12

Thurin woke with a start, confused by his surroundings, confused by the darkness. He reached around him, finding rough stone on every side. The Black Rock. He remembered. Slowly, on hands and knees, he moved to the mouth of the dead-end tunnel that he’d chosen to rest in. In the chamber beyond, a whisper of light from a single distant star gave a sense of the space without quite illuminating anything. Fungi grew in the warmth of the chamber, reaching heights and sizes unseen in the ice-roofed caves of the Broken. The place had the feeling of an old mine, hollowed of what had originally been sought here.

Thurin rubbed his head where he’d grazed it on the low tunnel roof earlier. He should have known better than to think he could catch Hetta. She had, after all, somehow managed to hide from both the Broken and the Tainted in the ice caves year after year. Quite how someone so big could hide so well Thurin couldn’t say. Perhaps she had other blood talents working for her. But her speed across the ground was no mystery. Her legs were nearly as long as his body.

Thurin quenched his thirst at a seep low down on one of the walls. He guessed that the priests didn’t have to hunt down intruders or escapees very often. It seemed possible to wander the mountain tunnels for days without seeing anyone, and without food or water those days would soon become a fatal burden. Thurin had only found the fungi cave by using his water-sense to track the flows within the rock. Even then it had taken many frustrating hours wending his way ever down until he finally found a point where the mountain released its precious trickle into the open. Thurin guessed that the heat generated by stars and the burning of coal in the complex melted ice higher up, allowing for a modest supply of drinking water and enough to farm fungi down among the roots of the mountain.

A stretch and a yawn drove some of the sleep from his body. Somehow a few hours’ slumber had lifted the weight of the mountain from his shoulders, though he felt it returning with each surfacing memory of recent events. He needed to find Yaz. The others would be here too. He would help them as well if he could. He shook his head, snorting a bitter laugh. And the hundreds held in the glow of those stars? Would he also rescue those? There truly was a mountain ready to crush him beneath an untold mass of obligation and duty. Where did it end? Was he bound to save members of the Broken who had been stolen from the ice caves before his mother’s mother was born? Did they even want saving? The man whose circlet Hetta had torn away seemed happy to serve the priests’ Hidden God. Was that his true desire, or something the star in his circlet had whispered to him for so long that it had become part of his thinking?

Thurin sat on a boulder and munched absently on a brown mushroom larger than his hand. In the ice caves they had been small enough to fit several in his palm. Madeen always made a delicious stew with them and Thurin could smell it there in that dark chamber, drawing him back home, back to the only life he’d ever known. He could just leave. Leave and go back.

The image of Yaz returned to him, as she had looked when being hauled away in the delivery cage, her eyes on his. He let out a long sigh. Home is where the heart is. Eular had told him that once, years ago, and Thurin had never understood it until this very moment. He could go back to the caves, take the long fall from grace and return to his people, but he would leave the better part of himself here, in the Black Rock. Living would be replaced by existing. The pursuit of happiness substituted with a mere counting away of whatever days remained. Yaz was an unfinished song and he wanted to hear more.

Thurin walked towards the distant star with a blind man’s caution, watching the dimness before him for any hint of obstacles or pitfalls. Something drew his eye; something more than just sight swung his head towards a clot of darkness on his left. A cold fear filled him, the sudden terror of discovering that you are not alone in a place where you have been at ease, a place where you have slept.

“Hetta?” He moved towards the shape beside the wall, arms outstretched, hands trembling.

The darkness gave back only silence and a growing sense of dread. Thurin’s feet wanted him to run. The steps he took towards the black shape grew shorter and slower.

Thurin reminded himself that he had lived with demons beneath his skin and dwelt in the unremitting night of the Tainted’s caves. He had done too much running away of late. Instead he forced himself on against every instinct. The figure was large, perhaps a human . . . It seemed to be seated. Thurin’s water-sense found nothing though, neither blood nor sweat nor tears. Unwilling fingers advanced, half expecting the blackness to bite them short. They discovered cold stone, but shaped as a body is shaped. A statue such as ice-workers sometimes make, but formed from the rock itself.

Thurin felt around the statue. The sense of relief that should have wrapped him failed to do so. Somehow his fear clung to him despite the nightmare monsters he had imagined turning out to be mere stone. The thing seemed half-finished, only partially cut from the wall. It sat cross-legged, hands resting palms up on its knees. If it were standing it would have been taller than Hetta. Thurin had to stretch to find its face.

All the time he examined the statue it seemed to Thurin that the name of whatever it was that sat before him was one he already knew, dancing just beyond the fingertips of his outstretched memory. He felt that in the very next moment he would be able to open his mouth and speak it. But the next moment came and still it eluded him.

