13
Soon they reached areas of the city untainted by water and showing the same clean lines that Thurin was familiar with in the works of the Missing. A dozen rooms and passages further on an ancient stream had cut through one of the Missing’s chambers, coating one wall with flowstone, fringing the ceiling with stone icicles. Something clanked into motion as the sisters’ light reached ahead. A curious thing of dull metal, a blunt iron-plated form like an unfolded cube, it almost seemed as if it had thick armoured legs and a wedge of a head. It appeared to be trying to struggle across to them but flowstone encased its rear half, pinning it to the spot.
“Is it a hunter?” Thurin didn’t think so. It was smaller than him for a start, and didn’t bleed starlight from its joints.
“A broken piece,” said the closest sister.
“A maintenance unit,” said the next.
“A lost dog now,” the one with the eye added. “Like many of the things the Missing left behind it doesn’t know what to do with itself.”
They left it scrabbling in the dark behind them, though for reasons he couldn’t explain Thurin felt a strong desire to go back and free the thing. Its dedication to whatever tasks its absent masters had set it had spanned centuries, millennia even. Being left trapped and useless seemed a cruel reward for its service.
They walked without conversation, descending several stairs, passing through endless echoingly empty rooms. Dust-haunted corridors drowned in a silence that swallowed the patter of their footfalls and returned nothing. Thurin was on the point of trying to ask again where they were taking him when in the very next chamber it seemed that they had arrived. The sister’s light picked out the lines of a great freestanding circle. An iron ring that stood tall enough for Hetta to walk through unbowed, though her hair might brush the upper curve. The sisters’ single eye seemed to grow brighter as they approached, its illumination pooling in deeply graven runes around the perimeter of the ring and causing them to glow.
“What is it?” Thurin stared in awe.
“A haze-gate.”
Curiously the chamber lay thick with mud around the margins, though Thurin’s water-sense had detected no streams or indeed any hint of water for the last part of their journeying. Yet here and there murky water pooled along ancient scars in the poured stone of the floor.
“Long ago I came here pursuing escapees.” The lead sister turned, her eye blazing now, too fierce to look upon. “I was a Breaker, in thrall to the Hidden God, my eyes taken by him and replaced with stars that ruled my mind. I didn’t know about the gateway though.”
Disconcertingly, the woman pulled the eye from her head and held it out towards the ring. The star flared brighter still and jagged lines of light crackled from it, reaching out to strike the ring’s perimeter, bright points of contact dancing over the runes. The whole space encompassed by the ring shimmered as if it were the surface of a pool, affording distorted glimpses of a world beyond. “With stars that the Hidden God has tainted the gateway is . . . ungentle. Only this eye survived the encounter, and in being purged it purged me too. Agatta was born anew, multiplied, given new vision, and strange thoughts.”
Thurin shielded his eyes against the glare until the sister stepped back and returned her eye to its socket.
“You called it a haze-gate? It’s a door? Where does it lead?”
“Everywhere,” said one of the blind sisters.
“Everywhen,” said the other.
“It was the gateway that gave us vision, that made us see everywhere and everywhen,” said the sister with the eye, “though a single eye does lack a certain depth perception . . . so sometimes it’s hard to judge the order in which things happen.”
“I’ll have my old eyes back one day,” said another of the blind sisters. “But not now. Long ago.”
Thurin reminded himself that the old women were insane and not to be taken too seriously. He kept his distance from the ring, uneasy in its presence. The shimmering centre had faded away but the hairs on his arms still stood on end. The mad old women had unnerved him too with their talk of seeing futures and pasts, and with the swift passage of the dagger-tooth knife exchanged back and forth between gnarled hands. He knew the long descent hadn’t been just to show him what could have been explained back in the fungi cave. And since they seemed to be waiting for the question, he asked it. “And why did you bring me here?”
“Because we saw it.” The other blind sister’s smile revealed yellowing teeth and dark gaps. “There’s no why about it. The boy opens it. The boy goes through.”
“Which boy?” the one with the eye asked.
“Her boy,” the last said.
All three nodded.
