25
A second day’s travel proved sufficient to put the Black Rock out of sight if not out of mind. A second night passed more easily than the first. By the third day Yaz, Maya, and Quina were back in the rut they had carved out through most of their lives. Days passed without being counted. None of them knew how far they might have to go. Erris said that if they had to reach the equator it would be a journey of four thousand miles. He said it with a laugh at the impossibility of such a trek. “But if the green belt were two thousand miles wide then . . . we’d only have to walk . . . uh . . . three thousand miles.”
On the march they didn’t talk, didn’t look around. They kept their heads down and retreated into their thoughts. One foot in front of the next, fighting the wind. They each became a mote of warmth in the vast, hostile coldness of the white death. A lone flame struggling to keep alight on ever-diminishing fuel.
For Yaz it was a hardship she had suffered so often and for so long that she was inured to it. Quina and Maya plodded beside her, anonymous in their frost-bearded hoods, ice and snow caked across their windward side. Her sisters now in this strange new clan.
Thurin suffered. He suffered with the isolation of the long march. His strength and endurance had yet to be forged, and yet he moved in a way the Ictha saw as extravagant, slowing almost to a stagger then gathering his energy to waste on determined surges of speed. He looked around as if there might be something to see. He tried to talk as if conversation might somehow support him, as if it might become a tether by which the others could drag him along. He felt the cold despite being bundled in so many layers of fur and hide that he seemed almost as wide as he was tall. He complained of lost sensation in his feet and hands. And each evening in the shelter his extremities looked whiter and took longer to recover. The cold hadn’t got its teeth into him yet but it had definitely started to nibble.
Erris, though, walked as if he were still in the tunnels of the Black Rock or among the trees in the forests of his memory. Indefatigable, a smile ready to crack the ice that built up across his face. The dog proved just as steady. Its relentless and unvarying gait might seem soulless but Yaz sensed that it was happy in its new life. Maybe it was just the way it circled the camp each night before settling, or the way it was ready and waiting at the boat-sled from the first hint of daylight, its silent, doleful stare greeting them as they exited the shelter, as if to say, “What kept you? We’ve places to be.” Yaz admitted over that night’s stew that her dog-theory might just be wishful thinking, but Erris surprised her by agreeing.
“The maintenance units were built to be useful. Zox believes he is being useful. This maximizes a measure within him that you or I would call happiness.”
Thurin, who seemed almost too weary to lift his bowl to his lips, gave Erris a narrow look. “It’s a made thing—like the toys our scavengers and smiths will sometimes fashion from pieces they find in the city. Norcris used to make these . . . he called them crabs . . . powered by a coiled spring. They would scuttle across the ground.”
Erris nodded. “It is a made thing. Like the hunters in the city, or the Watcher beneath the Black Rock.”
“And it can be happy?” Thurin raised a brow. “Were Norcris’s crabs happy because they moved forward?”
“Are true crabs happy when they scuttle across the bottom of the ocean?” Erris countered.
“You’re a made thing too,” Thurin said, getting to the crux of his point.
It didn’t feel like an attack to Yaz. More a pointed form of curiosity, but how Erris might take it she wasn’t sure.
“There’s nothing in you that wasn’t forged in the Missing’s smithies. All metal and board? Unless there’s your actual heart beating away somewhere inside that body?” Thurin shook his head. “And I know there’s not. I can’t sense any water in you at all. Not even enough for tears.”
Erris nodded thoughtfully. “It’s true. There’s nothing in here that wasn’t made by me using the machinery of the Missing. Except . . . information. The story of who I am, which was held inside Vesta’s mind, the void star at the heart of the city, and was placed in here.” He tapped his head. “And whether that’s really me or not is something I struggle with. It feels like me. I believe I’m the same man who fell into the city all those years ago, enough years for ice to swallow the world I knew. But I can’t ever know it for sure. The idea that the real Erris has been dead for thousands of years and that his world stopped the moment his fall ended. I don’t know what to do with that.”
