Invisible Things (22 page)

Tris had proved himself so thoroughly capable of dog-type companionship that she had given up any pretense of containing him in a box or basket. The cat tailed Sophie wherever she went, and found himself a nice warm spot on the ship near the tea samovar; Sophie was impressed at his ability to extract milk from the otherwise fairly hard-hearted cook in the tiny galley.

In a way Sophie was grateful for the seasickness. It stopped her from thinking so obsessively about whether she would find Mikael, and in what condition; what Elsa Blix wanted from Nobel; and whether Sophie would be able to persuade Blix to divulge more about Sophie’s parents. There seemed a significant element of personal danger, but that Sophie largely disregarded. If she couldn’t do anything for Mikael, she was not sure she would much care whether she lived or died. Also, being freezingly cold and extremely queasy was conducive to a stoical sort of detachment about one’s personal survival.

The vehicle that had been sent to meet her in the port was a white sleigh drawn by four white horses, unmistakably the style of Elsa Blix. The driver did not ask to see Sophie’s credentials—indeed, they had no common language, and he drove her in a silence that seemed increasingly ominous as they drew away from town. The horses strained to pull up the steep, mountainous road leading out of Longyearbyen, with only a handful of buildings interspersed through the landscape of rock, snow, and ice. Her stomach settled down a little as they drove, at least so long as she didn’t look over the edge of the precipice.

As the palace of ice came into view, Sophie at first thought it must be a natural feature of the island; only gradually did she come to see it for what it was: the work of human hands. The drive seemed to take forever, and then suddenly there they were at the gates and the driver was letting her off and pulling away without asking whether she would prefer him to wait.

The gatehouse was set into a wall, a glistening updating of medieval-style fortification made out of some material that Sophie could not at all identify but that shared some of the properties of ice. Sophie knocked at the door with enormous trepidation.

The gatekeeper who answered it was small and wizened, so thoroughly bundled up in layers of reindeer fur that one could not discern whether she was skinny or round. She ushered Sophie through the little house and out through another door into a passageway that seemed to have been actually carved through the rock. One half expected it to be lit by torches, but in fact the dim greenish light was emitted from glass tubes that Sophie thought must be some variant of the Tesla lamps (filled with neon or argon) that had been a popular subject of experimentation back at the institute.

The woman led Sophie along as though she must understand very well where they were going and what was about to happen, though in fact Sophie felt utterly perplexed and bewildered. The environment seemed frighteningly remote and isolated, but not in any other obvious sense threatening; it was a palace with no populace, a desert island of the mind.

They seemed to be walking upward at a slight incline, and after about ten minutes’ walk—the cost of excavating the tunnel must have been enormous, even in a part of the world where mining was almost as much a natural human activity as talking or sleeping or breathing—the path began to level out.

They came to a door of brushed steel or something similar, with an artificially lit combination lock of a type that Sophie had never seen before. She edged toward it to see if she could get a closer look, but though it was really just pure disinterested curiosity, it made the gatekeeper shove her away and utter a cloud of reproachful words, standing between Sophie and the matrix of the lock so that Sophie couldn’t at all see what she was doing, let alone what numbers she pressed.

The door swung open, and Sophie moved through the portal and found herself in the most amazing room she had ever seen. It was a glorious high atrium, like the nave of a cathedral, and everything—walls, floors, what little furniture there was—was made entirely of ice.

“What on earth . . . ?” Sophie said to herself. To be alone in this enormous place . . . She felt like the last person alive.

“Amazing, isn’t it?”

The voice came from behind her.

At the far end of the room, a white column of a figure had appeared and was gliding toward Sophie. It was the Snow Queen, Elsa Blix herself, dressed in a sort of mantle of white fur and almost as beautiful as the gleaming ice around her, which was subtly lit with a blue and purple and pink radiance that reminded Sophie of the nighttime illuminations at the Tivoli Gardens.

“Things have worked out better than I hoped,” said Elsa Blix, “and with a symmetry, even an inevitability, that I scarcely could have imagined.”

“What do you mean?” Sophie asked, though she had an inkling.