The one with the eye pointed at the rear wall where an alcove now lit up. A large single star burned there, golden, with a slow swirl of shadows crossing its surface. “That’s the key. We spent a long time fashioning it so that it would take you where you need to go. Those arts are lost so guard it well.”
Thurin shook his head. “I’m not going through that. I came to find Yaz. She’s up there somewhere.” He pointed, though only one of his audience could see the gesture. “You say you see everything, so you must know where she is.”
“She’s at the top.” The single green eye peered at Thurin, stripping away the layers of his thought. “Though you of all people should know how it is when you come to witches for prophecy.”
The light flared and the emerald flash took his sight along with all sense of up, down, and the passage of time. Only the question lingered . . . Me of all people?
Thurin woke to find himself alone in the chamber, sprawled on his back before the towering ring. The shifting golden illumination told him that the mad sisters had left the star in the alcove alight for him. The key, they had called it. The muddy floor squelched beneath him as he tried to roll to his side.
He sat and held his head between grimy hands, trying to squeeze his thoughts back together and seal the cracks left by the green eye’s scrutiny. He got slowly to his feet, expecting a spike of pain at any moment, alerting him to some or other injury, but found himself whole and unhurt.
“Ha.” Thurin snorted. He turned his back on the gate. He’d no intention of going through it, and being told that he would had only strengthened his resolve not to. Seeing the future was all well and good, but if you then told people about it you could hardly expect things to still unfold as foreseen. Without a backwards glance, Thurin set off along the corridor that had brought him to the chamber. Even if he’d become disoriented and lost his direction, there were three sets of muddy footprints to lead the way.
After about fifty yards the light grew too dim to give even the vaguest of impressions of the surrounding passage, let alone pick out the progressively fainter footprints left by the retreating sisters. Thurin stumbled on for another fifty yards, tripping over broken stone, grazing his knees in a fall, and finally reaching a three-way junction that he’d no memory of passing on the way in. From his time with the Tainted he knew that passages revealed by touch could paint a different picture in the mind from that delivered by the eye. It didn’t take him long to conclude that without light he had no chance of retracing his steps. Even with a light he wasn’t that confident. It was a long way and he had trusted the sisters to bring him back once they had shown him their secrets. It had been a foolish trust. With a sigh he set off back to the chamber to retrieve the star.
Thurin crossed the chamber’s floor, avoiding the worst of the mud. The ring threw its shadow against the wall and ceiling in a distorted circle. He avoided it too. He was sure nothing would happen if he passed through the empty gate, but he went around anyway. Even with the star it seemed unlikely that the ring could lead anywhere except from one side to the other. But if that were truly the case, what was it doing here?
The starlight made him squint before he got halfway to its source. Closer still and he had to view it through the gaps between the fingers of his raised hand. The star was larger than the sisters’ eye, big as a fist, larger than any star he’d seen, save perhaps for the crimson hearts that Yaz had torn from hunters. At five yards it woke the whispering at the back of his mind. Halving that distance set his skin tingling and filled his mind with a wordless roar. Closer still and a terrifying madness blossomed inside his skull.
Thurin backed away, finding himself sweat-soaked, his heart pounding, breath ragged. Carrying the star with him was not going to be an option. He rested, bent over, hands on his knees, and raised his head to stare at the gate. He wondered how long the sisters had seen him waiting before he finally decided that the haze-gate was his only way out of here. Stubbornness could still see him wandering blind in the unlit city but the chances were that he would stumble, lost, until starvation gave him a slow death or an unseen fall offered a quicker exit.
Thurin returned to the ring, running his hand over the deeply graven symbols around its edge. He’d seen their kin before, glowing on the walls of the undercity, the script of the Missing. The Broken had no writing but he had heard from those who’d lived on the ice that the priests of the Black Rock could trap meaning in their runes, whole stories even. The Missing’s writing did more than that. It spoke to you, managing to press emotions and commands past the translation barrier. The symbols beneath his fingertips remained silent though, biting their tongues, biding their time.