Thurin frowned, looking shamed but unsure of what to say. He opted for lifting his bowl and taking his time over a hot mouthful.
Yaz said nothing and later laid her head down, chasing the impossible circles of thought that must have haunted Erris for far longer than she had been alive. Was he a copy? Was a perfect copy the same thing as the original? And did it really matter one way or another to anyone who hadn’t met the original Erris? Everyone who had ever met the Erris that wandered into the city ruins so very long ago was dead along with thirty generations of their offspring and more besides.
Eventually her dreams took her, leaving the questions unresolved.
Days passed and the miles disappeared beneath their feet. The wind blew this way, then that. A storm came and for three days they hid within their shelter, praying to many gods that it would hold. When at last they emerged, the howling voice of the gale had all but entombed them in ice that had built upon the boards in a way it couldn’t on the more flexible tents of the Ictha. Erris pointed to two support wires that had snapped. The ice had actually kept the shelter up, a compacted wall inches thick that would remain standing if the boards could somehow be removed without damage. Erris did the necessary damage and repaired the wires, binding end to end, twisting them together with powerful fingers.
Weeks passed and Thurin began to find his strength, or perhaps they all weakened to his level. It was hard to tell. Hard to say how many miles they trekked each day. The landscape wasn’t without features: there were pressure ridges, variations in the tone and texture of the ice, rare places where snow had managed to build to a thickness—but these were not ways in which to mark the passage of distance.
In all those empty miles across long and silent weeks they had yet to see a single human, or the slightest sign that anyone had ever walked this way. Several times a day Yaz would call a halt, have Erris lift her to his shoulders and make a slow turn while she scoured the horizon for any telltale hint of a hot sea. Any hot sea could be spotted from across vast distances by the steam rising from them. But how long the steam persisted and how high it reached was at the mercy of the winds. And the winds were never merciful.
A month into their journey the food supplies began to run low. There had never been any realistic prospect of making the trip without resupply. It might well take them a year to reach the green lands. Daily progress was slowed by weather and broken ice. The Ictha might manage thirty miles in a day but the Ictha were not like other people, the Ictha were a different breed, and certainly Thurin could manage little more than ten. There was no way to drag a year’s worth of food behind you across the ice. Not even with an iron dog to do the pulling for the group. And to take enough food for four people for a year from the supplies needed to feed over two hundred newly woken people stolen from the Broken would have been too great an imposition. Even for the person who freed them. Especially for her. Yaz had not woken them to freedom only for that freedom to be the freedom to starve.
Her original plan had been a fever-dream and she marvelled now that the others had been either so desperate or so trusting as to believe in it too. Marching beyond the limits of their food they would have had to rely on the generosity of strangers to feed them. And both generosity and strangers were a great rarity on the ice.
Now, thanks to Quell, they had the boat-sled and the tackle stored inside it. All they needed was a sea and they could feed themselves. Even with hundreds of miles between them Quell was still clan, still looking after her.
“We need to find a sea.” Yaz was walking with Thurin at the front of the group. The miles had toughened him and he was holding his own now.
“That seems to be more difficult than anyone suspected.” Thurin didn’t look her way. They had had this conversation before. All of them had.
A hundred paces passed in silence.
Thurin broke it. “And seas are bigger than the Black Rock, right?” He still sounded incredulous when he said this—as if the Black Rock had shattered his old beliefs about how big a thing could actually be and in doing so had defined a new upper limit.
“Quite a lot bigger,” Yaz said. “Though, to be fair, they are holes in the ice rather than big chunks of rock that stick up into the sky. But the steam trails can rise higher than the Black Rock—under the right conditions.”
“We need to see a sea.” Thurin repeated the mantra that had become commonplace among them.
“Storm’s coming,” Quina called out from the back where she was walking beside Zox. “Snow!”
