26
Yaz felt her way towards the top of the ridge blinded by snow, blasted by white winds that sought to tear her from the ever-steeper wall of ice. She fell once, losing her gloved grip as she swung her axe and sliding back with a despairing cry. Erris caught her two yards lower down. With her eyes and mouth full of driving snow she could do little but begin to feel her way back up again.
Somewhere below her the Watcher could already be climbing, ready to tear them all apart just as it had destroyed the hoola. The threat loaned an extra urgency to an already urgent climb and had perhaps contributed to the mistake that had almost seen her drop to her death.
“. . . op . . . ee . . . urin . . .” Erris was hollering something right behind her but the wind stripped his words away before she caught their meaning.
Yaz could feel the strain of the climb in her arms, and in the long muscles of her legs. Her fingers were growing numb and she was starting to sweat. That alone could be a death sentence on the ice. Sweat compromised the ability of furs to keep a body warm. She tried to calm her breathing and not think about the long-fingered killing machine that had murdered Kao, ripped open a full-grown hoola, and was now hunting them down.
Steady progress. That was the Ictha way. Any task could be overcome by steady, unrelenting progress.
The sudden blast of wind as Yaz reached the top of the ridge almost slung her over it. She found herself twisted around, hanging on to the ice with gloved hands while the gale tried to trail her body out behind her over the drop of the far side. A desperate struggle got her clear and down below the whistling edge.
The air was clearer here, the wind less strong, and Thurin lay close at hand on a ledge of his own making. The ice around him was stained pink, smeared with blood. He greeted her with a pale-faced smile.
“W-what in the hells was that thing?”
“Hoola.” Yaz scrambled to his side as Erris dropped down behind her. A kind of horrified calm enfolded her. This couldn’t be happening. She didn’t want to lift Thurin’s furs and see the damage there. She couldn’t stand it. Her mind refused the situation much as it had refused when Zeen had vanished wailing into the Pit of the Missing. “Let me see.”
Thurin gave a thin, brave smile and leaned his head back, no keener to see than she was.
Erris had moved to where Zox’s reins ran taut across the top of the ridge behind the descending dog. He struggled to help the sled over as it came. “Yaz, we need to go,” Erris hollered across at them. “That was the Watcher!”
Yaz ignored him. Steeling herself, she pulled aside Thurin’s tattered furs, then the furs beneath them and the hides beneath those, and the rat-skin cloak. “How much are you wearing?”
“All of it.” Thurin lifted his head and winced. “How bad am I?”
Yaz dug deeper. The hoola’s claws had shredded all the many layers and torn into Thurin but far less deeply than they otherwise would have. The wounds were bloody but not so deep that they spurted or revealed the organs beneath. “You’ll live.”
“Yaz! The Watcher!” Erris shouted as he strained to lower the sled below the now-stationary Zox. He rarely sounded worried but he was clearly worried now.
“The Watcher?” Thurin sat up and pulled his torn furs around him, shivering. “How is that thing here? You said it would fall apart if it got too far from the void star.”
“It should have.” Erris rejoined them. “But it didn’t.”
“If it found us after all this time we’re not going to get away from it by running now.” Yaz looked up at the ridge just above them. She could feel the thing on the other side of the ice wall, its many stars a choir with a dark song passing between them. Just how close or far it was, though, she couldn’t tell. Most of her wanted to run anyway. A small part wanted to face the monster and obliterate it for what it did to Kao.
“We have to go.” Erris started to follow his own advice, pausing to ask, “Quina? Maya? Did they come over?”
“Yes,” Thurin said. “I told them—”
Two long iron fingers hooked over the ridge, their needle-pointed tips driving deep into the ice.
“Shit!” Erris stopped his descent and reached for Thurin. “Yaz, help me with him.”
But Thurin rose without help from either Erris or from his own legs, turning in the air as if grasped by the hand of an invisible giant. “I hit this thing with a flood before.” He reached out with both hands, wincing as his wounds pulled. “Let’s try a different way.”
The Watcher’s other hand clamped over the top of the ridge, all three fingers hooking into the ice. The driving snow began to colour with the bloody light of the stars and their song rose in a shrill chorus.