“I took your friend Mikael in nothing more or less than a fit of pique,” said Elsa Blix, sounding more meditative than Sophie had expected her to. “Little did I know that he would prove the perfect bait for the fish I really wanted to catch. . . .”

Sophie’s heart began pounding, and she had to stop herself from turning and beginning to run. Suddenly she felt too cold and tired to be afraid. She was filled with the conviction that Mikael needed her
now
, not after a lot of palaver about Elsa Blix’s elaborate schemes and weapons and peace and whatever it was about Sophie’s personal history that had led to her getting caught up in this absurd narrative featuring world-historical players like Niels Bohr and Alfred Nobel and Elsa Blix herself.

“Where is Mikael,” she said roundly, “and is he all right?”

“Your friend is in grand health,” Elsa Blix said in that strange hoarse voice she had, “though you may find him a little colder than the last time you saw him—but he has come along very nicely, I think.”

“Might I see him now?” Sophie asked.

“You shall see him but not speak with him,” said Elsa Blix. “You and I have business to discuss before I will release him from his bonds.”

The thought of Mikael in cuffs and chains filled Sophie with horror. What if Elsa Blix changed her mind about letting them both go?

The Snow Queen showed no sign of moving, and Sophie said nervously, “Can we see him
now
?”

Elsa Blix laughed. She was an outrageously beautiful woman—every slight gesture or turn of the head was arresting, and her charms made Sophie want to hit her.

“The impatience of youth!” she said lightly, her words irksome in a way that paradoxically brought Sophie back to herself again. She could smell the wet wool of her jumper and feel the supreme itchiness of the skin on her calves, which over her weeks of northern travel had become dry and scaly to a potentially madness-inducing degree. She surreptitiously bent down and gave the left calf a good scratch through the layers of clothes, Trismegistus twining quietly through her ankles.

It occurred to her that the pads of his paws must be very cold, but she did not want to draw attention to him by gathering him up in her arms.

“Come,” said Elsa Blix, holding out a hand to Sophie.

Sophie grimly kept her own hands at her side. She was not the hand-holding type, and of all people in the world the one she least wanted to hold hands with was Elsa Blix!

The ice maiden let her hand drop after a moment; she seemed untroubled by Sophie’s rudeness, and Sophie thought again that one of the most sinister things about the woman was her ability to remain unruffled.

They left the great ice chamber through an arched doorway of sorts and began climbing an elegant curved staircase, its individual risers made from blocks of ice glimmering with color; the overall effect was highly disorienting because of the lack of windows, which meant that one could not tell whether one were above- or belowground, in a cave or a mountain aerie.

They passed along a corridor of ice—was the place built newly again every winter, Sophie suddenly wondered, or could it be maintained year-round?—and came to a chamber that seemed to be separated from the corridor only by a thin curtain of clear glass beads hanging on strings.

“Go ahead,” said Elsa Blix as Sophie put forward a hand to push the strings apart and see what was on the other side. “Nothing will hurt you here.”

With this encouragement, Sophie used both hands to pull apart the curtain of beads. There was no further physical barrier, and yet in every other respect, Sophie could not have been more certain that she was looking at a prison cell, and that the figure under the heap of furs on the bed in the corner—the bed, too, was made of ice!—was Mikael.

“Mikael!” she called out, falling to her knees beside his bed and putting her hands on his cheeks.

But he slumbered on, his chest rising and falling regularly, his face pale and his features more like marble than anything living.

“He can’t hear you,” said Elsa Blix.

“Have you drugged him?” Sophie asked, her heart pounding with outrage and worry.

“He has been given a mild sedative,” Elsa Blix admitted. “Nothing serious—only what you might take yourself if you had trouble going to sleep.”

“Why hasn’t he escaped from this room, then?” Sophie asked. “Those beads can’t be the only thing keeping him here!”

“You’re not wrong, Sophie,” Elsa Blix said in that hoarse, gentle, infuriating voice. “It happens that the gas he inhaled during the attack at Niels Bohr’s party rendered him peculiarly susceptible to certain hypnotic techniques. Some people are far less vulnerable than others to the effects of that particular drug. You, for instance, do not seem to have suffered any ill effects, though I imagine you must have inhaled as much of it as Mikael did. To you, this curtain is nothing more or less than a wall of beads that can easily be brushed aside. But to Mikael, the fourth wall of this room is exactly like the other three: solid ice. No more would he imagine he could pass through it than you, Sophie, would think you could fly through the air under your own powers.”

