4

Thurin

A white dot broke into Thurin’s unending pain. A white dot that grew slowly as Thurin drove himself towards it. To begin with he thought it a hole in his mind, the first indication that the effort of lifting himself was starting to tear him apart. Later he remembered how the city cavern had shrunk to a circle of light that had diminished into a point and then winked out, swallowed by the darkness.

“The sky.” The sound of his own strained voice surprised him. The roof of the world cavern lay above him, lit by its own stars. Though he vaguely recalled that those only came out at night. Whatever that was.

Thurin drove himself upwards, the agony of the effort bone-deep now. It felt as though he were still tethered to the rock so very far beneath him, and that each yard stretched the tether a little more, building the tension that sought to reclaim him. The stones of the city continued to reach for him with a blind, insatiable greed.

The ceiling of the world grew larger, closer, brighter, a blue-white disk threaded with faint lines of crimson. A moaning sound grew too, like the bitter complaint of some great beast. And almost from one moment to the next Thurin was out among it all. The disc of the sky sprang away in all directions to become a dome so vast it defied both belief and understanding. The beast, whose whistling voice had heralded Thurin’s approach, remained invisible but somehow the air itself came alive and took him in a freezing fist, wrestling him from his course, pushing him from the hole until ice lay beneath his feet.

The light beat at him. Eyes that had known only starlight squinted and wept against the red sun’s glare. Blind and disoriented, he flailed for something to hold on to.

Thurin had been pushing upwards for so long that he hardly knew how to stop. The ice retreated below him and it seemed that he might be exchanging one fatal fall for another. But at last he managed to unclench the muscle in his mind that pain had locked solid, and began to fall, though less swiftly than if the world had had its way with him.

The ice met him with a hard jolt and he collapsed onto it. This ice was not like the ice he had known all his life; it was rough and dry where the caves were smooth and wet. It was colder too, colder than the farthest-flung caves. And the wind! Thurin stood quickly, wrapping Exxar’s rat-skin cloak tight about him. Already he was shivering. The shock of the frigid air in his lungs made his chest hurt. He squinted against the brightness, now coming at him from the ice as well as the sky. Tears leaked from his eyes, freezing on both cheeks.

Thurin made a slow turn. The spike of pain driven into his brain by recent efforts discouraged him from any sudden move. He turned with his body, not twisting his neck. Apart from the iron gantry, the cage, and the winding gear, there was nothing. Not one thing to rest the eye on until his turn brought a distant mountain into view. It took an age for his mind to make sense of what his eyes presented it with. Even then he wasn’t sure of the distances. How far to the point where sky met ground? How far to the mountain? It depended how large the pile of rock was, and Thurin had no real idea.

He turned instead to the familiar. To the empty cage that had carried Yaz and the rest. Their food and shelter had been left inside. He reached through the bars for one of the yellow-cap mushrooms and found it frozen solid, welded to the others in a fixed mass. When he withdrew his arm his wrist brushed the iron and even that brief contact seared him, taking skin with it.

Thurin pulled his hands into his sleeves and hugged them beneath his armpits. Already his face was a mask of numb flesh that no longer seemed to belong to him.

“The mountain.” There wasn’t anywhere else to go.

Thurin bent his head and began to walk. The ice near the winding gear had a large smear of blood across it; more splatters led away. He wondered if the blood was Quell’s. Perhaps they took the knife out of him there.

He trudged forward with his gaze on the ice, lifting his eyes only to check that he hadn’t strayed from his course. The great emptiness on every side haunted him, filling his mind with obscure existential fears. The expanses of space, the freedom to walk arbitrarily far in any direction, didn’t threaten him so much as wholly undermine the foundations of a life lived in confinement.

From time to time he risked a glance at the sun, a crimson orb low in the west. It seemed to him that it might be a vast star not unlike the ones that drove the hunters. Though, like the mountain, it defeated his mind’s attempt to balance the equation of size and distance. It offered no warmth but somehow it felt closer to friend than to foe and he was glad to have seen it at last.

The wind shocked him with its cold persistence. There seemed no end to it and no doubt that it was a deadly enemy. Already his feet were unresponsive blocks in their inadequate casings of skins and furs. How Yaz could ever have imagined they might trek south for weeks and months Thurin had no idea. He was far from sure that he would make it to the mountain. Already he was thinking about a retreat to the peace and relative warmth of the Broken’s caves. The forge’s heat seemed a distant dream.

As he walked, that part of Thurin’s mind responsible for his ice-work began slowly to hurt less, and started instead to tingle at the sense of the ice all around him. He started to see into the opaque whiteness before him, understanding the frozen flows and fractured depths of it.

