10
You didn’t kill him.” Yaz followed Maya, almost blind in the passageway. The only light struggled from door windows, each cell supplied with its own bowl of dimly glowing stardust.
“Killing a priest . . .” Maya shrugged. “It’s a big thing. It’s not time for that. Yet.”
Yaz thought that killing anyone should be a big thing, but Maya had shown no reluctance in the ice caves. The regulator, though, she had clubbed with her rod of hide-bound iron. Perhaps a lifetime of venerating the priests had hamstrung the small assassin. Among the Ictha any priest was afforded the same respect as the clan mother. Only since seeing Zeen tumble into the Pit of the Missing had Yaz begun to think of the order as her foe. Before then she had considered them the glue that bound tribe to tribe and clan to clan, finding a peaceful path where otherwise blood might have spilled across the ice.
Maya paused at a corner, gesturing for Yaz to stay back. The passage joining theirs was better lit. Already Yaz felt exposed. The clans thought that there were fewer than a dozen priests, and possibly that was true, but all the evidence Yaz had seen so far suggested that the mountain housed a considerably larger population than that. Whether they were mostly priests, or servants to the priests, like the guards she’d seen, Yaz didn’t know.
“Come.” Maya motioned Yaz forward. “Stay quiet.” Shadow swirled around Maya, not forming some clot of darkness that would draw the eye, but fading her, blurring her outlines into something a watcher’s gaze might just slide over. Tendrils of shadow wrapped Yaz too, working Maya’s magic on her.
Yaz followed Maya around the corner. Stars lit the way, hanging in iron cages from hooks set into the walls. Stars larger than her thumbnail. She heard their song and asked them to keep their peace as she passed, so that they burned no brighter.
“These are everywhere,” Maya said. “Except where they kept you.”
Yaz understood. She could have used the stars as weapons. The priesthood had tried to draw her teeth. Even Eular must have shared some of the regulator’s concerns. She considered taking the stars as they passed, but what better trail could there be to lead any pursuit right to her? Besides, she felt more affinity for the tiny star in her fist. It might lack the power of larger stones but she had made it herself from dust, grain by grain, and she knew it with the same intimacy with which she knew her own hand.
“Where are we going?” Yaz hissed.
Maya pointed the direction and kept moving. She led the way through a series of turns and down a long, narrow flight of steps. The stars became fewer and smaller, the shadows encroaching between them, reclaiming lost territory. Maya paused by the entrance to one chamber where darkness held sway. “Make a light.”
Yaz coaxed a narrow but bright beam from her star. It traced a line across the floor, rising swiftly to dance across a complex surface. Unable to make sense of what she was seeing, Yaz broadened the beam into a cone of golden light.
“Iron!” The priests or their minions had heaped the large chamber with teetering stacks of metal. About half of it comprised the wrought ingots that the Broken made beside the forge pool, about half of it great wheels or flat plates, and other larger pieces that perhaps the Broken had been unable to fit into their melting pot. And all of it lay rusting, neglected, a mountain of metal far greater than could be made by all the clans heaping their treasures together. Yaz gazed in awe.
“I’ve seen two other chambers like this,” Maya said. “And I can’t have explored more than a fraction of this place yet.”
“But . . . what does it mean?” Yaz let her light fade.
“It means that metal is only precious on the ice because the priests say it is. It’s a collar around the tribes’ throats.”
“I never knew.” Yaz had thought of the Broken as alone in their enslavement, trapped down in their caves, but it seemed that the Ictha were bound in their own way, despite the apparent freedom of the endless ice. A handful of intermittent seas anchored them to a nomadic circuit of the north, and the treasures of the Black Rock chained them to the will of the priests. “What should we do?”
“Hide!” Maya hissed.
“Hide?” Yaz willed her star to darkness and closed her fist around it.
“Now!” Maya took her hand and tugged her towards the great pile of scrap iron.
Yaz stumbled blindly behind Maya, relying on the girl not to get her impaled on any of the protrusions jutting from the heap. With an arm raised to guard her face, Yaz negotiated her way around the jagged obstacles, biting her lip to keep from cursing as her shin collided with something immovable. Maya dragged her into a crouch moments later. They waited like that for an age in a silence that Yaz ached to break. Her thigh muscles began to burn, and still Maya gave no sign to move again.
The darkness began to weaken. The mass of iron that had been invisible became a forest of silhouettes, all blocking the light now bleeding into the chamber as something approached along the tunnel. Yaz could hear whatever it was that was drawing near, though not quite with her ears. A dual-voiced star song reached out towards her, a discordant harmony. There was something sour and off-key about it that ran a shiver of revulsion down her spine. The sound tied the same knots in her stomach that the sight of the stump of Pome’s severed hand had, bright with broken bone and blood.
The light grew stronger and a figure walked into view. Yaz’s imagination had her expecting a monster, some nightmare creation of dead flesh and living metal. To see a normal person was somehow worse. The horror lay in the wrongness of the light that shone from their eyes, or rather from the sockets that had each been emptied of the eye it should hold and were now filled with a star of similar size, burning with a fractured yellow light.
