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Quell’s task had been a simple one. To locate Yaz and then use the tiny star the regulator had given him to summon an early collection of iron in the city chamber. He was also to introduce himself to the blind man, Eular, and pass on the regulator’s regards and cryptic messages, saying nothing of that to anyone else.
For the price of that small deception Quell would get to return a daughter of the Ictha to stand beneath the sky once more. A daughter restored to grieving parents. And then, only then, when they stood free upon the ice again, would he be able to ask the questions that had burned inside his chest ever since she fell. Only then would he have been able to ask her to share his life.
Of course now he lay dying. Even if the priests returned him to the Ictha he would just be a source of sorrow for them as they enacted the ritual of farewell and left him alone on the ice with salt and a cube of harp-fish for his hunger.
Worse still, he lay dying while forced to look up at the stranger who so fascinated Yaz, dark of eye and skin where the Ictha were copper-skinned and so pale of eye that the white and the iris became almost the same thing. The man seemed both impossibly strong and impossibly fast, matching Zeen’s superhuman swiftness and exceeding the strength of the Ictha manyfold. And the cruellest blow might be that he had the calm confidence Quell had sought all his life. Quell’s own reserve had cracked at Yaz’s fall and had started to desert him in earnest the moment his rope had snapped and he began his own fall into the midst of the Broken.
Even now, Erris was examining Quell’s wound, probing around the knife with his fingers as if they could somehow see deep into the surrounding flesh.
‘I was wrong,’ Erris said. ‘Given what’s been cut it would be better to leave the blade in place until we are somewhere warm with more resources.’
‘Just take it out,’ Quell grunted.
Erris shook his head. ‘You would bleed to death. Quite likely before we even get you out of this cage.’
‘Go and help Yaz then!’ Quell’s anger rose. Erris had stayed only to help him. And that had meant leaving Yaz to climb the cable on her own in pursuit of Maya.
‘I can’t see her at all now.’ Zeen sounded worried, staring up the cable after his sister, towards the distant circle of sky above them. During the long, slow ascent the boy had oscillated between joyous excitement at his return to the surface and abject terror that the regulator would simply deliver him to the depths again. In the excited moments Quell saw glimpses of the child who had marched south to the Black Rock with him. He hoped that child would return in full back on the ice and manage to leave the horrors of the Tainted in the hole in which they belonged. Though how Zeen might survive in the teeth of the wind, broken as he was, Quell didn’t know. Perhaps Yaz could persuade the priesthood to find a place for him within their mountain halls. She would have to deal with the priests of course. Quell had never thought her plans of a trek into the vast expanse of the southern ice anything but fantasy. The regulator would be waiting for them at the head of the shaft. And the magic of the priests was known to be unstoppable. Even this Erris would be put on his knees before it. The enchantments of the priests had held two dozen clans in check for generations.
‘How far above us do you think she is?’ Zeen asked again.
‘Too far,’ rumbled Kao. He held up a hand against the far-off circle of light and tried to squint past it. He too sounded scared. Despite the boy’s great size Yaz had assured Quell that he was hardly older than her brother.
The cage continued its smooth upward journey. The walls of the shaft were close on every side now and the cage scraped along one wall, spitting pulverized ice over all four of them. The white circle of sky grew ever larger, breaking the darkness into twilight. Quell began to see detail in it, some kind of structure over which the cable must run. He knew a moment’s fear for Yaz then – had she been dragged over the crossbar? But no, if she had come to grief in such a manner she would have fallen back.
The sound of the wind moaning across the open mouth of the shaft began to reach them. Already it seemed colder. Quell gave thanks that this was not the north. His skins were still damp from the flood that had poured out when Thurin had melted the passage. In any true cold it would be a death sentence.
With less than a hundred yards of shaft remaining, the cage came to a sudden halt.
‘What’s happening?’ Zeen got to his feet.
‘Nothing good,’ Kao muttered.
Quell struggled to sit but Erris laid a hand to his chest. ‘Remain still.’
Quell would have told him to find a sea and jump in it, but the pain from the knife became so sharp that he had to lie back in any event. He remembered the crash as the empty cage had hammered down on the city after the flood. He remembered the emptiness in the regulator’s eyes as he pushed children into the Pit of the Missing. ‘They’re going to drop us.’
