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 forward, 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 bowl of glowing stardust.

Yaz walked slowly towards the bowl, 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 bowl and made the twinkling dust rise in streamers to gather beneath her palm. When the bowl 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.

The door grated open and the dust fell from her hand, grey and lifeless. A man stood in the doorway, silhouetted by the lanterns of the two armoured figures behind him.

“I heard you were awake.” Eular stepped into the room, seemingly confident in his blindness.

For a vivid moment Yaz saw herself wearing the iron pot on her fist and punching the old man full in the face. The vision faded, but not the anger. “Where are my friends? Where’s Zeen?”

“Back in the undercaves with the Broken.” Eular’s words were mild where Yaz’s had been hot.

“I heard you say to drop them!”

“A figure of speech.” Eular waved the idea away. “The descent is fast but the cage slows towards the end and comes to a gentle rest.”

The tension in Yaz’s jaw eased a fraction, backing away from the level where it felt her teeth might shatter at any moment. She hoped what he’d said was true. “Why?”

“Why?” Eular echoed. He advanced into the cell and one of the armoured men followed him in.

“Why . . . everything?” Yaz realized she wasn’t cold. The air held a warmth at odds with all the stone heaped around her.

“Straight to the big questions.” Eular’s smile was fatherly, gentle beneath the eyeless horror of his face. Yaz found herself torn between pity and trust, but rejected both. She had been lied to by this man from the first moment they met.

“So tell me the big answers to my big questions,” she said.

“You were wearing a new glove when I came in.” Eular patted his way towards the bed and sat on it.

“You can see?” Yaz hadn’t imagined that he’d lied about that too, not with his hollow sockets to back his claim.

“I can see stars.”

Yaz frowned. “Just stars?”

Eular shrugged. “Sometimes they illuminate a fraction of their surroundings for me. I knew about your experiment with the dust from the shape the stars formed.”

Yaz shook her head. “You’re not answering me!”

“About the big questions?” Again that smile, which was so easy to believe in. “I’m stepping towards them by example. You were desperate and afraid. It drove you to experiment. I have little doubt that given enough time you would have found your way through that door and forged a new skill in the effort.”

“So?” Yaz had treated elders with respect her whole life. It was the Ictha way, to honour those who survived so long when the wind was a whetted knife always seeking to skewer those in its path. But Eular was like no elder she had ever met. And thinking of the wind as a knife brought with it the chilling reminder that Quell had been stabbed. She became aware that Eular had given up talking in favour of watching her with his empty stare. “So I would have found a new skill. So what?”

“Have you not changed, Yaz? Changed beyond recognition in your short stay with the Broken, full of hardship and extreme peril as it was?”

“I . . .” She nodded.

“And your friends? Have they not changed? Who was it that fired the coal seam? There were none capable of such work when I left.”

“Th—” Yaz bit off Thurin’s name, not wanting to offer Eular any answers. “They have changed, yes.”

“Well, that’s the purpose of the caverns. That is the why.” He spread his hands. “To change you. The truth is that it is not training which brings the old bloods to their full potential. The barriers that lie between us and what we could be are ones that can only be broken in the most extreme circumstances. True fear, true agony, true striving at the very edge of existence to save yourself, your friends, your family. There must be hope too. Always a sprinkling of hope.

“We don’t mine stars or iron in the Pit of the Missing. We mine you. We make heroes. We make warriors.”

“The hunters . . .” breathed Yaz.

“The hunters are there to chase you, to scare you. And when you’re ready, they are there to collect you.”

“Quina’s alive? She’s here?”

“Quina? The hunska girl from the Kac-Kantor clan? She came to the caves fast and left faster. Hunskas can be very quick to make the breakthrough. Always in a hurry.” He smiled at his own joke.

A weight lifted off Yaz’s heart. She hadn’t spent long with Quina but somehow she felt like a truer friend than the few Ictha girls her age ever had. “Can I see her?”

Eular nodded slowly. “Later.”

“And Quell! Quell’s hurt. He has a knife in him. How could you send him back down there?” Yaz took an angry step towards the bed and the guardsman matched it with a step of his own. A large man, though not a gerant. He had pale eyes and a face that, like those of the Broken, had not been carved by the wind. “You sent Quell to die!”

Eular shook his head. “The Broken have healers, marjals with a talent for it. Gella is the best. You met her, yes? Quell is better off with the Broken than with any of the clans, the Ictha least of all. The Ictha would take the knife for the iron and leave the man bleeding on the ice with empty words about his heroic sacrifice.”

Yaz held her tongue at that. It was true that the Ictha could offer nothing to those too injured to pull a sled and pitch a tent. The harshness of their existence left no room for such compassion. “You still haven’t explained—”

Rapid footsteps approached down the passage and a woman arrived, hurrying past the guard outside. She came to a halt, her priest’s robes flapping, trying not to pant. “Strangers. Approaching the east gate.”

Eular stood smoothly, as though he were not an ancient whose knees should creak with every move. “Strangers?” He smiled. “Remarkable.”

And with that he turned to go. “I must ask you to stay here, Yaz.”

Yaz made to follow. “I don’t want—” But the guard pushed her back and the heavy door slammed shut.

“Strangers . . .” Eular turned at the window. “I may have spoken more truly than I knew when I called you an agent of change.”