Yaz looked over her shoulder at the bruised northern sky. It did look like snow, though her experience of that was limited. She hadn’t seen snow fall, save at the margins of a hot sea, since she was a little girl, but five days before the gathering there had been tiny white flakes on the wind, enough to swirl in pure white currents across the ice. And here it was again. Erris had said that the fact it snowed at all was for him the biggest reason to believe a green belt still existed. The water in the snow had to evaporate off the sea, he said, and the tiny seas that sustained the ice tribes were far too small to account for it. Yaz had bridled at “tiny” and declared the Hot Sea of the North to be fully ten miles across, sometimes. Erris covered a smile and said that in his day the oceans had been somewhat larger.
“Snow?” Thurin asked.
“A kind of powdered ice that falls from the sky.” Yaz picked up the pace. “With luck it will miss us.”
Thurin frowned. “It doesn’t sound dangerous.”
“I’ve heard it can be,” Yaz said. “If there’s a lot of it.”
They marched on for half a day, keeping ahead of the storm, though it grew steadily closer, a strange mounding and twisting of clouds. The clouds themselves were an oddity. Usually the sky lay clear, occasionally slashed with high ribbons of mist glittering like a trillion ice crystals. But this was different, a low, thick, billowed mass like the steam clouds rising from a sea, but a thousand times bigger.
“There’s something ahead,” Maya called out from behind them.
Yaz lifted her gaze from the ground. For some miles now the ice beneath their feet had been a strangely clear kind she had seen only rarely before. A bluish-green ice into which vision would penetrate seemingly for a dozen yards and more before flaws and distortions blurred the line of sight. At one point Erris had spotted several large fish frozen in the act of swimming. They had argued for some time about the trade-off between the energy and resources required to extract the fish from three or four yards of ice and the benefits of enhancing their dwindling supplies. Thurin was eager to use his ice-work but Yaz knew the effort would open him to the cold. In the end they had moved on reluctantly in order to keep ahead of the storm, leaving the fish behind. Soon the snow would cover it all over and any temptation would be removed.
Ever since, though, Yaz had been scouring the ice in front of her in the hope of more fish, even larger ones, closer to the surface. And while her eyes roamed the depths ahead her mind tried to fathom how fish came to be in the ice in the first place. Maybe the same mechanism that had entombed the whale was at play, but that had been miles down. She’d seen a dozen of them so far, redfin, herring, gailes, and some unknown species, closer to the surface but still more than a yard down and most too small to warrant digging out. Thurin did, however, shatter a path down to three of the most accessible, adding two fat gailes and a greenling to their stores.
Now Yaz stared ahead to see what Maya had spotted. She had to blink at the whiteness for quite some time until her vision adjusted and she saw what Maya had been talking about. So much of her wanted it to be a sea that for a long moment Yaz was convinced that she was seeing a steam trail running close to the ice. But such delusions are hard to maintain more than fleetingly and she soon saw what it was.
“That is the biggest pressure ridge I’ve ever seen.”
They slowed as they came closer to the ridge. Over the weeks they’d seen their fair share of the formations. Clan wisdom was that the ridges formed for a variety of reasons including the tidal forces of the Ooonai, the day star that appears every eleven years or so, or earthquakes far below the ice, or places where the sea beneath the ice becomes land and the ice fights its way ashore. Some were lines of broken and jagged ice, anything from a few feet tall to a dozen yards. Others had been smoothed by the wind into curving glassy walls. This one was at least a hundred feet high and something between the two extremes, neither jagged nor wind-contoured but on the path from the former to the latter, its surfaces lumpy but fairly smooth.
So far when faced with difficult climbs Yaz had slanted their course southeast or southwest until the passage of miles subsumed the ridge into the ice. This one, however, ran east to west and stretched away towards infinity in both directions.
“Left or right?” Erris asked, joining Thurin, Maya, and Yaz in craning his neck at the white heights.
“Over.” Quina joined them. The dog plodded up behind her, the boat-sled rumbling after it.
“Seriously?” Yaz turned, frowning. “Someone will slip and break a bone. Or several bones.”
“Or die,” Maya said.
