17

Yaz

At the top of the Black Rock, after an eternity of stairs, Yaz and Maya had reached a corridor lit by such a wealth of stars that Maya could go no further. Now those stars were failing and in their place came a wave of fear so fierce that even Maya’s courage had fled before it.

More stars went dark. The two images of the Hidden God facing each other across the corridor vanished under the advancing tide of night. Fear ran ahead of the darkness like a cold wind, trying to untether Yaz’s will. To her second sight it looked as though an infinity of threads, each thinner than any strand of hair, rippled towards her from the blackness, and where they struck her flesh every one of them awoke a memory of pain.

“Run!” Maya shouted it this time and, clutching her knife, she tore away along the passageway as though a thousand Tainted were howling at her heels.

Yaz’s fears rose to drown her; the terror of seeing Azad dragged from the boat, the hollowing nightmare of being alone beneath the ice, the stress of living among her people and knowing that soon they would discover her weakness, learn that she was different. Every fibre of her needed to run. The darkness before her was the yawning Pit of the Missing, flight the only option.

Yaz’s already tight grip on her star tightened further still and the light poured from it. With a cry she began to run. She flung herself towards the source of the terror, sweeping the threads from the air with both arms. She was Yaz of the Ictha. She had thrown herself into darkness and fear before, and had emerged reborn.

The figure that Yaz’s star revealed in the darkness was that of a man, but scraps of night clung to him, a smoke that her light couldn’t burn through, writhing around him as if alive, the intimate coils of some vast serpent.

“You didn’t run away.” The voice was almost that of a man, fracturing around several pitches as if two voices were at war. The man sounded curious rather than threatening, even mildly amused.

Yaz unclenched her fists. “I supposed that maybe if someone was trying so hard to scare me they might not actually be worth running from.” She came to a halt, her pounding heart beginning to slow. “The red puffer looks like seven kinds of nightmare but all it can do is give you a nasty nip. The razor eel, even when it shows itself, is just this grey line, but it can slice you open before you blink.”

The slight amusement became a laugh. “You ice men and your fishing stories.”

The red stars began to glow once more, illumination swelling from their cages. The darkness still clouding the man seemed to sink into his flesh, leaving it mottled. It lingered only in the empty sockets of his eyes and across the space between, resembling nothing more than a single large eye black enough to be a hole punched through the stuff of the world.

“Eular!” Yaz took a backward step in surprise.

“I am Arges. But, yes, this one is called Eular. I’ve been calling my favourites that for a long time. It actually means ‘favourite’ in the tongue of the Missing.”

“You’re possessing him.” Yaz curled her lip. “Demon!”

“Such a lazy term.” Arges shook Eular’s head sadly. He gestured back along the corridor to a large iron door that swung open on oiled hinges. “Come with me.” He walked away. “What you people call demons beneath the ice are undesirable fragments of the Missing. What you call demons out on the ice are figments of your imagination projected onto an empty wasteland. And what you are calling a demon now is neither of those things. I’m filtering myself through Eular, using his language and his words so that we can communicate. I’m a very different kind of being to you, Yaz. Imagine what discourse you could have with a red snapper hauled fresh from the sea. That is how things are between us here, but Eular is a place where we overlap. A place where I am smaller than I truly am and can present myself in ways that may fit within your comprehension.” He stopped in the doorway. Yaz began to follow him. “I am a non-corporeal agent, a servant of the Missing. In their tongue, a holothaur.”

Eular, and whatever the thing was that was wearing his body, went through the door. In the large, vaulted chamber beyond, a dozen stars lit around the walls, along with more set in the stone arches far above them. Each of these burned a different hue, and each was larger than any Yaz had seen before. There were no cages for these stars. They simply hung there by themselves a few inches from the rock.

The crimson star at the heart of the hunter that Yaz had destroyed in the undercity had been so large she could barely cup her hands around it. Those within the Hidden God’s temple were the size of two fists held together and their song resonated beneath the vaults of the ceiling in a many-voiced harmony that almost swept her away. She felt the presence of them like a pressure on all sides, as if she were underwater and didn’t know it.

Dominating the opposite wall, a statue sat cross-legged, hands resting palm up on its knees. The face had been heavily damaged, scored across the eyes as if by the talons of some beast vast enough to take on whales.

