37
Yaz
When the dagger-fish had taken hold of Azad and dragged him into the sea, Yaz had held on to her brother for as long as she could. The beast had pulled the boat down too and the sea had closed over her head. The light had faded and the pressure had built until all she knew was darkness, pain, pressure, and the grip she had on Azad’s wrists. She had no memory of letting go and for that she had always been thankful. There had been no light to show his last goodbye. There had been no pain or sorrow, just the distant surface, impossibly high above her, sunlight filtering green through the waves.
Yaz rose slowly. She had thought that she would continue to rise when she broke the surface, thought that she was dead and that her spirit would continue smoothly into the skies. The cold winds would carry her for eternity and she would never again need to fill her lungs. She would observe without judgment or care, part of the world’s endless breath.
But the surface came and there were hands to receive her.
“She’s waking up!”
“Thank the Ancestor!”
Yaz coughed and opened her eyes. Erris and Maliaya were bent over her, their faces hard to see, starlight dazzling behind them.
“Thurin’s waking up too.” Quina’s voice, close at hand.
Yaz let Erris help her to sit. Maliaya, also sitting, shuffled back, her stump tightly wrapped in hides and held protectively to her chest.
Yaz’s star lay in the farthest corner, blazing out a cool blue light. On the wall opposite, a vertical gate identical to those in the dome above showed only darkness.
“Where’s Taproot?” Thurin sat up, aided by Quina. He rubbed his temples as if trying to massage out the same headache that Yaz had.
“Where we left him, I imagine,” Erris answered, puzzled.
Yaz got to her feet, using Erris’s shoulder to push down on. She began telling them about the diversion she and Thurin had taken with Taproot. She’d expected to wake up to a dozen devils and an array of tortures that made the Tainted’s bloodstained boards and sharp iron seem tame.
“I thought Taproot would be here too,” she concluded, still looking around for him.
“Well, ghosts belong in the underworld.” Quina looked worried, clearly shaken by Yaz’s visit with Seus and the god of death. “But we don’t. Can we go back now?” She pointed to the black gate.
Yaz wasn’t sure if it would still work. “Even if we could escape while Seus and Haydies are fighting, what’s up there for us? If we leave the dome, then we have to deal with the eidolon and resume our journey with all those horrors that Seus sent to track us down. Or we could do what we came to do and get this box to carry Taproot in. Then at least we’ll have some guidance.”
“We didn’t need guidance. We just needed to head south.” Quina was trying not to sound angry and failing.
“But now we do.” Erris saved Yaz from answering. “And the city might not have known that we were coming but it certainly knows that we’re here now. So we should move.”
“We don’t know where we’re going,” Quina protested. “Taproot said something about the seventeenth level, I think. But where are we now?”
“The ninth,” Erris said. “He told us that’s where we’d emerge. We just have to go down eight more.”
“Just—” Quina began, but Erris was already heading for the exit.
“We’ve got to go.” Thurin looked pale as he beckoned Quina on. “This Haydies scared me more than Theus ever did. And Theus terrified me.”
“Oh hells!” And Quina hurried after him, clearly very frightened.
Yaz, lacking any better idea, followed too, beckoning a confused Maliaya to go with her. She sent the star flying ahead of the group before they ran out of light. As grim as things were, at least they could see where they were going. However bad the threat, Yaz still didn’t think it could get worse than shuffling blind into the black ice.
The next chamber was as bare and empty as the first, lacking only a gate. Yaz relaxed the smallest fraction. She remembered how large Vesta’s undercity had been. Whatever else this underworld of Haydies might be like, it was at least unlikely to be crowded. They moved on, searching for stairs or shafts.
At the back of Yaz’s mind Haydies’s cruel promise repeated itself over and over. An eternity of suffering. She supposed if that happened she would find out whether she died with the flesh or somehow transferred into the new everlasting Yaz. It would answer Erris’s questions about whether he was “real” or not. She’d no intention of finding out, though. Death was better than capture. She only wished that the Path still lay within her reach to offer a quick exit.
“Where are we?” Maliaya’s question lifted Yaz from her dark thoughts.
“I . . .” Yaz opened her mouth to reply before astonishment at the girl’s restraint overtook her. All she had been through, and only now was she asking where they were.
“I don’t know what to tell you, Maliaya. We—”
“Mali.”
“What?”
“My friends call me Mali.”
