End. We both left California and moved to Washington and neither one of us had been to Dillon Beach since my sister’s bachelorette party over a decade ago.

Flying over California, we could see a wildfire. Brownish, gray plumes of smoke mixing with the clouds and on the land below, a clear line of demarcation between the blackened, charred landscape and the wildlife anticipating certain destruction.

Climate change is one hundred percent why California faces a worsening wildfire season every year. The summers are hotter, the drought conditions longer, and the plant life is dryer making the landscape extra flammable. Most California fires start from lightning or downed power lines during high winds. But people are responsible too.

Fireworks during backyard celebrations.

A cigarette is carelessly thrown out of a car on the freeway.

Campers leaving a fire unattended at a campground.

Growing up in a rural, Northern California town, we never canceled school every year because the air quality was dangerous due to smoke. The power company didn’t schedule power outages during windstorms. We didn’t live under the threat of an evacuation every summer. But these things are common practice now and for the last several years. California is seeing the very real consequences of climate change. This is the way California is now. It will likely get worse.

Everywhere.

Nationally.

Globally.

Unless we do something to radically change our course.

My vision for pulling my favorite quotes from each story serves two purposes. One, to entice you, and two, to create an atmosphere similar to the Academy Awards during the ceremony when clips of nominated movies are shown to the audience. A few lines of greatness to highlight the quality of the film. I hope you enjoy these as they pertain to the theme of our anthology.

The late State of California had yet more dying to do.

CARRIERS by Tananarive Due

Haven’t you noticed that most of the woodland birds are already gone? No chickadee concerts in the morning, no crow music at noon. By September, the loons will be as gone as the loons who did this. The fish will live a little longer, but eventually, they’ll be gone too. Like the deer, the rabbits, and the chipmunks.

SUMMER THUNDER by Stephen King

Among the corpses on the beach, and amidst the audible splinterings of bone behind the seawall of rubble, she understands that this is the way of things here, in this time. This revelation is the worst thing of all.

CALL THE NAME by Adam L.G. Nevill

Things in the City were deteriorating rapidly. There were riots. Disease had taken hold of the lower levels. Famine threatened. Political unrest and misinformation was rife.

FIELDS OF ICE by Gemma Amor

As they walked down the hill Michael smiled a little to himself. Not a happy smile, you understand, but a resigned smile of one who knows what is about to happen, and who also knows that he may do nothing about it.

THE WOOD ON THE HILL by Clive Barker

The question is, do you want to live to see a curtain call. You’re the heroine and if we’re following the original plot, you have an unpleasant reckoning in your near future.

FEAR SUN by Laird Barron

Just now writing something other than his story might well be a trap. He donned sandals and shorts and unbuttoned his shirt as he ventured out beneath a sun that looked as fierce as the rim of a total eclipse.

NO STORY IN IT by Ramsey Campbell

Of course, when a series of dark and mostly unexplainable events occur in the same spot over the course of many years, and most especially when these events occur within the confines of a small town, the spot is inevitably said to be cursed or even haunted – and the old water tower was no exception.

THE TOWER by Richard Chizmar

Hesitantly, Eva looked back toward the beach between the rocks and the water, the imbedded footprints of her and Bryce’s path still evident. The sand was crawling. All of it.

THE GUARDIAN by Philip Fracassi

She slept better in the morning. During the night, when she was alone with the dark, she heard screams coming from the hills above. Could be coyotes. Could be worse. The whispering city never gave clues.

LOW HANGING CLOUDS by T. E. Grau

Somehow it’s easier to imagine the ghost of a tree than it is the ghost of a man.

DEAD-WOOD by Joe Hill

"Rather rude, don’t you think? Destroying a person’s home?

I can’t fathom anything so devilish as that."

THE MAID FROM THE ASH

by Gwendolyn Kiste

It’s a watery place, teeming with all manner of strange fauna.

INUNDATION by John Langan

"I used to be so into the zombie apocalypse. I figured I’d be this hero in a society risen from ashes. Me, the phoenix of the new world order. But the real thing sucks. Because I’m going to die, and I can’t figure out which is more cowardly; resigning to that fate,

or fighting it."

