29

This isn’t like other seas.” Yaz knelt in the boat, weak but fuelled by her amazement. The winds were considerably reduced down at the water level and the temperature almost balmy. They bounced gently on small waves, jostling chunks of ice. Even Quina and Maya, packed with Thurin in the boat behind her, were showing signs of life. There’d been no sign of Zox. Erris said he’d left him up amid the ridges surrounding the crater, worried that the dog would be unable to climb back out.

“How did you get the sled down the cliffs alone?” she asked.

Erris winced. “It was very hard work. But they weren’t cliffs like you described. More of a slope.” He bent to paddle them further from the shore. “I think this sea didn’t melt its way open from under the ice.”

“How else could it be here?” Yaz agreed with him, though: it wasn’t as warm as a hot sea, the mists were less thick, and already plates of ice were forming on the open waters.

“That shooting star we saw a few nights back. I think it landed here and blew a hole through the ice sheet. Most of the debris would have been vaporized and deposited downwind as snow.”

“I . . .” Yaz remembered the tale Mother Mazai told of her own grandmother and the crater the shooting star had left. “We’d better fish fast then, before it freezes.”

The nets and hooks that had so intimidated Erris were Yaz’s domain. She instructed him on when and where to cast the biggest net, and how to paddle so as to draw it through the water at the best depth.

“If this sea didn’t melt its way up, then the fish won’t know about it.” Yaz stared across the waters, frowning. The boat-sled crunched its way through a thin plate of ice. “We could be fishing empty waters.”

Erris paddled on but without the speed and strength he had always displayed. “The shock wave will have travelled a long way,” he said. “Strikes like this aren’t so rare. Our forefathers put defences above the sky to stop the biggest of them. So any fish worth its fins should have come along to see what nutrients got stirred up.”

Yaz said nothing. She huddled in her furs, trying to imagine what the four tribes had left floating in the black sea to battle stars that fell from the heavens. After a time she motioned for a stop. “Haul it in.”

Erris set to work, quickly learning to balance in the boat as he dragged in the net. If he fell in Yaz imagined that he would sink immediately. No man as heavy as he was had any hope of swimming.

Yard after yard of wet net came dripping over the stern. The water formed icicles in the brief gap between the net leaving the surface and reaching the boat, only to be snapped off as it slid over. Yard after empty yard. It was often like this, with the catch bulking in the final section of the cone-shaped net. Part of the Ictha philosophy of life came from this simple act of faith. You put in the effort not for the reward you got now, but for the reward you hoped would lie at the end. Yaz’s whole life since she had left the Black Rock was summed up in that notion. All those miles across the ice, rewarded not by yet another vista of white on white stretching to the horizon but by the green she hoped one day to see in the south.

“Oh.” The last section of the net flopped into the boat. Empty.

“We’ll try again.” Erris bent to gather the already stiffening net.

“Further out.” Yaz bit down on the words that wanted to escape her mouth. That they’d found an empty sea. That they’d hunted so long for water, and now that they’d found some it was proving to be the only empty sea she’d ever encountered. Created in violence and unready to give out life.

Erris paddled further out. When he paused his efforts a rare silence enfolded them, gentled by the lap of small waves against the hull. The depth below the ice sheet and the thickness of the mist seemed to tame the wind to the point at which it no longer shrieked or moaned.

“Again?” Erris asked.

“Further out.”

“We don’t want to get frozen in.” Erris bashed at a passing ice floe with his paddle to make the point.

“A little further.”

Finally, at Yaz’s gesture, Erris stopped and threw out the net as she had instructed. Quina watched through slitted eyes, unmoving, her face a deathly white where it showed past her hood.

Erris paddled on, towing the net.

“A little slower.”

She let him go for three or four hundred yards, bumping aside stray ice blocks, crunching through new-formed plates. Again he hauled in the net.

“This time!” Erris promised as he drew in the final section hand over hand, wobbling the boat, inches from a fall he couldn’t ever come back from.

“No . . .” Quina croaked the word as the last slack feet of the net came back aboard.

“It’s alright. I’ll just keep tr—”

A white explosion of water engulfed the boat. Something huge and dark loomed amid the spray. The boat rocked violently and Yaz could see nothing amid the falling sea.

The air cleared, leaving them drenched. Yaz blinked and snapped her head from side to side. “Erris!”

Erris was gone.

“No! No! No!” She scanned the water. Raced her gaze along the side of the boat, praying to every God in the Sea that she would spot clinging fingers.

Erris was gone and with him their last chance.

She thought of him sinking even now, fathoms below them, dropping into the dark depths that would hold him until his energies finally dwindled and left just an empty shell.

“Yaz?” Quina’s scared voice reached through Yaz’s grief but she bowed her head between her arms. She’d no hope to offer. They were finished. The whale vanished with a flip of its vast tail flukes, almost swamping the boat and nearly tipping Quina over the side too. Despite herself, Yaz reached out to secure the girl.

“There’s . . . something,” Quina muttered, looking out over the dark waters. “Yaz!”

With a groan Yaz pulled herself to the side, pushing aside the wet bundle of furs that was Maya.

“What . . .” A white something was rising towards them.

“Ice?” Quina asked.

“Paddle!” Yaz hunted for another paddle. A block of ice was rising beneath them. A chunk larger than a man.

All her body ached but Yaz managed to drive the boat clear. She turned to watch the rising ice but it wasn’t rising nearly as fast as she thought it might.

The ice block surfaced with a lazy swell, as if heavier than ice should be.

Quina gave Yaz a puzzled look, too weak for further speculation.

Something lunged from the water and for a moment Yaz thought the whale had returned. But it was a figure.

“Help!”

Erris fell back, scrabbling for a hold on the irregular chunk of ice. He vanished beneath the water.

“Erris!” Yaz began to turn the boat, flailing at the waves with a strength she could have sworn was no longer in her.

“He’s gone,” Quina croaked.

But no, he was there, under the water, somehow clinging to the ice. He must have dived towards the block when he was flung from the boat and carried it under the waves with his momentum. Fortunately it was just large enough to carry him slowly back to the surface again.

For a desperate minute Yaz struggled to turn the boat and finally the prow bumped against Erris’s block. She bent over and shoved the paddle down into the water. A hand gripped it and tugged to ensure she had good hold.

“Help me, Quina.” But Quina could barely crawl towards her through the icy water sloshing inside the boat.

Yaz gritted her teeth and tugged back. She only had to hold Erris until he could reach up and get a hand on the side. Heavy as he was, part of his weight was buoyed up by the water. Both her hands clenched white-knuckled on the paddle.

When the pull of Erris’s weight came it was far greater than she had expected. The boat lurched to the side and the paddle slipped in her grip. Suddenly she was in a different boat on a different sea and it was Azad she had in her grip as the great beast that had taken hold of him pulled them both beneath the waves, and the boat too.

Yaz would not let go. Could not let go. She clung to the paddle more tightly than she held on to her life. And a moment later Erris’s hand broke the surface, seizing the side of the boat.

Yaz pulled aside the guard hides and he hauled himself in, water streaming from his body.

“Thank you.” He lay back, not gasping for air but staring at the sky and slowly shaking his head. It was a long time before he spoke again. “Well, I found out one thing. There are definitely fish down there.”