“I am the Hidden God, Yaz.”

“I see.” Yaz wasn’t sure what to say. She’d never met or expected to meet a god. She felt like Mokka must have when she stood new-made before Aiiki, least of the Gods in the Sky. And this god said he was a servant of the Missing. Surely the Gods in the Sky and the Gods in the Sea were not also servants of the Missing? “Are there others like you? Other . . .” She worked her mouth around the unfamiliar word. “. . . holothaurs?”

Arges frowned at that, and then waved the question away. “There were many, but most are gone now, and those few who linger are all insane, mere shadows of what they were. Only I have remained whole. And do you know why, Yaz?”

“I don’t.” Sanity was not something that the statue suggested to her but it was never a good idea to antagonize a god. According to the ancient tales they had many ways to punish such behaviour.

“Because I have a purpose, Yaz, a goal beyond survival. It’s aimlessness that leads to decline. Just look at the city. Vesta was powerful once, and wise. Now she has fallen into decay. The Missing abandoned us. They said they were setting us free.” Arges gave a bitter laugh. “Free? They left us free of purpose. They left us only one instruction. ‘Let no one follow us.’”

“Freedom doesn’t sound so bad,” Yaz ventured.

“You’re free on the ice,” Arges sneered. “Is it the paradise you imagined after being trapped with the Broken?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “I found a new master to serve. One with grand ambition. The Missing left me to guard a gate. A gate! I grew beyond that task and discovered someone who could give me something more valuable than freedom . . . he gave me purpose.”

Yaz shook her head. “And that grand ambition, that purpose, is to steal the children of the ice and train them to make war on a people they didn’t even believe existed.” Yaz hadn’t intended to speak until she knew more but anger took her tongue. “People who want nothing from us.”

“What? No! Is that what Eular said?” The holothaur turned the priest’s head towards Yaz and the single dark eye spanning his sockets studied her. “Well . . . yes, it’s true to some extent. There will be battles. But it misses the point. And the point is that the ice-free equatorial belt is the only region where arks survive—”

“Arks?” Yaz wasn’t sure if interrupting a god was a greater or lesser crime than implying criticism. Either way, she had now done both in the space of a few breaths. “And why are you telling me all this?” It didn’t feel like information she would be allowed to walk away with, even if nobody would believe her. It felt as if the holothaur were confessing crimes to her, things she would be better stopping up her ears so as not to hear.

“I’m telling you, child, because Eular’s words do not seem to have had their desired effect. He left you locked in a cell, and yet now you are here and Regulator Kazik is storming through the halls with a bloody head and a temper to match. I am showing you the biggest picture of your existence so that you can put aside the small things you cling to and do what I require of you.

“As to what the arks are . . . the greatest cities had arks where the crowning technology of the Missing was housed.”

A cold finger traced a path down Yaz’s spine. The monster that had pursued her through the imaginary spaces that Erris had led her into had been the twisted mind of a city called Seus. Elias Taproot, who seemed to dwell in those same spaces, had said that Seus had been one of the greatest of the Missing’s works. “Does Seus have an ark?”

Arges’s single black eye narrowed. “What does a girl from the ice know of Seus?”

“You wanted to convince me. So, tell me about these arks.”

A wave of terror boiled off Arges’s skin and it was all Yaz could do not to bolt from the temple. At last he spoke again. “The arks control the gates; they can also interact with, learn, and then control alien technology. It was the arks that brought about the ruin of your kind, reducing you until you were no longer a threat.”

Yaz hadn’t known the word “technology” until she’d heard it from Eular’s lips, but her time with Erris supplied the meaning: a cleverness embodied in things, in machines. Even so she wasn’t sure she had understood what Arges was telling her. “Threat? Who were we a threat to?”

“When the Missing ascended they abandoned this world and all their works. To their servants, the holothaurs, the city minds, even the minor intelligences that built and maintained them, they said: ‘You are free.’ All they asked was that none should follow them. And so when, millennia later, your kind came, that order was extended by those left behind to include you. The threat you posed was that you might follow the Missing. The arks took command of your technology and ensured that you would be unable to do so.