Sophie turned and stared at her.

“Did you set off that bomb at the Mansion of Honor?” she asked incredulously.

“I did not,” said Elsa Blix, “but I designed the weapon’s prototype, and sold it to the Germans, so I was not surprised when they used it as part of a preliminary preparation for the invasion.”

Sophie pulled back the scratchy wool blanket covering Mikael’s body and felt his hands; they were as cold as one might expect, and she began chafing them between her own hands to try to warm them up.

“Come, Sophie, you will have plenty of time with Mikael later,” Elsa Blix said briskly. “For now, I need you to prepare yourself to hear things of which your knowledge at present, I suspect, remains quite partial and imperfect.”

“Things to do with my parents?” Sophie asked, feeling treacherous for allowing her desire for more information about them and their fate to overwhelm her scruples about communicating so freely with the person who had kidnapped her dearest friend.

Elsa Blix smiled.

“Yes, Sophie,” she said, “that and more—but we will have something to eat first, and a drink of cocoa—you would like that, wouldn’t you?”

In fact, Sophie was hungry and cold enough that she would have welcomed even a hard heel of moldy, stale bread and a cup of hot boiling water, let alone a cup of delicious cocoa. The story of Persephone was strong in her mind, though. Persephone was trapped in Hades for six months of every year for her
whole life
because of her own failure to withstand temptation in the form of the six pomegranate seeds whose consumption tied her forever to her captor. A woman who had developed the chemical compound that had transformed Mikael was a woman from whom one should not even consider accepting refreshments!

“Nothing to eat or drink, thank you,” she said now, shaking her head. “The full story, please!”

“The full story—ah, Sophie, you are an idealist after all, not the funny little pragmatist I was led to expect. Can there even be such a thing as the full story?”

“Who have you been talking to about me?” Sophie said suspiciously.

Elsa Blix laughed. It sounded like the ringing of a bell, and Sophie hated her more than ever.

The room they had now entered had a beautiful array of food spread out on a low round table set between two great chairs, to which Elsa Blix led them. The chairs, which almost deserved the name
thrones
, were made not from ice but from a fine-grained dense wood that felt as hard and cold as stone.

Sophie planted her hands firmly on the armrests so that she would not accidentally reach out and eat something absentmindedly. There were beautiful berries of kinds that Sophie didn’t recognize, and biscuits that looked like a very delicate and delicious form of shortbread, and slabs of smoked fish and sliced cucumbers and rye bread covered with poppy seeds and a silver jug of cocoa next to a bowl of whipped cream with a pretty little silver spoon to serve it with. None of it had any smell, though, Sophie realized a moment later, and she hardened her mind and her stomach.

“You’re sure you won’t have anything to eat?” Elsa Blix asked.

She poured herself a cup of cocoa—the cups and saucers were made out of a delicate, almost translucent porcelain glazed with white-on-white snowflakes—and lavished a huge dollop of cream on it.

Sophie’s stomach growled involuntarily, and the tiny twitch of a muscle in Elsa Blix’s cheek made Sophie suspect that the Snow Queen found Sophie’s stubbornness amusing. She hoped she would be able to get away from here before too much longer—she had some ship’s biscuit and dried fruit in her pocket, but she was not sure how long it would hold her.

“No, thank you,” she said politely.

Elsa Blix selected a chocolate from the tray of sweets on the table. It was decorated with a crystallized violet, and when she had taken a delicate nibble, it could be seen that the cream inside was a faint violet also, or perhaps it just reflected the light in the chamber.

“It is long since time for Alfred Nobel to have departed this world,” she announced. “He knows it himself: he has been alive—if one can call it that—for over a hundred years, and he exists in a haze of guilt and self-reproach at the fact of his being temperamentally unable to cut the cords binding himself to life. But one thing must happen before he is ready to go. . . .”