City of Ice Read Online Free PDF Page A

him. The trains escaped into the darkness as quickly as they had emerged and Boyle was abandoned on his iron trellis, his body conjoined to rock.
    Pushing himself to his knees, he listened keenly to the trains. They had thundered a moment ago and now were gone from view. Soon they’d be silent. That frightened him, made him wary. How quickly they came up, then vanished. He would have to move more rapidly through the tunnel and stay alert.
    Boyle crossed along the catwalk to where the white light shone brightly enough that he could read his train schedule and double-check his watch. The outbound had been the ten-forty, the last in either direction for the night. A mercy. He stepped down a ladder to the tracks and walked deeper into the mountain. The men at the mouth of the cave had directed him into its core. He’d find his best story there, they promised. That’s where the hermit lived, the man known to them as the Banker. Boyle did not go far before spotting a flickering fire, which had to be his destination. He approached warily, mindful of his inner coldness, as though his fright had claimed the remnants of a residual warmth. Close, he called out, “Hello, there! Hello, the Banker!”
    Shadow moved. Out of the campfire a flaming piece of lumber was lifted and upraised as a sword, and a phantom man wielded the weapon and lurched to his feet. Flames swung through the air in haphazard design, then the torch was aimed at the interloper, the flames dancing wildly.
    “Are you the one they call the Banker?” the journalist called out.
    “Who goes there?” a voice shouted back. “Friend or foe?” The torch swished.
    Boyle had to restrain his laughter. He half-expected to discover that he had slipped through a whorl in time, that he was engaged now in a medieval joust. “Friend,” he answered.
    “Fat chance!” the fire-wielding dungeon dweller yelled back.
    “Listen, I write for the papers. My name is Okinder Boyle. Some of the boys at the entrance to the tunnel said I should come down here and talk to you. Do you have a story to tell? Or were they just shooting the breeze, playing a trick on me?”
    Unsure of his answer, so it seemed to Boyle, the man chose to wave his stick of lumber around. “What do you mean, a story?” he asked in a moment.
    “You know, how you came to be living here.”
    “I don’t live here. Only a damn fool would live here. I only sleep here and pass the time, you nut.”
    “That’s what I mean. I can use that sort of detail. I’d like to know your story. Starting with, if I might ask, why they call you the Banker.”
    “Long story.”
    “That’s why I’m here. To listen. Can I come up there?”
    “Well,” the Banker stated, then he fell silent.
    “What do you say?” Okinder Boyle pressed him.
    “Maybe you should come up here,” the Banker suggested, as though the idea had originated with him.
    “I’m climbing up there,” Boyle informed him. He placed his gloved hands upon a cement ledge, heaved himself up, and scrambled onto the catwalk to join the older man by the fire. The Banker had squatted down again, both palms faced toward the flames as he warmed his hands through his mitts. He had returned his torch to the fire. Boyle hunkered down across from him on a board, the small smoky campfire between them.
    “So who’re you?” the Banker asked him.
    Boyle studied his hermit. A full round face, he wasn’t underfed by all appearances. A scruffy two- or three-day beard. Impressive eyebrows and smallish eyes. Under one a scar glowed in the firelight, odd-shaped in that it was almost square, as though a patch of skin had surgically been removed from his cheek. He wore a heavy black wool cap.
    “My name’s Okinder Boyle,” the young man answered. “I’m a journalist.”
    “Yeah,” the Banker reminded him, “I heard all that. But who are you?”
    Boyle was momentarily disadvantaged. “That’s not important,” he said finally.
    “Maybe yes, maybe no,” the Banker