18
It is unwise to fight with gods, there can be no winning, but the Ictha have battled the worst of both the Gods in the Sky and in the Sea, and after many generations they have not yet lost. The wind cannot be defeated, yet it can be endured. The sea cannot be owned, yet with a battle it can be made to yield up some portion of its wealth.
It would be better if you changed your mind. But if you really are set upon defying me, then I can change it for you.” The Hidden God fixed Yaz with his singular black gaze but she saw only the darkness that had engulfed Quell, Erris, and Kao. Zeen must have been with them too. She didn’t know how long the slow bubbling rage had been building inside her, but it had been growing for a long time, perhaps even before she first threw herself into the pit after her brother. To begin with, the anger had no focus, tearing sometimes at herself, sometimes at blind chance and the injustices that seemed to form the backbone of the world she’d been born into. Now whatever barriers had held that rage back collapsed like an ice cliff shelving into the sea, and the wave that went before it carried her far from sense or caution.
“You may be a god, or you may just call yourself one,” said Yaz, “but you are not my god.”
A red mist descended across her vision. Quell was dead. And Zeen and Erris too. These were not ideas that would fit within her skull. Yaz reached out to seize one of the six stars before them, not with her hand but with her mind. The thing resisted her, twisting in her grasp, somehow wrong, like the hilt of another person’s knife, shaped to their fingers rather than to yours. But she had endured the holothaur’s projected fear and, snarling, she took possession of the star, hurling it at the dark eye, careless of whether it might shatter the forehead beneath and add Eular to the list of those that had died today.
Somehow Arges managed to react and slow the missile before it hit. He staggered back, blood sleeting from his forehead. A god’s blood, Yaz thought, before correcting herself: blood that a god had stolen. He raised one hand and reached towards her with the other as if seizing hold of something, his body twisted like a gnarled tree, darkness bleeding from his flesh. And Yaz found her mind darkening too, the shutters of night closing over her thoughts, the same thing that Eular had done to her when she had first emerged from the ice.
This time, though, she saw the threads he gathered in his hands, a multitude of them shimmering in her second sight, all running straight towards her head. In response, she gathered her own two handfuls and yanked back, returning her waning consciousness.
Arges was now a dark stain in the air all around Eular, his boundaries indistinct but hinting at a beast of some sort, three times as tall and wide as the man at its centre. Wings rose above the holothaur’s back, a black suggestion of flight, reaching to the vaulted ceiling to merge with the shadows there.
Yaz knew she would die, here in the temple of the Hidden God, but her rage had chased away any fear and made her feel as tall as her foe. Everything had been taken from her: her clan, her friends, her loves, her future—and now her past and all the truths she thought it stood upon. The monster before her wanted to take her skill and use it to its own ends, murdering a path through the innocent as it sought to flee this world.
Instead she turned her skill upon him. With one shattering scream she hauled every star from its place until they swirled around her in a blazing gyre, filled with the burning light of her wrath. Once more she became the centre of constellations, connected to each and every one of the orbiting stars, wrapped in their song, aware of a greater network resting within the mountain, and below it she even felt the great slow heartbeat of the void star reaching her across the miles that separated them.
Yaz sent the next of her missiles at the Hidden God, freeing an incandescent star from the gyre around her and shrieking her rejection of his terms as it tore through the air.
“No.” Arges caught it in the palm of a great shadowy hand before it came within two yards of Eular, who also raised his hand, like a puppet within a web of strings. The Hidden God closed his fingers about the star, changing both its tune and its colour, from wrath’s white heat to a translucent red. “Yours is a wild skill, child, but these stars are mine, and I have been learning their ways for many lifetimes.” The stars on the outer edges of the maelstrom swirling around Yaz began to burn red and fly away from her control. She felt the effect like a creeping doubt undermining her conviction.
Yaz tightened her hold on the remainder of her constellation, walling out the holothaur’s insinuations. She tried to see the river that runs through all things, tried to thrust her arms into its flow and gather the immensity of its power to her, but rage hid it from her sight.
Instead, she began to throw the stars into his looming darkness, blazing like comets, thunderous rage-driven blows. But somehow, despite his size, Arges was never in the path of her missiles. Instead he twisted aside, melted away, or deflected each just enough to miss and instead strike chunks from the wall behind.