“The food’s nearly gone. The sled’s about as light as it’s ever going to get.” Quina eyed the ridge. “We need to get south. We need to see a sea.”
Erris joined Yaz in frowning at Quina. “Seems unnecessarily dangerous.”
“Everything we do is dangerous. It’s just a slow kind of danger that we don’t notice. This is just a week’s danger all rolled up into one exciting lump.” She managed a narrow grin.
“Exciting?” Yaz shook her head. “You’ve gone ice-mad.” She had to admit, though, that trekking untold miles and getting no further south would be hard to take.
Quina shrugged. “It might turn the storm too. We could be safe on the other side.”
Yaz looked up at the heights. She didn’t know enough about snowstorms to say whether a wall of ice would divert them. But it might be worth a try. Even so—it looked impossible.
“I’ll climb it,” Maya said. “Find a path for the rest of you.”
Thurin shook his head. “It should be me.”
“You think I can’t do it?” Maya shot him a dangerous look that made him laugh, a bubbling good-humoured chuckle at odds with his often brooding demeanour.
“I think you can climb . . . but I know I can do this.” Thurin rose from the ice, nothing but empty air beneath his feet. “And this.” He reached a hand towards the ridge and the surface burst into a cloud of white that, when the wind tore it away, left a series of deep grooves.
“Roll me in the furs!” Quina blinked in amazement. “The boy really can fly!”
Yaz found herself glad that she had kept him from spending his energies on pulling fish from the ice. The rest of them just stared, trying to adjust to this new reality. Thurin had told them how he lifted himself out of the Broken’s caves but he’d never shown them.
“Thurin goes up first,” Yaz said.
Zox plodded past them, tugging the boat-sled. Thurin, Maya, and Quina backed away hurriedly to give room to the star on the sled.
“He seems keen too,” Erris said, his smile cracking the ice that had formed across the windward side of his face.
The dog reached the lower slopes of the ridge where a jumble of wind-smoothed ice blocks abutted the more steeply rising upper section, and began to nose a path through the larger ones. On finding an impasse, the black metal claws on its feet grew a couple of inches longer and the dog started to climb the ice.
“Help Zox,” Yaz said to Thurin. “If he falls and the sled is broken . . .” She didn’t have to finish. Even if they found a sea, no boat meant no fish.
Zox made slow but steady progress, anchoring three of his feet at any given time by sinking his long talons into the ice, then reaching up with his free foot to gain another six inches. The fact that he had the entire weight of the boat-sled dangling from him along with all their supplies didn’t seem to bother him at all.
Thurin climbed alongside the iron dog, making ledges to stand on while he watched Zox’s progress and checked the ice to ensure it would hold the weight.
Yaz and the rest of them made their way up on a parallel course, using ice axes for traction and occasionally calling on Thurin’s skill to put steps in the ice or just roughen the surface.
From her time in the undercity, clambering through the dry chambers of the Missing, Yaz was no longer a stranger to climbing, but at least in those chambers and shafts there had been a kindly darkness to hide the full extent of the fall. Also, she’d not had to contend with the wind’s sudden malicious attempts to pluck her from her perch and discard her into gravity’s care. The pressure ridge proved a more daunting ascent than any Yaz had made before.
“It’s only going to get worse,” said Erris helpfully from a few yards below her. “If we’re still climbing when that storm hits . . .”
“It’s not going to—” But looking over her shoulder the shock at how close the storm had got almost made Yaz lose hold.
From their current elevation they could see an incredible distance to the east and west, but in the north the advancing snow cut that short. “Is there . . .” A glint had caught her eye, a red flash, like the glimmer of sunlight on metal. There was something on the ice, just ahead of the storm front. “There’s someone coming!”
Erris turned at that, digging the fingers of one hand into a crack in the ice to secure himself. “Where?”
The storm front, a looming, swirling wall of white below the darker thunderhead, made it hard to see anything but snow.
“Back along our trail.” Yaz wasn’t so sure now. The black dot had all but vanished, perhaps becoming lost in the flurries ahead of the storm, or perhaps it had always been a figment of her imagination.
