34

For a long moment the two halves of Yaz’s mind battled on the edge of a knife. Half of Yaz knew that Maya was dead and that opening the wall was madness. The other half didn’t care about facts, only about right and wrong. That part wanted nothing but to rush out and save her friend even if that meant taking on death itself.

“She can’t be gone.” Thurin smacked his fist against the wall.

Quina said nothing. She sat and stared at nothing and held herself so still that if not for the tremor in her hands Yaz would have thought her possessed by some spirit. Two tears rolled down her drawn face.

Yaz felt a scream building inside her, irresistible as a sneeze. She stood, facing the black city before them, hands balled at her sides.

“Yaz?” Erris started.

The scream tore itself from her, a wordless roar of rage and loss, echoing about the dome, setting the star blazing, a hot blue light flecked with crimson.

“We should go on.” Erris started to reach towards her then let his hand drop.

“You think the eidolon can get at us in here?” Yaz snarled her reply, angry at everything, half hoping the monster would find a way in so she could make it eat her star.

Erris spread his hands. “I don’t know. Normally, no, but with Seus helping it, anything’s possible. We should find Taproot while we can.”

“She can’t be dead. She came so far.” Quina spoke the words as if reasoning through a puzzle, as if her logic could undo what had happened.

“We should go.” Thurin turned away from the wall and made to join Erris before shying away from the star’s aura.

“Give us some time.” Yaz spoke more harshly than she’d intended. “Doesn’t she deserve longer than a few moments?”

“She deserved a lifetime.” He spun to face her and she blinked in confusion. It looked as if he were orbited by tiny stars, but then she realized that some unconscious aspect of his ice-work had taken the tears from his face and set them hanging in the air where they caught the starlight. “But she didn’t get it. And now we’re here and she would want us to fulfil our mission.”

Yaz managed a smile. Maya would have used those words. Fulfil our mission. Axit to the end.

“Quina.” Yaz held her hand out to the girl and drew her to her feet. She came up awkwardly, favouring her left leg. Yaz opened her mouth for a word of comfort but suddenly Quina had her face buried in Yaz’s furs, choking broken sobs into her shoulder. Hesitantly, Yaz wrapped her arms about her, shocked at Quina’s thinness. It wasn’t the Ictha way. The Ictha endured: they didn’t waste energy on grief. But then she remembered how Quell had said her father broke down after she and Zeen went into the pit and, as if given licence, something snapped inside her too, and she joined Quina in her sorrow.

She didn’t know how long they stayed like that but eventually they parted. Yaz brushed the tear-wet hair from Quina’s face and turned to Thurin, who was crouched on the dome’s black floor studying his hands as if they were heaped with his thoughts. “Let’s go.”

They moved on further into the dome. Yaz sent her star ahead of them and everywhere it went it simply erased the black spires, carving a moving hole among them, allowing them to return as it passed on.

“What’s the point of all this?” Thurin waved at the towers. “And the ones outside?”

“I’m wondering what we’ll find in the middle,” Erris replied. “Another plaza and a much smaller dome? With a tiny city inside?”

“Does it need a point?” Yaz asked. “Does Zox have a point, or the others like him? Aren’t these just the works of another abandoned city mind, left to its own devices and slowly going mad?”

The buildings came to a sudden end earlier than expected. The plaza in this city was a hundred yards on each side, and the black floor lay scattered with scores of circles, all of them the same, wide enough for Yaz to lie in with her arms stretched out and still be a few feet shy of touching the edges. All of their perimeters were about a foot wide, six inches thick, and set with sigils.

“Haze-gates,” Thurin breathed. “Like the one I saw.”

“That should have been called a water-gate,” Yaz said. “It nearly drowned you. What was hazy about it?”

“Hayes gates,” said a mildly irritated voice behind them. “Watergate was a whole other thing.”

They spun around, and there, sketched in pale light, like one of Thurin’s dreams patterned on the mist, stood Elias Taproot.

“What?” Yaz had, in the long weeks of their journey, thought of many things she would say to Taproot when they finally met again. “What?” was not one of them.