“For Kao.” Thurin spoke the words quietly but a moment later the ridgetop shattered with a deafening cracking and for twenty yards to either side the top ten feet of the ridge fell back into the oncoming storm, an unknown tonnage of broken ice falling with the Watcher towards the flat ground far below.
Thurin landed lightly on his feet, braced against the unchecked wind at the jagged new summit of the ridge. “Now we can go.”
All of the group gathered at the base of the pressure ridge, sheltering from the storm winds. The ridge was less tall on this side as the ice sheet was thicker, but it was still tall enough to provide some protection.
They watched Zox continue to make his way slowly down after them, dangling their boat-sled precariously beneath him on two reins. Above, the sky continued to darken and snow filtered down, though falling less thickly than it did just thirty yards further out from the ridge.
“How did that thing find us?” Yaz asked. It seemed impossible.
“Zox, most likely.” Erris didn’t take his eyes off the dog. “He sends out signals every so often, trying to connect to the city network. And there are still . . . objects—stars, if you like—that the Missing placed in the skies above us, above the highest clouds, up beyond the air. Those can relay Zox’s signals across a great distance.”
“Well, tell him to shut up then!” Quina suggested.
Erris glanced at her. “It’s a very basic function—hard to shut down. And who knows, we may need to find a city before this journey’s over.” He looked back up at the dog, just ten yards above them now. “The real question is how the Watcher was functioning so far from Vesta. It should have fallen apart within a day’s travel from the city.”
“Zox didn’t,” Thurin said. The snow fell everywhere but on him, warded away by his ice-work.
“Zox is like me, built by the Missing or, in my case, by their machinery. The Watcher was made by the priesthood, cobbled together and forced to function by using stars to drive it. Once something like that goes too far from the will of the person who animated it and the augmenting effect of the void star . . . it reverts to its components.”
“Little help . . .” Maya had moved to intercept the boat-sled as it neared the ice and was trying to ensure it ended the right way up. Even as she reached up towards it the last but one of its four reins surrendered to the strain with an audible twang and the whole weight of the sled swung on a single strand.
“No!” Yaz’s despairing cry echoed off the ridge as she flung herself towards Maya. Knowing the boat-sled to be life and death to them, Yaz scrambled to get underneath it, less worried about being crushed than about the boat being holed. Quina and Erris, slower than her for once, reached her side as she made contact, their hands accepting some of the weight.
Grunting and cursing, they got the sled safely on the ice. Zox followed, unperturbed. As Quina hobbled back to Thurin, one foot leaving faint red prints on the ice, Yaz remembered that the girl too had been hurt.
Yaz led them on despite the snow, knowing that each day spent hiding in their shelter was another day’s food gone with no miles to show for it.
Thurin trudged on without complaint, though Yaz could see that he was moving stiffly, favouring his wounds. They’d bound some softer hides around the gashes and tried to arrange his layers so that the rips no longer matched up to give the wind access to his flesh.
Quina limped beside Thurin. The hoola’s swipe had torn her calf. She’d been lucky not to have the muscle sliced through. Erris had bound her bloody leg and she’d stood on it with a gasp and an “I’m alright. Let’s go.”
The Broken would advise rest and healing. The Ictha would leave Thurin to die. Yaz settled on a middle ground that pleased nobody. They had no healing and rest would only see them starve, so instead they matched their pace to Thurin’s. Yaz offered to take the large star so that he could ride on the sled, and he considered the offer—something that his pride had not allowed in the early days of their expedition.
“I had better walk,” he said. “If I stop I’m not sure if I could start again.”
And so they walked on.
The snow became as big a problem as the wind after just a few miles. Although the grains were small and driven at a near-horizontal angle by the wind, they were also never-ending and began to build up in a layer above the ice. Soon they were wading through the stuff.
“I never knew water could do this.” Thurin brushed snow from his hair and eyes. “I can sense the flakes.” A kind of wonder echoed in his voice. “They’re so complicated and . . . perfect . . . and each one is different. I—”
“They all look the same to me,” Quina grumbled.
