Kitabı oku: «The Girl and the Stars»

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Acknowledgements

THE GIRL AND THE MOUNTAIN preview

Also by Mark Lawrence

About the Publisher

Dedication

To the succession of English teachers who kept

this scientist from forgetting that there was more to learn at school

PROLOGUE

Many babies have killed, but it is very rare that the victim is not their mother.

When the father handed his infant to the priestess to speak its fortune the child stopped screaming and in its place she began to howl, filling the silence left behind.

Omens are difficult and open to interpretation but if the oracle that touches your newborn dies moments later, frothing at the mouth, it is hard even with a mother’s love to think it a good sign.

In such cases a second opinion is often sought.

On the diamond ice out past the northern ridges is an empty place where the wind laments and no one listens. Alone in all those miles is a cave where a witch lives. Or rather where she exists, for little about her might be called living. Agatta waits, nothing more. With the blood frozen in her veins she waits, moving only to crack the ice that forms around her and to let it fall.

The father and the mother came wrapped in sealskins and the furs of hoola, so bulky that they might be great bears roaming from the south. They set the salt price before the witch, and then the baby, swaddled in skins.

‘Go.’ Agatta creaked when she moved. She sniffed the air, and scowled, her face cracking. ‘The present.’ She looked down at the baby through frozen eyes. ‘This smells like the present to me. Such a thin slice between what was and what will be, and yet always so much going on in it …’

The witch waited for the parents to retreat from view. She watched the silent baby, aware of its pinkness. Her hand, in contrast, was the white of early frostbite.

‘What have we here? A little drop of warmth in a cold world.’ Agatta reached for the child, stretching her senses into the future and the past as she did, seeking out the roots leading to the seed and following the shoot across the years, branching into possible tomorrows.

‘Let me see …’ Icy hand touched warm skin.

Instantly there was fire. A fierce bright fire consuming frozen flesh.

The parents returned, cautious, summoned less by the single piercing scream than by the silence that followed. They entered the cave, blinking at the gloom and wrinkling their noses against the stink of burned meat.

Agatta stood where they had left her, one hand pointing at their infant, the other behind her back, still smouldering.

‘Take your child and go.’ Her voice creaked like the pressure ridges where the ice flows.

‘A-and the oracle?’ The father stuttered the words out, wanting to run but having come too far to leave without answer.

‘Greatness,’ Agatta said. ‘Greatness and torment.’ A pause. ‘And fire.’

CHAPTER 1

In the ice, east of the Black Rock, there is a hole into which broken children are thrown. Yaz had always known about the hole. Her people called it the Pit of the Missing and she had carried the knowledge of it with her like a midnight eye watching from the back of her mind. It seemed her entire life had been spent circling that pit in the ice and that now it was drawing her in as she had always known it would.

‘Hey!’ Zeen pointed. ‘The mountain!’

Yaz squinted in the direction her younger brother indicated. On the horizon, barely visible, a black spot, stark against all the white. A month had passed since the landscape had offered anything but white and now that she saw the dark peak she couldn’t understand how it had taken Zeen’s eyes to find it for her.

‘I know why it’s black,’ Zeen said.

Everyone knew but Yaz let him tell her; at twelve he thought himself a man, but he still boasted like a child.

‘It’s black because the rocks are hot and the ice melts.’

Zeen lowered his hand. It seemed strange to see his fingers. In the north where the Ictha normally roamed the whole clan went so heaped in hide and skins that they barely looked human. Even in their tents they wore mittens any time fine tasks were not required. It was easy to forget that people even had fingers. But here, as far south as her people ever travelled, the Ictha could almost walk bare-chested.

‘Well remembered.’ Yaz would miss her little brother when they threw her into the pit. He was bright and fierce and her parents’ joy.

‘You’ve spotted it then?’ Quell came alongside them. He had no sled to drag and could move up and down the line checking on the thirty families. He nodded towards the Black Rock. ‘I remember how big it is, but still, it always surprises me when we get close.’

Yaz forced a smile. She would miss Quell too, even though at seventeen he boasted nearly as much as Zeen.

‘Always?’ she asked. Quell had been to the gathering twice. Once more than her.

‘Always.’ Quell nodded, almost concealing his grin. He held her gaze for a moment with pale eyes then moved on up the column. He passed Yaz’s parents and uncle, who between them pulled the boat-sled, pausing to swap a comment with her father. One day soon he would have to ask her parents for permission to share Yaz’s tent. Or so he thought. Yaz worried what Quell might do when the regulator picked her out. She hoped he would prove himself grown enough to embrace this fate and not shame the Ictha before the southern tribes.

‘Tell me about the testing,’ Zeen said.

Yaz sighed and leaned into the sled traces. She had of course told Zeen everything a hundred times over but she had been the same herself before her first visit to the hole.

‘You’ll be fine.’ Zeen’s worries were nothing, it was just the mind turning on itself when there wasn’t anything to do but pull a load mile upon mile, day upon day. The journey had proved difficult, the ice rucking up before them in pressure ridges as if seeking to impede their progress. For the last week the pace had been gruelling as the clan-mother sought to make up lost time. Still, they would arrive a day before the ceremony. ‘Don’t worry about it, Zeen.’

On Yaz’s first trip south she had been sure the regulator would sniff out her wrongness. Somehow she had passed inspection. But that had been four years ago, and what had been starting to break within her back then was now fully broken. ‘You’ll be fine.’

‘But what if I’m not?’ The sight of the Black Rock seemed to have opened the gates to her brother’s fear.

‘The southern tribes are not like the Ictha, Zeen. They have many that are born wrong. We have to be pure. Weakness was bred out of us long ago,’ she lied. ‘When you walk the polar ice you are either pure or dead.’

‘Strangers!’ Quell came hurrying back down the column, excited. ‘We’re getting close!’

Yaz looked to where her parents had turned their heads. Faint in the distance a grey line could be seen, another clan trekking in from the east. And between the two columns, a single sled closing on the Ictha at remarkable speed.

Zeen stopped to stare in amazement. ‘How can—’

‘Dogs,’ Yaz said. ‘You’ll get to see your first dogs!’ Even now, as the distance narrowed, the hounds pulling the sled resolved into dots in a line before it. Soon she could make them out against the snow: heavy beasts, silver-white fur bulking them up still further, their breath steaming before them. In the far north the cold would kill them, but south of the Keller Ridges all the tribes used dogs. The Ictha said that a true man pulls his own sled. The southerners laughed at that and called it something that only a man with no dogs would say. Even so, everyone gave the Ictha respect. Anyone who has known cold understands that only a different breed can dare the polar ice.

‘Get along!’ Behind them the Jex twins shouted. Zeen started forward again just in time to avoid having them drag their boat-sled over him. Yaz kept level with her brother, watching the strangers approach.

Within a few minutes the whole column came to a halt while at the front Mother Mazai greeted the men dismounting their sled. Yaz could smell the dogs on the wind, a musky scent. Their yapping rang in ears unfamiliar with anything but the voices of men, of the ice, and of the wind. The sound had a strangeness to it and a beauty, and she found herself wanting to go closer, wanting to meet with one of these alien creatures, bound just like her to a sled by strips of hide.

‘They’re so different!’ Zeen struggled out of his harness and broke from the line to get a better view. He meant the people not the dogs.

‘I know.’ It had been the first thing to strike Yaz at her previous gathering. It wasn’t so much the difference of the southern tribes from the Ictha, it was that even among themselves they were varied, some with the copper skin of an Ictha, some redder, so dark as to almost defy colour, and some much paler, almost pink. Their hair varied too, from Ictha black to shades of brown. Even their eyes were not all the white on white that Yaz saw at almost every turn but a bewildering range. Many had eyes almost as dark as the mountain behind them where the rock won clear of the ice. ‘Don’t stare!’

Zeen waved her off and edged up the column for a closer look. She understood his fascination. Mazai said that where there are many tasks, many kinds of tools are needed. The Ictha, she said, had a single task. To endure. To survive. And to survive a polar night required a singular strength, one recipe. The clan-mother spoke of metals and of how one might be mixed with others to gain particular qualities. There was, she said, a single alloy fit for the purpose of the north, and that was why all who dwelt there held so much in common.

Yaz edged out to join her brother, ignoring her mother’s hiss. Soon they would cast her down the Pit of the Missing into a darkness from which there was no return. She might as well see as much of what the world had to offer as she could before they took it away from her.

‘That one’s the leader.’ Zeen pointed to a man who stood taller than any Ictha and thin, too thin for the north. In places strands of grey shot through the blackness of his hair.

In the months-long polar night the breath you exhaled through your muffler formed two types of frost, the normal southern one, and a finer ice that would smoke away into nothingness within the tent’s warmth. The Ictha called it the dry ice for it never melted, only smoked away. In places, in the depth of the long night, dry ice would drift above the water ice and, when the sun’s red eye returned, a great cold fog would rise in clouds miles high. The storyteller had it that dry ice formed when part of the air itself froze.

Yaz knew that if the thin grey-haired southerner were to draw breath on a polar night the cold would sear his lungs and he would die.

‘Back in line, you two.’ Quell came up behind them, the gentleness of his voice taking the sting from the reprimand. He steered Zeen back into place with a hand on his shoulder. Yaz wished that Quell would lay his hand upon her shoulder as well. The sight of naked fingers still amazed her. If she were going to die then she should experience a man’s touch too.

She had thought many times about pitching her own tent and inviting Quell in. Of course she had. Too many times and for too long. But in the end two things had always stopped her: sometimes one, sometimes the other, sometimes both. Firstly something in her rebelled at the idea that fear should force her hand before she was properly ready. It was not the Ictha way. And secondly there was the pain that Quell would feel when they took her from him. It would not be fair to use him like that.

Three things. Something else had held her back too. And might have been enough on its own even without the other two. A rebellion against a choice that seemed already to have been decided for her.

But Quell and Yaz had walked the ice together since the days when they could first stand on their two feet, and many of her dreams were filled with thoughts of the bold lines of his face, the strength of his hands, and the mix of kindness and bravery with which he tackled the world. She did not want to leave him. When the regulator cast her down her heart would at last be broken like the rest of her, though at least the pain would not continue long, and in death she would join the spirits of the wind.

Yaz returned to the line and watched Quell go forward. Like Zeen he wanted to listen to the southerners. She found a smile on her lips. The regulator might declare a man grown, but they were still just taller boys.

Perhaps she should have set her tent for him. But in any case she was still counted a child and properly they could not be bound until she had endured the regulator for a second time. Almost every broken child was culled from their clan at their first gathering, but even though it was as rare as melting, sometimes it took a second, and no child was truly counted as grown until their second gathering. So in many ways Quell had been a true member of the clan since he was thirteen whereas Yaz, at sixteen, was still seen as a child and would be until tomorrow when the regulator turned his pale eyes her way.

Her mother offered Yaz a knowing smile then looked away as the wind picked up, laden with stinging ice crystals. There had been sadness in that smile too.

Yaz looked down at her hands. Fear prickled across her. It seemed cruel that just one sleepless night away the hole waited for her, an open mouth that would devour all the days she had thought she owned. A future taken. No tent of her own, no boat to set upon the Great Sea, no lover taken to the furs. Maybe there would have been children. At least now Yaz would not have to harden her heart and watch while they in turn stood beneath the regulator’s gaze.

The clan-mother said it wasn’t cruelty. All the tribes knew that a child born broken would die on the ice. Their bodies lacked what was needed to survive. As they grew, the weakness in them would grow too. Some needed too much food to keep warm and would starve. Some would lose their resilience to the wind’s bite and the cold would eat at them, taking first the tips of fingers, nibbling at the nose and ears, later taking the toes. Flesh would turn white, then black, then fall away. In time the fingers and face would be eaten, dying then rotting. It was an ugly death, and painful. But the worst was that the weakness in that adult would pass into their children, and their children’s children, and the clan itself would rot and die.

There was a wisdom to The Pit. A harsh wisdom, but wisdom even so. The burden that Yaz had carried with her out of the north, which had hung from her shoulders each and every mile, was the same weight that set sorrow along the edges of all her mother’s smiles. Years had not blunted the sharpness of Azad’s death. Yaz should be leaving her parents with two sons to support them, but when the dagger-fish broke the waters her strength had not been sufficient to hold her youngest brother, and in what now seemed one long moment of horror he had gone, leaving her alone in the boat. If the regulator had seen at the first gathering that she was broken, Azad would have known his eighth year, and would have had many more to come.

A muttering ran down the column, one passing the news to the next, with a rumble of discontent echoing in its wake.

‘What? What is it?’

Yaz’s father ignored Zeen and told her instead, while the Jex twins leaned in to hear, ‘The Quinx clan-father says our count is out. The ceremony is today.’

‘Why aren’t they there then?’ Yaz’s hands began to tremble, a sweat prickling her skin despite the freezing wind. In the months of polar night it was difficult to keep track of days, but she had never heard of the count being out. ‘Was their count out too?’

‘A hoola attacked their column. They had to observe the rites for the dead. They’re force marching to get to the ceremony in time.’

The Jexes were already passing the news back. As the sun began to set, the regulator would commence his inspection. He would be finished by full dark. If they missed it Yaz would have four more years, albeit forced to remain as a child. From where she stood four years looked like a lifetime. ‘What will we do?’

‘We’ll march too,’ her father said.

‘But … it’s twenty miles or more, and it’s nearly noon.’

‘The Quinx are going.’ Her father turned away.

‘The Quinx have dog-sleds to carry the young and rest the grown!’ Yaz protested.

‘And we,’ her father said, ‘are the Ictha.’

The endurance of the Ictha was a thing of legend among the tribes. The Ictha husbanded their strength. Nothing could be wasted on the polar ice. Not if you wished to survive. But when called upon to do so they could run all day. Yaz began to flag after the second hour. Quell ran beside her as she started to labour, his brow creased with a pain that had nothing to do with effort. He was trying to shield her from notice, she knew that. Somehow hoping that he could drag her along by sheer power of will. Behind her the Jex twins’ relentless strides devoured the distance. Quell could try to hide her weakness. Others could turn a blind eye, perhaps not even admitting it to themselves. But the regulator would see. There was no hiding from him.

The Ictha could not let the Quinx open too large a lead even if they did have dogs. Old rivalries ran too deep for that. The Quinx didn’t even recognize Ictha gods but held their own, some of them twisted versions of the true gods, others entirely foreign. It was a duty of the regulator and his kin in the travelling priesthood to settle disputes and keep the peace. They witnessed oaths, blessed unions, and ensured the purity of all bloodlines. The priests knew all the names of every god, both true and false, and even had a god of their own, a hidden one whose name was secret. The clan elders told stories in which priests of old had channelled the power of their Hidden God to devastating effect, blasting the flesh from the bones of oath-breakers.

Yaz dug deep. Whatever recipe made the Ictha so suited to their environment had gone astray in her. She lacked what the others had. The cold reached her before it reached her friends. Her strength failed against tasks that others of her age could master. She had begun to notice it about a year before her first gathering. Around the same time that she found the river.

There are, impossibly, rivers that run beneath the ice. Yaz’s father said they were the veins of the Gods in the Sea and that enchantment made them flow. Yaz had seen, though, that if you press on ice with enough force it will start to melt where you press hardest. In any case, Yaz’s river was not one of those that run beneath the ice and are seen only where they sometimes jet forth into the Hot Sea of the north or the three lesser seas of the south. Hers was a river seen only in her mind. A river that somehow ran beneath all things, and through them. When she was ten Yaz had started to glimpse it in her dreams. Slowly she had learned to see past the world even when it filled her waking eyes. And everywhere she looked the river ran, flowing at strange angles to what was real.

Now, as she ran, her heart hammering at her breastbone for release, her lungs full of exhaustion’s sharp edges, she saw the river again. And she touched it. In her mind’s eye her fingers brushed the surface of that bright water and in an instant its terrifying power flooded through her hand. The river sucked at her, reluctant to let her go, but she pulled free before she burst. Heat and energy filled her, flowing up her arm and into her body. This was how she lived. Touching the forbidden magics of the first tribe to beach on Abeth, driving away the cold and the hunger and the weariness. It wouldn’t last and she would not be able to find the river again for days, but for now she felt as if she could run forever with a boat-sled on each shoulder, or dance naked in the polar night.

‘I’m fine.’ She made a smile for Quell and picked up the pace, hardly noticing now that she was even running.

‘I know you are.’ Relief washed over Quell’s face and he fell back to check the line.

Yaz fixed her gaze on the sled before her, making sure not to run too fast. She kept her bare hands in fists, knowing that the tips of her fingers would still be glowing with the power now pulsing through her veins.

Around the gullet that the tribes name the Pit of the Missing the ice is rucked up in concentric circles of ridges like the waves left when a leaping whale has returned to the ocean. Yaz always thought of the ridges as curtains, positioned to hide something shameful.

The ice around the outer slopes was littered with the sleds of many clans. Dogs waited in groups, tethered to metal stakes, and here and there a warrior stood guard.

‘Don’t stare.’ Yaz’s father cuffed his son without anger and pointed the way.

The Ictha would drag their smaller sleds up among the ridges. Yaz’s people had few possessions and the loss of any of them was often fatal, so even though theft was a great rarity among the tribes, the Ictha always kept what little they had close to them.

‘Quell will have pretty words for you at the gathering tonight.’ Yaz’s mother stood beside her. They were of a height now. It felt strange to stand eye to eye. ‘He’s a good boy, but be sure he speaks to your father first.’

Yaz’s cheeks burned, though a moment later sadness washed away any embarrassment. She almost broke then, almost sought the warmth and safety of her mother’s arms and cried out to be saved. But her mother had already turned to go, and there was no saving to be had. The world had no place for weakness.

More than half of the sun’s huge red eye had sunk behind the horizon by the time Yaz started to climb. The energies that had sustained her for hours began to fade, leaving her to labour up the slopes. Suddenly each breath burned in her throat, sweat froze on her skin, every muscle ached, but she endured, and all around her the clan kept pace. Behind her she could hear Zeen struggling too. Unencumbered the boy was the fastest of any of them, his hands were just as swift, falling to any task with blurring speed. Harnessed to a load, however, his stamina was less than the others of his age.