“Hayes gates are nothing to do with being hazy. They’re named for their creator. I met him once, you know? Professor Hayes. He was older by then, of course, past his best, and I had just finished as a student, but he was still the most brilliant man I ever met.” Taproot narrowed his gaze at Thurin. “And how does his name come to be on the lips of a tribesman at the end of the world?” He glanced around at the rest of them. “And who are you people anyway? And what do you want?” He kept his eyes on them while extending a long arm and then a long finger to point directly at the floating star. “And where did you get a core-stone?” Suspicion flickered over the narrow angles of his face.

“We’ve come from the city of Vesta,” Erris said.

“And you sent us here,” Yaz added.

Taproot raised a brow at that.

Yaz continued. “And there’s an eidolon hunting us outside the dome. I think Seus sent it.”

Taproot winced at the name. “Nobody sends an eidolon. Maybe he steered it here, or led it. But Seus being after you would explain all this.” He waved a hand at the plaza and in an instant all the Hayes gates lit up, each becoming a window onto some other place. Yaz could only see the nearest handful clearly, each focused on a different monster. The closest was a huge hunter, leaking starlight, hauling its articulated body across the ice with a chaotic thrashing of limbs. In another a silver thing hurtled along on a blur of motion that might be legs, its whole body sharp as a raptor fish. Yet another showed something more akin to a rolling blob of fat but with disturbing shapes dimly visible within it, one that looked like a man’s bones.

“What are they?” Quina breathed.

“The question you should have asked is where are they going?” Taproot said. “And the answer is here. They’re all headed this way.”

Thurin glanced up at the black roof above them as if expecting it to reverberate from a mighty blow. “How soon—”

“Which”—Taproot cut across him—“returns me to my question: who are you people and what do you want?”

“Like I said.” Yaz could still hear Maya’s last scream and was in no mood to bow and scrape before a false god. Or even be polite. “You sent us here. One of the other yous did. And I wasn’t going to come because all I want is just to go south and see the green world.”

Taproot shook his head. “That’s not possible. It’s thousands of miles to the Corridor and there’s nothing out there but ice. Currently it’s . . .” He looked to the side as if he could see something they couldn’t. “Holy Christ. Minus eighty-six out there. And that’s without the windchill factor. All you’re wearing is bits of dead animal. How are you even alive?”

Yaz didn’t understand the question and shook it aside. “But we ran out of food and needed help. And the price we paid for that is a friend murdered while we tried to get through your walls.”

Taproot pressed his lips together. His image flickered, and just for a fraction of a second Yaz thought she saw a pained expression in place of his annoyance. Sympathy maybe. “I didn’t know anyone was out there. I didn’t have eyes on you or the eidolon. The walls are kept strong. The gates are my only eyes on the world outside.”

“What I want now,” Yaz continued, “is to carry on with our journey and have Seus leave us alone.” She began to walk among the gates, peering down into each as she passed. For some reason they reminded her of the pool Eular had shown her, the one that had been too perfect for the water in it to freeze. Some showed monstrosities on the move; some just looked upon great wastes of white, giving no sense of scale. She could have been looking at a few square yards of ice or a hundred square miles.

She had expected Taproot to follow her or to demand that she stop. Instead he just watched her, as did the others, and so she roamed, hoping to be able to tie down her anger and her grief so that she could negotiate with Taproot and not speak her mind so plainly that he simply threw them out for the eidolon to finish off.

Twice she saw gates opening onto clans on the move, one seen from a distance at ground level, the other seen much closer but from above. The sight of so many people all in one place, moving with one purpose, made her ache for the Ictha and the certainty of that life.

Yaz paused to study the clan seen from above. All of the gates radiated cold, and though she couldn’t hear or feel the wind, she thought that perhaps if she were to step into one she might fall into being within the scene shown to her. She resisted the temptation. She moved on to peer at another hunter crunching through the ice. The idea that the gates might allow contact made her give this pool and the next a wider berth in case one of the horrors Taproot was tracking could reach out and snatch her.

“And what did this other me want you to do when you got here?” Taproot called, running out of patience. “Did he give you a message?”