“They’re not, though,” Thurin said. “I thought if I knew one thing in life it was ice. And now I find it falls from the sky in crystals that chime as they hit the ground, each with its own note.”
Yaz managed a smile. She had seen precious little snow in her life and never this much at once. Even so, it was making progress impossible. The wind was mounding it into drifts and they were only going to get bigger. “We have to make camp.”
They’d set the shelter up so many times that even in a snow-laden gale they were inside not long after unpacking the boards from the sled. Zox stayed outside as he always did, calmly folding into his cube. Yaz imagined they might have to dig down to find him in the morning.
Inside the shelter it seemed that the snow had somehow blunted the wind. The gaps soon packed with the stuff and the howls outside were strangely muted. In the heat pot the stars had diminished somewhat and were burning faster, but they would long outlast the food, and with snow caking the boards the shelter soon became warmer than it had been on any night of their journey.
“I could get used to this.” Thurin stretched then winced, rediscovering his wounds.
“Let me see.” Quina was at his side, pulling up layers of fur, her quickness defeating Yaz, who was closer to him, and leaving her feeling . . . she examined the emotion . . . leaving her feeling slightly jealous.
Erris leaned in too. “We have to watch for infection. The cold sterilizes pretty much everything but these slices came from an animal’s claws and germs can lurk in such places. Often by design, so that wounded prey can easily be tracked and killed.”
“Thanks for the lesson.” Thurin grimaced as Quina touched his belly. “I’ll try to bear it in mind next time I’m deciding whether to let a monster gut me. Anyway, check Quina, she got hurt too.”
“She’s next on my list,” Erris said. “Lie still.”
“Grey-scale stew tonight.” Maya got the blackened pan ready. “Though there’s no salt left . . .” She chipped something else from the much-diminished block of frozen fungi. “A copper-cap!”
“Yay!” Quina made a halfhearted cheer while frowning over Thurin’s injuries. Copper-caps were slightly spicy. In lieu of salt they made grey-scale stew—which was just grey-scale mushrooms boiled in water—slightly more appetizing.
“This one’s deeper than I thought.” Erris pointed to where a hoola claw had torn Thurin lower down towards his groin. “I could skin-bond it but stitches would be more durable.” He looked around at Yaz, Maya, and Quina. “Stitching? Anyone?”
From his supine position Thurin sighed then snorted. “Don’t look at them, they’d all send me out into the snow to die if you weren’t here. I hear that the clans will repair a sled harness a thousand times rather than discard it, but if a person gets hurt . . .”
“It’s down to me then, I suppose.” Erris bowed his head. “Anyone got a needle?”
Maya produced one of the bodkins that they used to sew the boards together with wire through pre-bored holes.
Yaz watched with interest, revulsion, and a mild sense of shame as Erris sealed the deepest of Thurin’s gashes with a series of deft stitches, having first sterilized the needle—used for repairing furs—and thread by boiling water in the pan then immersing them in it.
Seeing the thick needle dip in and out of Thurin’s skin suddenly reminded Yaz that she was wearing a smaller, finer needle. She patted her hides anxiously, worried that she might have lost it. But no, there it was, the silver needle that Elias Taproot had given her in some strange corner of Vesta’s city mind. He’d said it would lead her to him again, something she had no desire for. Taproot’s interest in her had brought her to Seus’s attention, as if she didn’t have enough problems to contend with. No, Yaz intended to have nothing more to do with Taproot, and to hope that Seus forgot about her. She was sure that a distant and crazed city mind had more important things to occupy its thoughts than one Ictha girl lost on the ice.
By the time Erris had finished with Thurin then Quina, and all of them save Erris had eaten their rather meagre portion of stew, the snow had sealed away all but the loudest of the storm’s yowls. The relative silence reminded Yaz of the Broken’s caves and felt rather odd after so many nights in their rattling shelter. She wondered how Arka, Kaylal, Madeen, and all the others were doing. Her stomach rumbled at the thought of the whale they must still be feasting on down there out of the wind.
“Are you alright?” Quina asked Thurin. She had offered to spoon his stew into his mouth earlier, and Yaz had been glad to see him decline her feeding.
