The pole pierced the frozen snow crust so easily that I nearly lost my balance. With a soft whirr, the white masses cascaded down, revealing the icy abyss that had lurked below. I toppled backwards and sat down heavily in the powder snow to avoid dropping the pole that I had spent hours carving into the trunk of a young pine. Around me, the sun reflected off the snow like a polished mirror, a stunning whiteness as far as the eye could see. I squinted, my heart pounding, my breath frozen in dense wisps. The crevasse at my feet exhaled a polar breeze, its unreal blue walls shining like the facets of a cut gem.

It was four days since I had left the foothills and the last trees, and three more separated me from the mines of Ifos. The stream that I had followed as faithfully as possible had finally vanished under a huge glacier, whose uneven surface I was now walking on. What I knew of the mountain was limited to my observation of the Carmians when we had passed through the passes five years earlier, and a handful of dubious anecdotes from my discussions with Jask, one of the mercenaries I had befriended during the waddan campaign against Ac-Pass. This wasn't enough, and this reality became more and more tangible as I progressed.

Before the snow there had been forests, much more than I had suspected at first. I didn't complain about it, on the contrary, it allowed me to build up my meager supplies and to prepare myself for the mountains. Soup mushrooms and snow boletes were growing all over the place under the conifers, so I had filled my pouch (and my stomach) to the brim. The bronze dagger still smelled of resin. I had struggled to hone it properly, but the long stick I used for walking had already saved my life on several occasions. When I had been captured in Ac-Pass, the phalangists had used the same procedure to take me and a hundred other slaves across the carmian Wall in the spring of my thirteenth year. An array of scouts had probed the snow ahead, while the soldiers supervised the laborious march of their spoils of war.

I had been able to cook the crows, of which there wasn't much left, because I had preferred to eat their meat as quickly as possible, to prevent it from spoiling. I had nevertheless kept some of the thinner bones, which had been cleaned and then slipped into the bottom of the quiver. I figured the bones would come in handy if I ever needed a needle. I had found the taste of the birds' meat much less vile than I had expected, and eating it, along with the abundance of sprouts and mushrooms, had restored much of the strength that the illness had drained from me.

The woods had finally become thinner. I had then advanced on landscapes of polished rock during a whole day, painfully going up the uneven trench at the bottom of which was foaming the torrent. Herds of chamois had spied my progress from the cliffs and the gorges had resounded with their alarm whistles. As the icy water paid little heed to the terrain, I had sometimes had to abandon its course to bypass the stone spurs from which it cascaded, and even resolve to do a little climbing. Although I was used to walking in the foothills and their slopes, I had struggled to advance in the maze of cold shale. My equipment had been my main enemy when I had to climb the cracked boulders. I had gotten rid of the boiled leather and the rope that weighed too heavily, hoping that I wouldn't regret it later.

However, despite the detours and the fatigue, I considered myself particularly lucky so far. The weather had been good - even if the clouds were now getting dangerously close - and I had experienced the discovery of the glacier as a real blessing, without which I would have been forced to climb much more dangerous rock walls. As it was, the gigantic ice flow had gnawed a passable path between the imposing ridges of the carmian Wall, a wide, flat path laid between the peaks that I could follow with relative ease. It was certainly exhausting to walk in the snow, and I had to temper my cautious pace by probing the ground ahead, but I was generally sheltered from the wind, and sufficiently wrapped up in my cloak, the dead man's clothes, and my slave's rags that I didn't have to suffer excessively from the high mountains' cold, at least not as long as the sun was warming the peaks. Of course, when night came, it was a different matter.