“All he gave me was this.” Yaz pulled the needle from the hides above her collarbone and started to return to the others.

“Ah, that’s what you used to open the dome,” Taproot said, as if some puzzle had been solved.

“No . . .” The idea that she might have simply popped the dome like a bubble using the needle left Yaz aghast. If she’d thought to use it then, Maya would have lived. Yaz’s stupidity had killed her friend. “I used the star.”

“Star? Oh, the core-stone?” Taproot’s gaze flitted to the floating star. “But a star that size shouldn’t be able to . . .” His eyes widened. “Something’s been done to this one! It’s been supercharged in some manner.” He frowned. “The other Taproot gave it to you?”

“I . . .” Yaz shook her head, miserable. “I . . .”

“We took it from an automaton built from Missing-made parts,” Erris said. “Yaz broke it into pieces then put it back together.”

“Remarkable!” Taproot clapped his hands but they made no sound. “And you too, young man. You’ve been broken into pieces and reassembled in some manner.”

“I fell—”

Another clap of those narrow, long-fingered hands. “You had a great fall! Ha! A veritable Humpty-Dumpty. But this time all the king’s horses and all the king’s men could put you back together again.” He turned back to Yaz, who wondered if perhaps isolation might not have driven this Taproot mad. “Admittedly, I myself am in need of some . . . reintegration, shall we say? All of us broken things. Perhaps we do have a common interest. The needle please, young woman.” He extended a hand.

Yaz started towards him, only to have her attention dragged to the left, where one of the gates showed yet another icescape. This one, however, was neither empty nor filled with monsters or tribers. Instead it showed a group of four figures in unfamiliar clothing, not furs or hides but long coats more similar to something Erris might wear. Two of them were curled on the ice, the third sitting close by with the fourth cradled in her lap. No one sits or lies on the ice unless they’re dead or close to death. Three of them looked to be female, judging by their long hair. The sitting figure drew Yaz’s attention most. Its skin was darker even than Erris’s, past brown into black, and its hair as tightly curled, cut close to the scalp like his. Boy or girl, Yaz could tell that they were young, Maya’s age perhaps.

“Where is this?” Yaz pointed to the scene.

Taproot raised both brows, his hand still extended for the needle. “The first question is always ‘when?’” Lowering his hand, he came to join her, walking as swiftly as a hunska, his feet making no sound. “Ah.” He peered past Yaz, studying the scene. “That’s now and a very long way from here indeed, thousands of miles to the south. The survivor is one of the potentials I’ve been studying.” He looked back at Yaz. “Needle, please.”

“Potentials?” Yaz handed it to him.

Taproot took the needle, somehow managing to hold it though his fingers were made of light. A slight shudder passed through him as he made contact, a ripple, as if he were a reflection on water that had been disturbed. For a long moment afterwards he remained without motion, not even a twitch in his eyes, saying nothing. “Ah!” A breath snatched in as though he’d broken the surface after a long dive. “Forgive me. It’s always like that when I integrate a lost fraction of myself.” Dark eyes fixed on Yaz with new interest. “Now I see why I sent you!”

“The Taproot I met was in the needle?” Yaz frowned. The process put her in mind of Theus assembling the scattered evils that constituted his dark half.

“A copy of him.” Taproot waved the question away. “He was a small fragment but we’ve been separate for many years and there was a lot of new data to assimilate.” He let the needle fall with distaste. “It’s come to this . . . We have to store our information in physical objects like savages and have them carried here and there by foot. But until Seus is cleared from the networks there’s no other choice.”

“What about this?” Yaz pointed at the scene by their feet. Erris, Quina, and Thurin had come to join them now to stare down at the dead and dying children. Erris was moving better, as if simply being within the dome were somehow restoring his strength. “Who’s this girl?”

“As I said.” Taproot pushed his upper lip under his lower one, contemplating. “A potential. Seus is working to crack open one of the remaining arks and if he gains control he’ll bring down the moon. That would close the Corridor and leave the whole of Abeth sheathed in ice.”