“Just sore.” Thurin eased himself back with a wince. “After due reflection I’ve decided not to recommend hoola-wrestling to any of the other Broken who opt to come up top.”
“It’s lucky you were wearing twenty-seven layers,” Maya said. “Or your insides would have been on the outside.”
Thurin gave a little shudder and shot Yaz a “rescue me” look. “Tell us a story?”
“I think you’ve heard them all . . .” Evening storytelling had become a tradition with them, even after days when all of them wanted to pitch headlong into sleep. Thurin claimed that even Zox moved in closer to listen and that you could tell how good a story it was by seeing how close to the shelter his cube had ended up.
“All used up?” Erris shook his head sadly. “You’re no Scheherazade.”
“Schey . . .” Yaz tried to fit her lips around the strange-sounding word.
“A storyteller in a story. She had over a thousand tales.”
“Never heard of her,” Quina said, getting back into the conversation.
“Ah, well, it’s a very old story. It’s even said that our ancestors brought it with them when they came to Abeth.” Erris smiled at the notion.
“Across the black sea . . .” Quina said. “You should tell us that story!”
“I’m no good at stories.” Erris held his hands up. “Besides, I’ve forgotten almost everything about it.”
“But you’ve reminded me of a story I’d forgotten. A very old one,” Yaz said, and she told it.
There was a time, shortly after Zin first climbed from the sea to find Mokka camped on the clifftop, when Mashtri came blowing around their tent. The trickster god was jealous of her brother and sister’s creations. Mashtri called to Zin and Mokka but they mistrusted her and stayed within the tent. Next Mashtri made creatures out of the ice and breathed life into them, wanting to make people of her own, but they all became monsters, cruel of tooth and claw. They circled Mokka’s tent, howling and hissing, and still Zin and Mokka would not come out.
Enraged, Mashtri blew up a great storm and tried to tear the tent from the ice. But Mokka was born of the wind and her tent resisted the gale. Mashtri gnashed her teeth. “Come out!” she cried. But the first man and the first woman stayed inside. And so, in her frustration, Mashtri reached up and took away the sun. She hid it for the longest time, leaving all the world in the darkness of its first night. “Come out!” she cried. “And I will give you a new day.” But Zin was born of the sea and the darkness therein, and his courage resisted the night.
At last Mashtri returned the sun and tried a different trick. She brought a new colour to the ice and named it green. “See what I have done,” she cried. “You don’t need to come out—just lift the flap of your tent and see.”
“When I was first told this story by our clan mother,” Yaz said, “I asked about the green and she said that the ice was green and Mashtri made towers like we do at the garden ceremony at the end of the long night. But I’m going to tell it using what Erris has shown me—the way the green world really is.”
Mashtri called to them and, as so often since, it was curiosity rather than fears or demands that moved man to action. Zin peered from the tent and was amazed. A thick green carpet of grass had covered the ice, a billion green blades taming the wind—as many as there are snowflakes in a storm. Trees stood beyond the grass, taller than three gerants standing in a tower. Great spears of wood, thicker than a man, rising from the ground and dividing and dividing and dividing into a complication of branches and twigs. Each tree possessed of an infinity of leaves, all green and delicate and fluttering.
Zin emerged; he trod the softness of the grass, and his wonder drew Mokka behind him, and at her smile bees and flutterbys rose from the grass in a great dance that was fast where it was small and slow where it was large. And the air was warm, warm enough even to melt the ice if there had been any left to see.
Yaz paused and looked around the tent. Erris’s smile had a mixture of sadness and amusement in it. Quina and Thurin were openmouthed, hanging on her words, Quina with her wooden bead clutched in white fingers, pressed to her lips. Maya’s dark eyes swam with tears. All of them lean and windburned, huddled in a snow-buried tent, all their purpose bound on this endless walk to the south in the hope of a miracle—the same miracle that Yaz was painting for them.
Mokka led Zin towards the trees and they found a legion of them, more than there are fish in the sea, a forest that stretched on without end. And in among the trees and their branches and the . . . plants . . . that grew between them were animals, a hundred kinds, big and small, dogs, and bears, and . . . deer . . . and many more, and birds in many shapes, not a gull among them.
