31
It took the rest of the day before they finally reached the end of the black ice’s migration and rounded the head of it: an inky knot of ice surrounded by a grey halo considerably narrower than it had been further north. Yaz could feel the malice radiating from the spirits trapped within. It put her in mind of Theus once more, the driving force behind the taint that had leaked from the fractured vaults back at the city of Vesta. She wondered whether, if Theus hadn’t risen to dominance and bent their will towards the reunification of his parts, that mass of evils would not also have migrated to the surface and begun its slow journey to the south.
“What do you think they’re looking for?” Quina asked. “The spirits?”
“Bodies.” Thurin shuddered.
“Life. War. Chaos,” Erris added. “It’s another sign that the green belt still exists, though. Something must be drawing them south, and my money would be on people. Lots of people just waiting to be tainted.”
“Money?” Quina asked.
Erris smiled and looked away. “Just a thing we used to have.”
Yaz led them for six more days, following the needle. She wondered how much of her life had passed simply eating up miles of empty ice stride by stride. Zox might be a machine made for walking but Yaz thought there was perhaps little difference between them. Both spending so long locked in the isolation of their own thoughts. Whatever might go on inside Zox’s head, though, was unlikely ever to be shared. Erris could get few responses from him—it was fortunate that the dog seemed dedicated to helping them.
Occasionally Yaz would find Zox staring at her with one black eye—he could only use both when aiming his head at you, the other being on the far side of his head, something that Erris said made him more like a sheep than a hound. And on such occasions, fixed by Zox’s dark gaze, Yaz would wonder what the holothaur had found when he had tried to invade that iron head. What had it taken to set Arges forgetting his revenge and go fleeing in terror instead?
Whatever it was, it would soon have to be left behind them. Erris and Zox seemed bound together in a race to the bottom. Each moving slower day by day, almost hour by hour, their movements less steady and less certain. Erris’s appearance didn’t change but in his motion he seemed to be gathering his years to him: each new day weighing him down with another of his centuries, leaving him walking into the future with an old man’s step.
Whatever Yaz had resolved about not leaving anyone behind, Zox could not be carried or even dragged. He was simply too heavy. She would drag Erris herself if it came to it.
She did change the order of their march to compensate for their changing strengths, and by the sixth day after rounding the tainted ice it was Thurin, Maya, Quina, and Yaz who pulled the sled, while Zox and Erris set an arthritic pace that left it unclear which of them was the more slow.
“I see something.” Maya was the shortest of them but often the first to spot a change ahead of them. Usually a pressure ridge.
Yaz squinted at the horizon. “I don’t.”
Maya just smiled and kept on walking.
A mile later Yaz could see it too. Something poking up in the distance. Something in the direction the needle was leading them.
It took a while for their minds to make sense of what they were seeing. Their assessment of the scale kept changing as miles passed beneath their feet and still they seemed to grow no closer.
“It’s towers,” Erris said.
“Made of ice?” Thurin asked. “Or just covered in it?”
“What else is there to make things that big out of?” Quina shook her head. “But ice won’t stack that high, surely?”
“It seems unlikely,” Erris said. “Even if the bases of the towers didn’t shatter, then gravity should bring them flowing down. A glacier travels a dozen yards a year on quite a modest slope.”
But they were towers. Graceful organic towers that put Yaz in mind of the diversity of fungi that the Broken cultivated, as well as their spears and swords. Glittering bridges arced between some, looking to be hundreds of yards up.
“It’s like Vesta was . . .” Yaz breathed, leaning into the sled harness.
Erris nodded. He had shown Yaz how the city of the Missing had once looked, and here was another, whole but made from ice rather than stone and steel.
“Do you think they made it for us?” Yaz asked.
Maya and Quina looked round at that, eyebrows raised.
Yaz stared back. “Well, either they did or it’s been standing here gods know how long and no word of it has ever reached us. Maybe nobody has ever seen it.” The idea that a whole city of ice with towers maybe miles high could have sat here undiscovered for generations seemed at once both possible and a frightening reminder of how few humans roamed the ice. If there was no sea beneath the ice here and it didn’t lie on a route that crossed ice-covered land between two seas, then there was no reason for any clan ever to come this way. Perhaps none ever had, and no man or woman had laid eyes on this thing though it might have stood a thousand years.
They walked on, Erris in the lead with Zox, Yaz and the others at the back, trailing the sled on long harness straps. By the time they reached the shadows of the ice city it became clear that they had continued to misunderstand its scale. Yaz felt sure that many of the towers would overtop the Black Rock.
As they drew closer still the tower tops began to catch the light of the setting sun, igniting with their own red fire. The spires were anything from ten yards to several hundred yards wide. They rose to dizzying heights that made Yaz feel insignificant. The structures were as varied as a fungi grove, swelling, spreading, graceful, defying the wind. The ice from which they were made was white and frosted, denying any vision of the interior.
Behind the spires the sky lay the colour of an old bruise: a storm brewing in the east. It would be good to have shelter before it reached them.
Erris stopped. “There’s something else.”