Yaz shook her head. “Arges said they were going to open the ark to follow the Missing into th—”

“What? No. Seus tells people what they want to hear to get them to do what he wants done.” Taproot dismissed the idea. “To have any chance of stopping him I need someone to get me into the ark he’s focusing on before he does, and that requires an individual possessing very rare talents. So rare in fact that many generations can pass without seeing a single person born who meets the mark. It’s possible the girl might have served, but the question is moot now. You’re here and you’ve already proven your talents.”

Yaz frowned. “But . . . you’re not just going to let them die?”

“Watch me.” Taproot turned and walked away.

“Wait!” Yaz shouted after him, suddenly angry. She’d just seen a girl die and one was enough. “This isn’t right!”

Taproot turned with a slightly guilty look. “People die all the time. Thousands every year. I could fill these gates with images of sickbeds and disasters. I can’t save them all. I can’t, in fact, save any of them.”

Thurin stepped up to stand shoulder to shoulder with Yaz. “But this is a gate. I was told I could step through one and go anywhere. I had a sea flow through one and try to drown me. So can’t you just open it and let them come here? You can’t save everyone. Those sickbeds and disasters would need medicine or miracles to save them. But these girls, certainly that one holding the other one, they could come here where it’s warm and they’d be . . .” It looked as if he wanted to say “safe” but thought better of it. “We could help her.”

Taproot seemed to notice Thurin for the first time. He pressed his lips into a flat line. “If you want to use a Hayes gate to go from one place to another you need a gate at both ends. If you want to use one to see a remote location, then that’s a different matter: you just need some clever steering and a bit of temporal orbital mechanics.” Seeing their incomprehension he reiterated the important bit. “You need a gate at both ends.”

“Unless . . .” Erris said.

“You know something about Hayes gates that I don’t?” Again Taproot arched a brow.

“I doubt it.” Erris looked around at the dozens of gates lying on the dome’s floor. “As far as I know Vesta only had one, and I didn’t know about it until Thurin told me. But I know there are other ways to move around the cities of the Missing. There are paths through walls, paths through a hundred yards of stone that quantals can take. The city told me that if there was a quantal path-walker at both ends of such routes, then they could open a passage that anyone could take.”

Taproot nodded and interlaced his long fingers. His hands were never still, always plucking at each other as if to keep occupied when they weren’t underlining his words.

“So,” Erris continued, “I’m thinking that this girl must be a quantal full-blood for you to have been interested in her if you’re looking for abilities like Yaz owns. And if that’s the case, isn’t there any way that the two of them can boost the link that allows us to see this image into a link that will allow passage? At least from there to here?”

“No.”

Taproot said it too quickly though, and both hands remained still, the only time that Yaz had seen him speak without their contribution.

“I don’t believe you,” Yaz said.

Taproot widened both eyes in great surprise. “On what basis? You’re a girl raised by nomads on the ice. I’m an expert. I’m a scientist with millennia of experience. I’m the one who—”

“You’re a bad liar.”

That at least shut Taproot up.

“Alright!” he snapped at last. “So maybe your data echo here has a point, but it would be enormously difficult to achieve, enormously dangerous, would require two quantals of remarkable ability, a core-stone of significant size, and would only be able to bring the remote party here. Additionally it wouldn’t allow any passengers, and I’ve observed that young lady long enough to know that she’s not going to leave her friends there to die.”

“They look dead already,” Quina observed. “They’ll all be dead before nightfall either way.”

“What . . . what are you doing?” Taproot stalked back to where Yaz had knelt beside the ring and set her hands to sigils engraved along the sides. “When I said dangerous I didn’t mean just to you—”

Yaz glanced at the other three and told them to get back. Thurin did the opposite, coming to stand beside her, one hand finding her shoulder.

“I meant dangerous to the city. And I don’t just mean this one, or the ice one outside. I meant the one under the ice. So unless your friends can get outside that kind of blast radius in a hurry then I advise you to stop.”

Thurin’s face hardened as he turned away from the gate to face Taproot. “If you’d ever walked to the edge of death out on the ice you wouldn’t be able to leave someone out there either.”