As his fingers moved higher the smoothly shaped stone became rough and jagged, as if someone had hacked away with a sword to ruin the work. The damage was greatest around the face. In place of eyes only great wounds remained, scored one way and the other. A name grew in his mouth, still unknown to his mind but wanting to force itself from his tongue.

Thurin stepped away, trembling, not trusting the stone figure to remain seated. Somehow the statue unnerved him more than finding an old corpse in the dark.

“Arges.” The name spoke itself from Thurin’s mouth.

Somewhere behind him a bright green light winked into life, throwing Thurin’s shadow across the statue looming before him.

“Don’t say.”

“That.”

“Name.” Three voices, one message.

Fear should have clamped Thurin’s jaw even if he hadn’t tried to bite down on the word. But it spilled from his tongue even so. “Arges.”

“Once more,” warned the person behind him.

“And,” said the next.

“He’ll come.”

Thurin clamped both hands over his mouth and staggered away from the statue. He turned towards the green light that had lit behind him.

Squinting, he could make out the shapes of three people, one with a burning green eye. He let his hands slip and an oath escaped him. Another of the mind-breakers he and Hetta had fled from. He began to run for the exit, lifelong habit making him avoid crushing fungi where possible.

“What’s he doing?”

“Running away.”

“From us?”

They were women’s voices, cracked with age. Something about them made Thurin falter. He came to a halt in the archway through which he’d first entered the cavern unknown hours earlier. Their surprised tone arrested him. He found himself beneath the single star in its cage and turned, slowly. It was hard to grow old among the Broken, so any that managed it earned a degree of veneration. Perhaps that respect helped keep Thurin there too.

“Come into the light,” he called back.

“We have our own,” one of the trio replied, but they came forward anyway, moving in that careful way the old have, perhaps taught by age, or perhaps they were born with it and that caution was what allowed them to weather the years. The leader, obscured by the glare of her one glowing eye, turned to illuminate the other two who trailed her, each holding on to the one before as though blind. The green light made them seem strange, as if they might be creatures from another world, but in truth they were old women in ragged skins, bony, angular bodies, wrinkled faces framed with straggling tresses of long grey hair.

“You’re new.” The ancient leading the others had one star eye and one hollow socket filled with shadow. The other two women were both eyeless. Thurin had grown up with Eular around, so the sight didn’t unnerve him so much as puzzle him. “Very new.”

“You can tell?” It was all he could think to say.

The three women laughed as if he’d told a joke, their voices cracking around the sound. “There’s none here fool enough to go messing with a statue of the Hidden God.” The first of the old women narrowed her eye. “And besides . . .” The green shaded darker and flushed into violet. “You have talent . . .” The light tingled on his skin. “. . . marjal . . . skilled in ice and fire . . .” She frowned. “There’s something e—”

“Let me see!” The second woman clawed briefly at the speaker’s face and to Thurin’s horror the green eye came away in her hands. Thurin took a step back, his stomach turning. He tried to remind himself it was a star rather than an eyeball. “Ah!” She crammed the star into her right socket and peered at him as if she could now see. “Give me the tooth! Give me the tooth!” She tugged a knife from the first woman’s hand, a blade that Thurin had missed in the gloom. Thurin recognized the type of weapon from Yaz’s description of the one she’d lost fighting Hetta: it had been fashioned from the tooth of a dagger-fish.

“Who are you?” Thurin asked, amazed.

“They call us the Grey Sisters.” She bowed. “None other.” The woman laughed as if she had cracked a joke and her two blind sisters cackled along. Their mirth had that wild quality to it that can come from eating too many silver-gill fungi, the type of laughter that’s one step from never stopping, one step from madness.

“Children of the Gods in the Sea,” the first managed.

“We saw the golden cities and rose from them beneath the ice . . .”

“Like bubbles!”

Thurin stepped back as they came forward, his eyes on the knife. He kept his hands out, palms down, fingers spread, placatory. “I was just . . . leaving.”

“Stay,” said the sister with the eye. “We get so few visitors.”

“I . . . uh . . . I have to find my friends.” Thurin risked a glance behind him, checking the entrance.

“The priests have them,” the third sister said. “And the priests keep what they have. Those who are brought here join the statues, or work in the mine. There’s no leaving here, boy. Only staying.”

“He’s looking for a girl,” said the sister with the eye. Apart from the eye it was hard to tell one from the other—triplets perhaps. “A special girl.”

“He loooooooves her,” the last of them crooned.

“He flew here,” said the first.

“On the wings of love.” The sister with the eye and tooth cackled.

“You’ve seen Yaz?” Thurin found himself torn between a knee-jerk denial and amazement. “How did you know about me flying?”