The Black Rock grew larger and larger, increasing its share of his vision until he had to crane his neck to look up at the distant peak. It seemed to Thurin that the only explanation for the shaft head being deserted was that the priests must have taken Yaz and the others to the mountain. The fact that their food and shelter had been abandoned was a clear indication that they had not gone willingly.

If the priests had been able to overpower Yaz and Erris that was bad news. Yaz had worked wonders with the stars, and Erris . . . Erris was something else again. Thurin hadn’t said anything but during Yaz’s escape his ice-work had told him that Erris was not a man, not a person, or any live thing. There was no water in him. Whatever he was his outer appearance was a lie. He was no more human than a hunter was.

The mountain grew nearer and Thurin began to struggle with the idea of how big it was. It seemed impossible that there could be space in the world for anything so large. And in between his wonder and his fear and his suffering he began to question what sort of reception might be waiting for him not far ahead.

The stories had it that the priests lived inside the Black Rock. Thurin understood the concept of caves far better than he did the idea of the “outside” and he was looking forward to finding himself in close confines once more. But in his experience of cave systems there were many ways to get from one place to another, and many entrances.

Thurin started to veer left. Whichever way the others had been taken would still be watched. Perhaps he could find an alternative route into the mountain. He knew, though, that he had better find it quickly or this monster they called the wind would kill him and his body would lie forever in the ice’s grip.

---

The tales told that the Black Rock resisted the ice’s advances, and that its stones were hot to the touch. The former claim was only partly true, the latter an outright lie. At the foot of the Black Rock the ice surged around the roots of the mountain, cladding the rock yards deep in some places, chasing any gorge or fissure up the steepness of the slope. But it did seem that something kept the rock a fraction above freezing, even where the wind wrought its cold anger on the heights. And thus, as the elevation grew, the ice became confined to fissures where the slow process of melting and refreezing allowed gravity to haul it back to the plains.

Thurin soon realized the scale of the task ahead of him. He would have to search the steep flanks of the mountain where the wind blew still harder, though that seemed barely possible. Before him lay a vast expanse of sullen rock that deceived the eye into thinking every hollow a cave mouth.

Thurin had to climb only a few ridges to know that if his feet hadn’t lost all feeling he would be in agony from the cruel angles of the rock biting through the soft hides wound about them.

Twice within the first hundred yards he had to reach for his ice-work to save himself from falling. The cold had robbed his hands of all cleverness, reducing them to claws barely capable of holding, and his numb feet tripped over every outcrop.

Thurin soon resigned himself to the fact that his self-appointed task was an impossible one and that it would be better to trek around the mountain’s base in search of the entrance that Yaz must have been taken to. For a brief while he had imagined himself a hero come to save his friends. That had been foolish pride. He should throw himself on the mercy of the priests. At least he would be with Yaz. If he set off immediately he might make it before the cold killed him.

Thurin hugged himself and took a last look up the mountain. Far above, his gaze caught on what might well be a cave mouth, huddled at the base of a daunting cliff. It was too far, too high, and it hardly seemed credible that—if it truly did connect to the priests’ caverns—it would be unguarded.

With a grunt of despair, Thurin turned and stumbled back down the slope, frozen and defeated. He would have to seek the main entrance and hope that the priests wouldn’t turn him away. Though to judge by the tales of the Broken there was precious little mercy on offer up in the world of sun and sky.

On the lower slopes the ice lay thicker, climbing up over rock as if eager to reach Thurin. Wary of falling, he stretched out his ice-work to find a sure path. His perception fingered through the ice with practiced ease, discovering faults and voids. Thurin was reaching out to roughen the surface along his chosen route when he became aware of a void that dwarfed all the others. Behind a few yards of ice there seemed to be the mouth of an ice-choked tunnel leading into the rock.

Thurin came to stand where the ice levelled off, facing the hidden tunnel. He wasn’t sure he had enough strength left in him to reach the entrance to which Yaz and the others had been taken. He was fairly sure he didn’t have enough strength to break through the ice and investigate the void he’d sensed. He was very sure he hadn’t the strength to do both.

In the end it was the wind that decided for him. It changed direction and blew harder than ever before. Thurin’s skins and Exxar’s fur cape seemed helpless against the gale’s assault. Wanting only to escape the wind’s teeth, Thurin sank his power into the ice. Here at least he was on familiar ground. Most days of his adult life had been spent reducing ice to fragments for the gerants to clear, and then searching them minutely for stars. Ultimately even the dust would be recovered.

Thurin worked quickly, finding the natural flaws and applying the pressure that would make them spread. The fractures that reached out forked, and forked again, turning the ice milky, dividing it into fragments all interlocked in a complex puzzle. Rather than rely on the absent muscle of a half-dozen gerants to overcome the puzzle with pick and shovel Thurin applied his own ice-work, breaking the mass apart in a crackling white explosion of pieces. The wind hauled all but the largest fragments to one side in a spreading white cloud.