LOVE PERVERTS by Sarah Langan

It isn’t your wound that aches you, makes you want to die, it’s the war.

IN THE COLD, DARK TIME by Joe R. Lansdale

We’re a long time ago, and you’d barely recognise the people who live here right now. But even in its earliest days, humankind was interfering with nature.

THE EVOLUTIONARY by Tim Lebbon

A cool gig, the coolest he’d ever heard of; a man with a paperback and a bunch of dead bodies, if that doesn’t thrill you nothing will . . .

TEENAGE GRAVEYARD WATCHMAN

by Josh Malerman

"Crawling her winding flow along the contours of our village, Black Queen was as beautiful as

she was terrifying."

BLACK QUEEN by Nuzo Onoh

The snow still falls. I can feel its purpose, and I think that if I close my eyes a little, I’ll see the colors hiding in it.

SNOW ANGELS by Sara Pinborough

He’s been given to Maw as a gift and Maw will give us the sea’s bounty in return.

MAW by Priya Sharma

All our apartment buildings, libraries, markets, salons, and restaurants were crammed together, like space was something to be shared intimately with everyone.

MEAN TIME by Paul Tremblay

A charity anthology donating its proceeds to climateoutreach.org seems so small compared to the scale of the problem. But coming together under the banner of horror fiction in a gesture of unity for the sake of awareness and contribution to a solution is better than not doing anything in all. Climate Outreach is dedicated to research, correcting misinformation, educating the public, and centering the climate change conversation around people, not politics.

It’s really important that we keep the dialog about climate change at the forefront of everything we do. Thank you for joining us in making that happen by buying, reading, reviewing, and talking about Revelations.

—Sadie Hartmann

November 2021

FIELDS OF ICE

In the Northern Reaches of a dying land that was once prosperous, a vast glacier sprawls along the floor of a valley between two distinct mountain ranges. The largest mountains in each range sit on either side of the glacier like guardian sisters. One is called Old White, and the other Old Red, named for the colours that burn on their peaks at sunrise and sunset. Old Red has a distinct geology, one composed mostly of sedimentary Ironstone, the surface of which has oxidised and now glows a brilliant shade of crimson when the sun hits it just so. Old White’s peak is perpetually capped with snow. She is taller, and has a more pronounced summit, one that thrusts up into the sky like a dagger jammed between a man’s ribs.

***

Not much is known of the territory that lies beyond the mountains. The barricade of ice that has piled up over centuries between them has prevented the few scientific and geographic teams that have ventured this far north from making much progress in the region.

Those teams did not count Hayder amongst their number.

Hayder does not travel as part of a team. Hayder travels alone. She does not enjoy responsibility. Expeditions that involve more than one person automatically imply an obligation: to protect the well-being and safety of that extra person. This onerous duty interferes heavily with her ability to do her job. Which is, simply, to find things. Hayder is very good at finding things, but only when she is left the fuck alone to do so. She is an archaeologist, one of the few left in the world, and glad for that. Academic scarcity means that she is valuable to the Minister, and valuable to the Keep. Being valued as a person in this day and age is not a common conceit.

At this present moment in time, Hayder hangs from two ice picks jammed hard into the side of a steeply curving wall of diamond-white ice, about two miles in on the swooping, crenelated surface of the glacier. Her boots are wrapped with leather straps that have wicked metal spikes attached to them: crampons. Her toes are bleeding from the impact of jabbing her spikes into the ice wall over and over again. The fortification she is scaling is starting to crumble in the midday sun. She must get to the top before the ice becomes too mushy to let her climb. If she fails, she will spend another cold, miserable night stuck in a deep, cobalt-blue crevasse, and she does not want that. Crevasses are natural traps, and Hayder has heard movement on the glacier at night. She is fairly certain it is a bear, and a hungry one, and she does not wish to present herself as an easy target by spending any more time in the fissure than she has to. Hayder is not enough of an idiot to think that she can fight a fully grown ice-bear and come out of the encounter unscathed.