“Agatta sees everything,” said one of the sisters without the eye. “What has passed.”

“What is.” The middle sister narrowed her green eye.

“And what will be,” the lead sister finished.

Thurin frowned. “You see everything . . . and you’re lurking in this damp cave?”

The last sister reached forward and snatched the eye from her sibling. She sniffed haughtily. “That should tell you something about the state of the world, young Thurin. Where else should we be? We have warmth and food and water.”

Thurin opened his mouth to answer but reconsidered. He had seen the ice. “What about the green world?” Yaz had spoken of it so often and her vision was like a fire that he could warm himself beside, but he could no more enter it than he could enter among the flames. His imagination could make no picture of what it might be like. Not even with the stone about him painted green by the light of the witches’ eye. “There truly is a green world, isn’t there?”

“There was.” The last sister watched him.

“There is,” said the second. “Just a sliver.”

“There won’t be,” the third intoned. “All things die. Even worlds. Even time dies if you give it long enough.”

Thurin shook his head to clear it of confusion. He hadn’t any time for these mysteries even if they weren’t the ramblings of broken minds, which they probably were. “If you know everything, then where are my friends?”

“Agatta doesn’t know everything—she sees everything. There’s a difference. A big difference,” said the blind one at the front.

“We do know where your friends are, though,” said the sister with the eye. “But you don’t manage to help them, not even a little bit, unless you ask the right questions.”

“What are the right questions?” Thurin asked.

“That wasn’t one of them.” Her eye narrowed and the light grew more intense. Whispers began to rise from Thurin’s mind as steam will lift when water is heated.

“You’re like that other one,” Thurin muttered. “But his eyes were red and they hurt more.”

“Those are the Breakers. The Hidden God makes them to serve his interests. Just as he was made to serve another’s interests. There’s always a bigger fish. We of the sea know this wisdom.”

“And who made you?” The whispers from the back of his mind reached his lips, bypassing discretion and politeness.

“The Gods in the—”

“I’ve never seen the sea. Until today I’d never seen the sky. Those gods are not my gods. And in the ice we say that the obvious answer is generally the right one.” Thurin gritted his teeth against the disconcerting effects of the woman’s narrow green-eyed stare and reached out with his water-sense, enfolding all three sisters in a gentle grip. “Until today I’d met only one man without eyes my entire life, and none who used stars to see with. So I think that if the Hidden God made the Breakers would he not also have made you?”

“We knew you could ask the right question.” The woman with the eye turned away.

The other two took hold of each other’s rags and followed in a line as she walked off. “Come on then,” the last of them called.

Thurin pressed hard on his forehead with both hands, trying to squeeze his thoughts back together. “Wait!” He hurried after them. “You really know everything? I mean, you’ve seen it all?”

“We have.” The lead sister slipped into a fissure that split the chamber’s rough-hewn wall, an ancient defect in the mountain that must have predated humanity’s delving, and most likely their arrival on Abeth too.

They took him by what seemed natural passages in the rock, carved by ancient waters, the two blind sisters finding their way with a tactile familiarity that spoke of years spent coming to and fro. Their route led deeper still, the only light being the emerald glow of the sisters’ single eye.

“Where are we g—”

“Wrong question.”

“Why are we—”

“Better,” said the sister just ahead of him. “But ‘why’ is a difficult question for us. When you have seen what will be, then there’s no ‘why’ save ‘because.’ Everything is a lot to see. It can’t be held in one mind. It fractures our thoughts. It steals ambition and desire. To see everything is to become a part of it. Like the mountain, or the ice, or the wind.”

Thurin saw in the green light a fringe of stone spears hanging from the roof of the cavern ahead like teeth in a devouring maw. The sight stole his many other questions and for a while he could only marvel at the subterranean wonders surrounding them as they walked. The rock seemed to have been melted and then refrozen into marvellous flowing shapes, like the icicle cave but with ice replaced by stone and sheened in faint rainbow colours.

Deeper still and Thurin began to sense a strange regularity about him, flat surfaces and sharp corners disguised beneath the flowstone. “We’re in the city of the Missing!”

“We are,” agreed the lead sister, flashing a green glance back at him. “How do you think the hunters bring back their prey?”

“I . . .” Thurin found that his feet had stopped moving. “But . . .” The idea that the world had always lain within reach floored him. In one sentence the old woman had replaced the impassable miles of ice with a trek through the undercity that any competent scavenger could make. She’d made a lie of the Broken’s isolation, of the fall that could not be reversed. A dizziness swamped Thurin, one that previously he’d only experienced at the edge of a high drop.

“Come on,” snapped the sister closest to him. “You don’t faint here. That comes later.”