Free Landfall: Tales From the Flood/Ark Universe by Stephen Baxter

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    ‘Who cares?’ Teif asked. They had finished their corpse-piling he stood, breathing hard, holding his great right hand over his wound. ‘Let them eat their husbands and fathers. As for us, we stay until morning – and then we go, Xaia. Back to the ships, and to the south, and home. We’ve come to the end of the world, and all we’ve found here is decadence and savagery.’
    ‘But the City,’ Xaia murmured. ‘It may still exist.’ She looked at Manda’s corpse. ‘And it’s already cost me so much. In the morning we go on.’
    ‘North? How far, Xaia? How long? What would it take to convince you the quest is futile? When you are dying yourself, or freezing to death? I can’t let you put yourself at such risk again. Not while I’m still able to save you.’
    Teil’s loyalty moved her. But she said, ‘We go on. In the morning … But first we’ll take care of Manda.’
    ‘We can’t bury her,’ Chan said. ‘The ground is like iron.’
    ‘We’ll take her back to the ship,’ Teif said. ‘Bury her at sea. She’d have appreciated that, I think, even though she was a lousy sailor.’ Then he slumped against a wall of the chamber. His sword propped against his legs, he kneaded his belly and grimaced in pain, his face grey. But he wouldn’t let Chan or Xaia see the wound.

VIII

    It was November by the time Proctor Chivian’s surveyors had chosen the optimal site for their Library of the Founders. It was inland, so away from the coast and any evidence of oceanic incursions on the past, and on the side of a hill, far from the flood plain of the nearest river, and far from the craggy slopes of Zeeland’s principal mountain, a volcano that had been long dormant but which, Chivian assured Thom, might waken when the world tilted and shook. ‘Nowhere is entirely safe,’ Chivian said. ‘Not on this world. But this vault, dug deep into the bedrock, will be as safe a repository as possible for the Founders’ wisdom.’
    Thom grunted. A thin sleet was falling from a leaden grey sky. He and the Proctor stood on the hillside above the construction site. From here he looked down a sweeping valley to the huddled rooftops of Orklund, and saw the glimmer of the sea beyond, with the murky glow of the cloud-masked sun low on the horizon. At this time of year, the sun never climbed much higher, and soon it would not rise at all.  
    But even now, in late November, as the world headed into the depths of the coldwinter, the Proctor had insisted the work proceed. So teams of workers were kicking aside resistant clumps of Purple, and hacking at the ground, stripping back the turf and the scree to expose the bedrock that lay beneath. The monument they would erect here, the Proctor had assured Thom, would be visible from throughout Orklund. But much labour remained to be completed before that monument’s capstone was put in place.
    Thom said now, ‘It’s not the challenges facing future generations that trouble me, Proctor, but the difficulties I’m imposing on this one. That rock is basaltic. It will be a huge task to dig as deep into it as you claim you need.’
    ‘We have explosives,’ the Proctor murmured, unperturbed. ‘And plenty of spare muscle.’  
    He was referring to the Proctors’ proposals to ship over indentured labour from defeated Brython. It would be another hugely unpopular step for Thom to take, and a further darkening of the relationship between Zeeland and Brython. And all without any input, let alone approval, from Xaia. But by now Thom knew what the Proctor was thinking: that if Xaia had not come home by now, this deep into the winter, the chances were she never would, and was therefore no longer a factor in the Proctor’s calculations about the future.
    The Proctor said now, ‘Grasp the goal, Speaker. Visualise the end goal. This won’t be just a Library; there will be a whole town here, of scholars and farmers and merchants and builders, all that is needed to support a great academic