6
Yaz
Abandoned in her cell once more, Yaz stood staring through the small window of the iron door. Strangers had come. Something so rare that it had taken Eular from his inspection of his prisoner. She imagined that clan members would occasionally visit the Black Rock for trade or to obtain rulings on matters that couldn’t be settled without higher authority. But these would not be strangers: they would be recognized by any one of a score of signs—their numbers, the design of their sleds, even the pattern of their walking. Some clans actually carried banners cut in distinctive ways, though the Ictha considered this wasteful vanity. So who could the strangers be?
To meet a stranger on the ice was a once-in-a-generation occurrence. When Yaz’s mother had been a young girl a man from no known clan had been spotted in the west, near the Hot Sea. He came from a tribe that the clan father of the time had never heard of. The stranger’s people had a version of the Ictha’s rite of passage, just as the known tribes did. Like Zin, the first of men, and Mokka, the first of women, each adult would, at a time chosen by the wind, go out and walk the ice alone. The aim of such journeying was to find the kyzat, the perfect place, a spot that on all the ice had been ordained by the Gods in the Sky and in the Sea for that individual alone as the place where all the elements of their life find meaning, giving a vision of such clarity that the air itself becomes ice and the wisdom of Sky and Sea finds a place in the seeker’s heart, allowing them to endure the hardships of the years ahead.
Quell had admitted to Yaz in a private moment that his own journey to find his kyzat, a walk that had lasted four days, had brought him to an ice spike at the juncture of three pressure ridges. Here he was visited by the epiphany that, having run out of his allotted ration of angel-fish, if he did not turn back he would lose first his toes then his fingers to the wind. Yaz had wondered if that wasn’t the wisdom that the ritual was designed to impart. That there is nothing but ice and more ice, and that if you are too stubborn to admit it and turn back, you will die and your malcontent will no longer burden your clan.
The stranger from the curiously named Lamarkan clan had clearly not been open to this message and had travelled so far beyond his strength and common sense that he no longer knew the way back to his people. The man limped to the Ictha’s camp at the clifftops where the wind swirls the great fog from the Hot Sea and beards every line with trailing ice.
“This sea is my sea. Its fish are my fish. This is the wisdom I have found.” The man had no fear, for the wind had taken it from him along with the end of his nose, the edges of his ears, and the flesh of his lips.
The Ictha had offered the stranger the warmth of a tent, though properly any who come to the Hot Sea of the North should be turned away, for it had been given to the Ictha on the day that Zin died, and belonged to no other. The man lasted four more days before the cold that had entered his bones stopped his heart. And in that time he shared with the elders some of the wisdom and lore of his people. So it is with strangers. They can bring gifts and they can bring danger. And ever after the Ictha had set a watch on the east when they took to the Hot Sea against the day that more Lamarkians might come, for part of the lore that the dying man shared was that the seas his people visited were all shrinking and that their gods had told them they must one day go in search of others.
In time, Yaz went back to her bed and returned her attention to the stardust that now scattered an area of the floor close to the table. Eular had sent it to sleep in the same way that he had silenced the star she had brought with her from the city cavern. Yaz felt a sudden pang of loss for that star. She had no possessions other than what she wore. She patted herself to check that her iron knife had not been missed, but no, it too had been taken.
A gleam caught her eye and she saw that they had missed one thing, or considered it beneath them to take. A silver needle remained stuck through the skins above her collarbone. She set a finger to it. The only physical evidence she had that Elias Taproot existed—a man she had met under the strangest of circumstances in the city of the Missing. He had said the needle would lead her back to him. It wouldn’t be leading her anywhere with the door locked, though.
As enigmatic as Elias was, it comforted Yaz to know she had a friend in the world beyond, the world that Erris had dwelt in before he had committed himself to the body he had spent so many years making for himself. But if Elias had not been a fever dream, then the monstrous Seus was real too. The mind of an entire city, albeit a distant one, bent on her destruction and the destruction of all those like her. That was not a comfort. Though Seus too acted in the world beyond and offered no threat that Yaz could see within the confines of the Black Rock or out in the teeth of the wind where no extra threat was needed in order to bring a swift end.
Yaz ran her fingertip once more along the needle’s length and then turned her mind to matters more concrete and pressing. The stardust was a puzzle. Had Eular left it to test her? Yaz knew how to quiet a star but this was something new. Closer to death than to sleep. Only by straining her senses to the utmost could she tell that some tiny spark remained active in the dust. She collected some in her palm and returned to the bed to study it.
Eular had done something akin to when water turns to ice. Just as a falling tear will come liquid from the eye, full of flow and possibility, but become solid before it hits the ground, something had been stolen from the star grains in her hand. Yaz needed to warm them up, to remind them of the life they once had, to teach them each their song again. She had no idea how to do it.
What she did have, she discovered, was time. A commodity that had been in scant supply down in the ice caves of the Broken where danger intruded into every quiet moment. She sat, trying to concentrate on the dust, attempting to poke it back into life with her mind. She even considered singing to it, but felt too self-conscious to try to croon a broken version of star song to a handful of dust.
Instead of focusing on the dust, Yaz’s thoughts slipped continuously away to dwell on the fates of Zeen, Quell, and Erris. Had Eular lied again about the cage being slowed as it reached the city chamber, or were they all safe, reunited with Thurin in the warmth and new security of the caves? And what of Maya, who had gone up the cable before her? Was the girl trekking across the ice in search of the Axit clan to report her findings as the first of their spies to escape the Pit of the Missing?