By the time they reached the top of the first ridge Yaz was helping to pull her brother’s sled as well as her own. By the third ridge she was pulling both almost by herself. She worried that her strength would fail and she would arrive at the testing having to be carried by her father. The fact that she lacked the full hardiness of her people was the first sign of being broken. The next common sign was that a child would grow too quickly and eat too much. Perhaps these ones were destined to become giants but giants had no place on the ice. Others lived too fast for the ice; they moved more swiftly than anyone should be able to, but they aged quickly too, and grew hungry quickly, and however fast a person is the cold cannot be outrun. Rarer still, they said, were the ones that developed strange talents. Yaz had never seen such a witch-child but whatever magics they had at their disposal were no match for the night freeze, and be they witch, quickling, or giant they paid a price, losing their ability to endure the white teeth of the wind. Yaz wasn’t particularly tall for her age, neither was she unnaturally swift, but her Ictha endurance had been eroding for years. The river gave her ways to hide these failings. They wouldn’t fool the regulator though. Clan-mother Mazai said that the regulator could see through lies, she said he could even see through skin and flesh to the very bones of a person, and that all weakness was laid bare before him.

The Ictha left their sleds at the base of the final ridge and Rezack, who was strong and keen-eyed, remained to watch over them. Yaz descended into the crater around the hole, exhaustion trembling in her legs. She and Zeen were towards the rear of the column now. Quell had fallen back to watch over them, his brow furrowed with concern, but this was not the time to be seen helping. That would do nothing for Yaz’s chances with the regulator.

The tribes had shaped the crater to their purposes, cutting a series of tiers into the ice. The space encircled by the ridges was maybe four hundred yards across and more than two thousand people crowded the level ground, an unimaginable number to Yaz who had spent almost every day of her life with the same one hundred souls.

At the last moment before they reached the crowd below, Quell pulled Yaz to the side, standing precariously on the slanting ice while others passed nearby with the practiced indifference of people with few chances for privacy.

‘Yaz …’ A nervous excitement, most un-Quell-like, haunted Quell’s face. He released her hand, struggling to make his mouth speak.

‘Afterwards.’ She placed a hand against his chest. ‘Ask me when it’s done.’

‘I love you.’ He bit down as the words escaped him. His eyes searched hers, lips pressed tight against further emotion.

And there it was, out in the open, delicate hope trembling in a cruel wind.

Quell was good, kind, brave, handsome. Her friend. All an Ictha girl could dream of. Yaz thought that maybe the first sign that she was broken wasn’t the weakness but that she had always wanted more. She had seen the life that her mother lived, the same lived by her mother’s mother in turn and on and on back along the path of years. She had seen that this life of trekking the ice between closing sea and opening sea was all that the world had to offer. In all the vastness of the ice, with small variations, this was life. And yet some broken thing inside her cried out for more. Though she stamped upon that reckless, selfish, whining voice, pushed it down, shut it out, its whispers still reached her.

I love you.

She didn’t deserve such love. She didn’t deserve it for many reasons, not least that the broken thing within her called it burden rather than blessing.

I love you. Quell watched her, hungry for an answer, and behind her the last of the Ictha shuffled past.

The Ictha knew themselves each as part of the body, and they knew that the body must be kept alive, not its parts. Sacrifice and duty. Play your part in the survival engine. As long as the flame is kept alight, as long as the boats remain unholed, as long as the Ictha endure, then the needs and pain and dreams of any one piece of that body are of no concern.

‘I …’ Yaz knew that if she somehow walked away from the pit this time then she was more than lucky to have Quell waiting for her; she would be more than lucky to resume her trek along the life that had always stretched before her across the ice.

Her heart hurt, she wanted to vanish, for the wind to carry her away. She did want Quell, but also … she wanted more, a different world, a different life.

‘I … Ask me at the gathering. Ask me when this is done.’ She took her hand from his chest, still worried for the heart beneath it.

She turned and followed the others, hating herself for the look in Quell’s eyes, hating the broken voice that gave her no peace, that left her dissatisfied with the good things, the voice that told her she might look the same but that she was different.

Quell followed at her heels and Yaz walked on, unseeing, understanding a new truth on her last day: Abeth’s ice might stretch for untold miles, but there was, in all that emptiness, no room for an individual.

The ceremony was already in progress as Yaz caught up with her brother. On the lowest tier, with only the dark maw of the hole below them, the children of seven clans belonging to three tribes queued in a great circle. Every few moments the line shuffled forward as each boy or girl presented themselves to the regulator in turn.

The old priest stood cloaked in an inky black hide that belonged to nothing that Yaz had ever seen hauled from the sea. Hoola claws reached across his shoulders and fanned out across his chest, threaded on a cord around his neck. His head was bare and bald, marked like his hands with a confusion of burn scars, symbols perhaps but complex and overlapping.

The Ictha said that Regulator Kazik had overseen the gathering for generations. While the other priests came and went with time’s tide, growing old, retiring to the Black Rock, Kazik it was said remained immune to the years. A constant, like the wind.

Today he was the regulator, merciless in judgement. Tomorrow he would be Priest Kazik and he would bless marriages, and laugh, and mix with the clans, and become drunk on ferment with the rest of the grown.

Yaz and Zeen joined the rear of the queue with a score of other Ictha children. One more came up behind, delayed by his mother’s arms. At the front, around a third of the crater’s circumference from them, another child escaped the regulator’s scrutiny. She scrambled away to join her parents watching from some higher tier.

Yaz shuffled forward with the line. The climb still burned in her legs and her chest felt sore from panting.

‘That was tough!’ Zeen smiled up at her. ‘But we made it.’ He stood close to the edge where the ice sloped sharply away towards the hole.

‘Ssshhh.’ Yaz shook her head. It was best to avoid any thoughts of weakness. They said the regulator could read a child’s mind just by staring into their eyes.

‘Has anyone been thrown in?’ That was Jaysin behind them, just nine, as young as any Ictha were tested. The younger children remained at the north camp with the old mothers. ‘Has anyone gone down yet?’

‘How would we know, stupid?’ Zeen rolled his eyes. ‘We just got here too.’ He moved behind Yaz to stand with Jaysin.

Yaz glanced at the hole and shuddered. Even here in the south the ice lay miles deep. She wondered how far she would fall before she hit something.

‘Are they down there?’ Zeen kept glancing at the pit. The closer they got to the regulator the further Zeen positioned himself from the edge. ‘Are the Missing watching us from down there?’

‘No.’ Yaz shook her head. Most likely all the pit held was a sad pile of frozen corpses, the broken children properly broken at last and removed from the bloodline. Some of the southern tribes spoke of the Ancestor’s Tree and of pruning it, but Yaz didn’t know what a tree was and her father, who had spoken to southerners at gatherings across the years, had never met any who had seen such a thing.

‘But they call it the Pit of the Missing,’ Zeen said.

‘It’s the children who are thrown down there who are missing.’ Little Jaysin spoke up again from behind Yaz. It seemed fear had made the boy brave. He rarely had the courage to speak outside his own tent.

‘It’s a different sort of … Oh, never mind.’ Yaz would let someone else explain it to him after she’d gone. Instead she looked up at the sky, pale and clear above her, laced with strips of very high cloud, their edges tinged with the blood of the setting sun. The Missing had lived on Abeth an age before the tribes of man beached their ships upon its shores, but they were all long gone by the time men navigated the black seas between the stars and came to this world. Many southerners treated them as if they were gods, though the Ictha knew that the only gods were those in the sea and those in the sky, with the ice to keep them from warring upon each other.

‘I’d rather just be left out of the tent,’ Zeen said. ‘If I was broken I’d rather just be left out.’

Yaz shrugged. A quick death beat a slow death, and at least this way you gave honour to your tribe. Also there was the issue of metal. Clan-Mother Mazai said that the priesthood was the only source of metal in a thousand miles, and not just pieces of it as might sometimes be traded between the tribes, but worked metal, fashioned to meet demand, be it knife or chain. The ceremony honoured the god of the Black Rock and that in turn earned the clan favour with the regulator. Dying here would help the clan.

A sudden cry jerked Yaz from her thoughts. The regulator was standing alone, the wind tugging at the tattered strips of his cloak. There was no sign of the child that had failed his inspection, just the faint and diminishing echoes of their screaming that still escaped the hole. A stillness pervaded the watching crowd, and they had already been still.

With a bored gesture the regulator beckoned the next in line.

‘I’m scared.’ Zeen’s hand found hers. He had been scared all along of course, but this was the first time he’d spoken the words.

The world turns whether we will it or not and everything, longed for or feared, comes to us in time. The queue leading to the regulator advanced slowly but it didn’t stop, and at last Yaz’s world narrowed to the point towards which it had spiralled for so long.

‘Yaz of the tribe Ictha and the clan Ictha,’ the regulator said. He never needed to be told name, clan, or tribe. The other tribes had several clans, but in the north they shrank to the same thing.

‘Yes,’ she said. To deny your own name was to cut a small piece from your soul, Mother Mazai said.

The regulator leaned in towards her. He had the familiar white-pale eyes of her own clan and seemed unconcerned by what the southerners called cold. The burns across his face, head, and hands looked as if he had been branded with some kind of writing, but with lines of symbols at differing angles and sizes, overwriting each other into confusion. He bent closer, showing his teeth in something that was not a smile.

‘Yaz of the Ictha.’ He took hold of her hand with hard, pinching fingers.

His scent was unfamiliar, sour and as different from the Ictha as the dogs had been. He was old, stringy, gaunt-faced, and looked displeased with the world in general.

The regulator had not touched Yaz on her first visit. Now he seemed unwilling to release her. The tattered strips of his cloak blew about them both and for a moment Yaz considered what would happen if she grabbed them when the time came that he threw her down. The image of his surprise at being hauled in with her struck through Yaz’s fear and she struggled to suppress the burst of hysterical laughter that was pushing to escape her.

‘You’ve seen it, haven’t you, girl?’ He looked up from his inspection of her hand and met her eyes.

‘N … No.’ Yaz shook her head.

‘You should have asked “what?”. All the ice tribes are terrible at lying but the Ictha are the worst.’ The regulator ran his tongue over the yellowing stumps of teeth worn down by years. Without warning he jerked Yaz’s hand to his face and began to sniff at her fingertips. She tried to pull away, disgusted, then realized that if he were to release her as she tugged she would fall back with only the slick gullet of the pit to receive her.

‘Seen what?’ she asked, too late to be convincing.

‘The path that runs through all things.’ He let her go with a last sniff. ‘The line that joins and divides. Seen it and …’ His gaze fell to the hand she now clasped to her chest. ‘And touched it.’

‘I didn’t …’ He was right though. She didn’t know how to lie.

‘That makes you rare, child. Very rare.’ Something ugly twisted on the regulator’s thin lips: a smile. ‘Too good for the pit.’ He nodded to the other side of him. ‘You stand over there. You’ll come with me to the Black Rock.’ Excitement tinged his voice. He had thrown children to their death without affording them the respect of caring. But now he cared.

So, numb and trembling, with her wrist still pale where the regulator had gripped her, Yaz moved on. She stood on the flat ice of the tier, watching without seeing while the others shuffled forward one place. She had survived. She was grown and equal to any in the clan. But still she stood here, forbidden to return to where her parents waited. To where Quell waited. Her gaze tracked back up the stepped ice, across the sea of faces, towards the heights where the Ictha families stood.

‘No.’ The regulator’s quiet announcement drew Yaz’s attention back to the line. His skinny old hand was clamped over Zeen’s face, fingers spread across the boy’s forehead and cheekbones. ‘Not you.’ And with the slightest shove he sent Zeen stumbling back. For a moment Yaz’s brother stood, caught on the edge of balance, his arms pin-wheeling, and in the next he was gone, sliding down the steep slope of the gullet then pitched into the near-vertical darkness of the ice hole. He fell with a single short cry of despair.

Silence.

Yaz’s face had frozen in shock, her voice gone. The thousands stood without sound. Even the wind stilled its tongue.

It should have been me. It should have been me.

Still no one spoke. And then a single high keening broke the silence. A mother’s cry from somewhere far up near the crater’s rim.

It should have been me.

The Ictha endure. They act only when they must. They guard their strength because the ice does not forgive failure.

It should have been me.

Yaz glanced at the blue sky, and in the next moment she threw herself after her brother.

CHAPTER 2

At first Yaz slid, then the black throat of the pit was before her and in the next moment she was falling, all the air escaping her lungs in a hopeless scream. The blind rush of dropping through empty space stole all her thoughts. Her body contracted against the inevitable impact. She grazed one wall, grazed another, continued hurtling down with the ice scraping at her all the way. She was sliding again, moving at impossible speed, every part of her clenched in terror. When she hit bottom all her bones would shatter.

The ice wall pressed on Yaz, and in doing so made her still more aware of her awful velocity. Suddenly the pressure increased, everything spun, and somewhere in the spinning she lost herself.

There are stars in every darkness. They are the mercy of the Gods in the Sky.

Yaz jerked in shock, crying out and thrashing her limbs. She was lying in water deep enough to reach her mouth. Coughing and spluttering, she tried to orient herself, slipped, and went face first into the pool. A moment later she was on all fours, choking. The water seemed to be about four inches deep and she was soaked. To be wet on the ice without a tent and dry clothes to hand was a death sentence. A hysterical laugh burst from her. She shook the water from her hair and looked for the light. There was no light, no distant circle of sky above her, just a velvet darkness filled with the constant sound of dripping.

Yaz got to her knees, trying not to slip again. She patted herself. All of her hurt a little; none of her hurt a lot. It seemed impossible that she could fall so far and break no bones.

‘Hello?’ She whispered it and wasn’t surprised when no one answered. ‘Zeen!’ Loud enough to be heard over all the dripping.

Nothing.

Yaz knelt and blinked at the darkness. ‘Zeen …’

It wasn’t cold. Even wet she could feel the warmth rising around her. Enough warmth to melt this great pit and to keep it open despite the relentless flow of the ice. ‘Hello?’

Darkness didn’t scare her, not in and of itself. In the many months of the polar night there was never sufficient oil to light all the tents, no matter how many whales were caught and rendered while the Hot Sea remained open. She longed for a flame now though.

‘Why am I not dead?’

Now that she thought about it Yaz realized that she had slid most of the way rather than dropped. Whatever heat had melted the hole it was a heat that stayed put while the ice continued its slow journey. The hole must slant.

She listened, her mind racing, pursuing erratic thoughts. She wanted Zeen. Long ago she had let their younger brother die. Her weakness had let him die. Now in the blackness a vision of Azad returned to her as he had been at four when Zeen was eight and she was twelve.

‘I’m sorry.’ Spoken to the empty space around her.

She wanted light. She needed to see.

Among the Ictha three elders were charged with carrying the flame. Three heavily shielded and slow-burning lamps, such that if disaster caused any one or two of them to go out the fire could still be relit. If the Ictha lost their flame it would be a journey of months to find another clan who might rekindle them. But there were no elders in the pit and nothing to burn in this wet hole even if she had fire.

Mother Mazai had a thing called glass, clear like diamond ice but refusing to melt even above a lamp flame. It had been fashioned into a disc, fat at the middle and thin at the edges. One summer she had shown Yaz that it could gather the sun’s red light into one bright spot that would burn against her palm. In the far south, Mother Mazai said, the sun blazed so hot that the bright spot the glass made could light a lamp wick.

Yaz shook the memories from her head. Despite being soaked in meltwater she was still dazed. The fall had rattled her brain around in her skull.

It occurred to her that somehow the darkness was not total. A variation in the blackness hinted at shape and form, though none of it made much sense. Perhaps some fraction of the day’s light filtered down through the ice … though it seemed hard to believe given how far she must have fallen. Even so, as she moved her hand before her face she had some sense of it passing.

‘What have I done?’ She moved slowly, feeling ahead. Even on all fours she felt unstable on the wet ice.

It seemed that she was in a large ice cave, its smooth floor dimpled with shallow pools. After just a few yards she found the first of several slick throats where the meltwater drained away, gurgling into unknown depths. The first was large enough to swallow a child, the second would have taken a man and his sled too. There appeared to be no walls as such, just the floor curving smoothly up until she could make no progress.

The illumination was fainter than starlight and seemed to come from all directions at once. It gave Yaz the impression that the chamber was a bubble trapped in the ice. She wondered how many times she had circled it when she shot in along the main vent. If each of the darker patches was a hole then it was amazing that she had missed them all.

‘Zeen?’ She shouted his name, realizing that one of the ice shafts that had failed to capture her must have swallowed him.

Yaz crawled to the nearest hole. The smooth slope made approaching dangerous, a little too far forward and she would start to slide. She fumbled at her belt for her knife. The blade was a tooth from a dagger-fish. The same kind that had dragged Azad from the boat. She could never draw it without thinking of her lost brother.

Using the knife-point to gain a little purchase Yaz moved closer to the hole, lying flat on the ice now. She listened, trying to untangle any meaning from the constant dripping and the chuckle of distant water. ‘Zeen!’

It occurred to Yaz then that she would have to throw herself down another hole, and that this time she would have to choose. More than this, the quick death she had imagined, smashed against an ice floor, might now be replaced with drowning in a flooded shaft, blind and struggling to keep afloat, until exhaustion claimed her and water filled her lungs.

She didn’t want to do it. Now that the moment of passion had left her she found that she lacked the courage to throw herself into one of these dark holes.

Alone and trembling in the black Pit of the Missing, Yaz began to weep for everything that she had lost, and from the fear at how her life would end.

Yaz gathered herself, time had passed, she wasn’t sure how long but the cold was starting to seep into her. A true Ictha would hardly have noticed but she had begun to shiver. She considered her options. Returning to the surface was not one of them. Even if there had been a flight of stairs carved into the ice she couldn’t return … What would the tribes think of that? They would push her back in or send her wet out into the wind to die. Yaz remembered the peculiar excitement in the regulator’s eye. He might welcome her. He might even keep the tribes from harming her … But there were no steps, just hundreds of yards of near-vertical ice running with meltwater.

‘No.’ Her options were to remain in the chamber and to see whether she froze before she starved, or to continue the pursuit of her brother, a pursuit that only chance had delayed.

Yaz peered at the hole before her. It seemed that the faint glow was coming from the ice itself. Her hand made a black shape before her eyes, too dim for definition. Fear returned as she inched towards the wet, yawning mouth. She didn’t want to die. It had been easy to throw herself after Zeen in the heat of the moment. In the cold of the cavern it was almost impossible to release the anchor provided by her knife and to let the drop take her.