Hayder adjusts her goggles, grits her teeth, and drags herself higher up the wall. Her foot slips, suddenly, and she finds herself cheek to jowl with the glacier. It is not a gentle dance partner. She hangs there for a moment, too tired to do much else. Her weight is taken by a rope around her waist. The rope is looped through an iron hoop hammered into the ice wall above her head. As she makes progress, she hammers in new hoops and ties the rope off fresh to each one, anchoring herself to the wall. It’s a laborious process. Her arms ache. In fact, Hayder’s whole body aches, and she feels as if she has been pummelled flat against an anvil by a heavy hammer. She is getting too old for solo expeditions, she knows this. But Hayder is stubborn, and motivated.

Because at the end of all this, there lies a prize. The Minister has given her a commission.

Once she has fulfilled it, she will be free.

As she recovers her breath, something in the ice by her cheek catches her attention, a discoloration in the intense blue that she has not noticed until now. She squints through her goggles, trying to see what it is. It is something stuck in the ice, something huge, and brownish in colour. It is frozen in place about five hand-widths away from her face, embedded into the glacier like an air-bubble in a pane of glass. The frozen mass is too distorted to be visible clearly, but she thinks she can make out legs, insectile, clawed. Lots of legs, in fact, and a blurry, distorted sort of head, or maybe it is a carapace, or maybe just a rock. Whatever it is, or was, alive or dead, it has been stuck in the ice for a long time and therefore doesn’t concern her at this present moment. The only thing she is concerned with is getting out of this crevasse and on with her commission. She has many miles of glacier left to cross, and as intriguing as the frozen object is, it is a distraction she cannot afford.

Hayder takes a deep breath, kicks out away from the wall. On the backwards swing, she jams first one foot, and then the other, into the ice, and pushes up. She throws her right arm back, and sharply hammers her ice axe into the wall. She checks to see that the axe has held, steadies herself, and repeats the motion with her left arm, making sure to swing vertically, rather than down. The trick is not to try and dig a hole with the axe, but to drive it in, like it’s a nail being driven through wood. Like most things, it’s about rhythm. Once a person masters the rhythm, the rest is simple enough. It’s also about keeping as close to the wall as possible, to distribute body weight evenly. Easier said than done, Hayder thinks, dragging herself higher. She wonders what the Minister would think of her if he could see her now, red-faced and raw, clinging to a slope like a tick on a goat, short hair drenched in sweat beneath her hat, face already bruised from slamming into the ice. He would most likely find it highly amusing, because he seems to find most things about Hayder amusing, indulging her as one would indulge a favorite pet.

Hayder can put up with his indulgence if it keeps her alive.

***

The Minister summoned Hayder in the early grey hours of one morning three weeks ago, to his private quarters, which Hayder was not too comfortable with. She went anyway, because the Minister was difficult to say ‘no’ to. She hoped he would not try to seduce her again. The last time he had, both of them had come out of the encounter feeling sickened. She had allowed him to paw her a little, but made it clear that she was not in any way enjoying the encounter. He had continued to paw at her despite this, his small, sweaty hands seeking a confirmation that didn’t exist, before eventually giving up, acknowledging that her mind was somewhere else entirely. Afterwards, Hayder had told him, gently, not to be offended.

‘I do not find pleasure in other people,’ she said, carefully avoiding eye contact. ‘Only in my work.’

And her dedication to her work was one of the reasons he kept her around, instead of having her executed. The Minister had a soft spot for Hayder, and probably thought that in time she would see sense, give into his advances.

Hayder was more realistic. She knew what refusal could do to a man, and she knew the Minister’s soft spot could freeze over at any time.

She thought about this as she entered his quarters, situated on the top floor of the Keep. It was with some relief that she found the Minister pacing, fully clothed, back and forth, back and forth, up and down, wringing his hands with impatience, a preoccupied frown upon his lightly powdered face.

‘Where were you?’ He snapped, when she cleared her throat to make her presence known.

