28
The food ran out five nights after the Watcher’s attack, but their meals had been growing steadily more meagre ever since they had lost the shelter. They had been fortunate that the boat-sled survived the attack. Without a sea, though, it wasn’t going to feed them.
It had taken two days to leave the snowfield behind. Walking had been a trial, especially for Zox, but the snow offered relatively easy shelter for three nights. On the first night back on the bare ice dawn came early. A shooting star lit the sky with great erratic pulses of light, enough to wake them all, even Thurin, glaring through the ice shelter he’d built them. Then came the sound. Yaz had never heard of a shooting star that spoke but the tales told of them finding their voices. A series of detonations shook the world as the star’s light intensified in the east then vanished.
On the ice the walking was easier, but they missed the snow at night. The effort of ending each day with the construction of an ice hut sturdy enough to withstand the wind was beginning to tell on Thurin even before the last of the fungi disappeared into their bellies.
Yaz would have suggested again, and with greater insistence this time, that Thurin ride on the sled. But Zox had slowed and was pulling the lightened load with ponderous effort.
“What’s wrong with him?” Yaz had asked. The dog had seemed indefatigable.
“His power source is running down,” Erris told her.
“He lasted thousands of years in the city and just a handful of weeks out here?” Yaz knew it had been hard going but even so . . .
“In the city he slept a lot. Like me. And he could always draw on the script for fresh energies. Our power storage is less efficient in the cold.” Erris shrugged. “And he did drag a laden sled up and down a hundred vertical feet of ice then basically burrow a twenty-mile hole through the snow. It’s true, though, I thought he would last longer than this.” He looked back at the dog, giving him a curious stare. “Maybe it has something to do with how he dealt with Arges. I still don’t understand that. I thought we were all going to die right then and there . . .”
Starvation is a much swifter process when you’re cold, but nobody dies truly thin on the ice. Starvation simply opens a gate for the wind to come through. It’s the wind that wields the knife.
They sat that night with empty bellies around the heat pot. Outside, Zox had almost folded into his cube but stopped a few inches short of his goal, leaving a long vertical wedge that had already begun to fill with frost.
The fragile ice walls Thurin had raised withstood the wind but there would be fiercer winds to come and walls such as these would not hold against them. Thurin lay curled on a board, too weary to complain of his hunger. The rest of them hunched around aching bellies, grimly eyeing the pot and imagining a pan simmering above it. Or at least Yaz was sure that Maya and Quina were doing the same as she was. What was going through Erris’s mind she couldn’t say. Perhaps the fear that he would have to watch them all die and then go on alone, leaving their frozen corpses for the ice to take.
Yaz risked a bare hand and removed Taproot’s needle from her collar. The thing had been weighing on her more heavily with each passing day. She tied a strand of her own hair around it and held it suspended. Slowly it found its own direction. She gave it a flick and rolled the hair between finger and thumb. The needle spun, slowed, and returned to the same direction: east and ever so slightly north.
“We could follow this,” she said. “We’ll be tracking backwards a little way, and I’ve no idea if the place is close enough for us to reach before . . . And when we get there, even if there’s a way in, it’s another city under the ice. There may well not be anything to eat there.”
“There might be fungi.” Thurin raised his head. “But you’d need stars for warmth and water.”
“There’s just as much chance of finding a sea whichever direction we go,” Quina said.
Maya grimaced. “Basically none.”
“Taproot wants to suck us into a war with Seus.” Erris shook his head. “You.” He corrected himself. “He wants to suck you into a war. He had generations in which he ignored me. And Seus is dangerous. Very dangerous.”
“More dangerous than starvation on the ice?” Thurin asked.
“Fair point.” Erris pursed his lips. “But his reach is long. I doubt Arges is his only recruit, and he probably has horrors like the Watcher in all of the Missing’s cities.”
“Anyone for continuing south?” Yaz asked.
Nobody answered.
“We’ll follow the needle tomorrow then.” It felt like defeat, like taking direction from someone else, handing over her quest for the green lands. But it had to be done. They’d run out of food and they’d run out of choices.
In the night Yaz’s fitful sleep, broken by hunger, came to a sudden stop when she realized that the whole shelter was glowing green. Her eyes opened wide but it took several moments before she understood what she was looking at. The semitranslucent ice of the roof and walls shone with a curious shifting light, the green deepening from that of new leaves to a vibrant emerald. The light was coming from outside. From the sky.
“Aurora,” said Erris softly.
“The dragons’ tails.” Yaz sat up. She wanted to go outside as she always did with her parents when the dragons flew. But it would let their heat escape.