Maya’s knife whispered from its sheath. She kept the blade beneath her arm so as to allow no gleam to draw the bright eyes to it.
Yaz bent her head, though she still saw the twin stars in her mind. You don’t see us. You don’t see us. You don’t see us. She repeated the mantra over and again, letting it circle within the confines of her skull. Something convinced her that neither Maya’s knife nor her own skills would avail them if that creature fixed its gaze upon their hiding spot.
The light sifted through tangled iron, shadows slid this way and that, distortions of distortion. The metal creaked as if unknown forces were tugging at it, searching for anything loose. And then, as quickly as it came, the bright inquisition was turned away and the glow retreated.
Another long silence followed before Maya rose. “Come on.”
“What was that thing?” Yaz asked.
“I don’t know, but there are more of them, and they can see me even when I’m hiding.” She sheathed her knife. “Keep doing whatever it was that you did, because we would have been found if you hadn’t done it.”
Yaz lit her star and followed Maya from the chamber. It felt wrong to be led by a child, but without guidance she knew that she would just walk herself back into the priests’ clutches, and sooner rather than later. “Where are we going?”
Maya glanced back at her, frowning. “To the Axit, of course.”
“The Axit?” Yaz hadn’t any desire to join Maya’s clan. Not that they would accept someone broken like her, or Maya come to that.
“Of course. I need to report. What I have to tell them will change everything. The tribes won’t bow to the priests once they know they’re sitting on a mountain of iron and taking half of what we have for just the tiniest fraction of it. It’s like they own an ocean’s worth of fish and are buying us with a few loose scales.”
“Why wait for me then? Why risk capture when you could have been long gone?” Did Maya somehow need her in order to reach the ice?
“If the iron that the Broken deliver isn’t the reason that the priests keep feeding them, then it must be for the stars. That’s what they care about. And I’ve seen what you can do with stars, Yaz. You’re a weapon and the Axit know what to do with those.”
Yaz twisted her mouth. She didn’t want to be a weapon or to have Maya see her as one. Maya had saved her life at least twice. Yaz hoped it had meant more to her than just securing the safety of a prize. “So the Axit will feed me and keep me warm? And what about you, Maya? Will they need you anymore? What happens to a weapon when the use for it has gone?”
Maya turned and met her eyes. “We Axit are warriors. We understand sacrifice. My life is in service to my people. I’ll lay it down for them anytime they need it, or when it ceases to have value to them.” The girl kept all expression from her face, her gaze empty of fear or hope, but the words sounded like something she had learned from the cradle rather than a creed of her own making. It also sounded like the Ictha creed, albeit a more warlike version of it.
“Your life should have value to you, Maya. It has value to me. That’s why I wanted to take you south, to find the green lands with me.” The lack of hope hurt Yaz the most; that, and the fact that she recognized in Maya her own willingness to sacrifice herself. And seeing it reflected in another’s eyes made her question the choices she’d made. Her own dedication to the Ictha had been hardly less strong. Until her fall she had been part of something greater than herself. Its survival had meant more to her than her own ambition. Life on the ice bred that kind of devotion. Without it there would be no life upon the ice.
Yaz had emerged from the Pit of the Missing to find the world a much smaller place, the old creeds too narrow to cover that which mattered most. Since her fall she had learned to dream. She had come to look beyond the boundaries of her clan and to wonder where the lines should be drawn. She had wondered for the first time how the survival of an individual might be weighed against that of a group, and why the group should end with a clan, a tribe, or a people. She had fallen from her life and crashed into a world that had filled her with hope, and fear, and confusion. The number of unanswerable questions that haunted her existence had multiplied and multiplied again. She found herself sorely in need of guidance, but both sky and sea were hidden from her, and the gods had never spoken to her in any case. A year ago she would have wanted to speak to a priest.
Yaz nodded slowly. She needed to go back to the pit, back to the others. There was no going south if it was to be alone. If Maya could get her out of this mountain, then that would be a good first step. “I’ll go with you.”
A flicker of surprise crossed Maya’s face, quickly hidden. “Good. Come on then.”
Maya led the way through unlit tunnels, moving cautiously. The size of the place surprised Yaz. She had seen the undercity of the Missing of course, and this seemed to be nothing on that scale, but she found herself astonished by the mere fact that the priests had carved through so much rock that there were enough chambers and tunnels to become lost in and to hide in.
Twice they followed long flights of steps, rough-hewn into the floor of tunnels where Yaz nearly had to stoop to avoid scraping her head.
“I thought the way out would be lower down, by the ice,” Yaz said.
“It is.”
Yaz stopped climbing stairs. Maya on a mission was a creature of few words. At other times the words ran from her like water from a holed skin. Had she learned silence against her nature, from watching the closed-lipped Axit warriors, or was the chatterbox Maya the act, just another weapon in her arsenal?
Maya stopped too, a few paces on. Yaz simply stood and watched the shadow-wrapped girl, little more than a smudge at the extremity of her star’s illumination, and her stillness pulled an explanation from her guide. “I think their temple is up here.”