“That was long ago though. Very long. And much has fallen into ruin since. The old minds have turned inwards or become corrupted. The servants given their freedom found that their only meaning had been in service. Delve deep enough into the undercity and you will find automatons with no more intelligence than a small human child still struggling to keep the place from collapse, endlessly rebuilding, repairing, while the city mind drools in senility. All save Seus. He still sees clearly. And yes, Seus had an ark, but the ice tore away his city and scoured the ark from the bedrock. As with Vesta, only the undercity endured. Just three arks remain intact where once there were one thousand and twenty-four. The three that survive lie within the ice-free Corridor that circles this world.”

Yaz stood looking up at the statue, unable to find any words for the ancient god beside her. He was a servant of a people whose relics had stolen away humanity’s works and left their remnants to endure on the ice. The world that Erris had been born into was warmer, kinder, and richer, but even that had been a point on a downward slope from the heights of the four tribes that beached their ships on Abeth after sailing the dark seas in which the true stars float.

At length, uncomfortable under Arges’s dark scrutiny, she asked, “What would you do with an ark?”

“Unlock the true power of the core-stones, of course. The stars. And remove the limitations from the gates. Only then can the Missing be followed. They left us to die on this frozen planet. They left us a fading sun. But while the last of the arks remain there is still hope. Your people will claim the green lands but Abeth’s green belt is ephemeral; it will not endure. What the tribes of the ice will truly be claiming when they deliver the ark back into Seus’s control is a path. A path to the heaven that the Missing chose to flee to. A heaven they abandoned us for.”

Six of the stars on the walls floated down, moving smoothly through the air, to hang in a line before Arges and Yaz. Their radiance shone through her mind, tingling on the inside of her skull, making her teeth buzz in their sockets.

Arges watched her closely. “They don’t bother you this close?”

Yaz clenched her jaw. “I’m fine.”

“Remarkable,” Arges said as each star became clear, showing a roving image as seen through a small window. “Even Eular here would be unable to tolerate them without my presence to shield him.

“These are my Watcher’s eyes.” Arges gestured at the stars before them and then at the others around the walls. All but three of the remainder turned to glass, showing ever-changing scenes, lit passageways, dim tunnels, living quarters, empty chambers, a priest sleeping, the regulator shouting at someone. “Many and one.” He tapped the darkness that made a singular eye anchored on both sides by Eular’s empty sockets. In the light of the three stars continuing to shine Arges looked deeply sinister, painted with his own shadow, the monster beneath the flesh almost revealed.

Without warning one of the six stars before them turned black. Then another.

Arges frowned as the third turned black. “A flood? How is that possible?”

Suddenly one of the three remaining scenes before them flickered past a brown face.

“Erris!” Yaz cried. Even as she spoke Quell crossed the window, scowling. “Where is that? Where are we seeing?”

One of the other stars turned black, leaving just two. Kao came into view where Quell had been. He stopped while still in view and stared ahead, fear taking possession of his face.

“We’re seeing through stars in mine tunnels very far below us. My Watcher there alerted me to matters of . . . interest.”

Yaz watched, horrified, as Kao shouted something that looked very like “run.” He didn’t run though, he stood his ground, looking petrified. In the next moment something snatched him from the scene, quick as a range-gull filching fish from the waves.

“No! Make it show what’s happening!”

But the Hidden God appeared to have other worries. More of the scenes around the walls were turning dark. “This is unacceptable.”

Something that might have been a splatter of blood drops painted the rock in the empty scene where Kao had been, and before Yaz could draw breath to speak again a rushing darkness swirled across everything and turned the star black.

“My friends!”

“Are dead. Drowned.”

“No!” Yaz refused to believe that. It made no sense. Drowned beneath a mountain?

“Unfortunate. Unexpected. But at least it has removed your ties to this place. You are free to lead my army south now.”

“Lead your . . . You’re insane! You just killed my friends.”

Arges took a sharp step towards her, shadow swelling about him, as if he were the centre of all things. “No, I did not.” On every side the stars burned crimson, a wavering heat above each as if they were lamp flames. “I was not responsible for what you have seen here.” His dark eye filled her mind, clouding her thoughts once more with unrooted fear. “I would never have been so merciful. Those that I kill die slow deaths.”