Thurin sat up too, the wonder on his face revealed by the shifting light. “I thought you were joking about this . . .” He reached up and a large section of the ice above them became almost as clear as air. The aurora stretched halfway across the sky, veils of light writhing slowly, as if a million tons of stardust were sifting down through cracks in the sky.
They lay back and watched together. Beside them Quina and Maya slept on. Neither of them would have welcomed being woken to see what for them was a regular occurrence.
“If we don’t . . .” Thurin sighed. “Well, I’m glad to have seen this. Whatever happens to us I’m glad this happened first.”
“I’ve never seen this with my own eyes,” Erris said, his head close to Yaz’s. “The coming of the ice wasn’t the only change I missed. Good to know that after however many thousand years it’s been I can still find new things.”
Yaz lay and watched the sky dragons lash their tails, and in the darkness her fingers found the warmth of Thurin’s hand and the cool strength of Erris’s. Fingers laced fingers, hands closed tight, and above them shooting stars streaked silently across dark infinities.
The next day they turned east, and a little north. Exhaustion weighed them down. Without food in her belly Yaz began to feel that she rather than Zox was dragging the sled behind her, and that each missed meal was a load of iron added to what must be hauled across the ice. The act of putting one foot before the next became a task that required focus. Without attention she would merely slow to a halt and then stand, leaning into the wind, obeying the demands of her body that she do nothing.
The wind found hitherto unsuspected chinks in her armour. Her extremities numbed, her core chilled, her lips cracked. Her face became a mask she wore rather than flesh she owned, and it seemed that if she were to make too violent an expression the whole thing might shatter and fall to the ground, leaving her skull bared to the wind’s assault.
Thurin shambled along, as if carried by sheer act of will rather than his failing muscles. Sometimes he swayed at impossible angles before recovering, and Yaz knew that only his ice-work had saved him from a tumble that on his own he might never rise from.
The cold plays cruel tricks. At the end, when the blood runs chill and sluggish through white flesh, the cold can convince a person they’re burning up. Victims shed their furs and die half-naked, caked in ice. The cold freezes your thoughts so that they crawl in circles, unable to change track, unequal to the task of grappling with new ideas.
They walked, each of them wrapped in their own struggle. Even Erris seemed burdened, weighed down by the horror of seeing his companions fail one by one while he carried endlessly on.
“Thurin?” Erris stopped and turned. Yaz, pitifully grateful for the delay, stopped too and shuffled to face back the way they’d come. Thurin had fallen to his knees and the sled had passed him by.
“Thurin?” Erris hurried to his side. “Get up.”
“This is wrong . . .” Thurin muttered through peeling lips.
“It is what it is,” Erris said. “Get up, my friend. Or I’ll have to carry you.”
“What?” Thurin looked up at that. “No. I mean this.” He tapped at the ice with a gloved hand.
Yaz joined them and stared. “It’s just ice.” She paused and saw it. “With a crack in it. Ice cracks all the time.”
“Not like this.” Thurin shook his head. “There’s no reason for this to be here. I know the ice. I can feel how it moves. This . . . is . . . wrong.”
“Well.” Yaz looked along the faint line of the crack to where Quina and Maya were still plodding on with the sled. “It’s going the same way we are.” She reached down and grasped Thurin’s arm, helping him back to his feet.
By sunset the crack was wide enough to wedge a finger in. Thurin stumbled to a halt and stood as if unsure where he might be. It broke Yaz’s heart to ask him to raise a shelter.
“Yes. A shelter.” Thurin slurred the words. He reached out unsteadily and the ice groaned, resisting his will. Slowly, inch by painful inch, a thin wall of ice broke from the surface like the blade of a rising knife. It rose to about chest height before Thurin toppled into a boneless fall.
“Catch—”
But Erris was too far away and Quina’s cold-blunted speed was insufficient to stop Thurin’s head hitting the ice. They wrestled him senseless onto a board in the lee of the partial wall while Erris set to improving the shelter with what boards and wires they’d managed to salvage from the wreckage the Watcher had left them.
Darkness fell on a pitiful, rattling shelter with three walls. The group cuddled together like lovers, as close to the heat pot as they could get without burning. The wind meant that one moment you could feel a painful heat on your face and the next a freezing draft. Thurin recovered enough to say that he was alright. An obvious lie. They should have taken his gloves and boots off to care for his fingers and toes, but without a proper shelter it would only endanger them more. Yaz prayed to the Gods in the Sky that the cold hadn’t got its teeth into his flesh. It hurt her to think of Thurin’s long, clever fingers blackened and twisted by the frost.
Deep into the night the last of their original stars fizzled into nothing, unable to deliver the energy that Yaz demanded of it. She crawled out into the full brunt of the wind and summoned one of the Watcher’s eyes from the sled, a sphere that she could cup comfortably in two hands, a sea-blue glow to it now that Arges’s influence had been removed. It was one of the odd ones out. The bulk of the others seemed related somehow.