Erris stared. He raised a finger to the side of his head, to the corner of his eye, pressing as if that might somehow adjust his vision. “Hells.”
“What is it?”
“I think . . .” Erris continued to stare at the advancing snows.
“Yes?”
“I think we need to climb faster!”
Yaz followed Erris’s advice and advanced up the roughened slopes that Thurin had prepared for them. She swung her axe, hauled herself higher, took hold, swung again. The wind had begun to fracture from one into many as it does before any great storm, infected by a wildness that has it running first this way then that.
“What did you see?” Yaz asked Erris again.
“I don’t know.”
The fact that he wouldn’t say was in itself as worrying as anything he might say.
Zox was nearing the top now, the entire weight of the loaded boat-sled dangling behind him, swinging in the swirling wind. Any slip and their journey was over, even if they managed to travel on for a few more miles.
Quina and Maya were about two-thirds of the way to the top, Erris and Yaz below them, though Yaz knew that Erris had opted to come last. Thurin stood at the very top, buffeted by the gale that sheared its way over the barrier. Even at this distance Yaz imagined she could see a hint of boyish pride on his face—king of the castle. She smiled to herself in turn and swung her axe. It was good that he had a chance to shine after being for so long the weakest link in their chain.
Yaz saw the hoola before it struck but so briefly and in such a state of shock that her dry throat had no time to release her scream.
The thing moved like an eel, a snaking motion, flowing along just beneath the crest of the ridge as if it weren’t a near-vertical wall of ice. Six-legged and perhaps three yards long, the beast was much as they appeared in the kettan that the Ictha carved from whalebone during the long night, a sort of stretched-out dog with a squashed-in face, mottled silver-white fur, and long black claws. It was on Thurin before any of them, even Quina, had time to register its presence. It pinned him with two forefeet, anchored itself with its rear feet, and tore at him with its middle pair, shredding furs as it sought to disembowel him. There were many tales of hoola attacks and the constant was that where a dog would go for the throat a hoola’s first move was to rip out your guts. Often it would start to devour your entrails before you’d stopped screaming.
All of them started shouting at once; Thurin’s cry was the loudest of all. An instinctive burst of power threw the hoola away from him but its front claws kept their hold and both of them flew into the air in a blur of motion.
Somehow Thurin managed to free himself, hanging in space above the near-vertical slope while the hoola fell away, a large flap of tuark hide trailing in its claws. The creature twisted in the air and, seemingly defying gravity almost as well as Thurin, it landed on the dog.
Zox shuddered under the impact and a white shower of ice broke away around the four anchor points where his talons were bedded in the ridge. In the space of two heartbeats Yaz watched first one then another precious thing hang on the edge of disaster.
The boat-sled swung wildly in the strengthening wind as the hoola scrabbled at Zox with all six paws, simultaneously trying to find purchase on the dog and to tear it open.
For a moment it looked as if they would both hold, Zox to the ice and the hoola to Zox. But there was only so much weight their claws could endure. Zox’s left front foot came free of the ice in a shower of fragments. The hoola lost traction and paw by paw lost contact with Zox’s blunt curves, leaving the iron scored with bright lines. Zox peeled away from the ice face, another foot torn free.
The hoola fell, howling a thin cry of rage that set Yaz’s teeth on edge and put the same kind of fear in her that the holothaur had. Something primal that prey feels when a predator turns their way.
Somehow Zox kept his place, driving back the foot that had broken free of the ice.
The hoola was on the nose of the boat-sled now, thrashing among the four long reins that bound the sled to Zox. The first line parted with a twang. The hoola spun around on the too-small platform provided by the sled, slashing out in fury at the sled, at the reins, at the ice wall itself. Another line surrendered and the sled lurched to the side. Taking its cue, the hoola leapt clear.
Defying common wisdom regarding falling, the hoola twisted the sinuous length of its body in midair and snagged the ice, skidding to a halt on a prominence jutting out of the slope. Without warning, it flung itself sideways and suddenly Quina was in the centre of its black gaze.