In that warmth, that heat, the wind hardly stirred, just enough to make the leaves dance and gently sway the branches. Zin and Mokka wandered, reaching up to take pieces of the trees that they could eat, listening to the soft silence of living.
Mashtri followed, laughing to herself, for she had blinded them with a dream that she had found behind the stars, and now she led them where she willed. Zin and Mokka saw the green world, but in truth it was still the ice that they roamed, guided now by Mashtri’s lies. Following a fleet-footed deer that wasn’t truly there. Following a trail that existed only in Mashtri’s glamour. Following the song of a bird that was nothing but a god’s mocking laughter.
Mashtri kept the lovers enspelled until they came at last to the place that she wished to show them. And when they arrived after a journey of many weeks, bone-thin, fever-eyed, fed only on imagination, sustained on wonder, Mashtri let the true wind, which she had kept at bay, return. The green world shredded before the wind’s knives and blew away, its tatters torn from Zin’s eyes, its warmth stripped from Mokka’s back.
Mashtri had brought the woman made by Aiiki, least of the Gods in the Sky, and the man made by Hua, least of the Gods in the Sea, to the shore of an endless black sea far colder than the ice yet unable to freeze.
“What have you done?” Mokka asked.
And Mashtri only smiled and turned her eyes towards the blackness.
“Someone is coming!” Zin cried, and Mokka saw that it was true.
Four boats came across the black sea, tiny and lost in its darkness. Zin and Mokka called to them, for it is a terrible thing to be lost on any sea, and this sea most of all. And the four boats heeded Zin’s cries and Mokka’s waving and beached upon the shore. And from those boats came new men and new women, the children of distant gods, gods neither of the wind nor the sea nor the ice.
“See?” cried Mashtri. “You are not special. You are not alone. Now each of you is one among many, like leaves on the tree, like trees in the forest.” And Mashtri laughed for she thought she had shared the pain that had started with her own failure to make a man. And the desire to give pain, even though it may not decrease your own, has ever been the consequence of hurt.
But Zin and Mokka were not dismayed as Mashtri had thought they would be. “We are not alone,” they cried. “At last! We are not alone!”
Mashtri fled then, across the ice, pursued by the laughter of a new beginning. And for many years Zin and Mokka were happier than they had known they could be—for company after a long time alone is like a new colour brought into a life.
In the end though, Mashtri’s trick within a trick showed its face and her mirth reached them on the wind. For the tribes that had beached their boats after sailing the black sea carried a weakness with them that plagued the descendants of Zin and Mokka down the long track of years. And Zin and Mokka went north and hid themselves and their trueborn children away, forbidding the people of the four boats to follow.
Yaz cleared her throat. “And in this story Zin and Mokka never died but are still on the ice, but so far north that not even the Ictha can find them.”
“I’ve not heard that one before,” Quina said, smiling the rare smile of someone hearing a wholly new tale.
“Me neither.” Maya nodded.
Thurin grinned. “Most of your stories are new to me. The versions that children bring down the pit with them are usually pretty basic, or rather garbled, or both.”
Erris was frowning though.
“You knew it?” Yaz asked, disappointed.
“No.” He shook his head. “I’m just thinking of what it means.” He looked around at them. “The black sea is the space between the stars, obviously. And the four boats are the ships that carried our tribes here from their collapsing systems. They didn’t all arrive at once, of course.”
“Of course . . .” Yaz had no idea what Erris was saying.
“I say ‘our tribes’ because those ships carried my ancestors and the ancestors of everyone who ever lived in the green belt—as far as I know. But . . .” Here he turned to stare at Yaz. “But the tale is telling us that Zin and Mokka were already here. If there’s any truth in this story, it’s saying that Zin and Mokka were the Missing and that their race bred with ours . . . and that the people of the ice, or some of them at least, share their blood!”
Yaz opened her mouth to object but found she’d run out of words.
“You know . . . they do say . . .” Thurin gritted his teeth against the pain of his wounds and sat. “. . . that the Ictha are a different breed.”