Breaking the star was hard. Harder than it should have been, and Yaz truly thought she might also have broken something inside her head by the time the star finally surrendered and fell into a dozen pieces, each a perfect sphere. They would burn faster than the larger star, but the others would be able to tolerate their presence.
Leaning into the wind, she returned to her friends and fed the stream of stars into the pot, igniting its sigils and pumping heat into the restless air.
Yaz slept fitfully and rose with a pale dawn more exhausted than she had been when she had lain down. Her head still ached from the effort of breaking the star in the night. Erris loaded Thurin onto the sled without discussion. The fact that he didn’t even protest scared Yaz more than the black bruise on his forehead or the lifeless flop of his limbs as Erris carried him across the ice.
Yaz had removed the stars from the sled so that Thurin could ride there and set them following her at a distance, a floating tail trailing in the wind.
Zox set a slow but unrelenting pace. As the miles passed the ice became curiously rucked up in long lines across their path, like thousand-foot-high pressure ridges. It made the going tough, and several times Zox scrabbled and strained to haul the sled over a particularly difficult one.
Exhaustion’s solitude wrapped itself around Yaz and once more she retreated into a narrow universe where one footstep followed the next and all of them filled her world. She became deaf to the wind, blind to the passage of the sun, focused only on the march. Focused on nothing but the march. She felt on the point of collapse but time after time she refused, time after time she lifted her boot, slid it forward, transferred her weight. An Ictha marching song rumbled its measure at the back of her mind, over and over. The ice would not beat her. The wind would not beat her. She was Ictha. This is what she was born to do.
She was Ictha. Take the next step. And the next. And the next. Ictha.
“Yaz?” The voice came from far away. “Yaz?”
“Uh?” She blinked, unsure if she were walking or had come to a halt. “It’s sunset . . . We need a shelter . . .” She croaked the words from a dry throat.
“It’s not sunset, Yaz.” Erris was standing in front of her. He took her shoulders in his hands. “It’s dawn.”
“We walked all night?” She blinked, feeling ice crack at the sides of her eyes.
“All day, all night, all of another day, all of another night,” Erris said gently. “It’s time to lie down.”
Yaz coughed. She felt broken. “The Ictha die on their feet.”
Erris bent his head, shifted his grip, and a moment later she was being lifted smoothly over his shoulder.
“I can’t!” she protested. “The others!”
“I’ve been helping Zox to drag the others for more than two nights and a day.” Erris sounded exasperated as he carried her back to the sled. He laid her down beside a figure so bundled in fur that she couldn’t tell if it was Maya or Thurin or Quina. Erris straightened, brushing ice from the short, tight curls of his hair. “Truly. The Ictha are a different breed.”
“You can’t drag us all.” Yaz tried to get up.
“Can and will.” Erris went back to the reins. But he looked tired. Yaz had never seen him look tired. “The going is getting worse, though. It’s as if that needle of yours chose the absolute worst direction. Every ridge is barring our path.”
Yaz said nothing. She had no faith in Taproot’s needle or its directions. But no direction seemed to offer any hope. That was the freedom of the ice. The freedom to choose any path you pleased and to die in any place, knowing none of them had anything more to offer than a cold death.
“Keep the stars following us,” Erris said. “We’re going to need them.”
Yaz wasn’t sure that was true, but somehow all seven of the larger stars had remained tethered to her will, even in the depths of her struggle. She strengthened that bond and lay back with her friends, the only one of them still conscious. Overhead, the white sky watched without emotion, waiting for them to die.
Yaz didn’t remember going to sleep. Cold is a stealthy assassin. In the end you never see it coming.
“Wake up, Yaz!” A hand was shaking her. “Wake up.”
Yaz tried to fend the hand away. Part of her thought it was her mother getting her up for another day’s march towards the Pit of the Missing. It didn’t sound like her mother . . . but whoever it was, she didn’t feel like more walking. It was cold out there and her furs were . . . less cold.
“Yaz, you need to see. I can’t do this on my own. I don’t know how to.” Strong hands were lifting her gently but cruelly into a cold wind.
Yaz cracked open an eye, blinking against the blur of tears already starting to freeze. She saw nothing, only white.
“Is . . . it . . . snow?”
“No.” Erris set her on her feet and kept her from falling. A white mist swirled all around them. Erris’s hair was white with frost. Even his eyebrows were thick with it.
“Where . . .” But the wind showed her. A sudden gust lifted the mist momentarily, exposing a fractured shelf of blue-green ice and . . . water, endless darkly rippled water stretching out before her. All of it steaming.
They had found a sea!