Yaz was still turning over possibilities when the sound of approaching footsteps drew her gaze to the door again. She shook away the image of Thurin being crushed by the falling cage and stood to receive her captors.
The door rattled and the sound came of something being fitted into the small hole she had spotted near the edge. The door’s opening was preceded by a loud click and the sound of the object being taken back out. Two armoured guards walked in, Eular following behind.
“Still here?” He smiled.
Yaz said nothing, though her eyes strayed to the exit.
An old woman entered behind Eular, her face deeply lined, her hair, long but thinning, the colour of iron. She wore a priest’s robe, with the hide strips trailing from both arms, and a lustrous silver-grey fur around her shoulders despite the heat. She fixed Yaz with black eyes that were hard as stones, then showed her teeth in a kind of smile. “I’m Mother Jeccis, my dear. Father Eular has told me so much about you.”
Eular swung the door shut behind them. “I remarked on you still being here, Yaz, to make a point. It’s a sad fact that when we’re warm and fed and safe we humans shy away from the barriers that stand between us and our full potential.” He rapped his knuckles on the metal. “If, instead of going about the business that called me away, I had spent the last hour in the corridor, torturing a loved one of yours on the other side of this door. Your brother, say. Do you think you would still be in this cell now?”
Yaz shrugged, feeling strangely guilty. “You said you put us in the pit to make us into warriors. It didn’t work for Jaysin. He died. A lot of them died.”
Mother Jeccis tutted, and Eular winced in a way that might not be sincere. “There’s a saying that you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs. But you don’t know what an omelette is, do you, Yaz? And you’re thinking of fish eggs.”
“I . . .” Yaz held her tongue but the image entered her mind of an ungainly bird strutting on the ground, and of an egg bigger than an eye, and not round as eggs are but an off-centred oval, with a skin that was hard and brittle . . . a shell. She shook her head to clear it of these images from Erris’s world. “No. What is an omelette?”
Eular regarded her curiously from empty sockets. “We are a poor people.”
“We?” Yaz rejected the familiarity. Eular was not Ictha.
“We. The ice tribes.” The old man waved his arms expansively as if he were at the gathering and all the clans stood within a spear throw of him.
Yaz shrugged. It wasn’t a concept she had considered before. The ice tribes were all the people that were, and they were not poor. Some had many furs. Others hoarded iron. Even in the hard north the Ictha managed to wring riches from the sea. Mother Mazai lit her tent with a whale-oil lamp all through the long night.
“We are poor,” Eular repeated. “Starvation is common, we die young, the seas are smaller and less frequent from generation to generation.”
“Poor.” Mother Jeccis nodded, smiling in her fine robe.
“We can’t care for our sick,” Eular continued. “We can’t keep those born with the old bloods alive, let alone nurture and train them. The pit is the only place where we can even approach what is needed.”
“You said you mined warriors there.” He had said “heroes” but Yaz wouldn’t use that word. She had blood on her hands. She had made hard choices that stained her soul. “Why do you need warriors?”
“We need them, Yaz. We.”
“The Ictha don’t fight.” Yaz scowled. “The Axit talk of it. But those days are gone.”
“What would the Ictha do if the Golin came north to fish the Hot Sea?” Eular asked.
“They would not.”
“The Golin follow the Wandering Sea. When they lose its trail they go hungry. If they grew hungry enough they might turn their eyes north. What would the Ictha do then?”
“We would turn them back,” Yaz said. “The Gods in the Sea gave—”
“The gods gave the Ictha their sea.” Eular nodded. “Did you know that I was not born like this?” He touched his fingers to the edges of his eye sockets.
“You said . . .” Yaz slumped. Eular had told her that he had been cast into the pit as a baby. “You lied. Perhaps you are lying now too.”
Mother Jeccis’s smile vanished. “How dare—”
Eular silenced her with a raised hand.
“Perhaps.” His smile held a certain sadness. He left Jeccis’s side to stand next to Yaz by the bed. “In my youth I was restless. My clan roamed far to the south, beyond even the Kac-Kantor. A stranger’s story took me from my family and saw me journey ever further south. I found the green lands. I saw their riches and knew that all my life I had known only poverty and hardship. I saw grass and I saw trees. And for that crime the men of that green world took my eyes. They said that their god had given them the grass and the trees and the rivers and the beasts of the land. They said if I brought my people there, then they would die two steps from the ice and the grass would drink their blood.” Eular reached out, patting for Yaz, and found her hand. She flinched away but he closed his fingers about her forearm, his skin gnarled around the knuckles and withered between. “So yes, there is a green world and I saw it when I still had sight, and my hands remember the touch and the warmth of it, Yaz. But it is a place of blood and death and if we want any part of it we must carve it out for ourselves with the blade of a knife. Like slaughtering a whale. And that is why we need heroes, Yaz. The people of the ice need an army because all men make their own gods and those gods tell them only what they want to hear. But the truth is that the cold continues to grow deeper and soon even the Ictha will need to run before it. The truth is that only in the green belt of Abeth beneath the light of the sun and moon can our people hope to live and live to hope.”
And Mother Jeccis, whose smile had slowly returned, nodded and showed her yellow teeth. “A war’s coming. A war that will paint the green lands red.”