Thurin sighed and watched the shadow he cast, a black tower amid the golden light painting the opposite wall. Even if he wanted to open the gate it wasn’t clear how it could be done. Thurin knew nothing about keys save that they were said to open or undo things. He’d never met anyone who had even seen one, but somehow the idea persisted, trapped in the language of the clans. It seemed logical that he would have to bring the key to the thing that needed opening. In this case that would mean bringing the star to the gate.
The star burned on, the slow roll of shadows across its surface varying the light. Thurin gathered his courage for a second approach. Perhaps if he ran at it . . . He shook his head. He might as well try to snatch molten metal from the forge pot merely by being quick. No part of him would let himself go close to the star.
He stalked the chamber, thinking furiously. More than once he shouted after the departed sisters that they might at least have told him how to open the gate.
Finally, exhausted, he squatted down beside one of the muddy puddles and wondered if he were thirsty enough to drink from it. Its presence confused him. He could sense no water seeping from the walls, and where would mud come from? In the ice caves of the Broken mud came only from decaying fungi and the waste they grew on. But he’d seen nothing like that here.
Thirst had never been something Thurin had had to contend with living beneath a sky of melting ice. He didn’t like it at all. His tongue felt unnaturally rough against the dry insides of his cheeks. He regarded the muddy puddle with a sour eye. Perhaps he could convince the water to reject the murk. With a small flex of his skill he lifted a rippling ball of water the size of two fists together. Experiments in the past suggested that the best way was to spin the ball fast.
Within the rotating ball the dirt quickly began to redistribute itself, concentrating around the equator in a black strip while the water behind started to clear. Exerting the necessary level of control was taxing but with furious concentration Thurin let the black water fly away while he maintained the cohesion of the central mass.
After several minutes’ effort the ball was somewhat smaller and the water a lot cleaner. Thurin arrested its spin and willed the water towards his parched mouth. The first tendril reached his lips and he was about to drink when something in the way the golden light rippled through the mass gave him a new idea.
Thurin sent the ball of water towards the niche where the star rested. He was already frowning. His plan had a missing piece. Even as he wrapped the water around the star in a new inch-thick skin he knew that it couldn’t maintain a grip. If he lifted the water the star would sink through it and remain where it was.
The whole cave rippled now as if fathoms deep in a sea that filtered the light of an alien sun, one that burned golden white behind shifting clouds. Thurin half expected to see strange fish swimming through the adjoining tunnels to circle the gate ring. Yaz knew about fish; she would be able to picture them better than the poor imaginings he based on the black, eyeless creatures that swam in the Broken’s streams.
Somehow thinking of Yaz made Thurin think of the ice, as if the girl would always be a part of it. And that gave him the last, most difficult piece of his solution. He focused the whole of his ice-working talent on the ball of water containing the star. He had seen the standing pools carved by past generations of the Broken where water can become ice within moments, the phase change triggered by some small disturbance that acts as a focus about which change can occur. He needed the water to freeze, to alter its state. He needed every part of the swirling fluid to link arms with its neighbours and lock tight. He needed the heat preventing that transition to leave.
The necessary manipulation proved rather like trying to thread a sinew through the eye of a needle while standing on one leg . . . and being attacked by a tainted gerant. Thurin stood as close as he could, one hand extended towards the star, the other clamped across his forehead to stop his thoughts escaping. Years of ice-work had furnished him with an instinctive understanding of the difference between ice and water on a far deeper level than can be gained from touch and sight. Somehow he needed to break the barrier between them, to force one to become the other.
An hour passed, perhaps three. The spike of pain returned, driven between Thurin’s eyes. He sensed himself on the edge of success but somehow it never seemed to reveal itself, like a forgotten name tickling the tip of his tongue but refusing to be spoken.
He slaked his thirst with muddy water and continued to press at the problem while his stomach rumbled its hunger.
A sound brought him out of his trance. A distant skitter, back along the dark corridor down which he had tried to follow the sisters. A sound and then silence. The star shed its watery cloak as Thurin’s concentration lapsed. He stared in the direction of the noise. At first he thought it might be the sisters returning to take pity on him, but the corridor remained dark, with no glimmer of their singular green eye. A sound and then silence, in a place where no sound should ever be ignored.