‘I can’t.’ But she had no choice.

Yaz ground her teeth together and pulled the point of her blade from the ice. She returned it to its sheath as she started to slide feet first towards the hole. Even certain death couldn’t stop an Ictha caring for what little they owned.

A moment later she plunged once more into devouring night.

CHAPTER 3

The fall was almost all vertical this time with only glancing blows from the walls to punctuate a terrifyingly long drop. The shock of impact was so violent that Yaz knew she had hit ice and was smashed beyond recovery. A moment later though she was thrashing in deep water, seeking the surface to replace the air that had been hammered from her lungs.

Yaz broke clear with a heaving gasp, both arms still churning the water about her. She gave a cry of frustration. Her worst fear had been realized. She would drown in the dark.

Yaz had learned to swim in the Hot Sea of the north. For much of the year hot upwelling from the ocean depths kept a circle of water open, nearly ten miles across. Like the three smaller seas to the south the Great Sea teemed with whales. Fish thronged there too, but it was the whales who had to return time and again for air after their long hunting trips beneath the ice.

Being able to swim was a curse. It offered hope. Yaz would still drown, but first she would struggle and suffer. The water she now swam in was only slightly colder than the Hot Sea. Not quite cold enough to freeze, but almost. She would be able to endure it for hours before exhaustion claimed her and the weight of her clothes dragged her under.

Yaz spluttered and reached for the wall of the shaft. If she stretched out her arms she should be able to touch both sides. Her fingers met no resistance and so she struck out in a random direction, hunting the edge. Three or four strokes brought no contact. She stopped, spluttered for breath, and shook her head to try to get the water out of her eyes. The sound of meltwater splashing down came from behind her now rather than all around.

Perversely it was lighter at this depth than it had been in the chamber far above. The walls had a faint glow to them and seemed much further away than she had thought they would be. Yaz swam towards the edge and realized that she was in another chamber rather than a shaft.

When she banged her knee on something hard Yaz gave a startled cry, missed a stroke, and began to flounder. It was then that she realized the water had grown shallow. Moments later she crawled out onto a shore of black rock, still yards shy of the glowing ice walls.

Yaz lay gasping, as much from the shock of it all as from the battering she had taken. Her body felt like a singular bruise, her ribs hurt, and she was cold. ‘Zeen.’ She spoke her brother’s name through gritted teeth and forced herself back onto hands and knees. The ground beneath her was rock, scoured into ridges. Apart from pieces collected from the slopes of the Black Rock and shown at the gathering Yaz had never touched raw stone before, just the smooth pebbles the Ictha kept for luck and the ones that Mother Mazai wore on a sinew about her neck, polished to a high shine and shot through with lines of colour.

She crawled further from the pool, water streaming from her parka, dripping from the black veil of her hair. Where the ice walls rose from the bedrock it was light enough for Yaz to count her fingers. They trembled with more than the chill. Her options had narrowed from a quick death crashing into ice at the bottom of a fall or a slower death drowning in a hole back to the slowest of all: starvation.

‘Zeen!’ She bellowed it and the loudness of her own voice made her flinch. The fall of water overrode any echoes and there was no reply. ‘Zeen!’

Yaz frowned and leaned towards the ice, almost close enough for her forehead to rest against it. She squinted, trying to see where the light came from. It wasn’t the red of sunlight, this was a more varied, richer illumination, carrying undertones of blues and greens. Close to the wet surface the ice was clear, further back it became misty and fractured. Buried in the body of the ice like a constellation of cold stars were motes of light, none of them seeming any larger than her smallest fingernail, most considerably smaller. The larger ones burned more brightly, though none of them by itself would illuminate much more than her palm if it sat in her hand.

The ice-locked constellations exerted a hypnotic draw. It was the smell that finally broke their spell. Yaz looked away and sniffed. Blood. The scent of slaughter. She stood, wincing, and scanned the chamber. The pool dominated, the excess flowing away lazily on the far side along a channel with just a few inches of clearance. The beach onto which Yaz had crawled occupied a third of the perimeter, the pool lapping up against the ice elsewhere. A pair of tunnels led away from the beach into the ice, smooth and carved by meltwater.

Yaz went to the nearest tunnel. She crossed the rock like an old woman. Not that anyone got truly old on the ice, but Yewan, her father’s eldest brother, was past fifty and starting to slow. She felt like he looked, stiff, making each move with care as if avoiding hidden hurts.

The blood looked black, spattered across the glowing tunnel walls. This had been an attack, not the butchering of some animal. Yaz touched a finger to one of the larger splats.

‘Fresh …’ She stared at her fingertip, feeling a new kind of coldness deep inside her. ‘Zeen.’ She started forward but stopped, her foot knocking something soft aside. Yaz crouched and patted the rock. She lifted the warm object for inspection. A thumb. Smaller than her own. The flesh chewed, splinters of bone jutting from it. She dropped it with a shudder, curled her lip, and followed the tunnel.

The sound of dripping from the pool chamber faded behind her and Yaz found herself folded in an eerie silence. The rock-floored tunnel was around fifteen feet wide and ten feet tall, the ceiling fringed with icicles. The longer ones had been broken off with none reaching quite low enough for her to touch. Whatever hunted down here had to be big, but it made no sense that it could be something like a hoola or a bear: they could hardly survive on a dozen children every four years.

For hundreds of yards the tunnel ran on, barely turning from the straightness of its path. Occasionally the groaning of the ice disturbed the quiet. Yaz had heard the noise all her life, deep-throated and rising into her family tent through the sleeping skins. The ice was never still and at every moment some part of it creaked in complaint. Down here though, actually in the ice, the sounds were louder, stranger, as if a great beast were waking from its dreams.

The wet rock beneath her feet wasn’t the pristine, ice-scoured rock that might be expected but slick with a thin film of grime, and though she had left the blood behind her the air held a faint but undeniable animal stink, not much different from that of the dogs she had met earlier.

Further on, the tunnel was intersected by another, then another, then a third. The first narrowed rapidly, old and squeezed by the flow of the ice, the second plunged into water lit from below by a ghostly radiance. The third was perfectly round and led upwards through the ice sheet at an angle steep enough to make for difficult progress on the slick surface. Yaz paused at the entrance, listening hard, hunting for smears of blood.

On her journey she had noticed that the tiny stars bedded in the ice ran in seams. In some places more thickly clustered and therefore brighter, fading away in others. The rising tunnel looked to grow utterly dark after just a few dozen yards.

Yaz turned from her inspection of the blackness. She stared intently along the tunnel she’d been following, sure that she’d heard a noise, something other than the grumbling ice. In the gloom ahead something moved. Then again. A shape, huge and black, lumbering towards her.

The tunnels offered nowhere to hide. She could run back to the pool or try to follow the dark side passage, all the time struggling not to slide back into the clutches of any pursuit. But neither of those would help Zeen if the beast had him, and even if she gained a lead any predator would just follow her scent.

The Ictha waste nothing, energy least of all. If there is a point to running then they will run with all their heart, but an Ictha will not run from fear. Even so, Yaz wanted to run. Instead, she drew her knife. If the beast was going to kill her it would have to do it here while she could still make a fight of it.

Fear clutched at her stomach but it was a different kind from the hopelessness she had felt in the first chamber. The anger that had begun to rise in her at first sight of the blood now started to burn, and the warmth felt good. Yaz had never been in a fight before. Life on the ice was all the fight her people needed. But it had been the worst day of her life, and likely it would be the last, and she was prepared to learn quickly.

Yaz hadn’t ever been far enough south to see one of the bears that roamed between the Shifting Seas but from the saga plays acted out by the elders she knew this must be one. Black against the glow, the thing shuffled closer, head bowed, brushing the broken stumps of icicles. The creature stood twice as wide as her and more again, huge within the shagginess of its coat. A rank odour reached ahead of it. Yaz’s knife suddenly looked very small. Quell had told her that a bear’s claws were longer than a man’s fingers. The dagger-fish tooth wasn’t more than four or five inches itself.

The beast stopped a few yards from her and raised its head. The great mane of its hair moved across what seemed now to be a mass of skins and furs sewn together in confusion to create one huge shaggy coat. The face lifted to regard her was human, the mouth red with blood. A black stain, darker than any bruise, covered one cheek. It seemed almost the shape of a hand, its fingers reaching across nose and brow in sharp contrast to the pale skin beneath. The woman roared, a great open-mouthed roar, exposing teeth that had been filed to points. She took a pace forward. Something reddish swung from the hide straps around her waist. Yaz stood transfixed, forgetting the danger. A head hung by its hair from the huge woman’s belt, not a neatly severed head but one torn from the body, trailing strands of meat. And the face that swung towards her was one she knew.

The cannibal charged and Yaz, frozen with horror, was too slow to evade her. Even among the variety of the southern tribes Yaz had never seen anyone tall enough that the top of their head would come close to this giant’s shoulder. She stood as wide as two men and when she brought both arms up before her in a double-handed blow it lifted Yaz off her feet and flung her back along the tunnel.

Yaz slid a fair way but before she could rise, or even haul a breath into an empty chest that felt as though every rib had shattered, the woman was on her. She reached down for Yaz with a hand that could close around her whole head.

The Ictha cannot afford to lose anything. Yaz had looped her knife thong about her wrist and the hilt lay within inches of her fingertips. As the massive hand descended for her Yaz snatched up the dagger-fish tooth and plunged it through the palm.

The woman snatched her hand back with a roar, nearly taking the knife with it. A heartbeat later a great hidebound foot came thundering down to crush Yaz’s skull. The cannibal’s heel slammed onto stone, pinning Yaz’s hair as she rolled aside. She yanked free and drove her knife through the woman’s other foot, losing her grip on it when the point struck the rock beneath. The monster roared in pain and Yaz saw her chance. She scrambled between the woman’s legs and took off, running down the tunnel behind her.

CHAPTER 4

Yaz ran the way the huge woman had come, sprinting at first, then with more caution. Behind her the roaring had faded into nothing, the cannibal slowed by her injured foot.

The glow from the ice gradually lessened and the circle of Yaz’s vision drew in about her, a tightening noose. Imagination began to paint her fears into the thickening gloom. She saw the head dangling from the cannibal’s belt, its frozen stare horrific and familiar. Whatever taint had caused little Jaysin to be thrown into the pit would never show now. Yaz hoped it had been the fall that had taken his life rather than the creature that had been eating him.

In her escape the thong securing Yaz’s knife had snapped, leaving her only weapon transfixing the woman’s foot. She frowned at the murky tunnel ahead, glanced back the way she had come, then carried on, empty-handed against whatever the darkness hid.

She jogged on, careful of her footing on the grimy floor. The animal stink seemed to be increasing rather than decreasing as she opened a lead on the giant. Several times she passed other tunnels but she kept to the largest, wanting room for manoeuvre if she found herself trapped in a dead end.

The big chamber took Yaz by surprise. The tunnel didn’t widen, it just opened into a much larger space without warning. Yaz had no idea that caverns so vast could exist beneath the ice. She got a sense of scale through the change in the quality of the sound and through the slight motion of the air. Also there was the marbling effect of half a dozen seams of the tiny stars that offered the walls and roof in glowing bands, too faint to illuminate the contents of the chamber but bright enough to be seen across its width.

Yaz stood, wondering, wanting to shout out Zeen’s name but lacking the courage. Who knew what other terrors the darkness held?

Quite what made her turn her head Yaz couldn’t say. It wasn’t something she was conscious of hearing. By the time she looked back over her shoulder and focused on the great dark mass rushing at her out of the tunnel’s gloom she could finally hear the rush of its footsteps. The cannibal gave a bloodcurdling roar. This time, rather than freezing Yaz to the spot, the roar galvanized her and she ran, sprinting along the edge of the cavern where the faint illumination might at least warn her of rocks large enough to trip her or to turn an ankle on.

Wounded foot or not the huge woman came after Yaz with terrifying speed, fuelled by rage and pain, devouring the yards in great strides. The monstrosity pounded ever closer, narrowing the gap between them, roaring giving over to a determined silence punctuated by laboured breaths. Soon Yaz could hear nothing but her own gasping for breath and the thunder of her heart.

The ground before her began to rise in a slope of ice-worn shingle, channelled and heaped by some ancient flow. Yaz started to scramble up. The shifting stones sucked away the last of her strength and she slowed to a crawl. Behind her the giant followed, sounding like an avalanche.

‘Hey!’ A voice from somewhere in the gloom. ‘Hey! Up here!’

Yaz glanced around wildly but saw nothing.

‘Here! Catch the line!’

Yaz swung her head and saw something dangling to her left. A rope! And high up on it a clot of darkness hung. A person! She veered towards them but in that moment the cannibal made a last desperate lunge and fastened a hand about Yaz’s leg, encompassing it from the ankle almost to the knee.

For a second both of them lay there, sprawled on the slope of shifting stones, too winded to do anything but pant. Yaz only found the energy to struggle once she felt herself being hauled back towards her enemy. She rolled onto her side and looked down. Close up the giant was still more fearsome; the charnel stink of her filled Yaz’s lungs. The ink-black stain across her face seemed to have moved, forming a band across her eyes now, stark against pale but grimy skin. The woman’s gaping mouth began to descend towards Yaz’s thigh, the points of her teeth gleaming wetly. Feeding on Yaz rather than finishing her off seemed to be the priority. Whether it was hunger or cruelty that drove the cannibal Yaz didn’t know, but she clearly intended to eat her alive.

Yaz grabbed a rock and hammered it down, not on the fingers but on the nerve cluster in the wrist. Quell had shown her the trick years before. Yaz struck home with all her strength and with a wordless prayer to the Gods in the Sea. She yanked her leg free just as those jaws snapped shut inches from it, and rolled away.

The rope hung less than ten yards off, vanishing up into the gloom. The figure on it had gone. Yaz ran, knowing even as she did that she wouldn’t have time to climb high enough before the giant hauled her down.

She grabbed the rope, a crude thing of twisted hide strips studded with knots, and turned to check her opponent. To Yaz’s surprise the giant hadn’t advanced. A much smaller figure danced around her, throwing fist-sized stones. The missiles seemed only to annoy the giant but when she lurched towards her assailant the boy just danced away. His speed and timing were breathtaking.

‘Climb!’ A girl’s voice, high above. ‘Bring the rope with you!’

Yaz reached up, taking hold just above a large knot, and began to climb. It was not something she had done before. The ice tends to be flat. But fortunately the Ictha are strong and what she lacked in technique she replaced with muscle power. A short way off the ground Yaz reached down, groaning as her bruised body complained, and grabbed a lower section of the rope to tuck into her belt. Then, bringing it with her, she continued upwards. She had to assume the boy had another means of escape. If he could run as swiftly as his dodging implied then the giant would have no chance of keeping pace.

Yaz reached the top of the rope in darkness. For some yards she had been climbing alongside an ice wall, presumably a vertical shaft in the roof of the cavern. Hands reached out to help her over the lip. More hands than she had expected. A number of strangers crowded around her, drawing her back from the hole.

‘Zeen?’ Yaz asked. Nobody answered, they only hustled her along, blind in the dark. Yaz frowned, then stopped moving. She braced herself against the slickness of the ice. ‘How did you do all this? Make a rope? Get up here? We weren’t that late to the gathering. You couldn’t have been more than an hour ahead, maybe two.’

Suddenly there was light. All around her figures shielded their eyes, some gasping as if it had been unexpected for them too. Shadows swung as the light moved, a bright point held between two prongs at the end of an iron rod clutched in a young man’s fist. Yaz squinted and could see that the source of the glare was one of the stars she had seen locked in the ice, though this was a larger one, considerably larger than her thumbnail. Despite its dazzle Yaz found herself staring at it, ignoring what its light revealed. It looked like a hole in the world, opening onto some bright place. For a moment the air seemed full of whispers just beyond hearing, the space between them strange and echo-haunted, as if a heavy stone had dropped, rippling the fabric of everything.

A cough broke the spell.

Six strangers surrounded Yaz. She spun around. Zeen was not among them. Two were younger than her, two around her own age, one a man in his twenties, carrying the light, and beside him a scar-faced woman in her thirties perhaps.

Yaz’s frown deepened. What was a grown woman doing here?

‘We had more than an hour’s head start on you, girl,’ the woman said. ‘The younglings came down last gathering.’

Yaz blinked. ‘Four years?’ Four years in the blackness. Four years under the ice.

The woman coughed a bitter laugh. ‘I’ve seen five drops since that old bastard gave me the shove. It’s still Kazik, is it?’

Yaz nodded. Kazik had been regulator even before her grandmother’s testing.

‘Shame. He’s lived too long.’

Yaz looked about her at the others. All of them were lean, cheeks hollow, eyes bright, all grimy, all wrapped in gut-sewn skins. The two boys of her own age held makeshift clubs, smoothed stones the size of a fist lashed with hide to the end of bones that looked suspiciously like the thighbones of a large man.

‘My brother?’ She held a hand to indicate his height. ‘Where is he?’

The others looked down, their mouths in grim lines. Yaz grew suddenly cold, stomach knotting, a twitch coming to her cheek. The scar-faced woman shook her head. ‘Hetta got him.’ She pursed her lips in the direction of sympathy. ‘Nearly got me once.’ She indicated the parallel lines scored across her face as if torn by claws. ‘Nearly got you too.’

‘No.’ Yaz drew a breath, understanding. ‘That was Jaysin. Zeen is bigger.’ As she said it the anger rose in her again. Little Jaysin, timid, eager to please, now torn apart and half eaten. ‘The giant didn’t have Zeen. It was Jaysin’s head on her belt.’

‘Gerant,’ the young man with the light said.

‘What?’

‘Gerant, not giant. The ones that grow too big. They’re gerants.’ The harsh shadows made something sinister of his face.

Yaz shook her head. She didn’t care about that. ‘My brother?’

‘He must have come down somewhere else,’ the woman said. ‘The shafts change between gatherings. We can’t cover them all. We didn’t expect anyone out here, but Hetta must have known somehow. She’s cunning, that one.’

‘The taint told her.’

Yaz glanced back, it was one of the younglings that had spoken, a fair-haired boy now holding his hand to his face in mimicry of Hetta’s black stain. Yaz had never seen hair so pale before, but then she had seen a dozen new things in less than an hour. She turned back to the woman. ‘My brother. Zeen. He’s all I care about.’

