9

Yaz

I’ve given you a lot to think about.” Eular got up from the bed. “I’ll give you some privacy to consider what you’ve been told.”

“Time to consider that you throw our children into a hole in the ice so they can suffer and die?” Yaz asked. “Or suffer and survive, at which point you collect the strongest for an army to attack the green lands? Have I got it right so far?” She couldn’t keep the anger from her voice.

Mother Jeccis stood looking from Eular to Yaz, grinning as if a great joke were being told. Eular smiled apologetically. He held his hands before him and moved his fingers as if he were delicately plucking floating hairs from the air before him. “We make the best of the bad choices before us, Yaz.” He turned towards the doorway with Jeccis following, and the two guards moved to flank them. “Give it some thought. That’s all I ask. And when I return we can talk some more.”

Yaz found herself nodding. The rage that had been boiling in her stomach was gone. Her hands that had been clenched into fists now hung loose at her sides. She blinked in surprise. “Wait . . .”

“Yes?” Eular turned to her over the shoulders of the two guards.

The questions and accusations queuing on her tongue had gone. For a moment she stood openmouthed before finding something else to ask. “You’ve been doing this for decades, slowly collecting these soldiers for your army—”

“Our army, Yaz.”

“So . . . won’t those chosen a generation ago all be too old to fight?”

“Ah.” Eular shook his head, a faint smile on his lips yet again. “There you have us, Yaz. You’ve discovered my secret sorrow. While I’ve grown old steering this endeavour to its conclusion, those who will have the honour to fight for the cause, those who will take the green lands and revel in a new life, they all wait in timeless slumber, untouched by the years.” He looked down at his gnarled hands. “Me though, I have work to do. I might rest for a few years here and there. Sometimes a decade. But I need to let time have its way with me every now and then. I’m like a stone skipping across the water, but with each splash I’m getting older.”

With that he turned and left. The door swung shut behind him with a heavy clang. It was only after the guards had locked the door and retreated beyond earshot that Yaz even thought to ask how she was to relieve herself.

The light departed with Eular and his men, leaving Yaz blind once more. A fumbling search by hand, however, discovered more than she had seen when she’d had the light of the stardust to aid her. She discovered a covered bucket under the bed and a jug of water. But these arrangements just revived her anger. She was of the Ictha, a free people, and these priests expected thanks for sealing her in a small chamber without flame or food. They expected her to sit amid her own stink until they returned to wrinkle their noses at her.

Yaz quenched her thirst then lay back on the bed to do what Eular suggested. To think. The months-long nights of the north had taught her the value of patience in the darkness.

She considered Eular first, pondering both the many lies and the many truths he had told her. He had said that he was cast down into the Pit of the Missing as an eyeless infant, and yet he must have first arrived there as a man. Had he not thought she would share that story with the Broken or did they too believe he had arrived among them as a child? Either he was careless with his lies, which seemed unlikely, or the Broken believed his story. And how was that possible?

She considered the absences that the old man must take from the Broken. If he were so highly placed among the priests of the Black Rock then he must spend considerable time here, surely. How were these departures not questioned among the Broken? Their caves were numerous and the Tainted made exploring the margins dangerous, but even so, it was inconceivable that his ability to simply vanish wouldn’t be questioned.

Yaz thought again of the children thrown into the pit to become strong enough for Eular’s army or die trying. She had been so angry about it when Eular stood to go and yet now when she reached for that outrage she found only disquiet and mild confusion. Had the old man talked away her objections so easily?

Yaz sat and tried to shake the fog from her head. Rather than dwell on the mysterious priest she reached out in search of the handful of stardust she had set down when Eular returned from meeting the strangers at his doorstep. She found the dust with her mind more than with her fingertips, beginning to understand how Eular said he could see the stars even though his eyes had been taken long ago. The tiny stars formed a web within her mind, a dense and glowing network of connections. It reminded Yaz of the network she’d so recently experienced in the city cavern, when she had for a few brief moments been the centre of a universe of stars all orbiting around her.

Yaz closed her fist about the handful of dust and squeezed it tight. Eular had said they threw the children of the old bloods into the pit so that peril could sharpen their skills, advancing them through barriers that practice and study wouldn’t breach. But the priests themselves held one of the four ancient bloods. Gerant, hunska, and marjal were sent to join the Broken and be hunted. The rarest of them though, the quantals, came to live in this warm mountain surrounded by wealth and luxury.

Was that simply corruption, bred by ownership of a greater power? Or did it imply that the quantals possessed some subtler arts that benefited from quiet study in comfort? Skills that were unlikely to peak while being terrified and chased by monsters? Yaz wondered what powers the priest had that she not only didn’t share but was wholly unaware of.

Rather than spend her time in fruitless worry, Yaz sought distraction amid the contents of her fist. She opened her hand and began to move her fingertip through the lightless dust, listening to the faint strains of its many-voiced song. Eular had all but silenced it but still there were traces remaining. She tried to isolate the song of a single mote of dust and lost herself in the task for the longest time. She began to hear unsuspected harmonies; a slow interplay of refrains passed back and forth like whale song in the highest imaginable key. There were melodies that dipped into her register then soared away beyond her reach. There were leaders and followers. Voices iterated around themes, elaborated them, passed the new work back into the mass. She imagined each song as the life of a person, lived in conversation with those around them, some seeking to dominate, others to follow, others still to take their own path regardless, all of them unique but also similar.