“Oh.” Yaz wasn’t sure they were friends yet.
“You saved my life,” Mali said, as if sensing her doubt. “I was going to die on the ice. And this . . .” She raised her stump with a grimace. “Your friends saved my life again. I know enough to understand that it had to be done.” She shook her head. “At least Mistress Blade should let me off lessons now . . . Probably not, though.”
“We’re . . .” Yaz paused as Erris entered another chamber ahead of them. He gave the all-clear sign and they moved on. “We’re still on the ice. Or we were. Thousands of miles north of where you got into trouble.”
“Why me?” Mali asked. “Why save a girl thousands . . . did you say thousands of miles?” She looked dismayed.
Yaz nodded. “You were chosen by Taproot. The ghost you saw with us. He’d found you I don’t know how long ago, and had been watching you because of your powers. You’re a quantal. A very strong one. As to why he wanted you . . . it’s complicated but now he wants me instead.” She shrugged and tried to smile. “Right now we’re in the same place we brought you to, only miles below the surface and quite a way into the rock beneath the ice. This is what remains of one of the cities of the Missing. The undercity. It’s called Haydies.” Yaz studied the girl’s face to see how she was taking this unlikely news.
Mali pursed her lips. “Either I’m still dying on the ice and this is my last dream before I join the Ancestor, or I’m here and have to believe everything you’re saying.” Despite her talk of trust the girl remained guarded and fell to silence once more.
They passed through half a dozen more chambers of varying size and along hundreds of yards of corridor.
“The biggest so far,” Quina breathed. The hall ahead of them could accommodate a spear throw, both in length and height. Small corridors ran off from both the long sides and a single large corridor from the rear.
The five of them moved through in a huddle, the star hanging high above them, its light playing across the cloud of dust raised by their passage. Yaz’s skin began to tingle.
“Wait.” She glanced about as the others came to a halt around her.
“I don’t see—” Thurin started.
But a glow from the end of the hall stopped him. A large symbol had begun to shine on the wall above the far exit. A single, complex letter of the Missing’s script. Immediately a profound sense of grief invaded Yaz, a shapeless loss that fastened onto Maya’s death and squeezed until the tears streamed from her eyes.
“Nina . . .” Mali choked out a sob for her dead friend.
The others’ faces ran with tears. Only Erris seemed unaffected. The sadness built as they advanced, until Quina stopped walking and dropped to one knee, sobbing her heart out.
“Quina. Come on.” Yaz reached for her. “It’s just . . .”
But it wasn’t just the script wall stopping them. Maya was dead. They should be grieving. Yaz couldn’t bring the words to her mouth. She couldn’t tell Quina to forget Maya, shake off her death and walk on. She couldn’t do it herself either. Beside her, Thurin fell to his knees.
Another symbol dawned on the wall beside the first, two feet across and seeming to glow through the thickness of the stone. This one brought with it a despair deeper than the one that had begun to infect them on the grey ice. A third symbol lit, this one bringing existential dread, as potent as the holothaur’s projections but directionless, making Yaz want to curl up and die rather than flee. She found herself on her hands and knees. Quina lay beside her, face in hands. Mali knelt with her fist clenched, staring at her stump. “They’re sigils. We can’t stay.” She grated out the words but made no move to leave.
Erris had been looking around at his companions’ behaviour in momentary confusion but now, under the symbols’ combined light, he began to feel it too. The Missing’s script wall seemed to be sufficiently adaptable to work against machinery as well as flesh and blood. Yet another symbol appeared, this one waking pain in every nerve. An alphabet of destruction had started to inscribe itself across the walls and soon it would spell their end.
Yaz had fought the script of the Missing before, back in Vesta. She rallied her strength and brought her star around behind the others, hoping that their desire to escape its effects would drive them forward. “Erris . . .” She reached out a hand and shoved Erris. “Have to go . . .”
The pain sigil made her want to scream, and crawling towards it only made things worse, but where every surface of the hall was starting to show new script, and even the side corridors were starting to glow, the corridor that led off beneath the original sigils lay dark.
Erris took hold of Thurin and Quina and managed to pull them with him despite his own discomfort. Mali followed on her own, bent under the pressure as if she were leaning into the wind, one arm raised to shield her face from the fierce light of the main sigils.