The woman nodded, biting her well-bitten lower lip. ‘The other search parties might have got him.’

‘Or the Tainted did,’ whispered the young girl standing beside the fair boy.

The woman shrugged. ‘We’ll join up with the rest of the Broken and find out.’ She held up a hand as Yaz started forward. ‘Once we’re sure the regulator has finished.’

‘He has,’ Yaz said. ‘The Ictha were the last clan. And I was near the end.’

‘Three Ictha.’ The man with the light looked at the woman. ‘I can’t remember the last time there was even one.’

The woman shrugged again. ‘Two now. Or maybe just one. We’ll go find out once Petrick is back.’

‘The boy who attacked the giant?’ Yaz asked. ‘Gerant.’ She corrected herself at the young man’s frown.

Back down the tunnel something rattled. ‘Speak of the devil.’ The woman nodded to the girl who had whispered about ‘the Tainted’. ‘Jerra, go let the rope down.’ The girl ran off into the darkness. ‘Check first!’ the woman called after her. ‘And don’t fall down the hole.’

The woman turned back to Yaz. ‘I’m Arka. That’s Pome.’ She motioned towards the hard-eyed young man with the star. There were other names but somehow they didn’t stick. Zeen was the only name she wanted to hear.

The girl, Jerra, and the boy Petrick, who close up didn’t look much older, came hurrying back, the girl clutching the rope. Yaz wondered how it had been secured. Her mind always threw in tangential questions at unhelpful moments.

‘Hetta?’ Arka asked. Yaz saw the cannibal’s mouth descending towards her leg again, drool hanging from pointed teeth.

‘Still raging.’ Petrick grinned. ‘I lost her in the threads. The new girl stuck her good. Hand and foot!’

Yaz frowned, her hand returning to her side where her knife should be. Even now the loss weighed on her.

‘And the pools? Any more arrivals?’

Petrick shook his head. ‘Think that’s our lot.’

‘Let’s go then.’ Arka led the way, Pome at her side, holding his light-stick aloft as though he were some grand official at a clan ceremony.

Yaz followed, her mind still spinning. Twenty years. That’s how long Arka said she’d been down here. Twenty years. It was as far beyond Yaz’s imagination as a tree. Or the thin green belt the gods were said to have put around the world’s waist, a place where the oldest tales said there was as much life on the land as in the sea.

Arka took the group along a series of tunnels. Many were clearly the work of meltwater but others seemed to defy logic, rising, falling, and twisting in a way that flowing water never would, and yet smooth and round, bearing no mark of pick or chisel.

Yaz jogged in the middle of the band. The Broken they had called themselves. Her new clan, she supposed, bound together by the fact they had survived the drop and wished to keep on surviving.

The darkness gave way to a dim and diffuse illumination as the ice began to be populated once more by the tiny stars. The others seemed to take the same comfort in this that Yaz did, even though they must have seen it every day for years. Little Jerra paused to gaze into the ice and dark-haired Petrick had to give her a tug to get her started again. ‘Slowcoach.’

‘Everyone’s slow next to you.’ The girl blinked, glanced at Yaz, and carried on.

Shortly after that, Arka sent Petrick ahead to warn of their arrival. The boy scampered off at speed and was soon lost in the gloom.

The further they went the more dirty the ice beneath their feet. Eventually they emerged into another rock-floored cavern, not so large as the one in which Yaz had escaped Hetta but still large and better lit.

The air here was warmer than in the tunnels and the soft drip of meltwater filled any brief silence. A crowd of maybe four dozen of the Broken stood in an arc around the entrance, lean, grimy, their clothes cloaks of woven hair over old hides and crude patchworks of small skins. Here and there points of light winked among their number, tiny ice stars sewn onto clothing or dangling from an ear.

More than half of those gathered were huge. Not as big as Hetta maybe, but larger than anyone Yaz had ever seen before. More gerants, given time to grow. For a moment she wondered what they found to eat, and what had originally worn the skins they dressed in.

Between the Broken’s reception party and Yaz a group of four new arrivals huddled together, wet, shivering, some clutching injured limbs or sporting angry red marks that would be black bruises soon enough. Zeen was not among them.

Yaz turned back towards the tunnel, meaning to leave. ‘Let me pass.’ She advanced on the boys blocking the passage.

A hand clamped on her shoulder. ‘You can’t go!’ Arka tried to pull her around. ‘You have no idea where you are or what’s out there.’

‘Zeen’s out there.’ Yaz jerked free of Arka’s grip.

Pome, the young man with the light-stick, slipped between her and the exit. He stood nearly a head taller than her, brown hair scraped back. His mouth held a brittle smile that put her in mind of the hook-eels that play dead right up until the moment they’re hauled into a boat then unsheathe a hundred claws and start to thrash. ‘Tarko is going to speak to all the wets. After that he will decide what to do about your brother.’

Arka moved to stand beside Pome. ‘I don’t know if Zeen can be got back, but I do know you can’t do it by yourself.’ She set her hand to Yaz’s breastbone as she tried to advance. ‘I remember the Ictha being famed for making the best of bad situations … like everything north of the Three Seas.’ She allowed herself a smile. ‘So let’s see some of that alleged common sense.’

Yaz ground her teeth but the sting of the rebuke managed to reach through both her anger and her resolve. She had let her clan down in a dozen ways since the sun rose. Every act she had taken unwrote the Ictha code. She bowed her head. Her recklessness and sacrifice had been as foolish as she had always been taught they were. She would do it right this time. Wait, plan, gather resources, and strike only when reason dictated. The Ictha way. Slowly she turned back and went to stand with the others who had fallen today.

Yaz joined the new arrivals. The gerants she passed to reach them made her feel as though she were a child again despite it being the day she was given her adulthood. She went to stand at the back of the group. The girl just ahead of her turned to see, teeth chattering. She looked to be just a little older than Zeen, of slight build with long brown hair and curious brown eyes. It was the different eyes that would take the longest to get used to.

‘S-So you’re the special one.’ The girl’s voice shook with cold. Yaz hardly noticed her own damp clothing. The cavern was warmer than her mother’s tent in winter. ‘T-The one they’re excited about.’

Yaz frowned. ‘Me?’

‘T-The boy said he saved you from a hetta. I don’t know what that is but he made it sound bad.’

‘It was pretty bad.’ An image of Jaysin’s dangling head flashed across Yaz’s vision again. She hadn’t considered why they would risk themselves to help her. They hadn’t helped little Jaysin. She shook the thought away. ‘Why would they care about me? I’m not special—’ She bit the word off. They were all special down here, she guessed. Just not in a good way. Broken. Unfit for the ice. ‘Why? I’m not worth saving.’

‘You don’t see it?’ The girl hugged herself, hands to her shoulders. ‘I guess maybe you wouldn’t … I saw it as soon as you came in.’

‘Saw what?’

‘The stars,’ the girl said. ‘They burn brighter when you’re near.’

CHAPTER 5

‘You stand before us still wet from the drop. Your tribe and your clan have thrown you aside and not one of them raised their voice to save you. They called you flawed, wrong, unworthy, and you were cast into darkness to die.’ The man who addressed them was neither tall nor old. Yaz had thought one of the gerants would lead, for who could stand against them? Or failing that, the eldest would hold sway with the wisdom of years. But the man who paced back and forth before the crowd seemed unremarkable save for the darkness of his skin which gleamed blacker than the rock itself, something Yaz had never seen even among the many tribes of the gathering. Even his head gleamed, lacking any hair. ‘We are your family now and we have all fallen here. We are the unwanted, the things of such little use that they are thrown away. We are what is beyond repair. We are the Broken.’

‘The Broken!’ The name rang in dozens of mouths.

‘I am Tarko. I command here by the will of the Broken. You have questions. We have answers. You are wet, and the cold will kill you long before you starve. We have heat and food. You were given no choice at the mouth of the pit. I give you a choice. A hard choice.’ He shrugged and pressed his lips together in apology. ‘A hard choice, but still a choice. You may join us or …’ He raised a hand towards the tunnel they had entered by. ‘Or make your own way.’

Tarko watched them, the handful of shivering southerners, and Yaz. She glared back at him, boiling with her fury at … everything … and as angry at having nothing and no one to blame as she was at the rest of it. A short silence reigned. Yaz felt the pressure of many eyes upon her, and still Tarko held his arm towards the dark tunnel.

‘No?’ His arm fell. ‘Then welcome, brothers and sisters.’ Tarko turned his gaze on the rest of Yaz’s new tribe. ‘Five … it is not what we hoped for. A single drop-leader will be sufficient—’

Pome stepped forward, raising his light-stick. ‘I was first to be selected! Arka and—’

‘Arka will be drop-leader for this group.’ Tarko singled out the woman who had brought Yaz in.

‘This is nonsense.’ Pome wasn’t done. A gerant moved to stand at his shoulder, glowering at Tarko, one eye filled with malice, the other milky white. This one looked as if he could crush ice in his fist, the muscles of his arm mounding beneath his furs. ‘We should have taken the centre pool back. We can’t survive on …’ He gave Yaz and the others a withering look. ‘… five.’

‘The Tainted are too many—’

‘And how many of us will there be in ten years if we only gain only five each gathering?’

Tarko sighed. ‘More than if we fight the Tainted for the centre pool each time.’ He looked away. ‘Drop-Leader Arka, dry these wets off and let’s see if they were worth the price we paid.’

‘Come on, I know where it’s warm.’ Arka strode past them and the children hurried after her. Yaz paused, gazing back at the dark entrance that had been the other choice Tarko offered. She watched the Broken, crowding around their leader and around Pome who had spoken against him, most of them trying to make themselves heard. Some were angry, some stern, but most just looked worried. It seemed that the ripples spreading from the arrival of Yaz and the others had not stopped at the edges of the pools into which they had fallen.

‘You, Ictha girl!’ Arka called from the rear of the cavern. ‘Come on!’

Yaz frowned then hurried after the group.

She caught up with the last of them. The girl glanced back and offered a nervous grin. ‘I’m M-M-M-aya.’ She stuttered the name past her shivering. Maya, who had said that thing about the stars shining brighter. Beyond the girl a boy more than a head taller than Yaz and broad with it, owning a man’s size but a child’s face, then another also tall but slender.

The cavern narrowed, then widened, then spread to join a maze of other wide, low-roofed caverns. It appeared that the warmth, which eventually found its way out through the Pit of the Missing, created an air gap above the bedrock of between one and five yards, leaving an ice sky above them supported here and there by still-frozen areas. Seams of the dust-like stars mottled the glacial ice above them providing a faint illumination, brighter here, darker there, and in some places a larger star, like the one Pome carried in his stick, seemed to have been deliberately sunk into a wall to provide better light.

Yaz swung her head from side to side, trying to take it all in, trying and failing to keep her bearings in case she should need to leave in a hurry. The glowing bands overhead kept distracting her, fascinating her eye and putting her in mind of the shimmering veils of light that haunt the polar night. The Ictha called those dragons’ tails, though it seemed each tribe had its own story to tell about them.

‘Down here.’ Arka led the way into a ravine in the bedrock. Rough steps had been carved into the stone and the sound of rushing water rose from far below.

Yaz brought up the rear, stepping cautiously, unused to having rock beneath her feet. Somehow it felt more treacherous than ice. Pinpricks of light broke the darkness ahead of them. Yaz shivered, not so much from the dampness of her clothes but from the thought that this was her life now. Rock and wet ice. She tried to imagine how anyone could live down here not just for days and weeks but for decades, without the ocean to supply hides and fur, sinew and oil, food and fuel … all the materials a people needed to construct their lives.

‘This is the hothouse.’ Arka’s voice drew Yaz from her thoughts and from focusing on her feet as she negotiated the last of the steps. The woman stood before a structure made from neither rock nor ice nor bone nor hide. Yaz had never seen anything like it. She found herself gawping and took comfort that at least the others seemed similarly amazed.

‘What is it?’ Yaz was the first to find her words.

‘The hothouse,’ Arka said. ‘Follow me.’ And she ducked inside through what seemed to be a tent flap but didn’t look like one.

‘It’s a door,’ said an older girl, suddenly scornful now that she realized she knew something the rest did not. She went in after Arka. One by one the others followed.

Yaz came last, running her fingers over the walls and ‘door’. They were flat like stretched hide though much thicker, vertical like the cliffs of the Hot Sea, hard like rock, smooth like bone. The whole structure sat upon a ledge with the ravine carrying on down to unknown depths, and backed against a rock wall. The small girl, Maya, went through ahead of her and Yaz followed.

‘Gods below!’ The blast of heat that met her was like nothing Yaz had ever experienced. As if every oil lamp the Ictha owned were lit and placed side by side in the same tent. She joined the others, noticing that unlike the rest of them the thinner of the two boys wasn’t wet or shivering. He had a narrow face, high cheekbones and, beneath a shock of black hair, dark eyes with a haunted look to them.

‘You come wet into the world and the next time you get wet will be your last.’ Arka’s tribe clearly shared some of the Ictha’s sayings. ‘That’s how it is up there where we came from. Down here things are different.’ She stepped aside and they saw behind her the rocky cave that the small building fronted. The space was both large and crowded, and it was lit by the light of stars set in what looked to be bowls of glass, a thing only Mother Mazai owned, and then just a small disc of it. For a moment, her vision still blurred by the heat, Yaz thought it was people crowding the space beyond, but she soon saw that only the skins they wore hung there, on lines strung from the ceiling, dozens of sets.

‘We dry our clothes here. Hang yours on the wire.’ Arka pointed to a line strung across the width of the cave. She walked into the centre, pushing aside sets of hanging skins as she went and setting them swinging. The shadows swung too and for a moment it looked again as if they were people, the Ictha perhaps, dancing for the sun at the end of the long night. Arka clapped her hands. ‘Hurry!’

She turned her back on them, bending to retrieve something from the floor. When she turned to face them again she seemed surprised that none of them had moved. In a silence broken only by the chattering of teeth she lifted the object she’d retrieved. A clan’s wealth in iron, a squat, heavy cylinder of the stuff, thick-walled and gripped by two bone handles. Deeply etched symbols covered the outside. Yaz knew that the priesthood had a writing that they used to put words on hides. That had always fascinated her. The idea that words, such fleeting things, gone almost as they left your lips, could be trapped and lie there bound in black lines inked into permanence such that they could outlive the one who gave them life. But these symbols were something else again. Like the ice stars they seemed both more real and more distant than the world around them. Complex as the many-legged spider-fish that crawl beneath the sea ice, each was different from its neighbour and yet the same. Each tangled her eye, trying to draw her through … to somewhere.

‘If you don’t warm up soon you may well never warm up.’ Arka frowned at them. ‘What? It’s a pot. You’ve seen a pot before, surely?’

Yaz hadn’t.

Arka set the iron tube on the floor and using a long metal rod she took one of the glass bowls from its niche in the wall, putting it on the floor. With a small scoop at the end of the rod she removed the star from the bowl and dropped it into the iron pot. Immediately the symbols carved into the metal began to glow. The heat radiating from them made Yaz’s face burn. It was as if she held her hand just an inch from a lamp flame. ‘Hang those clothes up! Now!’ Arka barked the order like a woman used to being obeyed. ‘You stay there, Thurin.’ She raised a hand to the black-haired boy as he moved forward with the others.

Yaz stayed with Thurin, though she backed away from the heat. Even Arka seemed surprised by its fierceness, raising an arm to shield her face. ‘I must have used too large a stone … ah … there, it’s easing off.’ She relaxed, then lifted her voice to address them all, falling into her role as their teacher. ‘The sigils set into the iron convert the energy the stone gives off into heat.’

‘I call them stars,’ Yaz said. She tried to look anywhere but at the naked flesh being exposed. The Ictha generally only took something off in order to replace it with something warmer. They would shed layers in their tents but never retain fewer than three. Only in the Hot Sea would they strip, and there the mists shrouded everything, hiding one end of a small boat from the other. The drying, when the Hot Sea closed, was a time of great hardship and more died in that handful of days than in the rest of the year together. ‘Stars. Not stones …’ She faltered under Arka’s hard stare.

‘Some do call them that. Heart-stones, core-stones, ice stars, it’s all the same. Strip.’

Yaz hesitated. With the exception of Thurin the others had moved among the hanging skins, seeking privacy.

‘Why isn’t he wet?’ She pointed an accusing finger at Thurin, who frowned, almost in pain.

‘Because he didn’t drop today. He’s here for … other reasons.’ Arka folded her arms and looked Yaz up then down. ‘Do the Ictha have something under their hides that the rest of us don’t?’

Yaz scowled. If she protested further they would all be watching her as Arka wrestled her out of her wet skins. With a snarl Yaz walked into the area where the clothing already strung up offered the most shelter. She stripped off her outer skins, wrestling with tight knots. Her innermost layer was sewn on, requiring a knife to remove and a needle to replace. She would not need it down here out of the wind. The wind was the true killer. It amazed her not to hear it. Its absence was a silence battering at her ears. Once when Yaz was little the wind had stopped. Not dropped or weakened, but stopped. It was a thing that even the grey among them had never seen. The elders thought that it might be the end of the world. Some wept. Some tore at their hair. And then the wind blew again and it was as if that moment of stillness had never been.

Yaz shed her sodden outer hides. Her best sealskins were still stored on her sled. The Ictha would make good use of them. She peered back at Arka around a hanging coat. ‘I need a knife.’ She said the words through gritted teeth.

‘Hey! We’re not that dangerous!’ A girl’s voice from among the drying clothes, Maya perhaps.

‘I am!’ A boy. Laughter followed that one.

‘She thinks we can’t resist her without her furs.’ Another girl.

More laughter. A slightly hysterical edge to it. Yaz reminded herself that they were children and she an adult. And that the pit had taken them all from their lives. If they didn’t laugh they would cry. She shook her head, trying to press a smile from her lips. It was funny, she guessed, to find herself next to naked in the Pit of the Missing and to still be sweating.

‘That’s all I can get off without a knife.’ Yaz walked back out wearing only the black mole-fish skins that her mother had sewn her into at the onset of the long night. ‘At least they got a good wash today.’ More laughter.

Arka sighed and shook her head. ‘Ictha!’