Yaz’s guilt about the long march to the sea flared at this and she resolved to be worthy of Thurin’s misplaced faith. It had been Erris who saved Thurin, Quina, and Maya. Yaz had fallen into herself and walked on, leaving them in her wake. This girl, though, this girl she would not leave behind.

She brought her blazing star to sit at the middle of the gate, waking all the sigils around its perimeter. The image took on new reality. Coldness bled from it; she could hear an echo of the wind. With utmost concentration, Yaz reached into the gate with her mind, defocusing her eyes to see the threadscape. The gate was very clearly a nexus of threads, directly linking many of those in the remote location showed to those flowing from Yaz, her friends, and the black city within the dome. Beyond that the complexity was mind-bending. The gate wove threads in ways Yaz hadn’t imagined before and couldn’t fathom now with the example before her. Using something and understanding how it works are two different things, though.

Yaz had already used the Path not more than half an hour previously, so to touch it now was beyond her, but she could still see it if she tried. It lay outside her reach, a thin band, distant but burning so bright as to vanish the threadscape just as surely as the sun chases the stars from the sky.

Her head still ached with the aftershocks of her star coming back together from its pieces but she tried to focus on following the threads that led through the gate. These formed the true connection to the scene showed; this was not the mere observation of shape and form in a moving image, this was deeper than touching. Suddenly she was profoundly aware of that distant place, the chill of the ice, the girl’s pain, her grief, and the absence of any other emotion, or any other thoughts. Only one heart still beat there. The friend the girl cradled was dead and cooling, the other two already frozen in place, part of the ice that would eventually subsume them and hold them till the end of days.

Can you hear me? Yaz tried to force her voice along the connection. “Can you hear me?” She spoke the words too.

“She’s called Maliaya,” Taproot said, clearly resigned to the prospect of having his home replaced by a crater larger than the falling star had made. “It might help get her attention.”

Maliaya? Can you hear me? Yaz tried a different, less used, muscle in her mind and sent her thought trembling along the threads that joined her to the girl.

Maliaya stiffened. “Nina?” One hand tightened its grip on the dead girl as she struggled to move her; the other hand remained an ineffectual claw. “Nina? Sia masleta! Che conco tua mea fleaa!”

“Nina? O Ancestor! I thought you’d left me!” The words, spoken without inflection and in Taproot’s voice, came just as Yaz understood that the girl wasn’t speaking the way that the tribes spoke. The idea that someone could be so alien as to not use the same words that she did had never occurred to Yaz. She’d never heard of anything like it before, save for Zox. It seemed miraculous that Taproot could understand the girl and replace her words with the right ones. But Yaz reminded herself that Thurin could fly, and focused her attention.

Maliaya, can you hear me?

“I hear you, Nina.” Taproot’s voice replaced the girl’s as she bent over her friend’s corpse, studying her immobile, bone-white face. “I don’t understand . . . are we dead now?” The tears froze before they could fall.

Yaz understood the girl’s confusion. The cold had got into her thoughts. It happened towards the end. I’m not Nina, Yaz projected. But I want to help you. I can only do it if you help me too, though, Maliaya.

Maliaya peered around her, trying to narrow her hood against the wind’s bluster and the sharp ice it carried. “I can’t see you.”

I can see you, Maliaya. I’m somewhere else. Somewhere safe. I need you to help me open the path between us. You understand when I say the Path? Yaz wondered if she should have called it the Path or the river that flows through all things, and had just started to wonder how the girl was understanding any of the words, when she realized that she hadn’t pushed either description at her, but had sent the image and the idea instead. Somehow this means of communication sidestepped the need for words of any type.

Maliaya?

Suddenly the Path flashed bright before Yaz, an infinity of writhing sea serpents thrashing through spaces and angles beyond imagining. Somehow, Maliaya stood on it, unbowed by the cold, walking the Path, energies crackling about her feet, blazing up around her, flooding through her. The Path tried to throw her off at each of its never-ending turns, a multitude of them fitting in between each step, and yet with a dancer’s grace and a terrifying singularity of purpose the girl kept walking. She couldn’t last long, though—nobody could; in moments the power would overwhelm her, consume her, burst her asunder, leaving not even a wisp of smoke for the wind to take.