Time passed and Yaz fell into the song, finding voices that belonged together and binding them fast. Joining her own melody to the mass, sharing back and forth.

A sound made her lift her head. A figure stood in the doorway, obscured by the light of the lantern she carried. “I said, you didn’t want your meal?”

Yaz tilted her head, trying to make sense of the sounds the woman was making. She had spent so long with the song that words no longer fitted easily into her mind. Had she slept? Had she dreamed? She didn’t know.

The guard came into the room while a second waited by the door. She picked up the small board beside Yaz and replaced it with another, also bearing half a dozen cubes of fish. Yaz was amazed to see her taking away food as if somehow it would no longer be good to eat. She wanted to say so but her tongue was too slow to shape itself to the task.

The guards left, taking their lanterns. But the light remained. The stardust scattered by the bed had woken and now glowed in a faint tracery of lines across the floor, oddly reminiscent of the script that the Missing set upon their walls. And in Yaz’s open hand the small dust heap she’d collected burned bright enough for its illumination to reach the ceiling. And in the midst of the heap, one small golden star no bigger than a baby’s toenail radiated its own brilliant light.

Yaz blinked. The star’s light danced in her eyes and something lit at the back of her mind as if in response, an answer to the question that she had set aside. Eular had taken her anger. He had done something to her. Something to change her. To change her opinion. To change her truth. And that was how he had lived among the Broken without question. She had thought that Pome had a power to sway others with his voice. She had wondered if there was more to it than just the words he used. Pome had perhaps owned some kind of marjal skill, an empathy . . . the word was one of Erris’s . . . that twisted others to his cause. But Eular had something more, an ability to change moods and memories, to weave a new truth out of the threads of the world. The image of his wrinkled hands plucking at the air returned to her. Had that been the moment?

“I need to get out of here.” Yaz stood and went to the door, pausing only to take a cube of fish from the board. She swallowed it almost without chewing and returned for the rest, realizing that she was ravenous. She reached the door licking her lips and wiping her hand on her leg.

By starlight Yaz found the keyhole. The concept of key and lock were alien to her but somehow her time with Erris had furnished the words and, together with the guards’ practical demonstrations in front of her, it was enough for understanding. She sprinkled a little stardust into the keyhole and made it shine brighter still so she could see something of the inner workings.

Yaz wondered if she could pack the keyhole with stardust and then heat it to a point where the metal would melt and flow. It would be difficult, though, and she didn’t see that it would necessarily help. The mechanism might jam and the door would still be locked.

If she could touch the river that flows through all things, and call upon the source of power that she assumed all quantals, including the priests of Black Rock, had access to, then she could blow the door from its hinges. But she had drawn from the river too many times in recent days. It now lay beyond her reach for gods knew how long. Even if she could touch it again so soon, she doubted she would survive another such experience. The cost for opening one door that way, in a place that might have many such doors to bar her passage, was far too high.

Whatever the cost, though, Yaz had to escape her cell, find help, and escape the mountain. It was that or have Eular slowly rearrange her thoughts with his plucking fingers, as if he were drawing threads from the air, or pulling on the strings of a puppet. Given sufficient opportunity he might steal away her anger, pinch memories from her skull one at a time, and change her mind entirely, until she joined his army willingly. With her thinking undone she would take her place in the ranks he kept frozen in time and wait there until the day he was ready to unleash his war.

Even now, Yaz wondered how many of her opinions were truly her own, what memories she might already have had stolen from her. It seemed to her that Eular wasn’t entirely wrong—she saw his argument even if she didn’t share his conclusion. But had he made her think and feel these things? Was he a monster who had already erased his terrible crimes from her recollection? Or was he a loyal son of the tribes, prepared to do anything to save his people even if it meant dooming others?

Yaz couldn’t tell. She couldn’t be sure. She needed to escape, or at least to find a defence. She sat in silence before the door, leaning in so that her forehead rested against the cold metal. She listened to the silence. No wind howling, no ice groaning. Nothing. Just the beating hearts of distant stars, some so slow and resonant that they must be considerably larger than those that Regulator Kazik had built his hunters around. None, though, were even close to approaching the size of the city heart, the void star where Erris had somehow lived for so many centuries.

Yaz returned her attention to the door. She tried to defocus her sight and look at the door in the way she sometimes observed the world when looking for new inspiration. Some time ago Yaz had learned that if instead of looking for the river that runs through all things, and being blinded by its light, swamped by its power, she turned away from it and stared into the darkness around it, she discovered new things. The darkness was never empty. Surrounding the river was a halo of infinitely many very much thinner rivers, tributaries—threads, if you like. And, like the great river, these threads wove their way through the world at odd angles, originating from everything, binding one object to another through a host of relationships and influences.