Quell’s words seemed to crystallize a truth that they all already knew. Erris was first to act. Almost too fast to follow he snatched up one of the stakes with which Yaz had planned to anchor their shelter. Next he took the heavy iron mallet that had fallen between two stacks of boards. With a single blow and a strength that even the largest gerant surely could not match, the man drove the stake a good two-thirds of its eighteen-inch length into the wall of the shaft, leaving the remaining six inches jutting out through the gridded bars of the cage wall.
‘Zeen, you help.’ Erris stuck another into place on the other side with two swift blows.
Zeen, moving as fast as Erris, began to supply the man with stakes, allowing him to focus on placing them and driving them home.
‘That will hold us!’ Quell tried to raise his voice between the hammer blows as Erris set a fifth stake. The cage was heavier than its contents, but even its substantial weight should be secure with five deep anchors.
‘You’re forgetting the cable!’ Erris said, accepting a sixth stake from Zeen.
Even as he spoke the cage jolted and settled heavily on the stakes. The cable above them began to fall, dragged down by its own weight, bowing against the shaft walls and then coiling down on top of the cage in a shower of broken ice. The metal cable began to mount up on the cage housing with frightening speed. The weight of it must be incredible and there were the best part of two miles’ worth of it still to come. Within moments the light had died to a fraction of what it had been.
Erris drove the last of their stakes home. Already the ice around them groaned as the increasing weight strained against the hastily sunk anchors.
‘I have to get up there before too much cable comes down.’ Erris snatched up both the awls they’d brought with them in case new holes had to be made in the boards during repairs.
Quell watched Erris climb. He wondered if the man would be able to find a way out of the rapidly growing mass of cable overhead. If not the weight would increase until the six stakes tore loose and they all made the long fall to their deaths.
Erris moved fast and exerted his enormous strength to push a way through the coils of iron cable. More quickly than Quell had imagined possible, he was gone, leaving them in darkness with the continuing thunder of descending metal overhead.
‘Can he do it?’ Zeen asked.
‘Climb out, you mean?’ Kao asked.
Quell tried to imagine it. A hundred-yard wall of smooth ice with cable rushing down just a yard from it. Erris would be relying on the two thin awls, hauling himself up by strength of arm alone, his whole weight, which according to Kao was far more than it should be for a man that size, depending on first one of the spikes then the other. ‘Yes, he can do it.’ It seemed a reasonable lie to tell, bringing comfort to the two boys, and if he was wrong then it would all be over soon enough.
They waited, blind and helpless. The sound of piling cable grew muffled as the thickness built above them. The stakes groaned alarmingly, the ice around them beginning its inevitable surrender to the mounting pressure. Quell could feel that he was bleeding again. Something had moved the knife. Perhaps the jolt earlier as they tried to drop the cage, or maybe Zeen had knocked it while scrambling for the stakes. Either way, his lifeblood was running from the freshly opened wound once more.
‘What does it mean?’ Zeen asked the darkness. ‘Yaz wouldn’t have let them drop us.’
‘They must have taken her,’ Kao answered in a hopeless voice.
‘Or lost her and done this out of spite or to lure her back.’ Quell spoke in gasps around the pain of his injury. He had never thought to die stabbed by a knife worth more among the Ictha than all of the possessions he had gathered in his life. But now it seemed instead that his end would come beneath a weight of metal greater than that owned by all the clans combined. He doubted anyone from the ice had ever died a grander death. And still he wanted to live, to fish the hot seas, to wait out the long night, to father children of his own.
The cage lurched downwards, just a fraction, but enough to bring cries of alarm from all three of them. One of the stakes must have gone. The other five were holding. For now.
‘It’s stopped …’ Zeen croaked.
Quell wondered what he was talking about. Of course it had stopped, or they would all be falling.
‘The sound,’ Kao said.
Save for the groaning of ice there was no noise from above.
‘It might—’ Quell bit off the words. It might be just that too much now lay atop them to hear through. But why not let the other two think Erris had made it out? Maybe he truly had.
They waited in the dark with the creak and complaint of the ice all around them, sometimes a deep far-off sound that reverberated in his chest, sometimes high-pitched and close, like the sudden fracturing of something brittle. Already, even after just a few days, Quell had grown as used to the sounds as he had been to the ceaseless moan of the wind.