“I see it,” Maya panted in the harness as they drew level with him. “Someone’s waiting for us?”
“Taproot!” Quina said.
Yaz looked at Erris doubtfully. She could barely see the distant dot on the ice near the first of the towers, but if Taproot had a body here why had he not come out to them already? In fact, why did he need them at all?
Erris said nothing, only continued to stare for a few moments more. He took his fingers from the side of his brow and shook his head. “One person, four dogs.”
“Dogs?” Quina asked. “Is there a sled?”
“Let’s find out.” Erris walked on, his muscles whining with that high-pitched complaint they had started making a few days back.
“I don’t like it.” Maya’s hand rested close to where her knife lay beneath her layers.
“Maybe he’ll trade for more food and furs.” Thurin sounded hopeful.
“Maybe he’s seen the green!” Quina quickened her pace, outstripping Erris’s.
Yaz said nothing. Part of her agreed with Maya’s caution. But the needle had led them here. When she’d consulted it hours before it had pointed them in this direction and now a city lay before them. The needle had led them to a sea, and now to a city.
They closed the distance and Yaz could make out the stranger now, standing immobile in the wind, two dogs to either side, also motionless.
“I don’t like this.” Quina this time, echoing Maya’s sentiment. “Why aren’t the dogs moving?”
“Well trained?” Yaz had no experience of dogs. Only Quina and Maya had worked with them.
“Dogs don’t stand like that,” Maya said.
The man too was curiously still. For a moment Yaz wondered if he and the dogs had somehow died and been frozen in place. Ictha died on their feet like that. But dogs?
Quina came to a halt. “I vote we go around.”
“Don’t be silly,” Thurin said. “We’ve come all this way . . . for this! And it’s the first person we’ve seen in months.”
Yaz exchanged a glance with Erris, then nodded. She dropped the sled harness and the lines behind her fell slack on the ice. The others dropped theirs too. “Come on.” She led the way.
A sense of foreboding grew as they advanced, seeded by Maya and Quina’s warnings and fed by the figures’ enduring stillness.
Coming close Yaz could still see nothing of the person’s face, bundled in furs as they were. The dogs kept their heads down, which struck her as odd given even her limited experience with the beasts. The wind fingering through their fur provided the only motion. All four dogs were dark-haired, large, but thin. Their fur seemed sparse compared to that of the ones kept by the three tribes, but it was warmer this far south, so that might explain it.
The gap narrowed to sixty yards, thirty, fifteen.
“Hello!” Yaz called out. She came to a halt, waiting for some response. Beside her Maya had her knife out now, clutched in a mittened hand.
Nothing.
“Are they dead?” Quina whispered.
“We should go back,” Maya said.
“Back?” Yaz asked. “That’s hardly very Axit.”
“If you believe you are advancing into a trap, the best way to spring it early is to retreat.” Maya took a step back, knife ready.
“Really?” Thurin asked. “We’re doing this?”
Yaz shrugged. “If Maya says so.” She began to step back too.
With a sigh, Thurin began to back away with her. Quina and Erris joined the retreat.
The man raised his head. Yaz saw now that it was a man, or had once been. His skin was a moving, interlocking pattern, stained black and red and green and yellow. The frost had taken his lips and the teeth revealed were crimson. One yellow eye regarded them with a curious hunger. The other was a crater of black flesh. With a single violent yank the man tore open his heavy furs and shrugged the robe to the ground. Demons crowded his bare torso too, allowing no patch of untainted skin to show.
“Eidolon!” Thurin screamed.
The thing began to run at them with a broken, unnatural gait.
Eidolon. Yaz remembered the Broken’s cautionary tales. From time to time the mind of one of the Tainted would fracture and instead of the usual handful of demons they would suddenly fill with scores, hundreds even, until they were like the black ice, suffused with old evils. The only upside was that packed with so much power the creatures were able to break Theus’s hold on them and escape the ice caves, wandering the surface and becoming a threat to those above.
With a deafening crack, three thick shards of ice erupted in a tight cluster, their points rising to ten or more feet. Trapped between them, the eidolon writhed to free itself, something about its silent rage more frightening than the worst of howls.
“Run!” Thurin sagged, clearly weakened by the effort of raising the ice.
“Don’t turn your backs!” Maya shouted, still retreating, knife ready.
Yaz did the same, pulling her own blade from her furs. Like Maya, she was watching the dogs, expecting them to give chase. It didn’t seem possible that the eidolon would escape. The bars of its icy cage were thicker than anything an Ictha could break.
The dogs did not give chase. Yaz’s stomach heaved as, instead of charging, all four shook off their hides as if they were loose cloaks. The flesh exposed was a nightmare of blue, black, and dark red, frostbitten rather than demon-filled.
As silent as their master they threw themselves not after Yaz’s friends but at the eidolon, leaping into gaps between the ice. They didn’t pull at him or attack the shards confining him. Instead their flesh began to slough from their bones as if it were melting in a fierce heat. It didn’t fall, though—rather it flowed, towards the eidolon, joining to his own corrupt flesh, building something new.
That was when Yaz retched and began to run. All of them did.