Yaz had never paid great attention to the threads. The river was the main show. The river gave a power that got things done in a hurry. A power that could solve the urgent problems like how to stay alive when a monstrous foe is just about to kill you. The threads, however, seemed as if they might be a cradle that held the subtle truths of the world. Perhaps this is what the priests spent their time doing, safe in the warmth of their mountain, fed and clothed by the labour of the tribes. Perhaps they studied the threads.

Yaz examined the lock, looking at the nimbus of threads that surrounded the door, threads that joined the iron to the rock, the door to its purpose, threads that ran out from the lock and carried its complexity into the world.

For the longest time Yaz sat contemplating the lock and the threads that ran from it and through it. Even the act of her observing it created new threads, joining her to the lock, running into the past and off into the futures.

Eventually Yaz reached her hand slowly towards the lock, her fingertips following the key thread that she’d finally isolated from the host. “Maybe . . . I could just—”

A startlingly loud rattle and click shook Yaz from her concentration. The door opened quickly, striking her side as she scrambled clear. And there, framed in the doorway with a lantern in one hand and a long curving knife in the other, stood Regulator Kazik.

“You’ve come to kill me.” It was obvious in his eyes. Yaz was surprised at how calm she felt.

Kazik said nothing, only slowly set down his lantern, his gaze never leaving her.

“You sent Quell down to bring me back. You could have left me to die down there.” Yaz found her feet and backed to the far wall. She picked up the iron bowl and held it in one hand like a tiny shield. After all she’d faced—huge mechanical hunters, hordes of screaming Tainted—it seemed impossible that a lone man with a knife should be the one to kill her. The same man who had pushed Zeen down the pit.

“Eular says you’ve learned as much in half a month as he did in half a lifetime. He’s too busy being amazed by you to realize how dangerous you are.” Kazik sounded nervous but the hand holding the knife remained steady. “Eular thinks you can lead the army, and that with you at its head it can march south before the long night comes again.”

“I don’t want to lead an army.” It was true and also seemed like what he wanted to hear. Yaz found herself glancing around as if the room might suddenly contain something useful, like another door. She forced herself to watch the knife instead. Lantern light beaded the blade’s serrations. The sharp edge suddenly cut her missing fear loose. “But that doesn’t sound like a good reason for murder. You wanted me to do this stuff!” She tried not to let the words spill out in a terrified flood. When someone is set on attack then fear only quickens their hand.

“You’re too big a risk, girl. That’s the truth of it. With you leading it, that army won’t be ours anymore. It doesn’t matter how we bind you to the cause, you’ll wriggle out of it. You got yourself out of the pit, after all. The boy had nothing to do with it.” Kazik shook his head. “Eular doesn’t see it, but he was the one who set me up to judge. And here I am passing judgment.” A snarl twisted the burn scars that the Missing’s script wall had left across his face.

“Everything I do, I do for the Hidden God!” He moved swiftly for an old man, his cloak’s tatter-strips trailing the swing of his arm. Yaz knew even as he struck that she couldn’t avoid the knife. The regulator would stick it into her as deeply as the blade had bedded into Quell’s side. And it wouldn’t stop there. Her fright escaped her as a wild scream and she lunged for his arm, knowing herself too slow.

A moment of confusion followed and Yaz found herself on the floor, tangled with her foe, terrified, not wanting to die, knowing the knife was close, knowing that any moment now it would slice into her and hot blood would spill out.

“No!” Yaz thrashed, trying to ward off the blow she couldn’t see. Surprisingly the regulator lay beneath her. Since she’d lost control of his knife arm she instead began to rain blows at his head, hoping to stop him before he could stop her.

“Enough!” A sharp voice above her. “He’s down already. We need to go.”

Yaz hit the old man once more before the words sank in. Kazik wasn’t stabbing her. He wasn’t even defending himself. She looked up, ready to fight, her heart pounding.

“Come on.” A small figure stood over Yaz and the regulator, silhouetted in the light. In her left hand she held an iron rod, bound about at the far end with a layer of hides. She’d hit the regulator from behind. Yaz was safe.

“Maya?” Yaz choked the word out, her throat thick with emotion.

The girl just beckoned her to follow then turned for the open door. Yaz got to her feet. The regulator’s knife gleamed in the darkness close to his head. Yaz started to stoop for it, then changed her mind. It wasn’t in her to slice anyone open, and she knew it.

“Come on.” Maya slipped through the doorway, leaving the lantern where Kazik had set it down.

“How—” Yaz wanted to ask how Maya had escaped the shaft head unseen, infiltrated the Black Rock, found her cell, and appeared just in time to save her. But she knew the answer already. This was Maya. She had already known her own strength when the Axit sent her into the Pit of the Missing to spy for them. Those strengths had been further honed on the edge of peril, forged in the same crucible that had apparently made Yaz herself into something that even the priests feared.

So instead of asking questions Yaz chose action. The stardust shot to her hand, rattling against her skin like an ice wind along with the small star that she had fashioned from the dust itself. And, without a backward glance, she followed Maya into the shadows.