The relief on entering the shadowed corridor came suddenly and so profoundly that Yaz crawled for several more yards before realizing she was cutting her hands on the rough stone. The absence of sigils seemed to be down to the fact that the perfectly flat planes of the Missing’s walls had been gouged away as if by great claws, tearing it right down to the bedrock behind the poured stone.
“We’re in the hells,” Quina gasped. “We’ve died and we’re in the hells!”
“Your knee’s bleeding,” Yaz said. “The dead don’t bleed.”
Quina looked down to inspect. Erris had pulled her over the torn rock and ripped a hole in the hides, breaking the skin beneath.
Mali picked her way across the broken stone. “Mistress Path always said that the world was far stranger and more complicated than what we see before us. I guess this is my punishment for laughing at the old woman.”
The sight of her own blood calmed Quina. She glanced back at the glowing hall. “We’ll need another way out.”
“We’ll need to find Taproot first, and the box he wants.” Yaz stood up and led off, sending her star ahead. Her confidence was fake, but she knew that staying put was only going to leave them hungrier, thirstier, and easier to find.
The undercity of Haydies had been transformed into something that felt close to the hells imagined by the tribes. The Ictha taught that the hells were the final resting place of any soul foolish enough in life to have angered all the gods. But if just one god stood up for you, then your soul would be spared.
The structure of the city remained but great swathes of it had been torn down to the bedrock with rubble piled in the larger chambers. Untouched sections remained too, but here the script returned to drive Yaz and her companions back.
The first ghost they saw was the pale image of a tribesman staring this way and that as if everything he saw was some new horror. His eyes never touched Yaz or the others, and he went on his way. A woman followed later, screaming but making no sound, her outer furs gone and her hair at wild angles. Further on they found a whole hall full of ghosts who seemed frozen in place but who followed them with their eyes.
Beyond this, they found a chamber of ghosts all burning in a pale flame as silent as their screaming. Yaz turned away from their agony, trying not to think about how long they’d been there, or what it meant.
Several times she heard the sound of scraping in the darkness behind them, as if something were dragging its leviathan body after them over the harsh edges of the stone. She had no intention of going back to confront whatever beast might be following them and made no mention of it to the others. But she did cast frequent glances over her shoulder and tried to maintain a swift pace till the sounds faded into the distance.
Three times they descended long falls that must once have been stairways, and three other times they climbed down shafts, no longer needing the Broken’s system of cables as the walls were so deeply gouged that climbing was relatively easy. Mali could not do it one-handed, but Erris was able to take her on his back.
“I’d feel a lot safer if we had our ropes off the sled,” Quina said, clinging to the wall of a hundred-foot shaft with a good half of it left to fall.
“You wouldn’t be any safer,” Thurin said. “I’m betting there’re a thousand ways to die down here, but falling isn’t going to be what gets you.” He grinned across, sweat sticking his black hair to his forehead. “I’d catch you.”
Yaz continued down. Her hands burned with cuts and her fingers ached. All her limbs trembled from overexertion. Before the changes had robbed her of her Ictha strength Yaz could have climbed up the shaft using only her arms, the greater danger being clumsiness rather than exhaustion. Still, her old fear of the drop was lessened by the idea that Thurin had hold of her blood and would not let her fall. Even if it had been Quina that he told.
Yaz tried not to look down but when she did she saw the others’ upturned faces, nervous in the starlight. Eventually she joined them, hugging her fingers beneath her armpits. The shaft came down beside a T-junction from which three wide tunnels led off, none of them offering a reason to choose it over the others.
“. . . thirsty . . .” Mali muttered the word in her own tongue. One word only but it suddenly unlocked the projection of her thirst along the bond Yaz had forged with her when dragging her through the haze-gate, and Yaz’s own mouth parched instantly to the point at which her tongue felt like sharkskin.
“Thurin, Mali needs water. Really badly.” Yaz turned to the girl. “You should have said!”
Mali stretched a smile. “Can you magic water from the air? This place is dry and you’re not carrying waterskins.”
“Why would anyone carry water?” Yaz was confused. The world was made of water and if you poured some in a skin it would be ice in moments and not come out again.
Thurin saved Mali from an answer. “There’s nothing close by. I can sense that somewhere it’s filtering down through the rock, but not nearly as much as in Vesta. The best bet is to keep heading down.”
“There may be fewer stars left here,” Erris said. “Less heat. Less melting. Less water.”
