On a white throne under a white roof under a sky greyer than a grandfather’s chin sat Rime IV, spawn of Rime III, spawn of Rime II, spawn of Rime, spawn of the First Frost. It gazed down from its frozen seat at the small thing of tepid water quailing in front of it on a patch of discoloured snow.
“Occupation,” it proclaimed.
The thing flinched, then flinched again at the precise prod of the coldguard at its back. “Your occupation,” it said. Its voice was a sad, high whistle that was all out of place against its craggy, ice-plated bulk. Were it outside you could’ve mistaken it for a random whimsy of the north wind, and in fact many people had, the most recent just under an hour ago.
“Tailor,” whispered the human. His lips were blue with cold, and the word slurred its way past them uneasily.
Rime IV waved a hand. The coldguard did its duty yet again. And all was ready for the last of the prisoners.
This one was peculiar. Its hide was more ornate and elaborate than the others.
“Occupation,” repeated Rime IV.
“Architect.”
Rime IV’s hand halted in mid-wave. “Elaborate.”
“Nel Mos, royal architect to Her Worship, the-“
One of Rime IV’s fingers twitched. The coldguard delivered a gentle admonishment to the human’s spinal column. “Explain your word,” it fluted.
Rime IV waited patiently while the little sloshing thing collected itself.
“Architect. Royal architect. I design, plan, and oversee the construction of structures. Large and small. Mostly large.”
One of Rime IV’s eyesockets swivelled. “Large?”
The human looked around. “Larger than this. By maybe-”
Rime IV’s finger tapped against its knee, and the coldguard’s talons halted themselves an inch from admonishment. “Continue,” it said.
“…by maybe three times. Oppli Cathedral certainly was, and maybe the Ducal Dome of Nolla too. I’ve had maybe seven or eight less commissions maybe twice the size. A baker’s dozen of a kind to it. And fourteen smaller.”
All six of Rime IV’s eyesockets spun once. “And?”
“And what? I mean, this is impressive, for ice, but-”
The coldguard made up for lost time, as gently as it knew how. “How would you improve upon this?” it whistled into her ear on bended knee.
The human took some time to respond, and seemed excessively fixated on the discoloured snow. Architectural speculation, perhaps? “Well. I wouldn’t.”
“Explain,” declared Rime IV.
“I’d start from scratch with a fresh foundation. I don’t fancy trying to renovate this place, not without knowing what went into the blueprints – which I’m not even sure exist.”
Rime IV nodded.
“No, I’d make something fresh. And if this is what you’ve got, then I’ve got a plan.”
“Large?” it inquired.
Nel Mos looked up at Rime IV for the first time since her sudden fall, and bared her teeth in that strange way humans did. “Large.”
Rime IV waved its other hand. The coldguard raised the architect up with as much delicacy as its carapace provided.
“Accepted.”
The tower’s base was to be stone.
“Why?” inquired Rime IV.
“You want to build big, you start firm. The ground here may be frozen solid, but it’s still just dirt and sod at heart, and at the sizes we’re dealing with, it’ll sink. We start with stones, we can make ourselves a nice firm platform to work with. And you give me a place to build, I’ll give you a beacon that’ll shine from here to the other end of the world.”
Rime IV flicked at the scribbles on the sheet before it. “Ice?”
“Farther up, yes. We’ll start with stone, but it’ll all be ice once we’re off the ground. And we can cover up the stone with a façade, if you’d prefer.”
Rime IV waved its other hand. “Yes.”
“Right now… right now what I need is a quarry. I know these hills are good for what I want, I just don’t know exactly where. Do your people have a spot for that sort of thing?”
Coldguards filed into the throne-room, heavy feet clacking on the smooth floor. Six separate limbs seized Nel and raised her to a position of prominence atop their owner’s brow.
Rime IV pointed. “Go.”
By midday, Nel Mos had been dragged across what felt to be half the Wandering Hills, and stood on a ridge above a craggy granite vale of surpassing beauty.
By the hour’s end she’d set half her crew of coldguard to laying out quarry plots.
A half-hour more, and the first test-stone was being carved free of its cradle, a task that took many once-gleaming talons down to dulled nubbins.