Yaz knew she had to act. The Path was too distant for her to touch, but the girl seemed closer. Yaz reached for the Path as she had so many times before. This time one of her outstretched hands met flesh. Fingers closed around her fingers. The awful power of the Path flooded into her a moment later, more than she had ever known or thought possible. She screamed, wanting nothing save to let go, but Maya’s image burned across eyes blinded by the Path’s brilliance, and Yaz hung on as if it were Maya she held and that this time if she only clung on to her then the girl would pull free of the eidolon and come through the wall unscathed. It felt as though she were reduced to ash and twisted bone, as if the hand she clasped the girl with were a blackened claw. Nothing could survive what had filled them, yet even as it tore her apart, Yaz pulled. Maliaya burst out of the gate as if surfacing from a deep pool. Yaz fell back, hauling her clear, both of them burning with light and fire, sending the others scattering and making Taproot’s projection vanish as the wind shreds mist.

Yaz struggled to own the power within her but it was beyond her strength. She sensed it would burst from her, uncontrolled, and the blast would leave nothing standing for a great distance. The white heat of it blanked her mind, leaving no room for fear or sorrow. The only imperative was release.

And suddenly the great pressure of all that energy . . . vanished. Maliaya had somehow taken enough control of it to send it back through the gate. The scene on the far side disappeared, to be replaced by white and nothing but white. A great fog of vaporized ice hiding a crater of unknown dimensions.

Maliaya stood among them, shockingly real, the first new flesh-and-blood person Yaz had seen in an age. She seemed dazed, her eyes not seeing, unsteady on her feet. Erris reached to support her but in an instant she’d taken his arm and used her body to undercut him, throwing him into the gate despite his weight. She’d moved like Erris did when he fought, but some of the Path’s power must have been lingering in her to have tossed him like that. She stepped towards Yaz, still in her fighting stance, brow furrowed. Quina intervened, quicker than thought, and, reacting nearly as fast, Maliaya snapped a series of punches towards her, using only her good arm. Quina twisted out of their path, one after another, only to have her feet swept from under her by a leg swing she didn’t see coming. Yaz and Thurin closed together, both to protect Quina and to secure the newcomer, but, twisting and kicking with amazing fluidity, Maliaya had them both on the ground.

Erris rose behind the girl, standing on the surface of the gate. She didn’t seem to see him or show any further interest in Yaz or the other two on the floor, but he approached cautiously even so.

“Nina?” Maliaya half sobbed, looking around wildly. “Where are you?” She started to turn unsteadily, then without warning collapsed into a boneless heap.

Yaz got to her hands and knees, gasping for breath. The girl had driven a heel into the centre of her torso and somehow robbed her of air. It seemed inconceivable that Maliaya had been so close to death and yet so deadly. But in drawing her through the gate Yaz had bound them so tightly that they had almost shared a heartbeat—she knew that despite what had just happened the stranger had been hanging on to life by her fingertips.

“How . . . how could she fight like that?” Thurin got up slowly, rubbing his neck and wincing.

“She’s such a little thing . . .” Quina limped over for a closer look. Yaz thought Maliaya wasn’t much younger than Quina, perhaps fourteen, but she was closer to Maya’s height.

Yaz knelt beside the girl and started to ease her gloves off. Like her long coat, they were too thin, too flimsy. They reminded her of what Erris wore in the worlds of memory where he had first walked with her.

Quina crouched to help her. The only other ice-triber in the group now, she knew exactly what needed doing. They checked Maliaya’s extremities. Her very dark skin made it harder to tell what damage had been done, but it was bad. Both hands and both feet showed signs of severe frostbite, but her right hand, the one she hadn’t used when fighting, was definitely the worst, the fingers hard and immobile, the blood within turned to red ice. Yaz and Quina exchanged grim looks. They held the icy fingers between their hands and breathed warmth into them, but both knew that it was too late.