“Why do we want to go there?” Yaz felt a cold finger trace her spine. She knew almost nothing about the Hidden God other than that, unlike the Gods in the Sea and Sky, he had a specific place in the world. He could be found. And that place lay here, within the Black Rock. Her knowledge had been assembled from rare occasions when conversation among the Ictha grazed against the subject and then hurriedly veered away. Even so, those few touches had painted a picture in her mind of something grimmer than the ice, more implacable than the wind. The priests were said to wear his likeness on chains about their necks, hidden beneath their robes. Yaz had even heard that they made statues of him. She had no desire to stand before one and let him gaze upon her through stone eyes. “We should leave now.”
“First know your enemy,” Maya said. “There are still chambers I haven’t seen, and what’s more important to understand than your foe’s gods?”
“You’re sure the priests are your enemy?” Yaz didn’t really want to be in the position of defending Eular and his kind, but the situation wasn’t so clear-cut that a clan could just go to war with them after so little reflection. And it seemed that Maya had not yet discovered this frozen army that Eular claimed to be building.
“Anyone who tries to exercise dominion over the Axit is our enemy. We have been at war with the Black Rock for generations. They just don’t know it yet. My uncle says that anyone who isn’t Axit is our enemy, but that’s old thinking and the clan father tells it another way. He teaches that no one deserves to die until they stand in our way.”
Yaz slowly shook her head. To hear such harsh ideas from the mouth of a child she knew given to kindness when not tethered by her creed . . . it made her sad. “You could stand in my way, Maya, and I would still count you my friend.”
Maya said nothing but the shadows about her weakened and in their midst she looked down as if shamed.
“Lead on then.” Yaz tried to sound more cheerful than she felt. “Let’s see what we can learn about the Hidden God.”
They ascended so many stairs that Yaz became convinced they would soon run out of mountain and emerge from the top. The place might not have as many chambers as the Missing’s undercity but it was starting to feel as though it spread nearly as far.
Clan histories came bound in tales like that of Zin and Mokka and were never accompanied by a count of years. Sometimes it seemed to Yaz that even the oldest of tales might have been witnessed by her grandmother’s grandmother. But here in the Black Rock it was clear that the priests must have laboured for centuries to hollow out such spaces.
On only three occasions did Maya stop to backtrack or take a side passage in order to avoid detection. The priests and their minions might be considerably more numerous than the clans believed but, whatever their numbers, they were spread thinly within the maze of tunnels and rooms their ancestors had carved through the Black Rock. In some ways the emptiness of the Black Rock was a mute testimony to the truth of Eular’s words concerning the dwindling numbers among the clans. On the ice it was hard to tell, and memories were either short or vague, but here the facts were recorded in stone. Once there must have been many more living here, supported by the labour of the tribes. Now their descendants rattled around in the space that long ago had been crowded.
“We’re getting near.” Maya had brought them from the rough-hewn service tunnels into corridors that boasted flat floors and straight walls. They passed the occasional iron door, though they saw no signs of life. Stars hung everywhere in cages, dangling from the ceiling and dousing the passage in rainbow hues. These were larger stars than those illuminating corridors lower down the mountain. Pome’s star, which had been a prize among the Broken, would have been just another corridor light here in the upper chambers of the Black Rock.
Maya stayed in the middle of the passages where she could, ducking when passing each star as if they gave off a heat that burned her.
They passed no statues but here and there an image had been scored across the walls in crude black lines as if someone had taken a lump of coal and scraped it over the stone. The figure scrawled in these scenes possessed a curiously violent energy. It seemed to be human, sitting cross-legged, hands on knees, palms upwards, head bowed, but surrounded by a black cloud of jagged lines and crossed through time and again as if the artist had wanted to obliterate their work once finished. It seemed at odds with the precision of the stonework and the harmonious light of the hanging stars. Like a livid wound on the face of a child.
Yaz stopped to stare at the second such image they reached. There was something about it that reminded her of Seus, the monster that had haunted the secret ways in which the city of the Missing seemed to hang, not in the shape of the body but in the violence of lines over and around the head. She suppressed a shudder and moved on.
The next turn brought them to a corridor echoing with the song of stars, all of them red and too large to hide in a fist. Yaz’s fingers and thumb would struggle to meet if she were to take one in her grasp. The figure of the Hidden God had been scrawled on both walls about halfway down, the two images facing each other with black intensity. This pair had their heads unbowed but so many lines slashed across their faces that little could be seen of them, their eyes just a single blackness at the crossing point.
“This is why I brought you.” Maya hung back. “I can’t go down there.” She scowled as if admitting to her weakness shamed her. “Not unless you . . . stop them.” She backed off a few more paces. “I can feel the stars tearing at me. Breaking my mind apart.”
“I can try.” Yaz raised her hand as a prelude to reaching out with her power. But before she could even begin she sensed a change in the star song. The red stars’ chorus sank through the registers, becoming deep as groaning ice, a dark premonition, then suddenly a wildness infected their tune, driving it higher, more strident. A new emotion haunted the corridor. One Yaz knew well. Fear. Black script began to appear on the walls, drawn rapidly by an invisible hand.
“Run.” Maya said it in a small voice as though she lacked the courage to speak any louder.
At the far end of the corridor one of the red stars blinked out. Then another. And another. And darkness swallowed the space behind them.