Ten minutes past that and she was halfway down a gully and rolling into her shoulders, head hunched to protect it from the pebbles and the cold. Her internal odometer told her that she was nearly half a mile away already, and accelerating. Her eyes, unfortunately, told her that the largest boulder at the bottom of the hill was a coldguard, standing up, arms opening wider, and wider, and wider.
“Unfortunate,” said Rime IV.
Nel Mos managed, with great effort, to make no noise.
It raised itself from the throne, took two steps and was in front of her, a tower of billowing cold. “Explain.”
“I was just-”
“The nearest hearth-fire is twelve days fast-march,” said the coldguard.
“I-”
“Explain.”
“The nearest warm-dwelling is sixteen days fast-march.”
“The-”
“Explain.”
“The nearest warm-town is two dozen days fast-march, travelling through the night.”
“I wasn’t trying to-”
“Example.”
The coldguard hauled up the architect with five claws and reached out with the other. She couldn’t feel the pain, just a strange pressure. There wasn’t even a sound.
“The stone will be hauled. You will be called. You must wait.”
Nel gave up talking as she was hauled away, all her spare breath spent. Her eyes lingered on the little red nub of her right foot’s biggest toe on the cold white floor of the throne-room as it vanished around a corner.
Days later, the architect was dragged to a high ridge from a low pit of cold slush and colder air, lips blue and body almost past the point of shivering.
“Behold,” said a voice next to her, heavy and creaking with glacial weight; Rime IV, not a coldguard. Her eyes – far-sighted at the best of times – were hazed by exhaustion and hunger, but she did as ordered.
The base was complete, or nearly so: a giant disc that could have served as a god’s gaming token. Dozens of coldguard scrambled over it, hook-hands grasping at slabs, scratching out etchings, prodding and goading at the backs of groaning things of compressed snow and hail that lumbered four-legged, burdened under tons of stone.
“Instruct,” it ordered.
Nel Mos took a deep breath and a deeper thought and began to talk. And as she talked, she began to draw in the snow.
By the day’s end, her second escape attempt had begun – on the back of a slushbeast. That night she ran afoul of a cold snap that turned her mount rigid as an oak.
“Unfortunate,” said Rime IV. And it was her right foot’s next-biggest toe this time, snip-tunk, and back to the pit with whatever nourishment could be chewed and scraped from a squirrel frozen rock-hard and stiff as a board. She cooked it inch by inch with the little warmth that could be secured by her pocket-lens, focusing the drab rays of a sun that hid behind grey clouds.
And so it grew on, and on. Time seemed to fly – the tower’s workers never rested, the tower’s builder never ceased her struggles. A level was built – a grand hall, a soaring library, a royal apartment, a solar. An escape was attempted – a dash into the maze of the under-foundations, an attempted smuggling within a load of construction debris, even the futile effort at overpowering a coldguard for its armour with a broken stone carved jagged. And each and every time another toe, another rebuke. All the same end to every story.
“Replacable,” commented Rime IV after the sixth time. The architect knew it wasn’t speaking of the digit that lay upon its floor. The tower was nearing completion
“Not by half,” she shot back. “The base was the easy part, and the floors after that. If the peak isn’t done properly, the whole thing’ll fall over. You need me.”
Rime IV waved its other hand, and she was taken away for her reward. This time it was a litter of mice, and as she felt tiny bones disintegrate against numbed teeth she drew sketches on the wall of the pit. Plans for a funeral, plans for a building, plans for the same damned thing in the end.
Every day it lived in her head, it grew. Ever time it grew, it turned. Ideas shaped into ideas shaped into ideas.
“Large?” inquired Rime IV. Its eyesocket twisted. Nel had decided that was a raised eyebrow.
“Large,” she agreed.
“Elaborate.”
The architect hugged herself absently to hold in the warmth – something she did without thinking now – and stared up at her work, the quickest she’d ever done. Thrice the height of the Ducal Dome. Nearly twice again the highest spire of the Grand Cathedral. The Gidling Spire, plus a third of itself and a nip more.