Yaz moved closer to the burning heat of the pot until the skins began to steam. The mole-fish hides had been softened with nagga venom, giving them a velvety feel, but they resisted water and wouldn’t stay wet for long. Yaz stretched. She had never felt so warm and lacked any inclination to ever step away. Then, remembering herself, and feeling the black-haired boy, Thurin, trying not to look at her, she hunched again, to present as small a target as she could for others’ stares.

Arka called to the three now naked among the hanging skins. ‘There are capes at the back, to wear when you’ve hung your clothes to dry. Then come out here and join us.’

Maya and Yaz sat with the iron pot between them, the huge boy and a black-haired girl completed the circle, the heat making their faces glow. Arka and Thurin sat further back, knees drawn up before them. The boy, Kao, had shrugged his cape from his shoulders and gathered it around his waist. His arms were so thick with muscle that it had to fight for space along his bones, heaping itself up. He watched them all with disdain from blue eyes that sheltered beneath a yellow fringe.

‘The old man made a mistake.’ Kao’s voice rumbled deeper than Yaz’s father’s. ‘I don’t belong down here. I’m as strong as any man in the Golin clan. Stronger than most. I’m not some broken thing. I don’t belong here with you …’

‘Us what?’ The dark girl was called Quina. Her face reminded Yaz of a hawk, eyes like black stones.

‘Rejects.’ Kao spat the word. ‘There’s nothing wrong with me. I’m going to climb out and throw that scrawny priest down his own hole then—’

‘If you can climb out of the pit it shows that Kazik was right about you,’ Arka said. ‘If you can’t then maybe he was wrong, but nobody will ever know. It’s the perfect system.’ She raised a hand to forestall Kao’s hot reply. ‘But I would enjoy watching you do it.’

‘Me too.’ Yaz hadn’t intended to speak but the words left her mouth. She dropped her gaze as the others glanced her way. In the heat of the moment she had forgotten that not only was she bare-handed before strangers but she was showing more of her skin than an Ictha sees on their wedding night.

‘In any event,’ Arka said. ‘We are all here, rightly or wrongly, and there is no returning to the surface. My task is to educate you in the ways of the Broken so that you can become useful and earn your keep. Our lives are … hard. You will have noticed that fewer of us grow old than even the Ictha.’

Yaz bowed her head as the others looked her way again. She hadn’t spotted even a single greyhead among the Broken. At perhaps thirty Arka looked as old as any of those Yaz had seen.

‘There should be more of us,’ Quina said. ‘I saw a dozen pushed and there were many still behind me.’

‘Did the hetta eat them all?’ Maya asked, round-eyed. Yaz guessed her to be the youngest of them, around thirteen. Quina might be fifteen. Kao her own age or a year younger. Despite the size of him his was a boy’s face.

‘Where did you hear about Hetta?’ Arka frowned at Maya and glanced towards Yaz.

‘The boy said it.’ Maya looked nervous. Yaz suddenly wondered why the girl was the youngest of them. Most got the push at their first gathering. There should be plenty of smaller ones. ‘Petrick. He said a hetta got someone …’

‘Hetta is one of the Tainted. A wild one even for them. A rogue. She hunts alone,’ Arka said, and beside her Thurin, dry and fully clothed, shivered despite the heat. ‘And to understand the Tainted you have to understand that the stories told to scare little children are true. The black ice is real.’

Kao snorted with laughter, Maya paled, Yaz quietly made the sign invoking the protection of both the Gods in the Sky and the Gods in the Sea. Quina, however, just nodded.

‘The Ictha have never seen such a thing,’ Yaz said.

‘Nor have the Golin.’ Kao leaned into the heat. ‘Because there is no such thing.’

‘My people have seen it in the south. Far to the south. A grey scar in the ice, black at its heart.’ Quina narrowed her eyes at Kao, daring him to dispute her.

‘It is rare for black ice to reach the surface. But down here it exists.’ Arka turned towards Thurin as if checking on him. His gaze had fallen to his hands and he made a slow study of his fingers, a twitch in his cheek giving the lie to this show of disinterest.

‘They say if you walk on the black ice it fills you with terrors,’ Quina said.

‘And if a man touches it’ – Maya’s voice trembled – ‘it can make him murder his children.’

‘The Tainted are people who have touched the black ice?’ Yaz asked, and once more she saw Jaysin’s head dangling by the hair from Hetta’s belt.

‘Worse.’ Arka looked grim. ‘They swim in the pools that form where it melts.’

Maya gasped. Yaz, an adult grown, allowed herself no expression of horror but drew her knees up under her chin, feeling even now the touch of Hetta’s vast hand as it had closed around her lower leg and begun to pull her towards those teeth.

Thurin had grown still and very pale. And he was pale enough to start with. ‘It takes more than a touch of the black ice to taint most people. There are spirits in the ice, looking for a way inside you, looking for cracks. Anger will let them in, cruelty, greed, any weakness, even fear will invite them in eventually.’ He stood and turned to leave.

‘Thurin. Sit.’ Arka motioned for him to return.

‘And the Tainted do worse than swim in the black pools.’ Thurin had his back to the others now. ‘They drink from them.’ And he walked away, with Arka’s demands that he stay ringing in his wake.

‘What’s up with him?’ Kao snorted.

Arka made no reply and they joined her in silence, soaking up the heat until at last a distant clanging reached the cave. Arka cocked her head to listen then relaxed. ‘It’s the signal for night. We keep our own cycle down here. I’ll take you to the settlement. You can collect your clothes here tomorrow.’

‘What about Zeen?’ Yaz was no longer sure why she had thrown herself down the pit. In the moment she did it it had seemed that it was for her brother, though quite how it might have helped she couldn’t have said. But now, against all odds, she really did have a chance to help him and she was damned if she would just shut up about it and go to sleep.

‘The Tainted have him,’ Arka said.

Even though she had guessed the answer a cold fist still clenched around Yaz’s heart. ‘Then I need to find him before they eat him.’

‘They won’t eat him.’ Arka shook her head. ‘They are vile but none are quite as crazed as Hetta. They’ll taint him along with the rest of those they caught from today’s drop.’ Arka stood to go. ‘You don’t have to worry about finding your brother, Yaz. You have to worry about him finding you.’

Yaz got hurriedly to her feet and caught Arka’s shoulder. ‘There must be a way to save him.’

The woman turned, the scars on her face very white against heat-reddened skin. ‘Oh, there’s a way. It’s just very hard, is all. It’s a lot easier to taint someone than to untaint them. I’ve been here twenty years and only seen it work once.’

‘Then I need to meet that person,’ Yaz said. ‘The one who was saved.’

Arka pulled free and started towards the door. ‘You already have,’ she said. ‘He’s called Thurin.’

CHAPTER 6

Arka led them from the ravine back into the ice caverns. Their footsteps echoed through the endless twilight, each breath steaming up before them. To her amazement Yaz saw that what she had first thought to be fallen lumps of ice scattering the floor of these long halls were in fact something very different. Roundish objects, in shades from white through grey and brown, lay here and there, varying in size from an eyeball to a head, all of them smooth-skinned, some beaded with water drops.

‘What are they?’ she asked as they drew closer to a place where scores of them clustered.

‘Are they dangerous?’ asked Maya, moving closer to Yaz.

‘Rocks,’ Kao declared.

Quina reserved her judgement.

‘Fungi. They grow where the stones … the stars … give enough warmth.’ Arka bent to pick up a small one from the shadow of a larger one. It made a faint tearing sound as if it were attached to the rock.

‘It’s an animal?’ Yaz wondered why it didn’t run away.

‘A plant. You can eat them.’ Arka took a bite from it and winced. ‘These sort taste better cooked.’

‘Plant?’ Maya asked. Yaz thanked her silently, not wanting to always be the one showing her ignorance.

‘Plants …’ Arka waved her hands at the things helplessly. ‘They don’t move and they don’t bleed but they live …’

‘Like a tree,’ Quina said quietly, rolling something small between her fingers.

Arka frowned. ‘I don’t know about those. But Eular says plants grow anywhere that there is warmth and water and light. He says everything living depends on them for food.’

‘I bloody don’t,’ Kao growled. ‘I eat meat like everyone else.’

‘Yes, but the fish you take from the sea eat plants or eat other fish that eat plants and—’

‘There are plants in the sea now?’ Yaz asked.

‘Yes and—’

‘But there’s no light under the sea,’ Quina said.

‘Well …’ Arka grew flustered. ‘There must be … Eular knows these things. Ask him!’ She thrust the rest of the fungus ball into Quina’s hand and strode away. ‘Come on!’ As she walked she offered more advice on the mysterious world of plants. ‘The brown ones aren’t bad raw. Brown ones with reddish spots will have you vomiting blood for a week. Purple ones will kill you. We weed out the bad ones from the groves but out in the more distant caves you’ll find them, sometimes mixed in with the good ones.’

The settlement sat in an enormous cavern whose entire roof glowed faintly with innumerable stars. Instead of tents, angled to resist the wind, the Broken lived within strange, blocky dwellings fashioned from a variety of materials each more foreign than the next. Glass was the only building material Yaz recognized, gleaming in ill-advised openings in walls. Many of the walls were made from what might be rock but of a lighter colour than that underfoot. The rock had been shaped into blocks much like those the Eskin clan made from snow to construct shelters.

‘Do we have to sleep in one of these?’ Maya’s voice echoed Yaz’s own mistrust of those hard flat roofs and sharp angles.

‘Is there nothing you’re not afraid of, girl?’ Kao snorted. ‘No wonder Clan Axit wanted to drop you down the pit!’

Maya put her head down and said nothing. Clan Axit were the largest of all the clans and many said they all thought themselves kings of the ice. Although life in the wastes left no room for war the Axit had a reputation for fierceness. Blood and more blood had been spilled in the long ago and some said they trained in secret for a war still to come. Yaz gave Kao a hard look until he coloured and turned away.

Yaz couldn’t tell how large the settlement was, only that it seemed to cover a bigger area than the Ictha used when pitching their tents. Perhaps there were more of the Broken than she had first thought. Or maybe there had been more of them in the past.

As they drew closer to the buildings Yaz sniffed at the familiar smell of humanity, stronger here than in camp where the wind scoured the ice between the tents. She saw figures moving in the gloom, making their way along the clear pathways between the various structures. Closer still and she heard the drip, drip, drip of water on rooftops. Every surface close to horizontal glimmered with a light so subtle that the eye almost missed it, stardust falling with the meltwater.

Arka directed them to a low building, one of the first they reached. ‘You’ll all be sleeping in this barracks tonight. And I will be in that hut over there.’ She pointed to a smaller structure whose door faced the barracks door. ‘To keep an eye on you.’

Arka followed them into the barracks. Unlike some of the other buildings this one had none of those glass-covered openings, a fact for which Yaz was grateful. A single small star-stone hung from the roof support in a wire cage, providing a weak light. A dozen bedrolls had been laid out on pallets of the same stuff the walls were made of. The rolls themselves were patchworks of worn skins, sewn and resewn to the point that Yaz wondered if she would wake to find hers in a hundred pieces. She didn’t recognize the fur, not hoola or harp whale.

Maya yawned and Yaz found herself suddenly exhausted. She had no idea how long had passed in the first ice chamber she’d dropped into. Would the gathering far above be in full swing or breaking up as the sun rose? For a moment the weight of all that ice seemed to crush her. She bore it though, along with the weight of sorrow for her mother and her father and Quell and maybe for some of the others she would never see again. Would they be grieving amid the celebrations, even though they were not supposed to? The music and the ferment were meant to help in the forgetting but she hoped they would each at least shed one tear for the girl they had lost.

‘You stay here until I come for you.’ Arka opened the door, pointing. ‘That hut way over there by the entrance to that side chamber. That’s where you go in the night. Nothing freezes down here so we don’t take care of our business near where we sleep. And nothing is wasted. What we have no use for helps grow the plants we eat.’

‘The fungi eats dung?’ Kao pushed up the blond mop of his hair in disgust. ‘And you eat the fungi?’

Arka shrugged. ‘You will too if you don’t want to starve. It’s the circle of life. The dead go into the pits too. It’s how life is. Eular says that on the ice that circle is broken because Abeth is dying. What you take from the sea does not return. But down here the cycle still turns life into death and death into life, and will do so as long as the stars shine.’ With that she left them. Yaz sat, watching Arka walk away and wondering who this Eular was who seemed to know everything.

‘Well, I’m not eating that … muck.’ Kao slammed the door behind Arka.

A low chuckle brought their attention to the gloom at the far end of the barracks where what had seemed to be a heap of bedding now raised its head.

‘So this is where you ran off to.’ Kao snorted at Thurin and shook his head. On the ice nobody stormed off in a temper. The wind would cool you down quicker than you liked, and if your anger took you out of view then you might never find your way back.

Thurin shrugged. ‘I have things to prove before they let me back.’

‘Back?’ Quina went to take a sleeping place not far from Thurin’s.

Thurin said nothing, only lay down and turned away. Maya went to take a place near the door.

‘Not that one,’ Kao said, looming over her.

Maya moved to another, and Kao scowled at her retreat. Yaz watched, wondering that someone so large would feel the need to push a small girl around. Kao could have made an issue of Thurin laughing at him, if he wanted a fight, but there was something haunting that one’s eyes that might give a mad dog pause.

Taking a pallet a good distance from Kao’s Yaz settled herself down. ‘I’m going to find my brother and rescue him from the Tainted.’ She said it with more confidence than she felt and looked through the gloom at the shapeless heap that was Thurin.

‘If you see him you should run,’ the heap replied.

‘Arka told me that the rest are not as bad as Hetta,’ Yaz said. ‘They don’t eat people.’

‘Let them catch you and you’ll wish they had eaten you.’ A long silence. ‘Theus is worse than Hetta. Much worse.’

It was as if Thurin were daring her to ask. She held her tongue. She wasn’t sure if it was pride that kept her lips sealed. Or maybe it was just knowing that since she had to go after Zeen it was better she didn’t hear anything which might make it harder to leave.

Thurin told her anyway. ‘Theus has a plan. He leads them. All of them. Even Hetta is scared of Theus. He’s looking for something in the black ice. Been looking for it a long time. A very long time.’

‘Who is he? What tribe? How old is he?’ The man had taken her brother. Yaz found herself needing to know, however bad it might be.

Thurin didn’t speak for a while and the barracks seemed to hold its breath, as if the others were listening too and feared to betray themselves.

‘Theus is as old as the body he wears. When I first saw him he was wearing Gossix, a boy I used to know.’

‘Wearing?’ Yaz shuddered. She could only think of a flayed skin, just as the Ictha wore the skin of mole-fish, the hides of tuark, and seal furs traded from the Triple Seas far to the south. ‘None of the tribes would—’

‘Theus is not of the tribes.’ Thurin’s voice fell to a whisper, haunted with memory. ‘He comes from the ice itself.’ He seemed about to say more but the door burst open and light flooded in, chasing shadows to the corners.

‘On your feet, drop-group!’ Pome stood, revealed in the light of his own star.

He watched, hard-faced, as they stood, Thurin last of all, favouring him with a dark look.

‘Inspection time.’ Pome strode in between them. ‘Let’s see what sorry excuses we’ve been given this time.’

Maya shrank away from the star as Pome waved it past her on the end of its iron rod. Pome swung back to Kao by the doorway. ‘Big fellow, eh? Golin?’

Kao nodded.

‘I should have been leader of this drop-group,’ Pome said. ‘But Tarko has his politics to play. In the end though, drop-groups aren’t here or there. You come sit with us sometime, down at the Green Shack, and I’ll tell you how things are under the ice. The Broken are listening to me these days and they like what I’m saying. Tarko has me marked for great things.’

Kao nodded and Yaz found herself starting to nod too. She stopped. There was nothing she liked about this young man: not his attitude, the things he said, or the way his gaze slid over her, and yet somehow his words had been carrying her along with them.

‘Get out, Pome.’ Thurin spat. ‘Take your pretty lies with you.’

Pome curled his lip in annoyance and strode towards Thurin, thrusting his star before him. ‘Was that you talking, Taint? Or did you let a demon take your tongue again?’

Thurin backed from the starlight, shielding his face as if it were a fierce heat.

‘See?’ Pome looked back at the rest of them. ‘The Tainted can’t stand the stars. The light is what keeps us safe.’ He glanced at Kao. ‘Never go where it’s dark, boy. Not down here. They’ll have you in a moment.’

‘Yessir.’ Kao gulped and nodded.

Pome turned and jabbed his star at Thurin, who was pressed to the back wall now. The light made him gasp as if in pain, forcing him to slide into the corner on his rear.

‘Stop that!’ Yaz found herself moving forward. However convincing Pome’s words felt, she didn’t like what he was doing one bit.

‘Or you’ll stop me?’ Pome swung round, thrusting his star at her chest.

Yaz squinted down to where the star blazed against her mole-fish skins, brighter even than before. It was just light though, no heat, no pain. The star gave off a faint sound, like the strains of a distant song, with a rapid beat beneath it. ‘You should leave.’

Pome frowned and jabbed the star against her. He looked puzzled.

‘Pome!’ It was Arka at the doorway. ‘Get out here.’

Pome’s face tightened. He forced a smile over gritted teeth and left without saying anything more.

‘Are you all right?’ Yaz tilted her head, not sure if she should offer Thurin her hand to help him rise. Outside, Arka and Pome’s raised voices diminished into the distance.

‘Fine.’ Thurin got to his feet, not looking at Yaz or her half-offered hand. He brushed himself down and went to his bed.

Thurin didn’t speak again until they were all settling to sleep. ‘People think Pome’s special because he can withstand the stars, but that’s not why he’s dangerous. He’s dangerous because his words get under your skin. Listen to him too long and you start believing what he says. And if he doesn’t manage to hook you that way then watch out for the ones he does hook.’

Sleep took an age to find Yaz. Imagination chased her through her exhaustion. Strangers’ eyes watched her from tainted faces, laden with malice. At last she turned her thoughts from Thurin’s words only to rediscover the unsettling warmth, the dampness in the air – something she knew only from the Hot Sea – the irregular splat of meltwater drops falling upon the roof, the distant groaning of the ice always on the move. All of it conspired to keep her dreams away and instead her mind replayed the events of the pit and the screaming rush of her fall, over and over.