“You’re strong, child, but you lack subtlety.”
“I.” Yaz hurled another star with screaming force. “AM. NOT.” Two more tore holes through the holothaur. “A. CHILD.” Another star shredded the darkness, and a last one broke through all the forbiddings in its path to strike Eular’s chest so hard that he was thrown back into the wall.
Yaz stood, panting, suddenly aware that she had thrown her last star.
“And I am not where you think I am.” The voice came from behind her. She was falling before she managed to turn half the way to face him. Falling into a blackness far below her, with nothing and nobody to cling to.
She reached for the little golden star that she’d manufactured so painstakingly from the dust in her cell, trying to funnel all her strength into one small conduit and send it like a white-hot lance through the holothaur’s heart. She felt the star flare within the pocket she had returned it to, but the strain was too much for such a small star, and in an instant it fell back once more into the faintly glowing dust from which she had made it. Her last chance squandered.
An age passed and it seemed to Yaz that she swirled blind in dark waters, borne away by the same flood that had swamped her friends. She was lost in darkness until she found herself surfacing into the bloody light of a long gallery amid a silent crowd. Her forehead ached and it seemed as if she were still being carried. Whoever was carrying her whispered in a deep voice, a muttered litany just beneath hearing, all the words escaping.
For the longest time Yaz did nothing but hang there in the shadowed depths of her misery. Everyone she loved had died, drowned in an underground flood, with no light, no air, no direction. That was not something you survived. She had fought and been defeated, her strength irrelevant against that of a god. His tricks had undone her, holed her like a waterskin, and left her empty, the warm heart of her ripped out and frozen in the cruel wind of the world’s indifference.
Eventually the grogginess eased sufficiently for Yaz to see beyond her first impressions and she realized that she wasn’t being carried but was hanging in some kind of metal harness, her toes inches away from making contact with the stone floor beneath her. The red light came from a star set where iron bands crossed over her chest, and, more annoyingly, from another set out of sight just above her eyes. From the ache in her forehead she imagined that the star might have been anchored there with metal staples sunk into her skull.
She turned her head. It felt as heavy as the mountain. The bones in her neck grated across each other, every muscle screaming with effort. All of her hurt. The generalized red glow came from orderly ranks where scores more prisoners hung as she did in iron harnesses, each with a red star on their chest and a smaller one in the band around their forehead.
The whispering that pervaded her mind seemed to echo back at her from all sides, the same hidden mantra repeated from a multitude of stars. Yaz tried to reach out to the star throbbing on her brow, first with her hands, and on finding that neither would obey her, with her mind. She discovered that, like the stars in the temple, the stars here had been shielded, attuned to another mind very different from her own, and each time she tried to push past those protections the star on her forehead would throb, diffusing her effort with a buzzing confusion that swarmed around inside her skull, crowding her vision with fractures.
Part of her—a large part—didn’t want to struggle. She didn’t deserve to survive when so many had died. What would her life even be without them? Among the Ictha “alone” was just another word for death.
“Hello?” Her mouth didn’t want to obey her. The word bubbled meaninglessly on slack lips.
“I told them you would need watching.” A familiar, reedy voice, the speaker out of sight. Yaz lacked the strength to turn her head towards him. “You shouldn’t be able to even twitch, yet here you are trying to speak.” Regulator Kazik limped into view, his head bound with a strip of white fur where Maya had clubbed him. He lifted the long knife he had brought to Yaz’s cell to kill her with and laid the cold iron blade against her neck.
“Hrrr.” Yaz’s lips wouldn’t form the insult she wanted. She locked her gaze with his, wanting to burn him with her hatred. A flicker of belief deep at the core of her turned into a flame, fed by the desire to thwart the man before her. Maya! Yaz was not utterly alone. Maya had fled, infected by the holothaur’s fear. But the girl was ruthless and resourceful. There was still a grain of hope.
