‘If we had a boat, and if the tide was going out, I’d chance it,’ I said.
‘If,’ said the Fool, and snickered. I looked at him in shock. He looked terrible, and it was not just the blue light. He took his pack from my arm and sank down on the wet steps with it. For a moment, he hugged it to him as if he were a child hugging a beloved doll. Then he opened it and rummaged to the bottom for the flask of brandy. He opened it and offered it to me first.
I took it, weighed it in my hand, and then drank no more than a quarter of it. It was the same apricot brandy that he had brought to the little house that Hap and I had shared. I swallowed the warmth of a summer day, and then breathed out through my open mouth, tasting apricots and friendship as I held the flask out to him. He took it from me, exchanging a square of black bread for it. It was half the size of my palm. I sat down beside him, and ate it slowly. There were raisins and nuts in it. It was dense and sweet and small, making me more aware of the hunger I’d been ignoring. We ate slowly in silence. After I’d licked the last crumb off my palm, I looked at him. ‘Up?’ I said.
‘It won’t lead out,’ he told me softly. ‘Think about where we are, and the legends we’ve heard from the Outislanders. This is where they came in under the ice to see the dragon. That little winding staircase must go up to Icefyre. Why else would it be there?’
‘Maybe it goes up and out,’ I said stubbornly. ‘We won’t know until we try it. Maybe that other, wider way goes to the dragon. That would make more sense.’
He shook his head. ‘No. The dragon must be above us, if you could sometimes see him from the surface. The staircase goes to the dragon. Not out.’ He was adamant. He leaned his head against the icy wall. ‘There is no way out for me. And I’ve always known it.’
I heaved myself to my feet. The seat of my trousers was wet. Oh, good. ‘Get up,’ I told him.
‘There’s no point to it.’
‘Get up!’ I insisted, and when he didn’t move, I seized him by the back of his collar and hauled him to his feet. He did not resist, but only gave me a doleful glance. ‘We’ve come this far together, through the years and over many a path and by-way. And if we are going to end here, under the ice of Aslevjal, then I’m going to see this damnable dragon that made us come all this way. And so are you.’
Is there anything more wearying than shallow steps? Perhaps slippery shallow steps. Nevertheless, we ascended them, and as before, we stayed close to the inner wall and kept our ears perked for sounds of anyone coming our way. We heard the waves growing ever fainter behind us and the random plops of falling drips. Eventually, we reached the place where we intersected with the carved corridor. We halted there, listening, but heard nothing.
I was tired. I was sure we’d gone far past a time when we deserved a night’s sleep. My head felt stuffed full of felt and buzzing flies. The Fool looked worse. We crossed the corridor and entered the stairwell. He followed me slowly up the narrow steps. The staircase wound as it climbed. As soon as its curve took us out of sight of the main corridor, I stopped him. ‘You. Drink the rest of the brandy now. It will warm you and give you a bit of heart, perhaps. In any case, it will do you more good inside your belly than inside the flask.’
‘Can I sit down?’ he asked.
‘No. I might not be able to get you up and moving again,’ I replied heartlessly, but he had already sunk down onto the step. Again he took the brandy flask, opened it, and offered it to me. It wasn’t worth an argument. I wet my mouth with it, and then told him, ‘You finish it.’
And he did, in a single deep swallow. He seemed to take a long time to cap the empty flask and put it away. ‘This is hard,’ he said, but he did not seem to address his words to me. ‘I’m too close to the end. I’ve had glimpses of this, but never clear ones. And now all I know is that I must go on, and that every step I take leads me closer to my death.’ He met my eyes and said without shame, ‘I’m terrified.’
I smiled. ‘Welcome to human existence. Come. Let’s go see this dragon you came so far to save.’
‘Why? So I can tell him I’ve failed him?’
‘Why not? Someone should tell him we tried.’
It was the Fool’s turn to smile. ‘He won’t care. Dragons care nothing for good intentions or failed attempts. He’ll only despise us. If he notices us at all.’
‘Ah! And that will be such a new experience for both of us.’
Then he laughed, and I did, too, not loud, but in the way men laugh when they know it might be the last opportunity to share a joke with a friend. We were not drunk, at least, not on brandy. If the Fool was right, we were drinking the dregs of our lives. I think that whenever a man realizes that, he tries to find every last bit of pleasure in it.
Up we went. The stair wound narrow, and I wondered what madman had carved it. Had there once been a natural feature that someone had ordered into a stairway, or was all of this a sculptor’s icy fancy? We went up. At one time, the walls had been decorated with bas-relief ice carvings, but they had been defaced, probably deliberately. All that was left were bits of legs or a hand in a fist, and once a woman’s lips and chin. I grew to hate the unevenness of my gait, one foot booted and one in an ice-coated sock. When we stopped to rest, I let the Fool sit down. He leaned against the wall, and I thought that he dozed. When I saw the tears creeping down his cheeks, I roused him. ‘There’s no good in those. Get up. We’re moving on now.’
My voice was kinder than my words. He nodded to them and hauled himself to his feet. We continued our climb. Like an unending nightmare, the winding steps went on and on. The pale globes could not light every corner of the twisting steps. Every shade of blue and white that could be expressed took a turn. It was a cold and wearying beauty that we traversed. We climbed more slowly, and then rested together, and went on. It seemed that eventually we must break out of the ice, that it could not go on much longer. Then we came to a level gallery carved in the ice. And the dragon.
A thick layer of ice remained between him and us. We saw him through the distortion and haze, yet even so, he was breathtaking. We walked slowly the length of the gallery, paralleling Icefyre. He was bigger than two ships. His wings were folded to his sides and his tail curled back around him. His head was turned back on his long neck, coiled away from us. We gazed at him in awe. The Fool’s aching heart was in his eyes. The immense sense of the dragon’s life almost overwhelmed my Wit. Never had I been so close to a natural living creature of such great size. Then we came to a crudely-bored tunnel that wormed through the ice toward the dragon’s breast. I stooped and peered into it. It ended in the darkness of the black dragon. I took a breath. ‘Lend me your Elderling lantern,’ I asked the Fool.
‘Are you going in there?’
I nodded slowly, unable to say why I must.