Yaz lay in the gloom staring at the roof above her. In her whole life this was the first time she had tried to sleep anywhere but within her family tent. She needed the constant complaint of the wind against the hides. She needed her father’s growling snore building to the familiar snort then temporary silence. She needed the cold and the knowledge that Zeen and her mother pressed her, hide-wrapped, to either side. Yaz thought of her mother then and a tear ran from the corner of her eye. What must it be like in the tent now with just the two of them in all that space? Father, grim-faced, hands in fists upon his lap, knuckles white. Mother, proud, her face carved by the endless wind, iron in her long dark hair, eyes as pale as the wastes. Four years ago she had two sons and a daughter. Now they were gone. Would her pride still carry her over the ruin of her family? A second tear rolled after the first.

Finally Yaz dozed, woken periodically by a gnawing hunger, not helped by regular gurgles from Kao’s stomach. Hunger reminded her that however suicidal her mind might have been in throwing her down the Pit of the Missing, her body intended to live and was demanding that she look after its needs or things would go hard on her.

When a dark shape crept past her Yaz imagined that whoever it was was heading for the distant hut Arka had pointed out. But the figure, too slim to be Kao and too tall for Maya, left the door ajar and turned the wrong way. Curious, Yaz slipped from her covers and moved to follow.

She saw now as she left the barracks that it could only be Thurin ahead of her. On the ice he wouldn’t last long, too thin to resist the wind’s assault. Yaz herself lacked the full solidity of the Ictha but Thurin looked as though he might be blown away before the wind froze him.

The gritty rock felt curious underfoot, sticking to her damp feet. To leave a shelter without boots and liners was to lose toes to the frost, but here a lifetime’s learning could be undone in one drop. Yaz stumbled as she followed Thurin away from the settlement, stubbing her big toe on a fold in the rock. She cursed as quietly as she could, hobbling along a good thirty yards behind her quarry.

Thurin crossed the length of the cavern, jumping two small streams, and came to an archway that led to some new chamber, darker than the one they occupied. Near the entrance a single light burned, a star-stone larger than any of those Yaz had yet seen, bedded in the ice at a level she might reach if she were to stand on Thurin’s shoulders and stretch.

Thurin came to a halt near the arch. ‘You’re not doing a very good job of spying on me, you know.’ He didn’t turn towards her.

Yaz froze and said nothing.

‘Stealth isn’t really a skill you need on the ice. I’m told the wind hides every other noise and that there’s nothing to hunt.’

Still Yaz remained motionless, the air trapped in her lungs.

‘You should have told me that you weren’t trying to be quiet.’ Thurin at last turned to face Yaz and she released her breath. ‘But I have heard that the Ictha can’t lie.’ He cocked his head. ‘Is that true?’

‘Yes,’ Yaz lied, and they both smiled.

‘You can’t sleep. Most can’t on the first night. Maybe the others are just faking it. The big lad, Wayo?’

‘Kao.’

‘Kao, then. He can’t really snore like that? I’m sure it must be some kind of a joke …’

Yaz found herself chuckling and made herself stop, suddenly stern. ‘What are you doing out here?’

‘Answering questions.’

Yaz didn’t smile this time. ‘I have more. I want to know—’

‘Aren’t you cold?’ Thurin asked.

‘I—’ Yaz looked down, mortified at the reminder she had nothing on but the mole-fish skins she’d been sewn into. She should have stolen Kao’s cape but it was so warm she hadn’t noticed her state of undress. Now beneath the brightness of the nearby star she felt next to naked. ‘No!’ She had hoped the word would come out defiantly but it ended up as more of a squeak. ‘Too hot if anything.’ Not a lie. Under Thurin’s amused gaze every inch of exposed skin felt as if it were burning.

‘It’s a breath away from freezing.’ Thurin shook his head. ‘The stories about the Ictha appear to be true. Are you all as strong as bears too?’

‘I don’t know. I’ve never seen a bear, let alone wrestled one.’

Thurin smiled, though there was a sadness in it, the same sorrow that had been haunting him when they first met and ran beneath his laughter. He turned back towards the ice again.

‘I have more questions.’ Yaz moved closer.

‘I didn’t come here to answer your questions,’ he said.

‘But you said—’

‘I have questions of my own.’ He crossed to where the rock held a puddle and crouched before it.

Yaz bit back on her impatience and went to stand behind him. Shouting at Thurin was unlikely to get her the answers she needed. Though she was prepared to knock his head against the rock as a last resort if that was what it took. ‘Well?’

Thurin reached out to the water, putting his hand into it, flat against the rock at the bottom, long fingers splayed.

‘Ah …’ Something twisted inside Yaz, a curious sensation, as if she were a pool into which a ball of ice had fallen, sending out ripples. Only she was the ice and the ripples as well as being the pool.

Thurin let out a small gasp, pain perhaps, and raised his hand. Somehow the water rose with his hand, a slowly undulating glove, inches thick on every side, beautiful where the light came through to project moving lines of light and shadow across Yaz’s stomach and thighs.

‘You’re a witch-child!’

Thurin laughed and the water fell away in sparkling drops. ‘I’m not a child. And it’s an old blood that runs through us. Older than the Ictha or any other tribe. Marjal blood.’

‘Us?’ Yaz wasn’t sure she wanted this strange young man as her kin.

‘Well, you’re too small for a gerant, unless you’re twelve … and you don’t look twelve.’ For a moment Thurin’s gaze ran the length of her.

Yaz let anger burn away any sense of shame at her state of undress. ‘I’ve seen the long night sixteen times. None but the Ictha can endure it.’

‘Ah, but that’s why the regulator threw you down, is it not?’ An eyebrow arched. ‘You wouldn’t have lasted many more. You don’t strike me as a hunska even though you have the black hair. Your eyes are too pale. Are you quick?’

‘Quick enough.’ Yaz thought of Zeen. Her brother made her seem slow. In the hand-slap game there was no beating him, and although his eyes weren’t the night black of some southerners like Quina, they were the darkest she knew among the Ictha.

‘Not gerant huge or hunska fast, and yet thrown down here with the rest of us. You’re a marjal, Yaz.’

She hadn’t been sure Thurin had even registered her name. It sounded strange in his mouth, the southern tribes blunted the edges of their words.

‘Will I be able to do … that … then?’ She nodded at the rippling puddle.

Thurin pursed his lips. ‘We marjals have many tricks; the gods reach into their bag of marvels and scatter us with this gift or that, but never too many. The most common are skills to work with shadow or air. My talent is the most prized of the basic skills down here. We can influence the ice, even in its molten form.’ He waved a hand at the puddle and the ripples vanished. ‘I can also work with fire, that’s a rarer skill than ice-work but useless. There’s nothing to burn here.’ He shook his head, smiling ruefully at the gods’ joke. ‘The rarest elemental skill is rock-work. But there’s no rock on the ice and no fire beneath it.’

‘How do you even know you can work flame if there’s no fire down here?’ Yaz asked.

Thurin smiled. ‘At the forge they melt iron down. I can understand the heat, move it around. It feels the same as when I manipulate the ice. I think my flame-work might actually be stronger than my ice-work.’ He shook his head again at the irony.

‘Are there other magics?’ Yaz asked. None of this sounded like the river that runs through all things, the source of her strangeness.

‘Some. Oddities that crop up now and then. Welaz could make things float in the air. Anything. Even people. But he’s dead now. Old Gella can make a wound heal faster than it should. Dekkan can find things that are lost.’ He shrugged and pulled his coat around him. ‘How can you not be cold?’ he asked.

‘Why did you come out here?’ Yaz tried to turn the conversation in a new direction.

‘Maybe I wanted to spy on someone.’ Thurin met her eyes with a frank smile and Yaz turned away. ‘Or maybe I needed to check I still had value.’

‘Do the marjals lose their powers then?’ Yaz asked. ‘I know the Tainted had you. Is that why they let you go? Your power got weak?’

‘We don’t lose our skills, no. If anything they get stronger. Once ice-sworn, always ice-sworn. But I’m exhausted and underfed.’ He looked down at his own thinness. ‘And the Tainted don’t let anyone go. Ever. Arka led a raid to get me back. A woman died. Another man lost his eye. They should have left me.’ He stared out into the darkness, bleak and silent for a moment. ‘Tarko wouldn’t have let them risk it if I weren’t valuable to the Broken.’

‘But why? The trick with the water is pretty but—’

‘They need me to dig through ice. I can dig faster than three gerants put together. For a tenth of the food ration.’ Thurin forced a smile and patted his narrow stomach. ‘I like the digging too. If I don’t use my ice-work regularly then the energy builds up inside me and when I do eventually use it … well, it can be dramatic.’

Yaz looked around at the echoingly large space about them. ‘These caverns are huge. Why is it so important to dig new ones?’

‘For these.’ Thurin turned back towards the wall, thrusting his hand out. High up the ice shattered and the brilliant star fell within a cloud of glowing fragments to strike the rock beneath.

‘Should you have done that?’ Yaz glanced back towards the settlement, alarmed. For all that she wanted to find Zeen she knew she needed help from the Broken. Getting banished on her first night would cap off, with one stupid move, a day’s journey that had started with another very stupid move.

‘Relax. It’s us ice-workers who put the things up there in the first place and they’re always being re-sunk. All of the stars generate a very small amount of heat even without sigils around them. They sink through the ice very slowly. The tiny ones, little more than dust really, sink so slowly that the current of the ice can lift them. The big ones all end up on the bedrock given time.’ He advanced on the star as he spoke until he was reduced to a silhouette with the light streaming all around him.

Thurin’s steps grew slower and closer together as he approached the star, almost as though he were fighting to make progress against a great wind. Yaz could hear the strain in his voice when he spoke. ‘This is the largest of the stars we use as lights. People don’t like to get near them, especially the bigger ones, so we use smaller ones in town.’

‘You … you’re not worried someone will steal it?’ Yaz wondered if that might be exactly what he was doing right now.

‘The Tainted? No, the Taints can’t abide them. Won’t go near one if they have a choice.’ There was real pain in Thurin’s voice now, and still he had a yard to go if he were to pick the stone up.

‘What are you doing?’ Yaz called, squinting into the light. ‘Why are you doing it?’

‘Proving … something … to … myself.’ Thurin took another step then fell back with a cry.

‘Thurin!’ Yaz ran to help him as he crawled away, the light flaring behind him.

‘I’m all right.’ Thurin pushed her hand from his arm and staggered up.

‘You don’t look all right.’ He looked like a rag that’s too worn to be used as anything but stuffing. She glanced towards the star, still blazing on the rock. ‘How can you put it back if you can’t even touch it?’

Thurin waved a tired hand at the star and the water rushed from the puddle to set it rolling back against the ice wall. He made a fist and twisted it. Somehow the ice drew the star half into it and began to lift it. Fascinated, Yaz edged closer while Thurin continued the slow upward flow of the ice, raising the star above her head towards its former position. Creaks, groans, and small splintering noises accompanied the star’s gradual ascent, the ice protesting just as it did on a larger scale as the great sheets moved across the rock.

Glancing back Yaz could see the effort it was costing Thurin. In the twilight she could almost see the threads of magic connecting Thurin to the wall. Suddenly he faltered, the gossamer network of his magic fell apart, and with a sharp retort something high above Yaz snapped.

The star fell, hit the rock, and rolled, coming to a halt by the side of Yaz’s foot. She heard Thurin cry out in shock then find his words ‘Get away! Quick!’

The star blazed so bright Yaz could see nothing but its brilliance. The power and nearness of it sang in her bones, a wordless roaring, beautiful but wild enough to drown in. Despite its smallness and outpouring of light the star seemed a wider and deeper hole than that into which she had thrown herself only hours before. Unable to stop herself Yaz crouched and reached to pick the thing from the floor. The light made black lines of her finger bones and a rosy haze of the flesh around them. Her whole hand tingled, then burned, then closed around the star, so small that she could almost hide it within her grasp.

‘Be still,’ she told it for it seemed to her that the star was a racing heart, beating beyond its limits. And suddenly the blaze vanished, replaced by a molten reddish glow like that of the setting sun. There was a silence too. She had barely heard the star’s song before, but now that it was gone the air seemed to ache for its return. Yaz looked for Thurin and saw nothing but blackness swimming with after-images.

‘What have you done?’ Thurin, aghast, speaking from her blindness.

‘I asked it to be quiet.’ Yaz blinked and was relieved to see Thurin as a dark shape moving against a less dark background.

‘You shouldn’t be able to do that!’ He sounded scared. Amazed, but scared. ‘Make it work again.’

Yaz went right up to the wall and held the star above her at arm’s length, stretching. She pressed it to the ice. ‘Make it go in.’

Thurin’s magic fluttered around her and the ice swallowed the star as easily as if she were pressing it into fresh snow. ‘It’s still not working!’ he hissed.

Yaz stepped back. The star’s red glow gave the ice around it a bloody hue. ‘Sing,’ she told it. And in an instant the light returned, bright as it had ever been.

‘Come on!’ Thurin grabbed her shoulder, nails biting into bare skin. ‘We need to go back.’ He pulled her with him. ‘Pray nobody saw that!’

Both of them stumbled into the settlement, exhausted. Yaz found herself unable to stop yawning and Thurin seemed barely able to stand. ‘Working the ice … takes something out of me.’ He straightened with effort.

Yaz just nodded and followed as he led off again. Her sight had yet to recover entirely and the cavern’s twilight pulsed around her. Amid it all a mysterious clot of shadow moved across her vision like a person wrapped in night.

‘I’m not normally so weak,’ Thurin muttered. ‘But when I was …’

‘With the Tainted,’ Yaz supplied.

He nodded. ‘My ice-work got used, but it wasn’t me using it. I was a passenger in my own body. I’m out of practice at being me … if that makes any sense.’

Yaz said nothing. Part of her was thinking of Zeen, demon-haunted, wandering out there somewhere in the black ice. The other part ran Thurin’s words through her mind. Out of practice at being me. She felt adrift. She had, for her entire life, been a small but vital part in a single organism dedicated to survival against the odds. Just like every other member of the Ictha she’d carried out her duties in the certain knowledge that should she fail they would all suffer. On the edge of extinction every mistake carried a fatal edge, every waking moment had a purpose, every hour was occupied. It seemed strange that after what should have been a fall to her death she had for perhaps the first time in her life a chance to practise being her.

On the outskirts of the settlement Thurin turned and looked out across the great cavern sleeping in its own starlit twilight. A dozen openings led from it into other caverns or tunnels. ‘It’s pretty, but seriously though, don’t wander off.’

‘I might get lost?’ asked Yaz, trying not to bristle at the suggestion she couldn’t look after herself.

‘You might get taken.’ Thurin made a flat line of his mouth. ‘Hetta will only eat you. Theus haunts the dark, and those they can’t fill with demons …’

‘What happens to them?’

Thurin turned away. ‘Sometimes we hear them screaming, even here. It can last for days. They do it to tempt us out there.’

Yaz hung her head. The shadows and starlight seemed suddenly less beautiful and she shivered despite the warmth.

Thurin led off wearily without saying more.

They reached the barracks and almost fell through the door. Yaz found the energy to close it behind them, noticing as she did so that the door to Arka’s hut stood ajar. She wondered for a moment if the woman had watched them return together. She decided that she was too tired to care, about anything, and crawled beneath her thin blanket with a sigh. She thought of this Theus, this nightmare creature waiting for them in the darkness, and was sure she would lie awake until the next day. But she was asleep before she drew her next breath.

CHAPTER 7

Hua, least of all the Gods in the Sea, made Zin, the first man, from salt water, the bones of a tuark, and the skin of a whale. While Aiiki, least of all the Gods in the Sky, made Mokka, the first woman, from ice, clouds, the whispers of four lost winds, and a colour stolen from the dragons’ tails.

Zin climbed from the waves and scaled the great cliffs to find that Mokka was there on the heights before him and had already set her tent. Zin asked if he might enter for the wind was a stranger to him and cruel. Mokka knew the wind as she knew herself and let the man come within, for he would die without.

Zin brought fish from beneath the water and he ate to restore his strength. Mokka asked if she might eat for the sea was a stranger to her, showing its face but rarely. Zin knew the waters as he knew himself and let the woman eat, for she had known only hunger.

Hua and Aiiki were the least of all the gods and neither spoke nor touched, but the children of their minds came to walk all corners of the world, and their work was in its way as mighty as that of any in the sky or in the sea.

None walk ice but for the sharing of Zin and Mokka. None survive there alone for the wind is cruel and the sea is a stranger. All their children are taught this lesson in their cradle hides. To forget this is to forget ourselves. To forget this is to go into the ice before your time.

A clanging sound drew Yaz from the depths of her dreaming. An alien noise. The Ictha owned little metal and what they did own came from the priests of the Black Rock, iron pins that could be driven into the ice where bone would prove unequal to the task, knife-blades for those who could afford the trade goods demanded for such things. Yaz’s uncle owned an iron knife but it had been her grandfather who purchased it with the horn of a narwhal and a stack of bundled tuark skins as tall as himself. Even so, Yaz had heard the sound of metal on metal before: it clanged.

CLANG.

Yaz sat abruptly then clutched her blanket to her. On all sides her fellow newcomers were sitting up, remembering where they were, and realizing that they had no idea what to do until someone arrived to tell them. Yaz drew up her legs and hugged herself, not against the cold but against the memories of the previous day.

The clanging stopped but Arka failed to appear.

‘What was that?’ Maya asked.

‘It’s to wake up the day shift.’ Thurin yawned and stretched. ‘Not that we have nights and days down here. But Tarko likes to keep things ordered.’

‘So, we’re awake.’ Kao hulked in front of the star-lamp throwing everyone into shadow. ‘Where do we go for breakfast?’

The others grinned but Kao’s answering scowl showed that he wasn’t joking, and now that Yaz thought about it she discovered herself to be ravenous. She went to dip a hide cup into the water bucket at the end of the barracks and drank. The bucket was made of no substance she knew. The water tasted clean but everything here was strange, nothing felt right.

‘Where did all the young ones go?’ Quina asked suddenly.

‘They fell to the Taints,’ Thurin answered in a quiet voice.

‘She told us that yesterday. The scar-faced woman … Arka.’ Kao sneered, though whether at Quina’s stupidity or some distaste for Arka, or both, Yaz couldn’t tell.