“Hello?” The word left him and vanished into the unyielding blackness.
He tried to gather himself. The unexpected noise had left him unsettled. He hadn’t wanted to be alone, but now that it seemed he might not be, suddenly solitude seemed like a good thing.
Thurin was still peering nervously into the shadowed passageway when the attack came from behind. The only warning he had was that tingle in his ice-sense he always got when large bodies of water were in motion. Sight and sound had yielded him nothing. He threw himself forward and the blow scythed above his head.
Hetta came on, roaring now, trying to stamp the life from him. Thurin rolled this way and that, pushing with his ice-work to deflect her feet so that they slammed down inches from his head rather than pulping it against the stone floor.
“Hetta! It’s me! Stop!”
But the woman’s face was demon-stained once more, no recognition in her eyes. Thurin gave her a mental shove and scrambled to his feet as her advance jolted to a halt. She champed her pointed teeth together, lips bloody, and lunged again. Thurin hauled at the blood running through every part of her and matched her strength just as her reaching fingers grazed his shoulder. With a grunt of effort he dragged her back across the room, her feet sliding through the mud. The white agony in his head told him that this wasn’t something he could keep doing, though.
Hetta was full of her own demons. The mind-breaker that had chased the two of them from the frozen army must have fractured her mind, loose fragments becoming the demons that rode her. And now she’d hunted him down. He could flee into the dark but Hetta had survived for years on prey she chased through black tunnels. Thurin found himself paralysed by an unmanning fear, the terror that fills a cornered animal. Hetta would overwhelm him. She would kill him here or out there in the dark, and her sharp teeth would tear the flesh from his bones. He would die in the undercity, alone, and Yaz would never even know that he’d come after her.
Hetta found sudden, unexpected traction, digging a foot in where some unknown force had scarred the floor. She flung herself forward with a bladder-loosening howl, diving for his feet. Despite the resistance from his ice-work her outstretched hand somehow clamped around his shin. And then, with irresistible strength, she began to pull him towards her, still howling through a mouth now flecked with bloody foam.
In Thurin’s last moments a surprising clarity settled on him, driving out fear, shock, regret, replacing them all with a single thought. Open the gate. The sisters had said he would go through. And he couldn’t do that if he died here.
He reached out for the water that had fallen from around the star when his concentration broke. It lay pooled across the uneven surface of the alcove. Lifting it to engulf the star took a moment’s thought, a moment that brought him half a yard closer to Hetta’s mouth.
Thurin needed the water to be ice. He needed that more than he needed his next breath or the next beat of his heart. The ground scraped beneath him. Hetta’s other hand found his hip. She raised her head, mouth wide and dripping, taking her time now that she’d won. The stains of the demons beneath her skin made a warring pattern of red and black, each claiming half her face, the zones interlacing along the divide where they battled for dominance. Thurin only half saw her. The shell of water occupied his mind’s eye. Two zones. Something clicked deep within his brain; some barrier to understanding surrendered to pressure. He made two zones, driving heat from the farthest region of the water into the closer. A half shell of ice cupped the star, and a half shell of warmer water fell away.
Hetta drew Thurin’s thigh to her gaping mouth. He didn’t fight her. His strength was as nothing beside hers. Instead he threw the star at the gate, yanking on the ice that now held it. How it could possibly help him wasn’t the point anymore. Perhaps the sisters had just seen him opening it and then Hetta dragging his corpse through. But he had done what he could and if he had to die he would at least have finished his life with an achievement.
The noise of the gate opening was at once so deep, high, and loud that Hetta’s jaws snapped shut in surprise just a fraction of an inch from the meat of Thurin’s leg. The sound pulsed through the rock; it thrummed in the longest of Thurin’s bones and it whined in his ears. The view through the gate became a black wall, far darker than the corridors leading from the chamber. It swallowed the light of the star so utterly that it plunged the room into unbroken night. The roar that followed was to Hetta’s roar what the ice wind is to a single breath. And a fraction of a heartbeat later water filled the space in a blast that carried all before it faster than a stone falls.