The effort, on top of the exertion that brought him to the surface, left Thurin’s brain ringing like a cracked bell. He staggered beneath the burden of his weariness and picked his way over the larger chunks, advancing into the cavern of broken ice he had created. He moved with the caution of an old man wary of his own fragility. It felt to him as if any sudden move might shatter his skull. Even tilting his head was enough to slosh the pain from one side to the other, making him cry out in a high-pitched keening.

In this manner he advanced several yards. Almost immediately the wind died down, howling its complaints around the mouth of the tunnel. Thurin forced himself to keep moving rather than to sag into the relief and let it take him to the floor. Even without the full blast of the gale it was still bone-achingly cold and with the red sun settling towards the horizon behind him he could only imagine that it was going to get even worse.

The ice gave way to stone. The slanting rays of the sun threw Thurin’s shadow ahead to join with the gloom further back along what proved to be a hand-hewn tunnel. With a gasp of relief he hurried forward until the darkness left him blind. He took from one pocket a collection of small stars, none bigger than a baby’s tooth but together enough to make a dim glow about him, and, lighting his own way, he made a slower advance.

Almost immediately he began to feel better, though his head still ached fiercely as if to warn against any further exercise of his talents. The tunnel sloped upwards at a modest gradient and seemed to grow warmer every ten yards. The moan of the wind faded from hearing and before long he could almost imagine himself on a scavenging trip in the undercity.

The life gradually returned to his extremities. His feet especially hurt like all the hells, burning and tingling, but after the stories he’d heard of the cold biting off toes he was very glad to feel his own complaining.

Thurin pressed on. Like the undercity, the passages and occasional chambers he passed had a feeling of having been deserted long ago. He wondered that the priests would take the enormous effort to carve such space from the mountain and then not use it.

The rock was in the main the same hard dark stone he had seen on the mountain’s flanks, but another kind of stone littered the ground in places, more fragile and darker still, a true black from which his handful of starlight could coax no variation.

“Coal,” Thurin whispered, lifting a fist-sized chunk of the stuff, which was less heavy than any other kind of rock he knew.

In one spot he found a thin coal seam running through the harder stone. He wondered then if the priests mined coal from stone in the same sort of way the Broken mined stars from ice. It could be that these chambers and tunnels were part of an exhausted mine.

In a low-roofed side chamber later on he found a rusting iron truck, a container large enough to hold several men and set on four wheels. Thurin had never seen wheels before except on toys that Madeen sometimes made for the children from pieces the scavengers brought back. The scatter of broken coal at the bottom of the empty truck hinted at its purpose.

He moved on, cautious and quiet, aware of his hunger and thirst now that his body had recovered from the wind’s assault. The passage he was following had widened and begun to head downwards. The air continued to warm. A small noise from the darkness ahead brought Thurin to a halt. He stilled his breathing, closed his fist about his stars, and pressed his shoulders to the wall. The noise came again. A wet, tearing sound.

Thurin inched forward. He had come to learn this place. To find Yaz. Not to hide. The same task had faced Quell when he entered the unfamiliar world of the Broken, and he had not shied from it. Thurin determined to do just as well if not better, admitting to himself that he considered the man a rival.

Thurin kept to the wall, placing his feet carefully. A chamber lay ahead, lit very faintly by three small stars seemingly abandoned on the floor. The space was little more than a widening of the passage, a passing point perhaps for loads of coal and empty trucks. To one side of the chamber a figure squatted with its back to Thurin. A figure so shapeless in its mound of ragged furs that he could only guess that it was human. A very large human.

The tearing sound came again. Whoever it was . . . whatever it was . . . they seemed to be chewing something.

Thurin knew he was in danger. He didn’t understand how he knew but he did. Without releasing his next breath he took a slow step backwards. Others might think it fear that pushed him away, and it was fear that filled him, making his hands shake and his brow sweat, but his retreat was driven by common sense rather than terror.

Even as Thurin stepped away the stranger raised a shaggy head and sniffed at the air, then again, more sharply as if catching a scent. The person turned as they rose, and continued to rise, huger and wider than Thurin had feared. One vast hand clutched the sorry carcass of what might once have been a rat. The other fur-laden arm sported a metal bar wrapped around it in a spiral. The sniffing face revealed by parting locks of filthy, thickly coiled hair split in a grin that put on show an array of teeth filed to points.

Now Thurin’s fear truly overmastered him. How could she be here? How could he escape? He had imagined all manner of horrors that might await him within the Black Rock but this horror had not been among them.

“Hetta . . .”