With a groan of his own he raised himself a little, resting his shoulders against the board stacks. He could feel Kao and Zeen’s silent fear, and as the only adult among children he felt he should offer what comfort he could, even if it was only distraction from their fate. ‘More adventure than you ever wanted, eh, Zeen?’ The boy had lived for tales of danger and discovery.
‘Hells yes …’ Zeen managed a broken laugh. ‘I could use some boring right now. Just set me to repairing tent hides or waxing runners. I don’t mind.’ He sighed. ‘I want Yaz back.’
‘Don’t you worry about her,’ Quell said. ‘She’s strong. Stronger than all of us.’
‘She let the dagger-fish take Azad …’ Zeen’s voice trailed off.
Quell growled. ‘I didn’t see your brother get taken. I heard the cry and he was gone when I turned. I saw Yaz leaning over the side with her arms in the waves. Then I saw the boat turn over. And then I saw it go down. Now, I’m not saying it wasn’t a dagger-fish, just that no dagger-fish I’ve ever seen or heard about could take an Ictha canoe under. It had to have been the biggest damn dagger-fish to swim the sea. More likely a whale-eater looped a coil round your brother and pulled him under. What amazes me isn’t that something like that would snatch Azad but that anyone, even an Ictha, had the strength to hold on to him so tight that the whole boat would be dragged under. The aprons were in place. No water was getting in past Yaz and not even that much where Azad had been. You’ve no idea how much force it takes to pull a canoe down when it’s full of air. I’d be astonished if a dagger-fish could manage it, but think of this: it had hold of Azad, not the boat, so the only thing dragging that boat down was Yaz, by not letting go. I know I couldn’t have held on.’
‘What happened next?’ Kao asked in an awed breath. ‘How did she get out?’
‘I thought she was gone too.’ Quell winced at the memory. ‘The sea was calm, just a few bubbles rising. I couldn’t even see the boat. I knew she was gone. I was shouting for the others. I …’ His voice caught in his throat. He hadn’t the words to say how it had felt just watching the water where she vanished. It had been as if he was drowning too.
‘Jex and Jax had arrived in their boat and were shaking their heads. She’d been gone forever. She had to have drowned by then even if she wasn’t eaten. Jex was just saying how sorry he was and suddenly something broke the water nearby, like a breaching whale, launching nearly clean out of the waves. We paddled towards it through the mist. And there she was, unconscious, flopped over in the canoe. The air trapped inside had shot it back up once she let go. That’s Yaz for you. That’s how strong she is. And she tells it like a dagger-fish just took a bite, dragged Azad off and she left him to his fate.’ He shook his head in the darkness. ‘I think something broke in her that day. I think that was the day she started to change. Started to become … what she is now.’
They sat in silence for a long moment after that. Just the blind dark all around them and the groan of the ice. Quell gathered himself. ‘What about you … Kao, isn’t it? What clan are you?’
‘Golin!’ A half-hearted Golin chest-thump sounded in the dark. ‘Best there is …’
Quell knew the boy was wondering if they might ever take him back. Privately, Quell thought there was more chance of finding the green on Yaz’s crazy quest. The Golin were famous sticklers for rules and regulations. The code had kept them alive in the wastes and they in turn kept the code alive.
Quell changed subject to keep the lad from brooding. ‘What do the Golin fish in those southern seas of theirs?’
‘Southern?’ Kao bridled, as Quell had known he would. ‘The Golin are the best fishers on the ice. We follow the Wandering Sea and our boats are longer than a full-grown red shark.’
Kao carried on, talking about species both known and unknown to Quell, boasting as boys will, showing his enthusiasm for the hunt, telling of the time a sheerfish had bitten off his paddle without even enough of a jerk for him to know that the blade had gone.
Time passed, and Zeen was telling Kao about the pranks young Ictha played with the dry ice at the end of the long night, when Quell realized that for the first time in an age he could make out a dim outline of the boy. Their own long night had come to an end. Looking up he saw a weak light fingering through gaps in the coiled mass of cabling. Even as he stared the illumination grew stronger, more yards of cable lifting.
‘Quick, Kao. Find that hammer and be ready to pull those stakes when the cage tries to rise. A solid upstroke on each should work them free.’
