He was relieved to see a guard patrol walking slowly along the road, bundled in fur-lined cloaks. Crime wasn’t as bad as it had been, the harsh penalties imposed by the Water Council during the summer had seen to that, but there was always somebody desperate enough to loot an abandoned property for food, firewood, warm clothing, even snow shovels.

When he had cleared a path to the road he put his shovel back in the house, locked the door carefully, and followed the cleared road towards the heart of Etxelur, making for the junction to the north-south Etxelur Way. The Wall itself loomed over him. Ice clung to buttresses and balconies, and gigantic icicles dangled. After every snowfall there were unusual forms, sculpted drifts, shapes strange and unexpected, created by the wind swirling around the Wall’s complex frontage. The world was full of complexity, Thaxa thought, of pointless beauty that came out of nowhere, from falling snow and moving masses of air and a growstone wall. Nelo’s artistic eye might have been caught by these strange winter visions. But there were uglier sights too, great scars in the growstone core where the frost had got into it. It had been a long time since it had been safe to send up repair crews, and even when they tried the growstone wouldn’t mix or set properly in the cold.

He turned down the Etxelur Way, the main route south. This too was being steadily cleared by more bands of workers, slumped, labouring people. There was some traffic on the road, carts laden with ocean produce heading south from the Wall, the usual steady trickle of nestspills coming the other way. They were people. Desperate parents, struggling children, infants in arms. Nestspills.

Beyond the banks of cleared snow, beyond the dense suburbs of the Bay Land and Flint Island, the land was flat and eerily featureless. Northland was a tremendous plain anyhow, and now the fallen snow had erased the detail, with only faint lines where the dykes ran, and clusters of shapeless hillocks that were houses or flood mounds. Even the canals had frozen over and were becoming lost in the snow, and it was rare to see a tree that hadn’t been cut down for firewood.

Not far down the Way he came to the lodge of Ontin, standing on a very ancient flood mound, a modern house with a square floor plan, wooden frame, and steeply pitched roof. Ontin greeted him at the door. The doctor, wearing heavy outdoor clothes but with his boots off, had evidently been out clearing the snow himself. Once inside Thaxa stamped the snow off his own boots. He saw that Ontin’s wife and sons were tending to a family, huddled by the fire, husband and wife, a pair of infants close in age. One child, a boy, had the swollen belly of deep hunger.