“We’ll move on and find some,” Yaz said. “After a short rest.” It pained Yaz to admit her weakness but she sensed Mali needed the rest too. The group slumped to the floor, backs against the walls. Mali closest to Yaz but still regarding her with a degree of reserve despite the depth of their connection.
“What were you doing on the ice?” Yaz asked. The girls had seemed so unprepared. It suddenly struck her that she was at long last face-to-face with someone from the green world. Someone who could tell her the truth of what awaited them in the distant south.
“We were ranging. Every novice has to go up onto the ice at least once before they leave Mystic Class.” Mali frowned as if pained by more than her wrist. “We shouldn’t have gone more than ten miles from the Corridor but a terrible storm came and we must have got turned around. Our tent blew away and . . .”
“Without shelter you die.” Yaz nodded.
“Even with the tent we couldn’t have lasted long. It’s hard to believe anyone can live there all the time. And this far north! Do you all live in ruins like this?”
Yaz tried not to smile at the idea. “No. On the ice. Nobody lives in the Missing’s ruins. It’s dangerous, nearly impossible to get in and out, there’s no food, and there are probably monsters hunting us right now. So be ready.”
Mali set the back of her head to the wall and exhaled slowly. “When Mistress Path told us all that stuff about worlds behind worlds I always used to say that I wanted to see it. I’d moan about how dull it was at the convent. She’d always tell me to be thankful for sweet mercies. Her little joke. But the joke’s on me now.” She bit her lip and scanned the shadows, alert, warrior to the fore, wounded girl relegated to the background, idle chatter over with once again. “I think—”
A terrible roar cut off whatever Mali had to say. It sounded like a mix of the hoola’s cry and metal being tortured until it broke. It also sounded as if more than one thing was coming.
“Let’s go.” Erris stood, hauling Thurin up with him. He led off while the girls scrambled to their feet, choosing the tunnel that seemed to take them most directly away from the source of the cries.
“A hunter?” Thurin asked, clearly as shaken as the rest of them.
“I doubt it’s like the ones Eular made,” Erris said. “These will be the work of a city mind. Something more like the avatar that came after Yaz and me when we escaped the void star.”
Thurin asked no more questions and concentrated on running. There had been plenty of evenings on the ice spent recounting tales of the previous weeks beneath it. Thurin and Quina knew how deadly the avatar had been and that it had survived a blast of Yaz’s Path-power.
They clambered over rubble, cutting hands and knees in their haste, squeezed through a narrower section, and passed beneath another vertical shaft. The star flew ahead of them into a new chamber, driving the dark ahead of it. One large clot of shadow resisted. The star’s light stripped away darkness until all that remained, revealed in the centre, was an avatar, cast in the same black metal that Vesta’s assassin had been fashioned from, but in a very different form. This was a dog, so huge that the top of its back was level with Yaz’s chin. It had three vicious-looking heads, each tilting to regard Yaz and her friends as if they might be good to eat. Yaz could sense no star within the thing. Like the assassin in Vesta, it had a different power source and relied on careful manufacture rather than a star’s ability to pull together random parts into the service of some grand design.
The three-headed hound stood guard at the mouth of the largest tunnel they’d yet encountered. One that headed downwards at a steep angle, with ghostly flames clinging to its deeply gouged walls. Faint screams reached up from the darkness behind the beast. If there was a designated mouth to the hells, Yaz thought that this must be it.
Erris spread his arms and began to back away. “We can find another route down.”
“Not if it eats us first,” Quina said. She hadn’t even bothered to draw her knife.
“I think it’s got to stay here to guard—”
The avatar proved Thurin wrong immediately by leaving the entrance to advance on them, moving with alarming speed. Yaz had hoped its size and weight would make it ponderous but now she knew there would be no escape by running from it.
They ran anyway. Mali, slowed by blood loss and exhaustion, trailed and one dog head dipped to snatch her up in jaws lined with gleaming steel teeth. An invisible force jerked her sideways just before the main fangs could snag her. Thurin lifted her into the air, too high for the guardian to reach.
It turned on Yaz instead. She sent her star straight at the gaping mouth that darted in her direction, aiming the blazing orb with enough speed to punch a hole through someone. To her shock the dog snapped her missile out of the air and swallowed it in one swift motion that plunged the room into darkness.
“Help!” It wasn’t clear who shouted.