‘Sleeping,’ she replied, calmly. One had to be calm at all times with the Minister. His temper was legendary, and Hayder was very well acquainted with it. His tantrums could last for days, with devastating consequences. Once, a key report from the Keep’s Chief Climatologist had been delayed by an hour due to a malfunction in one of the four massive solar pillars that cornered and powered the City. The Minister had executed the Climatologist by locking him in an air-tight glass cabinet he’d had purpose built for such an occasion. He forced the entire staff of the Ministry to watch as the climatologist suffocated, publicly. Then, he hunted down the dead man’s family, stripped them naked, and strung them up around the four pillars by their ankles. Hayder would never forget the sight of the climatologist’s eight year old son, his pale, skinny body twitching and screaming as he hung upside down a thousand feet in the air and tried to fight off a starving carrion-bird as it tore strips of flesh off of him. The bodies hung above the city until the bones were picked clean, and it was at that point that Hayder began to consider, seriously consider, the fragility of her situation.

The Minister grunted, waving away her missing apology. Despite her careful neutrality, not many people spoke to the Minister the way that Hayder did. Most people bowed and scraped, but Hayder had never been one for subjugating herself. While she was in the Keep, she remained courteous and professional, without giving much of herself away. The Minister seemed to respect her for that. It helped that Hayder had made him a lot of money over the years, bringing him the spoils of countless expeditions and excavations without demanding too large a cut for herself. The Minister respected money more than anything on this earth. It was the only thing he thought about, from the moment he awoke to the moment he laid his head upon his fine silk pillow. Money. Riches. Wealth. Resources.

All of which were fast running out. Not just in the City.

Everywhere.

Which, Hayder knew, was why she was here.

She was about to be given a new commission.

And not a moment too soon, Hayder thought. Things in the City were deteriorating rapidly. There were riots. Disease had taken hold of the lower levels. Famine threatened. Political unrest and misinformation was rife. From the Minister’s window, she could see thick plumes of smoke coiling into the sky. The smoke came from funeral pyres. Every morning, at first light, the City burned its dead. Mass cremations were becoming problematic, however, acting as a focal point for an already strained population’s ire. She could hear the distant cries of assembled protestors jostling around the pyres, beating their drums and chanting angrily as their loved ones burned to ash.

‘Rise! Rise! Rise!’ They screamed. Hayder knew it was only a matter of time before they did, surging up through the layers of the City like a tide, flooding the streets and eventually swallowing the Keep whole.

In short, Hayder wanted to get out, before the City imploded.

‘The Pyres will soon become unfeasible,’ the Minister said, following Hayder’s eyes. ‘I do not know what we shall do with our dead then. Our burial grounds are all full.’

Hayder kept quiet. She knew where a good portion of the dead would go: into the Keep’s kitchen, or at least, those bodies that tested as disease-free would. This meant the remains of the elderly, the young, and the malnourished would be recycled, for want of a better word. The meat stripped from the bones and dried, the bones ground to make compost for the Keep’s arboretum, one half of which was given over now to crop production- but only to feed those who lived inside the Keep. Not for the plenty, the starving masses down in the City. How could the Ministry govern if they were as hungry as their citizens? The Keep’s integrity must be protected at all costs, and if that meant cannibalizing the wider population for the survival of an exalted few, then so be it.

It was the main reason Hayder had been eating only freeze-dried synthetic protein packs for the past six weeks. It played hell with her digestion, but kept her conscience clean.

Yes, a commission was just the thing. And, once she was out from beneath the delicate, groping hands of the Minister, she had no intention of ever coming back. Soon enough, he would have more important things to think about anyway, such as the collapse of an empire.

Hayder waited, as was her way.

The Minister stopped pacing, and turned to her. His eyes were enormous and haunted in the low morning light. They were the eyes of a zealot. Hayder remembered a different time, when the Minister had thought of things aside from his own fiscal legacy. When the Minister had valued culture, and history, learning and art, and not just his own skin.

‘I found it,’ the Minister said, interrupting her train of thought.

‘You found what, Minister?’ She asked, cautiously. But Hayder knew very well what. She just wanted him to say it out loud.

‘The Vellum,’ he replied, obligingly, and a slow, boyish smile spread across his features.