With temperatures dropping dangerously close to dusk, I had taken the habit of taking refuge under the snowdrifts, in which I dug with the pole and knife and a piece of slate that I used as a shovel. I did this a long time in advance, so that I would never be surprised: in the glacial trench, darkness would suddenly arrive. Even before starting the ascent, I had cut long strips of cloth from one of the blankets, which I used to wrap my hands carefully. During the day, the thick straps were inconvenient and made my every move awkward, and although they allowed me to handle the pole without numbing my fingers, I would have given anything to be able to do without them. Once the sun went down, however, I had to make sure I covered my extremities diligently or they would freeze, one of the vital lessons I had learned from my first trip over the Wall. Curled up in my dens of packed snow, I closed my eyes shivering, sheltered from the biting gusts that sometimes swept over the peaks and would have killed me in the open within an hour.

In spite of the exhaustion caused by the walk - but also by the perpetual vigilance that I had to display - sleep was an erratic mirage after which I had to run constantly. It usually came upon me unexpectedly, when I had struggled so hard that I no longer expected it, busy as I was fighting the dead. The faces of the slaves, their pale and bloated bodies, stained with the dry blood they had spat out, lurked at the edge of fatigue. When I finally managed to fall asleep, suffocating sensations almost immediately tore me from sleeping. The anguish came to prowl then, came to embrace the shape of my soul and of my most secret desires in the quiet darkness of the glacier.

I dreamed of Froggy, and how we had loved each other despite the shackles. Sometimes she wore Brindy's face. Froggy would gasp with pleasure and then inevitably her quiet moans would turn into a cough. She was soon twisting, rotting against me. I would then mate with her dying flesh, but it was cold and poisonous and there was no consolation to be had. I would end up opening my eyes wide in the frozen gloom, my mouth twisted with despondency and horror. Sometimes I doubted I was even alive. At daybreak, I would emerge from my holes to tackle the icy path again, and the light would help me defeat the ghosts.

I came to fear the night more for the tumult it carried within than for the deadly cold that came with it. I worried about my yawning and the strain of fatigue, which in turn crushed hope and morale, which was already low. How could I hope to triumph over the Wall if I was unable to rest properly? Wouldn't it be less painful to go numb, to give up once and for all, as long as I had the comfort of a full stomach? There was no shortage of these questions during the day, but the road was a salutary refuge that allowed me to put them aside as often as necessary. The journey was a simple answer that could stand on its own. Moving on, as long as there was food and warmth and strength left. Banish any hindrance to doing so, and be content with it. To make every span a victory, and consign the rest to oblivion.

I blew on my palms, crouched at the edge of the chasm, and wrapped my reluctant fingers around the pine pole. The knotted shreds of blanket that protected my hands still stuck from the resin. My muscles tightened. I stood up, taking deep breaths of cold air, and studied my surroundings warily, my eyelids narrowed to two slits so I wouldn't be blinded by the light.

On either side of the glacier, the great snow-covered peaks rose in orderly lines, like two processions of needles. On the edges and the steepest slopes, gigantic projections of dark stone sometimes escaped the white coat. At the foot of these peaks the moraine accumulated, the trail of crushed rock carried by the weight of the ice, piled up in disorder and half buried. I had tried to walk there at first, but the progress was difficult and perilous, and I had discovered that it was easy to slip or to get my ankles stuck in the folds of the rock covered by the snow. I had preferred to advance in the middle of the glacial valley, where I figured I was only a tiny point on the surface of the immense basin that separated the mountains. I sneezed because of the sun and set out to circumvent the crevasse.

My feet crunched in the snow, where I sank up to my mid-calf. I walked slowly, in a difficult ternary rhythm that I had finally gotten used to. First the pole, then one leg, then the other, and so on. Suddenly the valley resounded with the curious song of the glacier, a low, deep vibration as it happened dozens of times a day. The roar reverberated through the whole body, from the quivering eardrums to the insensitive toes. Cracking sounds followed, as sharp as thunder. I swallowed and clenched my jaw and fumbled under my clothes for the wineskin, which I held against my skin to keep it from freezing. Then I drank, without being able to get rid of the recurrent feeling of not being in the right place, a hovering uneasiness that had imposed itself more and more, with each step I took towards the south. It was true that I was moving away from the only civilized place I knew in this part of the world, and also that I was undoubtedly running to my doom in the icy labyrinth of the Wall, but there was something else. A disturbing sterility that echoed my own loneliness.

