21

Thurin

I thought we would put you all together.” Regulator Kazik’s voice reached through the cold red fog wrapping Thurin’s brain. He struggled to open his eyes; then, realizing that they were already open, he struggled to see.

“You should listen to the stars, Yaz, see things our way. Be friends,” Kazik continued.

Thurin could see Yaz hanging before him, with Maya to one side and Quina to the other. The regulator was pacing back and forth in front of Yaz. Thurin tried to turn his head to see if Quell was hanging beside him but found himself unable to do so.

“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.” Kazak’s gloating seemed a distant thing. Thurin wanted to sleep, to listen to the other voice, the one whispering behind his eyes. He couldn’t understand the words, not yet, but he knew he soon would, if he listened hard enough.

A knife gleamed redly in Kazik’s fist. He raised it to Yaz’s face. Thurin tried to move but his muscles ignored him, each in its own separate sleep. He tried to reach out with his ice-work and hurl the man away. But that hadn’t worked even before he had been hung in the iron harness with a star on his chest and on his brow. Kazik had mastered Quell and Thurin as if they were children. They had fallen within heartbeats of each other, blasted by the light the priest summoned from his hands.

Thurin hung there, trying to find focus, trying to gather his anger into a useful ball, while the priest told Yaz that her friends were dead or captured, that she was alone, and that he was going to watch as the stars enslaved her or destroyed her.

Thurin tried to say that he wasn’t dead, that he was right behind her, that he’d come all the way from the ice caverns to find her. But his mouth could barely twitch and he hung in silence out of her sight and no doubt out of her mind.

Eventually Kazik grew tired of verbally torturing Yaz and retired to the fur he had set by the wall. He left Yaz to hang, sparing her a narrow glance from time to time. Thurin hung too, like a discarded cloak in the drying room, trying to resist the sleep that wanted to drag him down and leave his eyes open. He could sense the dreams waiting for him and they scared him.

For a long time he focused on the back of Yaz’s head, the blackness of her hair, the copper skin of her neck. She didn’t know he was there, almost close enough to reach out and touch her. The regulator had shown her only Maya and Quina. He hung, helpless and watching.

Time ceased to have meaning. The view never changed. The light never changed. Thurin began to wonder if the whispering wasn’t only talking him away from his own opinions but from the passage of days too. Whatever shell stood between the captives and the march of years Thurin knew that it was slowly closing around him too, sealing him away from the world. He fought it. The regulator helped, even though Thurin could only see his feet. Every little twitch, every shift of position, gave back the idea of progress and change, the idea that this heartbeat differed from the one before.

At one point sleep snared him but a single fleck of brightness brought him back from the brink. At first he thought he had imagined it as the brilliant speck was nowhere to be seen. But then it drifted nearer, catching his eye once more. Tiny and golden, like a fleck of dust caught in a ray of light shafting among the hides in the drying chamber. It drifted by him, seemingly without purpose, though what gave it direction he couldn’t imagine, as no breath of wind stirred among the motionless ranks.

Thurin watched it go, knowing a sudden sorrow when he thought it would float away from his field of view. But instead it lifted and veered over Maya’s shoulder before becoming lost on the far side of her. Even as he mourned its departure another tiny point of light caught his attention, this one drifting up from somewhere around Yaz’s hip.

From outside came footsteps, but not of more guards. These fell heavy and iron-shod. Whatever was coming sounded huge. Kazik heard it too and was on his feet with a curse. He drew his knife and backed along the rows of hanging prisoners.

When the new arrival advanced through the doorway Thurin was amazed to find it much smaller than he had imagined. If it stood beside him the thing would reach no higher than his hip. Yet it moved with a ponderous weight. From glimpses seen between the bodies in the front rank Thurin couldn’t decide what it was. It seemed to be covered in flaking mud, which fell from it as it turned its blunt head first one way then the other.

Erris stepped up behind it, bathed in the bloody starlight. He fixed Kazik with a dark look. “You should let me take them, priest.”

“All here belong to the Hidden God,” Kazik said. “And you should know that I can blast the flesh from your bones, stranger.” The priest raised an empty hand.

“I doubt that.” Erris allowed himself a small smile.

He spoke to the creature that now stood between him and Kazik, the noises coming from his mouth sounding like nothing a human should be able to make. The creature, which Thurin was beginning to think must be the iron dog Quell had described, advanced on Kazik with heavy steps.

It seemed Kazik had squandered his power on Quell and Thurin because his hand remained empty. Instead, he reached towards the far end of the gallery and a hail of crimson stars came hurtling through the air to whirl around him. He shot them at the dog and at Erris, like a boy flinging a handful of stones, though with the kind of force that could punch a hole through a gerant’s forehead and out the back of his skull.

The stars that struck the dog whined away, ricocheting from the walls and leaving clean streaks of shiny metal where they first hit. Erris merely moved out of their way with the blurring speed of a hunska full-blood. There was a single dull smack of impact with something softer than iron.

“You missed,” Erris said.

“I think not.” Kazik raised his knife, standing within the orbit of the few stars remaining to him.