‘But why?’ Quina persisted. ‘Why are all of us here nearly grown and all the young ones … none of the older ones … with the Taints?’

‘It’s a good question.’ Thurin closed off Kao’s retort with a raised hand. ‘It depends on how the pit is. The vents form, stretch and twist as the ice flows, and then are abandoned as the heat finds a new more direct route to the surface. There can be many ways down and sometimes who falls where just depends on how heavy they are. The shafts sort them like …’ He wriggled his fingers as if trying to pluck a good analogy from the air.

‘Fish in a sorting basket,’ Maya offered.

Yaz and Quina grunted. It was well said. In a sorting basket the fisher shook their catch in the right way and the largest rose to the top, the small fry packing the tail.

The door banged open. Arka leaned in. ‘Come on then, eat!’ She frowned at Thurin. ‘You know this stuff. Show some initiative.’

The five of them followed her out into the same gloom that had seen them to bed. Kao, Quina, and Maya clutched their capes about them, and Yaz brought her blanket. Arka cast a disapproving eye over them. ‘All right, all right, you can go fetch your clothes from the drying cave. I want you back here before I get bored of waiting. Thurin, make sure they don’t get lost.’ She clapped her hands. ‘Run!’

Thurin led off at a steady pace, weaving around the larger puddles. Quina kept easily at his shoulder, Yaz next holding to a straighter path, Kao and Maya labouring at the rear, one too heavy for speed, the other too short-legged for it.

Yaz slowed considerably when they reached the ravine. The narrow path down into it gave onto a decidedly fatal-looking drop on one side. Quina was nearly dressed by the time Yaz joined her and Thurin. The heat immediately made Yaz sweat, droplets beading the redness of her skin and making her wonder why she’d bothered drying the clothes. In the north an Ictha could not afford to sweat. Even that small amount of moisture could see them freeze entirely. Here in the heat and dampness she seemed to do little else.

‘Be quick about it,’ Thurin advised. ‘We don’t want to make Arka look bad. Pome is just itching to find fault and get himself put in charge of us. If he put half as much effort into defending us against the Tainted as he does into fighting Tarko and agitating then we’d still have them confined to the black ice.’

‘He … he’s not dangerous though?’ Little Maya looked worried. She looked worried most of the time.

Thurin made a half-shrug. ‘Arka thinks he is, but Tarko doesn’t see it. Arka isn’t convinced that everyone who’s disappeared lately has been taken by the Tainted or while scavenging. But that’s hard to prove. Just because some of those who vanished were standing in Pome’s way doesn’t mean he had a hand in it. Life down here is dangerous … So don’t go making enemies of Pome or anyone else. Especially Pome.’ He glanced at Yaz, a warning look, as if standing up for him last night had been a foolish thing.

Yaz dressed in a hurry, haste making her clumsy, and then had to wait for Maya and Kao to finish before Thurin would lead them back.

‘Why dry clothes all the way out here anyway?’ she asked.

‘The stone keeps the heat in better than any shelter. And we don’t like to make too much heat under an ice roof. Sometimes they don’t just drip. A chunk can fall. And that tends to hurt.’

Yaz winced.

Quina stood, fully dressed in her clan furs. Their clothes identified their clans both by design and composition. Nothing but men survived on the ice in the far north so the Ictha had no furs save the few they traded. They wore hides and skins. Among the Broken, though, the differences were lost amid years of repairs. The coat and leggings that wrapped Thurin’s narrow musculature were a patchwork of furs and leathers in which Yaz saw no clues at all to his clan.

Quina offered her a narrow smile, quick then gone. ‘More speed less haste. We’ll get your brother back from the Tainted. They got Thurin back after months. So you can take the time to match your ties up.’

Yaz looked down to realize she had mismatched one side of her outer coat to the other. ‘Dung on it!’

Quina’s grin returned. ‘Is that how they curse in the north?’

Yaz felt her cheeks colouring but she nodded. She found herself liking this narrow girl with her guarded ways and swift smiles.

‘I thought the Ictha would be good at swearing, what with all those long nights to practise!’ Quina went to the doorway. ‘I’ll teach you some better ones later.’

Maya’s struggling head emerged wide-eyed from the top of her parka. ‘You’re going to rescue your brother?’

‘Yes.’ Yaz frowned. The Ictha would call it throwing good spears after bad. The Ictha couldn’t afford grand gestures. Weakness had to be abandoned on the ice. Grow too old, get sick, become injured, become a burden and the harsh equations of wind and cold dictated that you be left. No one would come after her. She had committed the crime of weakness and the Pit of the Missing was her sentence, though somehow the regulator had commuted it. She set her jaw defiantly. This was a new world. New rules applied. ‘Yes, I am. And soon. Coming with me?’

Maya paled at that and edged towards Thurin, waiting in the doorway. Thurin shot Yaz another glance, this one unreadable. Quina had already left the hut.

‘Come on!’ Thurin waved to go, even though Kao was still struggling to get his other over-boot on and lace it.

‘I feel better like this.’ Yaz stamped her boots, the rock no longer grating against the soles of her feet. Back in the clothes she’d been wearing when she dropped Yaz felt like an Ictha again. She looked like one too. The mix and colour of her skins declared it. She wondered how long it would take for her differences to fade into the patched oneness of the Broken. She wondered if the guilt would ever fade. If she would ever lose the feeling that it had been her fault which dragged her here. Her failure that deprived the Ictha of a pair of able hands and took her parents’ first and last child from their tent.

The others started up the path at a half-run, laughing as Kao bellowed curses after them. Yaz followed, deep in her thoughts, Kao labouring behind her, still snatching at his boot. He began to catch them up in the second great chamber, puffing and blowing.

‘Call that running? Arka told us to hurry!’ Quina sped off, showing a remarkable turn of speed. ‘Come on!’

Thurin made to chase after her but paused when he saw that Yaz had come to a halt. ‘The Ictha girl needs to rest?’

‘No …’ Yaz wasn’t sure what it was but it was … something. The river that runs through all things remained hidden from her; she had used its power on the previous day to match the endurance of her tribe and it would be some time yet before she could find it again. But even when the river lay beyond her reach there were echoes of it everywhere, lines, infinitely many and infinitely fine, running from and to every part of every thing. She only had to defocus her vision to see those threads, and sometimes, like now, they encroached without her asking. They had pulsed in the air around Regulator Kazik while he inspected her at the mouth of the pit and they vibrated now, throughout the cavern, as if they were a net across which something heavy were advancing. ‘Over there.’ She pointed without seeing.

‘No?’ Thurin spoke the word in disbelief.

‘What is it?’ Maya moved to stand behind Kao, who joined them, puffing, and with angry words waiting only on the breath with which to express them.

Yaz could now see two points of light in the direction she’d aimed her finger. Far across the dark cavern. Hard white light of a kind she had never seen. Not the soft red of sunlight or the warm orange of flame.

‘With me!’ Thurin shouted. ‘Run!’

Yaz took off after Thurin, the others following, all but Quina who had gone off ahead and become lost from sight in the gloom. ‘What is it?’

Thurin saved his breath for running. Yaz pounded after him, praying no unseen fold of the rock would trip her, and from behind came a growing clatter of hard feet hitting stone, a clattering and a clashing and a thrashing. Whatever the thing was it was gaining on them at a frightening rate. In seconds it would be on them, and with the cavern wall looming ahead they had nowhere to run in any case.

‘In! Crawl!’ Thurin reached the cavern wall at a point where the base failed to quite meet the floor, leaving a narrow gap between ice and rock. Yaz threw herself after him, cutting her hands on the grit to save tearing the knees from her leggings. Skin grows back, hides don’t, was an old Ictha saying.

‘Deeper!’ Ahead of her Thurin was on his chest, scraping further in.

Kao and Maya launched themselves after Yaz and a heartbeat later their pursuer hit the wall with a thump that shivered through the ice. A shower of pulverized fragments fell in a white veil across the entrance to the gap.

‘Quick! Get in deeper!’ Thurin sounded desperate.

‘I can’t!’ Kao’s thick body was jammed two yards short of Yaz’s position.

‘Grab hold!’ Yaz had already half turned to wedge herself deeper and now turned further to reach back for Kao’s outstretched hand. Behind the boy she could see what seemed a forest of black legs through the clearing debris.

‘Pull!’ Kao screamed.

Yaz hauled, trying to anchor herself, but Kao proved more tightly held and instead they only succeeded in dragging her forward a few inches.

Behind Kao’s scrabbling feet something large and black clanged against the rock and a blinding white eye filled the crevice with light.

‘Try again!’ Thurin shouted and above Kao a layer of ice several inches thick shattered and fell away as Thurin exercised his power.

Yaz hauled and Kao lurched forward.

Through slitted eyes Yaz could see a variety of limbs invading the gap, some sinuous like black metal tentacles, others rigid and articulated, iron arms with too many elbows and skinning knives for claws.

Kao jerked his foot back as one of the clawed arms reached for it.

Thurin shouted behind them. ‘Back further! It opens up!’

In a nightmare of squeezing and pushing Yaz and Kao burrowed deeper until at last, as Thurin said, the ice roof lifted slowly, then swiftly, and they found themselves in a bubble the size of an Ictha tent, the almost-dark broken by the faintest glow from the walls.

‘What in the long night is that thing?’ Yaz almost had to shout to hear herself above the grinding and fracturing noises coming from the cavern wall even though it was now separated from them by ten yards of ice.

‘A hunter from the city,’ Thurin said. ‘It shouldn’t be here. They hardly ever leave the ruins.’

‘But what is it?’ Yaz demanded.

Thurin only shook his head. Behind him the glare from the hunter’s eyes was a diffuse white glow reaching through the yards of ice.

Yaz crouched down to peer back the way they’d come. The hunter had lifted its head to get in close and was reaching for them blind. The longest of its arms raked the rock two yards shy of their chamber but could reach no further. The only light now was a deep red one, so deep it was almost black at times, radiating out from between the plates of armour covering the creature’s body. Yaz couldn’t make sense of the thing; it looked like a random collection of segmented pieces joined together. ‘How long will it stay?’

‘I don’t know. It’s not supposed to be here.’

‘City?’ Yaz looked up, suddenly realizing that Thurin had mentioned a city. ‘What city?’ Men had had cities before the ice swept them aside. The legends said so.

‘A city of the Missing,’ Thurin said. He leaned back and shook his head. ‘You really don’t know what goes on down here at all, do you?’

‘No!’ Suddenly she was angry. ‘And neither did you before you were pushed down the pit, so don’t play so high and mighty with us!’

‘I wasn’t pushed.’ Thurin said it so softly she wondered if she had misheard him above the hunter’s clawing. He’d thrown himself down, like her?

Kao snorted, recovering some of his composure. ‘Of course you were, you lying sack of—’

‘I was born here.’

CHAPTER 8

‘How long do we have to stay here?’ Kao had been pacing for what seemed like hours. One pace, two pace, turn. One pace, two pace, turn.

‘I don’t know.’ Thurin had given the same reply the last several times and it didn’t seem to stick.

‘Try sitting,’ Yaz suggested from where she sat.

Kao made no reply. He seemed more scared of the narrowness of the space confining him than of the hunter outside. And he had been pretty scared of that. Yaz didn’t blame him there. No amount of muscle is going to make a difference against a creature of iron with knives for claws. But fear of enclosed spaces was not something the Ictha knew. Anyone who couldn’t spend three months inside a tent would not last long among her people.

Outside, the grinding continued as it had continued the whole time.

‘Will it dig its way to us?’ Maya asked, eyes wide in the darkness.

Yaz would have said no, nothing could, but the sounds did seem to have grown louder, as if the beast were actually making progress. Certainly when it reached in every so often its claws seemed to scrape the rock much closer to their hiding place each time. Either it was burrowing through ice at a remarkable rate or its limbs were growing longer!

‘The others will come,’ Yaz said. ‘Quina will have told them.’

‘Unless that thing got her,’ Kao said.

Yaz shook her head. ‘Then Arka would have sent someone to check on us already. Arka said we should hurry.’

‘They’ll all know by now,’ Thurin agreed. ‘One way or the other.’

‘So they come and find us and …’ Yaz still marvelled that they were being attacked by a mass of iron that would outweigh all the metal owned by even the largest of clans. Her life could soon be ended by a sharp-edged heap of treasure of incalculable value. ‘How do you beat these things?’

‘We don’t. We hide and eventually they go away.’

‘And if they don’t?’

‘Then someone draws them off. But they always go away in the end, and if you can make it to the long slope they hardly ever follow you past the gateposts.’

‘So … why hasn’t someone drawn it off?’ Maya asked. Now that they were in real trouble she sounded perfectly calm, no sign of the wide-eyed nervous girl from before.

Thurin didn’t speak for a moment, and then, as if deciding on honesty, ‘I guess they’ve tried to draw it off but it just wants us more than it wants them. Sometimes that happens. It’s one of the reasons you won’t see many grey hairs among the Broken.’

Kao stopped pacing. ‘I’ve got to get out,’ he muttered to himself as if it were a sudden realization. ‘Got to get out.’ He fell to his hands and knees and began to crawl to the gap.

‘Don’t be stupid.’ Thurin grabbed the boy’s shoulder and tried to haul him back. He made almost no difference against Kao’s strength but the boy lashed out anyway, sending Thurin flying back into the wall of the chamber.

Yaz stepped between Kao and the gap just before he could enter it. ‘That thing out there will tear you apart!’

Kao showed no signs of having heard her. Somehow his fear of being trapped in such close confines had overwhelmed his fear of the hunter. He jumped to his feet with a strangled cry and reached to grab Yaz as though intending to toss her aside too. Bracing herself against the wall she caught both his wrists. The boy growled and tried to fasten his hands on her shoulders. He stood well over six feet, his arms heaped with muscle, and his strength was frightening.

‘What?’ Kao grunted with effort and pressed down even more forcefully.

Yaz ground her teeth, breathing heavily and held him where he was, hands just inches from closing on her. In the main chamber a great crash rang out.

‘How … are … you … doing … this?’ He eased the pressure, amazed.

A pained laugh rang out behind them, Thurin back on his feet, clutching his side. ‘She’s of the Ictha. The northmen are a different breed.’

‘Listen!’ Yaz let go of Kao’s wrists. A second great crash sounded outside along with an unearthly howl more chilling than any the wind ever made. The light dimmed, nothing but the faint glow of the surrounding ice reaching them.

‘It’s not normally like this.’ Thurin’s voice sounded beside her, closer than she had thought he was. ‘Even when hunters do leave the city they stick to the fringes. I’ve never heard of one this far in. We’re practically at the settlement.’

Yaz shrugged, trying to offset his worry. ‘This sort of thing has been pretty normal for me lately.’ The hunter scared her less than Hetta had, though it looked even harder to overcome. Somehow it was Hetta’s hunger that terrified her more than iron claws and spikes.

‘Ha.’ Thurin snorted. They faced each other, just two handwidths between them but still not close enough to make out each other’s expression.

‘It’s stopped.’ Maya crouched low and peered through the gap. ‘It’s gone!’

Kao bent to join the girl but Yaz turned from Thurin and shoved him back with a grunt. ‘It could be a trick. We wait!’

Kao straightened but thought better of testing his strength against hers again. Yaz was glad of that. Her arms hurt. She had always been told the Ictha were stronger than the southern tribes but had thought it meant only that they could endure the cold better. However strong the Ictha might be, though, Yaz knew that a couple years more growing would see Kao able to brush her aside without effort.

‘What’s going on out there?’ She directed the question at Maya, still on her belly looking out.

‘I can only see ice. The way out’s blocked. But I hear digging.’

‘The monster?’

‘I don’t think so …’

The four of them waited, crouched and ready, listening to the crunch of ice, quieter and less violent than it had been before.

‘Halooo?’ A woman’s voice from outside.

This time nobody stood in Kao’s way as he threw himself at the gap and began to wriggle out beneath the ice.

The rest of them followed, Thurin bringing up the rear. Many hands reached to help them from the mass of crushed ice mounded around the base of the wall. Yaz rose to find herself surrounded by the Broken, scores of them, hulking gerants making their neighbours look like children. Arka led her from the debris as others helped Thurin out. Quina was among them and had taken charge of Maya, brushing fragments from her long brown hair. Pome was there with his star-on-a-stick, others also bearing lights, some holding smaller stars in glass bowls on the end of long poles. Their leader, Tarko, stood among them in hurried conference with a series of his people who took off running once they had their orders.

‘This!’ Pome stepped forward as Thurin stood dusting sparkling fragments from his skins. ‘This is what comes of toying with the Taints! Theus will come for us all. His numbers are growing and we sit back and let him plan our destruction! We leave him to choose when to lead the Tainted against us.’ Pome singled Thurin out, pointing in accusation. ‘Instead of a war to eradicate their kind and take back the drop pools, we capture one of their number and try to cleanse him. Wasting months’ worth of stones and losing a good warrior in the process.’

‘That good warrior was my mother!’ Thurin roared, and about him the crushed ice writhed as though some great serpent were moving just beneath its surface. ‘I don’t need some surface walker one drop from his fall to tell me—’

‘Peace!’ Tarko boomed. His voice rolled out deep as glaciers groaning. ‘The Tainted did not bring a hunter to our caves. Tainted do not go to the city.’

‘And hunters don’t come this far into our territory!’ Pome shouted to mutters of agreement from behind him. ‘But still we have a hunter on our doorstep hard on the heels of Thurin’s restoration. We have challenged the order of things, against the will of many here, and now we see the price. The Tainted are lost to us and a quick death is all the mercy we can afford them.’

Tarko rubbed both hands across the back of his neck as if seeking to ease some tension. He looked tired – close to exhaustion even – but when he answered it was with a measured tone. ‘And what would you have me do, Pome? Return Thurin to the Tainted? Leave him to the hunter? I thought you were eager to fight. Today we have driven off a hunter. When have the Broken known such a victory?’

This time the mutters were for Tarko and they were louder. He continued, ‘I’ve set a watch on the long slope so we will know if a hunter comes our way again. But we’ve shown that here at least we have some defence against them.’ He nodded to himself and looked out across his people, waving them on. ‘Now, each to their task. The ice does not mine itself.’