Yaz stood frozen, hearing the hound’s metal claws close by. Unable to see, she had no idea which way to run. Instead she reached out to the lost star, willing it to emit both heat and light at its utter maximum. Several glowing spots appeared in the darkness and Yaz blinked to make sense of them. Not, as she’d hoped, chinks in the hound’s armour showing a red heat within, nor spots where it might be melting . . . the light was escaping through the beast’s eyes, all six of them throwing out enough illumination to reveal the chamber once more.
“Run!” Yaz continued to force the star past its limits while heading back the way they’d come.
The others ran too, Quina at the front, Erris to the rear by choice. Thurin had returned Mali to the ground and she was making the best speed she could. The hound howled from three blazing throats and gave chase.
They got less than fifty yards, almost to the shaft they’d walked under on the way in. Erris turned at the last moment to meet the hound face-to-face . . . or faces. Erris’s inhuman speed had returned as though something in the air of the city had replenished his energy stores simply as he walked through it. Even so, he barely sidestepped the first snapping head, and the next, although it failed to get its teeth into him, sent Erris flying backwards, felling Thurin with a flailing leg as he tumbled across the ridged stone.
The hound was on Erris again in a moment, knocking Mali and Yaz aside in its eagerness. Yaz felt as if she’d been hit by a wall, only to crash into another one a moment later. She slid down, dazed, with her back to the corridor wall. Thurin and Mali were sprawled on the ground, Thurin bleeding profusely from a cut to his forehead. Erris was on his back, pinned beneath one of the hound’s great feet. Only Quina was standing, and although she had her knife out now there seemed nothing useful she could do with it.
The star still burned inside the hound. Yaz could hear its wild song but it didn’t seem to be greatly inconveniencing the beast.
One of the heads dipped to get a mouthful of Erris. He reached out a hand to ward it off and it took his arm instead. Yaz had no doubt that when it was finished with Erris the rest of them would be slaughtered in short order. Which actually seemed a merciful end given the alternatives Haydies had mentioned. Even so, as the heads not mauling Erris turned her way and fixed her with blazing eyes, Yaz realized she very much wanted to live. She tried to get up, pressing on the sharp stone with bloody hands.
The thunderbolt struck without warning. At first Yaz didn’t understand what had happened. It was as if a massive iron hammer hit the avatar squarely in the back, just at the base of the triple necks. The sound of it hit like another blow, deafening her. And a heartbeat later something even larger hit, shattering into pieces and covering the scene in debris.
The triple-headed hound collapsed with its chest against the ground, and the hammerhead that seemed to have fallen from the shaft above rolled clear. It came to a halt, lit not by the beast’s glowing eyes, which the blow had shut, but by the glow of the impact site where the star’s heat appeared to be finally melting a path to the outside. It now revealed itself not to be a hammer at all but a large cube of dull iron with rounded corners. The second, larger object that smashed when it hit now appeared to have been a boat-sled.
“Zox . . .” Yaz managed to croak.
As if answering his name, Zox began to unfold, his head lifting to regard the scene with the same sad black eyes that had watched her cross a thousand miles of ice.
Fresh light sprang out as the avatar head that had Erris’s arm in its jaws once again opened its eyes.
Mali was on it in a trice. She began beating at it with something she’d seized from the wreckage of the sled, the blows making a din that just managed to reach through Yaz’s deafness. Despite her smallness and the size of her opponent, the ferocity of the blows seemed to stun the hound. The frying pan’s edge hammered down across its eyes. In the next moment Mali flipped the pan so she had hold of its edge and drove the handle directly into one glowing eye, putting her whole body into the thrust.
Yaz joined the fray. She gave up her attempt to stand and instead reached out with her mind, taking hold of the remaining Watcher’s eyes from the sled’s wreckage. With an effort that sent a sharp pain to divide the two halves of her brain, Yaz whirled the half-dozen stars into the air, accelerating them along tight trajectories to smash into the active head at the highest velocities she could manage. The stars ricocheted away, out of her control, one only missing Mali when deflected by her pan. The fifth impact proved the most solid, embedding the star in the back of the hound’s head. With a curious sigh it slumped forward, releasing Erris’s arm. It shuddered once then lay motionless.
Yaz stood unsteadily. Quina and Thurin came to join her, driven back from the hound by the stars’ auras. The triple-headed hound stayed down, not even twitching as bright rivulets of molten metal began to trickle out beneath its bulk. Somewhere deep within it Yaz felt the star responsible fizzle into nothing, utterly spent.