Erris tilted his head and opened his hand. One red star had embedded itself about halfway into his palm. Without apparent discomfort he dug it free with his other hand, dropping it to the floor and leaving a dark, bloodless crater in his flesh. “Put down your knife and free my friends.”

Rage twisted Kazik’s face. Stepping in close to Yaz, he set his blade to her neck. “I should kill the bitch and be done.” He spat the words in a fury.

“Don’t . . .” Erris held his hand out, clearly frightened that Kazik really would kill her. “It’s not her fault. It was never her fault.”

“All she had to do was accept the gift that was offered to her!” Kazik shouted. “She could have come away from that gathering to live here in the warmth, in luxury, no more howling wind, no more endless ice. That’s all she had to do!” He roared out a wordless cry and flung down the knife. “But no! And now I’m driven to this!” Without warning he drove the hooked fingers of both hands into the corners of his own eyes, and screaming at an impossible pitch gouged out the contents of both sockets. How deep he dug Thurin couldn’t say, but as the man thrashed his head in agony it was obvious from the gore spilling down over his cheeks that he would never see again. The maiming turned Thurin’s stomach and he would have looked away if he could.

Erris stood watching in frozen horror. The regulator staggered away from Yaz, bent double, his agony unable to escape as anything more than a hiss and a hacking in his throat, as if he were trying to cough out some scream too large to fit past his jaw.

The spell cast by Kazik’s act of self-mutilation broke and Erris sped past him to Yaz’s side, reaching to find whatever clasps held her.

“Leave her.” The voice that rang out loud and firm behind Erris carried an undercurrent of the regulator’s cold arrogance but resonated with something deeper and more vibrant. “She belongs to me.”

Kazik moved back into Thurin’s view, standing straight now, still with the bloody ruin trickling down his cheeks. But where the gory sockets should be Thurin saw only a pooling darkness that spread from one to the other to create a single dark eye across his brow and the bridge of his nose. Kazik pointed a bloody finger at Erris. “You are not what you seem to be. You are something made.”

Erris turned to regard the regulator. “And you are not the priest. You are something worse, something wearing his body.”

“I am Arges. The Hidden God. You, on the other hand, are something that has escaped from the city. A new thing.”

Erris shook his head. “You’re no god. I know your kind, holothaur. A servant of the Missing, just like our friend here.” He indicated the iron dog hunkered down between them. “What are you doing with these people? This isn’t your task.”

Arges shook his head and the gore trickled. “I have a higher task now. I serve a higher power.”

“What higher power?” Erris laughed. “You’ve already fashioned yourself a god.”

“And Seus is the king of gods.”

Erris’s tone darkened. “That one is evil. Bent on destruction. Turn away from him while you still can. The core-stones aren’t yours to play with. Go back to your duty and stop interfering with my kind. You’ve already got blood on your hands, and this”—he glanced along the lines of captives—“will only bring about more killing.”

Arges put a dark smile on Kazik’s lips. “I’m not harming them. The stars are a form of life. You, on the other hand, stranger, are a form of death. You’re a ghost that thinks it’s alive, haunting the machine long after you should have gone into the void.”

“I am alive.” Erris sounded uncertain though, as if the Hidden God had wounded him. He took his hands from Yaz’s harness and glanced down at them, at the bloodless wound. Thurin tried to shout at him, tried to tell him to ignore the distraction and release Yaz. But Erris continued to study his fingers. “I remember my life. All of it. I remember my childhood, my mother—”

“You remember because memory is all you are. The city’s memory of a boy who strayed too far centuries ago. A boy who died and whose bones are drifting in the ice. You’re just a symptom of Vesta’s sickness. The city has grown sentimental. It made a copy of that dead boy and let it think itself alive. But that’s not life, just a parody of it.”

“No!” Erris grew angry, stepping towards Arges. “You’re lying.” He gestured to the dog. “Take him!”

As the dog began its leap Arges made a dismissive gesture and with a loud snap the dog folded into the metal cube it had been when Quell first saw it. The cube rocked forward, fell onto its front face with a clang, and was still.

Erris threw himself forward with blinding speed but some invisible hand dashed him from the air and sent him sprawling at the feet of the first row of captives.

“This is not the city, dead boy. You are in my domain now.” Arges advanced upon him.

Erris sprang up fast enough but the confidence Thurin was used to seeing on his face had gone. “Let her go. The Missing wouldn’t sanction what you are doing here. I can’t allow—”

“You? Allow?” Arges made another gesture and Erris stiffened. A wave of his hand and Erris fell backwards, still paralysed. “And what would you know of the Missing’s desires? Which of them wouldn’t sanction my actions? Are you talking about the creatures that abandoned us for their secret paradise? Or maybe you mean the dark fragments they left behind to pollute the world? Those, I am sure, would applaud me.”

Erris made no answer. He lay like a fallen statue. The dog remained a cube. Silence returned to the gallery. Thurin hung immobile and useless. And another tiny mote of glowing dust drifted aimlessly past his eyes.