The gathering appeared to be over. Slowly the crowd began to break up, moving off in threes and fours, some deep in their silence, others talking animatedly among themselves to the accompaniment of the drip drip drip from above and the distant groan of moving ice.

‘What happened?’ Thurin asked Arka, amazed. ‘How did you drive off a hunter?’

‘Tarko worked the ice,’ Arka said.

‘Tarko has marjal blood, like Thurin?’ Maya asked.

‘Someone’s been paying attention. Tarko is the strongest ice-worker among us.’ Arka gave the girl an approving look and Maya beamed up at her. ‘He broke a block from the ceiling bigger than Hetta and let it drop on the hunter. That got its attention. The second one seemed to hurt it. Anyway, it retreated after that.’ She pointed to the far end of the cavern where more caves opened out. ‘Let’s go.’

Yaz ignored the woman and kept her gaze on Thurin. His mother had died in the effort to rescue him, perhaps on the same day Yaz fell. It explained the sadness in him. And he was tainted but was rescued from that too. She needed his help if she were to rescue Zeen. Guilt rose, the old Ictha guilt that always reached up to run its claws through her whenever she thought about herself rather than others. She’d been looking at Thurin as someone who might be a friend. Or even more than that. Those were the sorts of dreams that saw you die on the ice, the sort that hurt the clan. Thurin was her means to recover Zeen. That was her focus. Nobody would know the Tainted better than someone who lived among them. ‘I’m sorry about your mother.’

Thurin frowned, uncomfortable. ‘Nobody lasts long down here. But I will miss her. Very much.’ He paused and added, ‘I’m sorry about your brother.’

There seemed nothing else to say. Sometimes all your words are the wrong shape and none of them will fit into the silence left when the conversation pauses. Yaz looked away from Thurin, her stomach a cold knot. Zeen would be poisoned and insane when she found him. She would need to do whatever had been done for Thurin. The knowledge ate at her. Each new thing she learned only bound her tighter to the Broken. She needed them, and while every instinct told her to go out now and get her brother to safety, her head told her to stay, to listen, and to learn.

‘How—’ But already Arka was leading the others back towards the settlement. Yaz hurried to catch up with her. ‘How do you make someone who’s tainted better again? And what’s this city? And why can’t you just bring ice down on them there too?’

‘Because in the undercity the ceiling is made of stone,’ Arka said. ‘And the rest will have to wait until I’ve eaten. Maybe the Ictha don’t need food but I’m starving.’

‘Food!’ Kao said it as though remembering a lost love. ‘Hells yes.’

Arka led them to the settlement, past the barracks and further in amid a confusion of huts and larger buildings, all different both in design and orientation. They looked almost to have been made from discarded pieces of larger, more complex objects, like the child’s doll Yaz’s father had fashioned for her when she was little. The thought stung her and she wondered what her parents were doing now, what Quell was doing, and how far away they were from her now, up in the freshness of the wind.

She looked around and sniffed in distaste. The settlement lacked the order of an Ictha camp, it was dirty, and it smelled … it smelled delicious! Yaz sniffed again. Arka had led them to one of the largest halls and as she opened the door a wave of warmth rolled out along with the most wonderful aroma. All five of the drop-group suddenly found themselves as hungry as Kao had declared himself to be. They wasted no time installing themselves around a platform that Arka named a table on objects she named chairs, designed to allow them to sit while at the same time being raised to be on a level with the table. Yaz wondered what was wrong with the floor but she made no complaint.

An older woman with dark hair that fell in a strange curling way came in hefting a huge bowl that seemed to be made of iron, blackened with fire on the outside and steaming from within, the source of the wonderful aroma. Yaz was as amazed by the woman’s curls as she was by the fact that metal was so plentiful here that it could be used to make bowls to keep food in.

Arka held up her hand. ‘Two things. One: don’t touch the pot, it will burn you. We serve food hot here. Madeen will bring bowls. Two: this is Madeen. She cooks the meals. Never upset her or you might get something nasty in yours.’

Madeen gave the lie to these words with a motherly smile as she hefted the pot onto the table, then swung round suddenly to aim a narrow-eyed scowl at Maya who jumped and nearly fell from her chair. Laughing, Madeen went to fetch the bowls.

‘Oh, and three: these are spoons.’ Arka showed off a metal scoop.

The pot contained what Arka described as stew. Yaz stared at the steaming and complicated pile of … pieces … in the strange bowl before her. ‘But what is it?’

‘Stew. Eat it. It’s good.’ To prove her point Arka scooped up a lump and put it, still steaming, into her mouth.

‘But … won’t it burn me?’ Yaz could feel the heat rising off the stuff.

‘No.’ Kao spoke the word oddly, trying to fit it around a large mouthful while rapidly sucking and blowing air into and out of his lips. ‘Is good.’

Yaz, Maya, and Quina joined Thurin, Kao, and Arka and started to eat. Yaz had only ever eaten fish before, hot from the sea or cold on the journey from a closing sea to an opening one. The Ictha ate their travel rations frozen. As far as she knew all the other tribes did too.

The warmth was delicious on its own. Whether it made the slices of fungi taste so wonderful or whether they tasted that good cold Yaz couldn’t say, but she knew for a fact that a burned mouth was a small price to pay. She ate with a dedication that nearly matched Kao’s. She’d never tasted anything so full of flavour, so complicated, savoury with a slight saltiness to it.

Towards the bottom of the bowl, as Yaz mustered the strength of will to slow down, she discovered small chunks that seemed familiar, though far more tasty hot and soaked in the stew’s dark juice. ‘This is fish!’

‘It is.’ Arka nodded. ‘You can’t live on the fungi alone, not for too long. Without fish and salt you fall sick and die. Fish livers hold most of what you need to live.’

‘And where do you get fish? Where do you get salt down here?’

Arka met her gaze with serious eyes. ‘Where do you get iron up there?’

‘I … The priests trade it with us.’

‘And we trade it with the priests.’ Arka had all their attention now, though Kao still pushed in another mouthful as he stared at her. ‘Some say it’s the only reason they put us down here.’

‘But …’ Yaz ran out of words.

‘Broken children die if they stay on the ice. A slow, cruel death,’ Quina said. ‘That’s what the pit is for, to keep the bloodlines pure.’

Arka shrugged. ‘Maybe. Maybe not. Have any of you ever seen a gerant, hunska, or marjal child given the chance to try?’

Nobody answered.

‘They throw us down here,’ Yaz said slowly, ‘and we search for metal from this city, and in return they give us some salt and fish? We work for the priests. Slaves in a hole?’

‘Stars too,’ Arka said.

‘What?’

‘We mine the ice for stars too, and trade them for the food we need, and sometimes skins. Though mostly we use rats for that.’

‘Rats?’

‘Like tiny bears … only different.’ Arka waved the question off. ‘But yes, you’re right. We’re slaves working for the priests of the Black Rock.’ She pursed her lips. ‘I’m impressed. It normally takes several days for wets to figure it out, and you’ve just dug most of the answer out with a spoon from a bowl of stew!’

They finished eating without further talk, each held by their own thoughts.

‘Is there more?’ Kao was the first to speak again.

Arka snorted. ‘Gerants! Three times as strong, five times as hungry.’ She shook her head. ‘You got the largest bowl. There’s more later. We eat when we rise and again just before we sleep.’

‘How do we know when that is?’ Maya asked. ‘The light never changes here.’

Thurin frowned. ‘You just know.’

‘You’ll learn to “just know”.’ Arka walked to the door, beckoning for them to follow. ‘It can take a while, but you have the rest of your lives to learn.’

CHAPTER 9

In the story days the first of men, Zin, who climbed from the sea to Mokka’s tent, rose from his sleeping hides and found himself old. He saw in his hands the lines that told a lifetime. With a sigh he set down his dagger-tooth beside the many kettan he had carved in the long night. Zin left his shelter and saw a brittle dawn in the east. The cold had bound itself tight across the ice. A knowing came then into the first of men, a shout and a whisper, carried by the cruelty of the wind, borne by the strangeness of the sea. This would be his last day. And so Zin walked into the whiteness that was the world seeking to know what had become of his many sons and daughters.

Though he had grown old Zin bore the wind and the miles upon his shoulders and in the morning of his last day he found three of the four tribes that had sprung from his seed. In the west the Axit had grown broad, their eyes dark, their hearts fierce, and they knew him not. They followed the seas and their fine nets caught small fish in great number and variety. With octar ink his Axit sons tattooed the flames of dragons’ tails across their necks, licking up over their cheeks. Their threats cracked the ice. His daughters wore bones through their eyebrows and came running before their men with spears in hand.

In the east the Quinx had found a dog and it had become many, as dogs will when fed. Zin’s Quinx sons were tall and wore their hair in warrior braids. His daughters there drove dog-sleds and with their teams hauled even the green whale from the sea. No memory of Zin remained in all of the Quinx. They prized stone beads from such rocks as the Gods in the Sky sometimes cast upon the ice, and because he wore none they counted Zin as lesser, despite his age and the whiteness of his beard.

Far to the south Zin’s Joccan sons walked beneath strange stars in such heat that sometimes molten ice would run and flow even outside a tent and delight the children before it froze again. Joccan wives painted their eyelids black and their hair grew in many shades. The Joccan had forgotten the face of their father and replaced the stories of their mother with lies of the green world that only the gods know.

At last, growing weary, with the sun falling, Zin turned north and walked to the lands where the cold is born and where it hunts. Here the ice grew hard, the landscape fractured, the voice of the glaciers sharper, louder, more fierce. Zin’s Ictha sons turned their pale eyes towards his approach and were amazed for the first of men came among them bare-chested and they knew him for their father and wept. And as the sun descended on the last day of the first man his children of the north feasted him with harp-fish and tuark and the eggs of the great loach, and sang the oldest songs that told of his love for Mokka and the days of his youth when Zin had taught his offspring what secrets of the sea the gods had given into his care.

And come the night the Ictha gave back to the sea that had birthed him all of Zin save that which they held in their hearts.

Yaz stood with the others outside the food hall. She found her shoulders hunched and forced them to relax. It wasn’t cold. It was just the strangeness of the place, the twilight gloom, the glistening ice sky lit with its own stars, the constant dripping, and on all sides the shadow-wrapped buildings full of strange angles and built from gods knew what. Here and there the occasional star-stone hung, alive with light and whispers, drawing Yaz’s eye, reminding her of the star she’d held on the previous night, burning in her hand, its song pulsing through her.

Arka coughed for attention. ‘There are six main tasks we turn our hands to here. On the surface we all did everything. Here we choose a role and we stick to it. You can change, but not from one day to the next. We have …’ She raised her hand and spread the fingers, closing the first one as she began. ‘Harvesters, who seed, protect, and collect the fungi. Hunters, who catch rats for meat and skins, and blindfish from the rivers. Scavengers, who gather metal and building material from the city. Smiths, who melt down the metals and work them into new forms. Miners, who hack star-stones from the ice.’ With four fingers and a thumb closed in Arka now held a raised fist. She brought it smacking down into the palm of her other hand. ‘And warriors, who keep us safe from the Tainted.’

‘The warriors don’t have to do anything except fight?’ Kao asked.

‘They patrol and practise their weapon skills. Actual fighting is rare, thankfully, but still too frequent for us to replace our losses.’

‘I’m going to be a warrior!’ Kao nodded as if the matter were settled.

‘First we do the tour,’ Arka said. ‘Spend some time seeing what goes on here. Sometimes the dullest-sounding tasks are more interesting than the most exciting. Harvesters always have something to do, warriors can find themselves bored, then terrified, then bored.’

‘A warrior! Not grubbing around with those … plants,’ Kao said.

‘They do get to eat as many as they like … as long as no one sees them do it.’

Kao’s truculence weakened as opposing desires waged war. Arka allowed herself a small smile then led them on. ‘First we visit the foundry!’

‘The foundry is the closest area to the main pit shaft that we still hold.’ Arka had led them for what felt like an hour and couldn’t have been anything like that. ‘Can any of you guess why we keep such valuable industry out here where the Tainted contest us?’

‘To show them who’s boss,’ Kao grunted.

‘It’s too difficult to move?’ Maya asked.

Yaz frowned, puzzled.

‘The heat,’ said Quina. ‘It needs to escape without drowning you or bringing the roof down.’

‘Fast brain as well as fast feet,’ Arka said.

At the exit to the low cavern they had been traversing Arka led the drop-group past three gerants and a short dark man heading in the opposite direction. One of the gerants must have been close to nine feet in height and was built like a bear. All three of them wore metal plates linked together by iron rings, each plate no bigger than Yaz’s hand so that together they formed a flexible metal skin over the warriors’ chest, arms, and upper legs. Rust patterned them like frost rings on a closing sea.

The smaller man wore no armour. All four carried iron spears, not bone shafts tipped with an iron blade but iron throughout. And at their hips they bore huge knives with small arms spreading from the hilt.

‘Swords,’ Thurin said, seeing her surprise.

Arka led them on through a perfectly round tunnel that went up and later down, gently undulating through the ice. Broken rock had been scattered on the floor to give purchase in the steeper sections. There seemed no way to account for the conflicting gradients. Meltwater would only flow down.

Arka paused where one tunnel pierced another, listening.

‘How are these tunnels made?’ Yaz had seen similar ones before, shortly after crawling from her drop pool.

‘Coal-worms.’

‘What-worms?’ Yaz knew of worms that swam beneath the ice surrounding the Hot Sea but none of them were much longer than her arm and she didn’t think they burrowed.

‘Coal.’ Thurin waved his hands. ‘Black rock, but not like the mountain. Eular says it used to be forests … trees … and you can burn it just like whale oil.’

Thurin said whaleoil, as if it were one word and he had little idea of what a whale or oil were. Which Yaz supposed was true. ‘Good for burning but hard to light, Eular says …’ He looked at Arka for support.

‘Coal-worms eat coal. They generate heat and melt their way through the ice. Though mostly it’s the young ones who travel, looking for new deposits. The big ones only move on when they’ve exhausted the seams.’

‘Lucky for us a big one chose to head where we’re going then!’ Yaz said.

Arka frowned. ‘This was made by a baby. Pray you never meet a full-grown worm.’

‘What were you?’ Yaz kept close behind Thurin in the tunnels and asked her question quietly.

‘What was I?’

‘You know, hunter, harvester, warrior—’

‘I was a miner. Mostly.’ Thurin glanced back at her, his face curiously lit by bands of stardust in the ceiling just above them. ‘Ice-workers have to be. Well, they are “encouraged”. Miners produce most of the stars that we give to the priests. But the biggest stars are scavenger finds. Like the one we … the one that lights the settlement cavern. And those are dangerous.’ His voice carried the warning. ‘Not all the Tainted were stolen from us. Some went willingly. A star can do that to you. A big one. They break your mind up and fill you with demons.’

‘What sort of demons?’ little Maya asked from behind Yaz, proving to have sharper ears than expected. She was shy but curious, always watching. ‘What do they look like?’

‘Imagine all your hate broken away from you and given its own voice,’ Thurin said. ‘Living under your skin as a separate thing. Or all your greed, or lust. I’ve seen it happen, once. A demon made just of you. Crawling over your body like a stain. That’s what it looks like, just a stain, no bigger than your hand. A taint. So be careful around the stars. Even the smaller ones. They weren’t made for us. They aren’t good or evil. Just dangerous. Like fire.’

The coal-worm’s tunnel eventually descended to the bedrock again and connected with a melt chamber. The air was warmer than back at the settlement, the dripping faster, small streams wound their way across the rock, vanishing beneath the ice at the chamber walls. Yaz led them past more warriors into a cavern lit by half a dozen bright stars whose glow revealed a collection of sheds beside a lake, and above them a ceiling that funnelled up into a steep but slanting shaft vanishing into darkness.

‘This is where I fell,’ Quina said, her narrow face growing tight at the memory.

‘Me too. But I made a bigger splash!’ Kao slapped his belly and chest.

‘What’s that smell?’ Maya sniffed. Ever since coal-worms had been mentioned she’d been jumpy. It was hard to remember that the timid child came from the Axit. If she had not been dropped she would soon have worn their bone piercings through her eyebrows and allegedly, beneath her furs, blood tattoos recording the clan’s victories over past enemies. Walking close behind Maya it seemed to Yaz that something odd happened each time the girl flinched at a new sound. A subtle change, so slight it might just be imagination. The twilight seemed to flinch with her, as if just for a moment the shadows themselves drew in their breath. Maya sniffed again. ‘What is it?’

Yaz inhaled slowly through her nose. The air smelled of blood and fire and harsh, alien scents with sharp angles to them. ‘I don’t know.’

‘Metal, being melted down,’ Arka said.

‘Metal melts?’ Yaz blinked.

‘If you get it hot enough. A lot of things do. Even rock!’ Arka took them towards the huts.

As they drew closer a man in a thick hide apron emerged. The skin on his bare arms glistened with sweat and black smudges decorated bulging muscle. He grunted at Arka and took two handfuls of random metal pieces from the bin beside the hut. The mixture included toothed wheels of unblemished silvery metal, thin black wire in coils, and rusting iron rods with traces of some coating that had been stripped away.

‘That’s Ixen. He doesn’t say much.’ Arka caught the door before it closed and took them inside.

The heat hit Yaz like a blow and she staggered beneath it. The shed was a longish hall whose central feature was a large bowl of what looked like stone, supported on thick chains that ran to the ceiling. Ixen dumped his collection of metal pieces into the bowl, discarding one and adding some more iron rods from a nearby stack.

‘It’s like cooking,’ Arka said. ‘You have to get the mixture right.’

While Ixen added his finishing touches a bony woman, also in a scorched hide apron and little else, came from the rear of the shed to lower a heavy sigil-covered pot on another chain so that it nestled among the scrap.

‘That pot looks like it’s iron but it’s not. It can get hot enough to melt all the other metals in there without melting itself.’

‘So … how did you make it?’ Quina asked.

Arka frowned. ‘That happened before my time. But I guess we’d be in trouble if we lost it.’ She frowned again. ‘Though we do occasionally find metal it can’t melt.’

The woman with the skull-like face took a pole with a scoop on it and began to move stars from a box to one side, dropping them one by one into the grey pot. As she added them each ceased its shining and instead the sigils on the pot began to emit a redder glow along with a fierce heat. Yaz backed off, not wanting to cause the stars to burn too bright and drive the sigils to incinerate them all.