***

Hayder reaches the top of the ice wall, drags herself over the lip of it, and rolls onto her back in relief, arms and legs now screaming with exertion. Once she gets her breath back, she sits up, taking off her crampons so that she can stretch out her sore feet. She unties the rope from around her waist and groin, and looks around, working out some kinks in her neck. Everything is blue and white and brown upon the glacier, and Hayder grudgingly admits that ice is a good deal more interesting than she’s given thought to, before. The shapes and colours are extraordinary, and she has to remind herself that, no matter how static the huge stretch of frozen mountain water seems to be, it is in fact in a constant state of movement. Like molten lava pouring down the sides of a volcano, glaciers creep forward constantly. She knows this, but it is hard to comprehend when sitting upon something that feels so solid.

Because this glacier moves quite fast, as glaciers go, it is dirty, much of its surface covered in rock dust and sand that has worn away from the mountains it grinds past. It moves at different speeds in different places, creating ridges and fells, folds and tunnels, caves, crevasses and cliffs. Despite the gravelly top dermis, it is spectacularly beautiful, like an ancient painting Hayder once saw of a melting clock hanging loosely over a naked tree branch: weird, fluid, and improbable. She scans this display with tired, watery eyes, and then freezes. She sees movement to her left, or at least, she thinks she does. It is hard to tell with the way the sun is angled. Hayder frowns. If a clever person was to follow her across this glacier, it would make sense to walk with the sun behind them, so that they could not easily be seen. Hayder’s skin prickles. Who would be following her across the ice? Perhaps it is not a person. Perhaps it is the ice-bear she thought she heard before, tracking her through the night.

Hayder discards this idea quickly. Her instincts tell her otherwise.

She removes her goggles, peering through lowered lashes to try and get a clearer look, but the glare is too great. She puts them back on again. Waits, still as a statue.

There! Definitely movement. The sun obligingly vanishes behind a fleeting cloud. Hayder makes out two shapes, dark against the ice. One tall, one small.

Not a bear. Two people. Trekking across the glacier, following the same path she had before falling into the crevasse.

She is being followed. She chews her lip. Has the Minister sent assassins for me? She muses. Has he learned of my plan?

Hayder is not scared of any would-be death merchants. She has survived four assassination attempts prior to this one. Rivalry and jealousy are rife throughout the Keep, and Hayder’s position as one of the Minister’s pet academics makes her a target for other people’s ambitions.

Hayder is strong and fast, however, and has reasons to live.

She does not think these shadows are assassins. Assassins do not tend to travel in pairs, and they also travel light. The smaller figure seems heavily burdened. Neither of them are particularly nimble upon the ice, nor are they particularly quiet. Hayder can hear clunking and scraping noises as they walk. Assassins do not generally announce themselves quite so noisily.

So who is it? Innocent travellers? Someone from the Keep?

Either way, Hayder does not want to meet them unprepared. She has her ice-axes, but those are only useful for close combat. She much prefers something of a long-range nature.

She crouches, and peers back down over the lip of the crevasse, looking for her pack, which she has left at the bottom. It was too heavy to climb with, so she secured it with a separate rope, meaning to drag it up the slope after her once she’d reached the top.

Hayder clenches her hands, which are sore and bloody from the axes. She starts to haul on the pack rope, pulling the heavy bundle carefully up the wall she has just climbed. Her rifle is in the pack, the barrel of it peeking out of the top flap. It is an antique, like most of the things she owns, but in perfect working order. She learned how to make her own bullets years ago, manufacturing them in her apartment in the Keep as a way of trying to wind down of an evening. She has bags full of cartridges in her pack, and is glad now that she has.

Hayder looks over her shoulder. The couple are much closer now. The weird icy sculptures on the surface of the glacier have warped her distance perspective, making things appear further away than they really are. She curses under her breath, figuring she has maybe five minutes before the couple are close enough to be a threat.

She redoubles her efforts, yanking hard on the pack. Too late, she remembers that she has taken off her crampons. Her feet slip on the ice. Hayder cries out, falling backwards, landing hard on her back and sliding dangerously close to the edge of the crevasse.