The cable above them continued to snake away, until at last the final coil unwound and the whole thing became taut. The cage jolted upwards.
‘Get them free!’ Quell coughed.
‘What if it’s a trick? To get us loose then drop us again?’ Kao hesitated.
‘Just do it!’ If Quell had to lie in the cage with a knife in him for the rest of his life then he would rather that be a short time than a long one.
Kao hammered and tugged and a dozen blows set them free. Immediately they began to rise.
The daylight intensified rapidly. Quell found himself shocked by its brightness and was soon squinting at the world through the gaps between his fingers. The noise of clanking metal grew louder and louder as they rose. Suddenly they were in the open, the wind knifing through the bars to steal their body heat. Kao and Zeen began to shiver immediately, but Quell, even in his damp skins, welcomed the freshness of it. The air in the caverns had felt dead to him; the air in the city smelled of decay. The wind, though, that was a living thing. Not a friend but an adversary that reminded him he too was alive, even with the blade bedded in his side.
A dark hand reached out and slipped a hook through the cage bars. The clanking that had ceased now resumed and the cage was dragged to the side, beginning to lean at an angle away from the iron frame that stood over the shaft mouth and about which the cable slid on a wheel.
‘Don’t let anything fall out!’ Quell barked. ‘Quick!’
Zeen took him at his word and moved with lightning speed to prevent the fungi and smaller tools rolling across the now-sloping boards and out through the cage bars.
Erris climbed the outside of the cage and fixed another hook, higher up this time. He returned to a huge piece of winding gear, toothed iron wheels stacked in brain-aching complexity. Erris set both hands to an iron bar standing out horizontally from the central mechanism and placed his feet in small pits in the ice for traction. He began to circle the device, pushing the capstan bar; there was more clanking. His progress turned the wheels within wheels, and somehow released some of the main cable while drawing the newly attached cable in close. The net result was to stand the cage on its base beside the shaft.
Quell struggled to sit, cursing all the gods he knew by name. The expanse of the ice greeted him, endless, white, haunted by the wind. The only landmark was the Black Rock, thrusting through the glacial sheet, a vast fist of stone not more than a few miles distant. The shaft mouth with its winding gear and gantry was deserted, though Quell noticed a smear of crimson not far from the mechanism, and a scatter of droplets around it. Someone had bled here.
‘Why is it so cold?’ Zeen hugged himself. It looked wrong, one of the Ictha bothered by a southern breeze, but Quell had seen great changes in both Yaz and her brother over their week or so beneath the ice. He could see no reason, though, why such changes should crowd into the space of a few days when for the year before their drop neither sibling had shown anything but the slight signs of their difference creeping upon them. Perhaps it had been the stars.
‘Kao and Zeen, if you could climb out first, I can help Quell.’ Erris’s voice broke the landscape’s spell and both began to climb, Zeen practically running up the bars. Kao, moving more slowly, found his hands sticking to the freezing iron.
Erris climbed in and Quell, knowing the feeling unworthy of him, began to hate the man even as he descended into the cage. Erris would carry him out of there as though he were less than a child, lifting a full-grown man of the Ictha with one arm, while Quell hung useless, trying not to scream as he jolted against the bars.
‘This isn’t good.’ Erris knelt to inspect where the knife stuck into Quell’s side. ‘I’ll have to try something.’ With a grimace he held his hand between them, squeezing thumb and forefinger together. Within a few heartbeats both digits began to smoke. With his other hand Erris pinched the side of the wound closed then ran the tip of his smoking finger along the joined edges. Where his finger passed, a dark brown strip the same colour as Erris’s skin now covered the redness of Quell’s skin and sealed the gash around the knife.
‘That should hold you.’ Erris reached around Quell and, with a father’s care, lifted him; then began to climb.
The nightmarish pain was thankfully brief and Quell lay gasping on the ice with Kao and Zeen watching anxiously over him while Erris returned for something from the cage.
‘What happened here?’ Quell asked when Erris came out again carrying boards and wire.
‘When I emerged there was no sign of Yaz or Maya.’ Erris set to work wiring three boards together. ‘Only six robed priests standing by the capstan. They ordered my surrender and then took up iron bars against me when I would not.’ Erris shrugged. ‘When they found that they couldn’t overwhelm me they retreated, dragging their wounded. They went that way.’ He pointed towards the Black Rock.