Throughout my journey, I found the crystalline gurgling of the imprisoned gullies, and my progress had also been punctuated by the rumbling of an avalanche that had crashed into the valley from the heights. It wasn't a silent universe, far from it, but since I had been walking here I hadn't heard the voice of any other living being and I hadn't existed in any gaze except my own. The cold rock and snow reflected nothing, not the slightest illusion to hold on to, not a single friendly shadow. I had come to miss the fearful lizards of the pine forests, the vermin of the mining camp, and even the company of flies. I had left a place of death, but I wondered, more and more often, if the asepsis of the glacier didn't frighten me more than the mass grave of the camp. The trench radiated a palpable melancholy. All existence was eclipsed by the frozen gigantism of the landscape and the complaint of ice on stone. In spite of this, I sank into it a little more each day.

The detour robbed me of an hour of light. When I was sure that I had finally bypassed the crevasse, which wound eastward in a network of disparate cracks, I agreed to take a break to eat and quench my thirst again. I stuffed the wineskin with snow when the night came, and even if I didn't like the taste or the temperature, I didn't lack water. On the other hand, my food supply had already been cut in half, and I knew that I would soon have to make the decision to ration what was left. For the moment, my objective was to reach the end of the glacier, which shouldn't be so far away, and then decide from the heights which direction to take. When I allowed myself to think about it, which didn't happen often, I found this plan absurdly optimistic. As I couldn't formulate a more satisfactory one, I was content with it without fooling myself.

At the bottom of the dead guard's boots, I regularly wiggled my toes to make sure I wasn't losing sensation. In truth, I wasn't really worried about my feet, because they were protected by the leather, and especially warmly wrapped in the crumbled wool I had stuffed into the boots at camp. I kept my eyes fixed on the gentle slope of the glacier, which climbed higher and higher, coiled in the stone like an old sleeping snake. Several times the path had turned towards the east or the west, slow meanders of a frozen river.

As my attention wavered between the glittering horizon and the snow I was walking on, I was reminded of little clan tunes that I could sing in rhythm. Questions also blossomed with each stride, anecdotal thoughts that competed for the vigilance I was trying to impose on myself with the handling of the pole. How many miles had I walked, and how many more were ahead? Had another man ever walked here on the same path? Had he made it over the mountains? Was it too late to turn back? My mind wandered, and then my stick sank a little too easily, a little too deeply, and my body suddenly tensed, ready to jump back.

Some time later, I strayed from the middle of the valley in search of a promising snowdrift. I probed several with my pole before deciding. The one I chose was a plump accumulation of snow, which had settled around a broken ice patch, a large sliver that the glacier's progress had eventually raised to vertical. The shaping of shelters had been imposed on the slaves during the arduous journey through the snowy passes to Ifos, and although the loneliness and lack of equipment made the task difficult, it was an area where I had acquired some expertise. As I dug into the snow with the slate chip, I saw behind me the procession of bulging clouds. The clouds were now overflowing through the trench I had crossed during the previous day, and some of the peaks had disappeared under their ineluctable progression. The horizon was fading behind wisps of purplish mist that didn't bode well for the future.

The wind picked up at the end of the day as I was perfecting my shelter, brief gusts that were scathing and chaotic. The most fearsome gusts came from the north. They came screaming into the crucible, scratching the powder and foaming the rock needles above me. I began to dig faster. For three days I had walked ahead of the weather, and I had hoped that the clouds wouldn't follow, that they would remain trapped below, prisoners of the first peaks. Now there was no room for doubt. I didn't know what to expect, not really, but I was quite certain that my luck was about to run out. I sniffed, my face frozen in the growing cold, and shoved my things into the shelter I had carved out of the snow. Then I crawled, pushing my package in front of me, to settle into the icy cocoon. I finally blocked the entrance to the tunnel, and proceeded to unfold my blankets in the petrified darkness.

The ghosts came to me long before the storm.