Not again! She thinks, frantically, and let’s go of the pack rope, not wanting to be pulled back into the deep blue fissure. The pack drops heavily, landing with a thud. Hayder feels her body slip closer to the edge. She tries to sit up, but the sun has melted the ice further in the time that she has been sitting on the lip of the crevasse, and everything is now glossy and wet under her feet and hands, which scrabble for purchase, failing to find any. In slow-motion, Hayder feels herself slide inexorably over the edge of the large crack in the glacier, gliding over the ice like a wet fish slipping out of a fisherman’s hands. She yells in frustration, twists her body, and grabs the only thing she can in the split second she is given before tumbling back into the crevasse. One of the iron hoops, hammered into the side. Her right hand hooks over it, the sleeve of her jacket catching fast over the hoop’s edge, and she is brought up sharp, one arm stretched out above her head, the other trying to find a hold in the ice wall she is now so reluctantly familiar with.

And this is how Morgan Halligan finds her.

***

Two faces peer down at Hayder as she hangs uselessly by one hand from the small metal hoop. She is stuck. If she lets go, and slides back down into the crevasse, she will not be able to climb out without her crampons and axes. She is, however, dangling in such an odd way that she cannot lever herself up, even though the top of the crevasse is reasonably close. The situation is not sustainable. Her right hand is quickly growing numb, and her grip is starting to fail. The fabric of her sleeve is similarly unable to take her weight, and very shortly it will rip.

The faces above see this, make surprised noises. They belong to a man and woman. Hayder realises she knows the man.

‘Morgan? What the fuck are you doing here?’ She pants, angrily.

The man blinks, and an insufferable smile spreads across his downturned face.

‘Saving your life, it would seem.’

His hand reaches down, grasps the back of Hayder’s jacket, between her shoulders. Another hand clasps around her snagged wrist. Two more hands seize her free arm, and Hayder is pulled to safety. She collapses in an exhausted pile at the feet of the couple. Before saying anything else, she reaches for her crampons, and straps them back on her feet. She has learned her lesson twice over now: never take off your crampons, not while you’re on the ice.

Then she says: ‘I would have fallen barely twenty feet, don’t flatter yourself.’ Her arm aches, having been almost wrenched out of its socket by her fall, and she winces, shrugging and rotating her shoulder in an effort to bring some circulation back. It is a diversionary tactic while she tries to think about what to do next.

Morgan dusts ice crystals off ungloved hands, which look blue from the bitterly cold wind that blows across the surface of the glacier. Why isn’t the idiot wearing gloves? She thinks. That is just like Morgan: to assume that the rules of play are meant for others, and not for him.

‘You’re welcome,’ he says, dryly.

Hayder considers her situation. It is clear that Morgan has been sent by the Minister to spy on her. Morgan is the City’s Chief Geologist, and has crossed paths with Hayder more than a few times throughout her career. They trade barbs frequently in academic council meetings. She considers him a flamboyant arse and a sycophant, but he is also a necessary evil. He, like herself, has the ear of the Minister. It is therefore better to have him on her side than not, in the spirit of keeping friends close, and enemies closer.

Hayder doesn’t have friends, anyway.

She swears inwardly. This is not something she has planned for, but she realises that she should have, because the Minister likes nothing better than to pit his employees against each other. Morgan is here because the Minister doubts her loyalty. This is not a good thing. The Geologist has been tasked with keeping an eye on Hayder in case she disappears with the Vellum.

I knew it was too easy, she thinks. She curses her naivety in thinking the Minister would allow her to carry out this expedition alone. He had merely indulged her request to do, so in order to persuade her to accept the commission. Not that refusing was ever an option, anyway. Refusal means death. Those terms are hard to argue with.

Hayder takes a good, long look at Morgan’s companion while she collects herself. She is an aged, short, stooped woman with a massive pack strapped to her back, although the obvious weight of it does not seem to bother her. Morgan himself carries only a small day-pack. The old woman has bare feet, which on closer inspection are covered with thick, scaly skin, so thick it looks as if she has hooves at the ends of her weathered legs. She does not appear to feel the cold through those rigid soles, and Hayder assumes she is local, a native to the region. One of the elusive Niton tribe, maybe. Or perhaps Clintu. Either way, she is definitely not of the City.

‘Who is this?’ Hayder asks, rudely. ‘A slave? Slavery went out of fashion years ago, Morgan.’

Morgan smiles and shakes his head, unperturbed by Hayder’s sarcasm.

‘She is not a slave. She has a name. She is called Pamuk,