“The largest,” she said. “Easily the largest I’ve done. Almost certainly the largest ever. And with ice. Would’ve been much simpler with standard materi-”
Her eyes had been on Rime IV’s hands, and so the blow from the coldguard at her back came as no surprise.
“Do not denigrate,” it whistled mournfully into her ear.
Rime IV turned away from its contemplation of the fixing of the tower’s tallest spire. Five hundred turns of its length would be required to fully run the course of its thread, to screw it down firmly enough to fasten in the bolts that would embed it for all time.
“Complete?” it asked.
Her eyes never left those carelessly dangling fingers. “No,” she said.
Eyesocket twist. All the eyesockets. “No?”
“I said I’d build you a beacon, and I meant it. We’ll need more ice, a lot more, and the best you can find. Ice so perfect I can see my heartbeat in it, clearer than air. Ice so polished I can see my twin in it, better than any mirror. Give me this, and you will have your beacon. And it’ll go much farther than the other end of the earth.”
“Acceptable,” said Rime IV, and that was the last she heard for another day.
It was quick. Almost too quick, in the end.
The tower took shape, a shape of slenderness glad in a thousand shards. Mirrors coated it, and translucent lenses filled its guts. Every surface that wasn’t an illusion was invisible, to the point that ever the coldguards trod carefully and with limbs extended. Only the architect knew her way, propelled by that same devious memory that kept her designs fresh in her skull. Under her hands the tower changed, fleshed itself, turned into something that pierced the sky and stared back at it.
And at its base, at its center, underneath a ceiling that opened up to the heavens hundreds and hundreds of feet above, sat a throne of crystalline ice larger than the grandest mansion. And on that throne, all its bulk nearly lost in the immensity, yet precisely tuned to be the center of the eye, was seated Rime IV, spawn of Rime III, spawn of Rime II, spawn of Rime, spawn of the First Frost.
“Complete?” it inquired of the small figure far beneath it, huddled on the floor. A hundred coldguards surrounded it, having liberated it of the last, smallest toe of its left foot just minutes earlier.
“No,” said the architect, speech slurred through a mouth ever-frozen. “There is one thing.”
Rime IV leaned far back in its throne, its tendrils clinking softly against a thousand perfect reflections of itself. “Expand.”
“The last mirror is being mounted as we speak. Above us.”
Rime IV nodded impatiently. “Done.” Its hand rose, the coldguard stirred.
“Wait. One thing.”
The hand halted.
“One more thing. Just one.”
“Speak.”
“The mirror. The mirror’s being placed. And… it has no name. It needs a name. Speak the name.”
Rime IV thought, and unlike its prisoner, its thoughts were slow and cold. It thought, and it thought, and it thought, and at last it stirred in its seat, both of its mouths opening for the first time since its spawning, since its own name had left its maws.
“It. Is.”
It coughed, deep in its chest cavity. Hollow rattling came from within, and it spoke stronger now.
“It is. It is The Tower of the Last Frost.”
“Yes it is,” said Nel Mos, looking up to the sky. “Yes it is.”
In the end all those escape attempts, all those stories, all that arguing, all that tower, all of it paid off. For the very moment that the last mirror slid into place in the highest spire of the highest peak of the Tower of the Last Frost was the same moment as the sun, wits long-dulled by the winter months, chose to herald the first morning of the first day of the spring.
It was not much of a thing, as far in the north as the Wandering Hills were. A fleeting gleam of brightness in the gloom.
But even one instant of light can go a long ways. Up and down and around the tower nearly a hundred times, by Nel Mos’s designs. Up and down and around and through and into itself, doubling on itself, tripling, quintupling, on and on beyond words and into numbers, turning itself from a beam to a blaze to something fiercely beyond any sensations at all, that took one last rise and plunge and dove down from the heights to refract itself in every direction from that crystal throne.
If there was a sense that could describe it, Nel Mos’s weren’t up to the task. All those weeks of cold had left her with a chill that she felt nothing could lift. Still, she found a word for it afterwards, that feeling that entered her as she saw, for a split instant, Rime IV’s expression change and the air turn bright.
Warm.
It was, in fact, twelve days fast-march to the nearest hearth-fire. Fifteen without toes.
But Nel made the trek smiling every last step of the way.