Quina moved as swiftly as Yaz had ever seen anyone move, hunska speed propelling her up the slope faster than falling. She vaulted from lump to lump, taking advantage of the roughness Thurin had induced.
The hoola almost missed her, snagging only her calf with an outstretched paw as it sailed past, yowling in rage. Maya had been close to Quina on the climb but there was no sign of the girl now. She must have wrapped herself in whatever shadow she could find and made herself one with the ice. Given time the hoola would doubtless sniff her out but instead it clawed the ridge, found its balance and tore down the slope, aiming at Yaz.
Yaz reached for the Path, its power her only chance. It had been weeks since she had last used it, to blast a path through a smaller pressure ridge, and the Path had begun to press on her mind as if it wanted her to follow it. Summoning the energies, letting them flow through her, was always less difficult if she were calm and in possession of ample time. Even so, she found her hands glowing, crackling with stray power.
For half a second she hesitated, even as the hoola surged towards her, gouging the ice in its frenzy of forward motion. Mother Mazai talked of a clan to the south that worshipped the hoola and, even with her friends injured and herself at risk, Yaz understood where that worship came from. To wring out an existence alone on the ice as the hoola did was an astonishing thing, a testament to the refusal of life to wholly relinquish its grip on this frozen world. Like the Ictha, the hoola travelled from sea to sea in search of food, but unlike the Ictha the hoola managed alone, meeting others of its kind only briefly in the steams of a hot sea when the mating frenzy was on them.
Yaz raised her hands reluctantly, not wanting to destroy the creature. Like them it was a lone mote of warmth in the endless expanse of the white death, an extraordinary survivor dedicated to a lonely road. Beautiful in its way.
Erris propelled himself past Yaz into the hoola’s path, willing to pit his speed and strength against the hoola’s to save her if she wasn’t going to save herself. At the same moment Yaz let fly, sending her power towards the hoola in a bright line of destruction. It struck the ice in front of the beast and exploded a section of the slope, flinging the hoola into space once more. The hoola fell again, this time too far from the ridge to save itself. Yaz found herself falling too, struck by a large chunk of ice and peppered by many more sharp fragments. A hand caught her and swung her back against the ice.
Yaz found herself hanging from one arm, her gaze directed back down the fifty feet of the ridge she had climbed so far. The storm had raced towards them, its full fury only a hundred yards or so off. The space between the storm front and the wall was already thick with loose snow being blown ahead of it and rising in swirling flurries to hide the ground.
Yaz saw the hoola hit the ice, landing on all six feet without apparent discomfort as if it had jumped down a small drop rather than been flung halfway down the tallest pressure ridge Yaz had ever seen. It raised its head, baleful eyes making contact with her momentarily before the snow swirled again, taking the beast from view.
Erris hauled Yaz back onto the ledge that she’d been knocked from. The wind was so fierce and cold that she was shivering, her cheeks numb and stiff, eyes glazing with ice.
“It’s still alive,” he said.
“I’m glad,” Yaz said, still staring at the spot where it had landed. And she found that she was glad. It would have weighed heavily on her if she had used her gift to destroy the creature.
“Come on!” Erris began to climb.
“Wait.” Yaz sensed something, a familiar tingle at the edge of her mind . . . Stars.
A moment later the snows swirled away to reveal the base of the ridge once more. The hoola hadn’t moved, wasn’t moving, but something else was. Something large with long metal limbs emerged from the storm and snatched up the hoola in yard-long steel fingers. In one brutal motion it tore the hoola into two halves, staining the ice with gore. The storm covered the scene, hammering into the ridge, slamming Yaz back against the ice and trying to take her feet out from under her. Erris kept his grip. Yaz hung, shocked, still trying to understand that last glimpse before the snow took away her vision.
There had been a monster far larger than a man. And in place of a head the monster had a metal dome, and about the dome half a dozen stars orbited, all of them red as blood.