The regulator raised his bony hand, trailing the knife’s point up the side of Yaz’s face towards her left eye. “Don’t worry: I’m not going to hurt you. We’ll be friends soon. Or you’ll be dead.” He gestured to either side with the knife. “All this works very well on the others. The great majority of them survive. But with us quantals . . . not so much. And with those like you, Eular, and me, the rarest of quantals who have an affinity for the core-stones . . . it’s often fatal. Which is why Eular wanted to convince you the old-fashioned way, with logic and a judicious touch of thread-work here and there. But you were resistant even to that. Which means this will very likely kill you. The system takes your resistance and turns it back on you. You’ll literally break your own mind if you try to stop it being changed. This knife, though, would have been the kindest option.” He pressed and Yaz felt a sharp pain before he withdrew the blade. “And once your mind’s changed you’ll sleep with the others, outside time’s dominion. Until we need you.”
Yaz could feel the whispering as if it were an eel sliding its way around her brain, digging deep, coiling behind her thoughts.
“We normally leave our guests to convert quietly and then wake them as needed. You, however, I am not going to leave alone.” He cocked his head and leaned in close with a sour smile. “I don’t trust you to be here when I get back. So instead, Yaz of the Ictha, I’m going to stay here and watch you die. And if you don’t manage to do that—well, I suppose Eular will have his way and you really will lead our army against the green lands.”
Yaz wanted to deny it but she could already feel the whispering beginning to merge with the deeper voices of her own mind. She tried not to listen to it, tried to distract herself by focusing on the person beside her, just visible from the corner of her eye. A young woman with long dark hair.
Oh no.
A cold hand closed around Yaz’s heart. Quina hung there, slack-jawed, the same kind of iron band around her head that must be around her own. The blurring cleared from Yaz’s eyes and she saw with revulsion for the first time that a host of thin black wires ran from the band to burrow beneath the skin, anchoring it there like a plant rooted to the soil.
“You recognize her now? Another one I sent to the Broken with you,” Kazik said. “She must be very fast for the hunters to have harvested her so soon.” He smiled his narrow smile. “I thought we would put you all together. You should listen to the stars, Yaz, see things our way. Be friends. You need new friends, after all. The ones you had are all dead or hanging here with you. And I’ve told the stars to make them forget who you are just as you’ll soon forget who they are.”
Kazik set the flat of his blade to Yaz’s cheek and turned her head. There on her other side, looking tiny in her harness, Maya hung, her eyes fixed on some distant point, a red star glowing on her brow.
The last flicker of hope died within Yaz’s breast. The world became a colder, greyer place. The whispers grew louder and more pervasive. Thurin at least was safe. Happy with his people. That was the last grain of goodness she had to hold on to. She wondered if he would tell his children tales of the girl he knew in his youth who left to find the green lands where no ice can endure. Would he tell them that she made it, that she lived warm and free among the flutterbys and trees? A single tear ran from her eye. She felt it roll across her cheek. The Ictha do not cry. Water is precious on the ice. Waste is death.
Kazik moved from her line of vision and then returned with a bundle of furs, which he threw down beside the wall where she could see. He settled down on the heap, making himself comfortable. “I was an Ictha once.”
Yaz would have told him that being Ictha wasn’t something you could set aside any more than you could leave your spine behind. But, even if she had still commanded her mouth, she no longer had the heart to dispute him. Her journey had finished. She had jumped into the Pit of the Missing and had been falling ever since. Now she’d found the bottom of her own personal pit, and if anything emerged from it, then it would no longer be Yaz.
“I used to listen to all those stories of Zin and Mokka during the long night, back before they took me to the gathering,” Kazik said, his tone thoughtful now. “All those lies. But the Hidden God tells us that there is a kernel of truth in all the oldest lies. Even the ones about love . . .” He shook his head as if ridding it of some irritation. “I used to like the tales with Mashtri best.”
Yaz did too. Mashtri, a rogue God in the Sky, came to earth as the north wind and worked endless cruelties upon Zin, seeking to end him in any number of ways. But he always foiled her plans.
“You know the thing with those stories though, the thing that Mashtri always got wrong?”
Yaz did. She had seen it even as a child too young to come to the gathering.
The regulator nodded, seeing the understanding in her eyes. “When Mashtri had Zin in her traps, and there was no way he could escape, she would always blow away across the ice and leave him to his doom. And that’s when Zin would find a clever way out and escape.” Kazik leaned back against the wall, watching Yaz with his pale Ictha gaze. “So, I’m going to stay right here and watch you until this is finished, one way or the other. The game is over, Yaz.” He settled comfortably in the furs. “You lost.”