‘I think … I can see them.’ Kao shaded his eyes and squinted out over the fractured landscape of pressure ridges separated by ice flats. ‘Far off, still heading away.’
Erris worked to fashion a sled on which Quell could be dragged. ‘We’ll have to follow them.’
Zeen nodded, his mouth a flat, worried line.
‘Go to the Black Rock?’ Kao seemed aghast at the idea.
‘Yaz must have been taken there.’ Erris cast a dubious eye over the ice. ‘Besides, where else is there to go?’
‘I …’ Kao twisted his mouth. ‘I could strike out to the west and meet the Golin on the shores of the Lesser Sea.’
Erris looked incredulous but extended his arm out towards the west. ‘I wish you the best of luck with that. But I bet it’s warmer inside the Black Rock. In any event, I have to take Quell there. His only chance is to have the knife removed and then to rest somewhere warm with access to food and water.’
Kao bowed his head, still shivering. ‘I guess if Yaz needs us …’
And before long Quell found himself being dragged across the ice on boards made by the Missing from gods knew what, towards a forbidden mountain full of mystery.
CHAPTER 3
Yaz
Yaz woke with a groan. For a blessedly long moment she had no idea where she was. She wondered if she had somehow fallen back into the city, for wherever she had ended up there were no familiar sounds, no wind worrying at the tent hides, no cavern walls creaking as the ice edged forwards, no drip drip drip of meltwater. No sounds at all.
She sat up, still wrapped in ignorance, and found herself in a chamber not unlike those in the city of the Missing but hewn from the rock rather than walled with poured stone. She lay on a platform rather like a table with very short legs, the bedding a luxury of furs such as all of the Ictha together would be hard pressed to muster from their tents. A small iron pot of stardust provided very muted illumination.
The chamber had one exit, sealed by a heavy iron door with a small window in it. The sudden memory of Eular drove Yaz to her feet. The old man had been in league with Regulator Kazik all along. More than that, he seemed to be in charge!
Yaz reached the door in three strides. She stopped herself, fist raised to pound iron, a demand for release on her lips. Instead she pushed on it to confirm that it wouldn’t open. Nobody seals you in a room just to let you out when you tell them to. She returned to sit on the bed and gather her thoughts.
Eular couldn’t have spent his whole life with the Broken and yet be a high-placed priest, possibly the highest of all and commanding the Black Rock. She had met him beneath the ice in that cave on the very margins of the air gap melted by the stars. He had lived alone, summoning his visitors and seldom mixing with the Broken … What had Thurin said about him? Eular could go for months without being seen. That had to mean he had a way between the surface and the caves. Maybe something like the iron-collection route but secret. Though how such an exit could be kept hidden from the Broken Yaz had no idea.
As Yaz sat, fractured memories began to emerge from the darkness that Eular had forced upon her, reassembling themselves into the story of her recent past. With sudden shock, Yaz remembered the cage. Her brother, Erris, Quell, and Kao hadn’t been far behind her, coming to the surface. The phrase ‘have them drop the cage’ returned to her, the last words that she’d heard before she passed out. In an instant she was there at the door, hammering on the metal, shouting for Zeen. If she could have touched the Path she would have blown the door off its hinges. But she’d drawn on her power too much recently and the Path lay beyond reach.
Yaz could see a rock-hewn tunnel and several more doors like hers, but nobody came to their dimly lit windows. She shouted until her voice grew hoarse, her cries echoing away down the passage. Scared and angry, she turned from the door, rubbing the side of her hand. Her eyes came to rest on the only thing of interest in the room. The small pot of glowing stardust.
Yaz walked slowly towards the pot, attuning her mind to the faint buzz of innumerable heartbeats. The tiny stars sang in harmonies, their song spiralling past the upper edge of Yaz’s hearing, even though she wasn’t listening to them with her ears. She held her hand out flat about a foot above the pot and made the twinkling dust rise in streamers to gather beneath her palm. When the pot lay empty, its contents hanging in a shifting mass below her fingers, Yaz slowly turned her hand and let the dust flow across her skin, a glowing glove of muted colours.
