38
How did he find us?” Thurin helped Erris to his feet, his eyes on Zox rather than the deep but bloodless wounds the hound had inflicted on Erris’s arm. “How did he even get into the dome? And he went back for the sled? How did he hold on to it?”
Yaz tried to imagine it. Had the scraping noise that she’d heard behind them been Zox dragging the sled? The dog would have had to find a way through the dome wall, then select the right gate and plunge through it. He would have had to drag the sled through what must have been miles of the undercity, before hurling himself down a hundred yards of vertical shaft, boat-sled in tow, just in time to hit the avatar square in the back of its necks.
“Taproot said there was something wrong with Zox,” Quina said. “Something about being ‘infected’?”
“Did the eidolon taint him?” Yaz wanted to bring all her remaining stars in tight around the dog, but the others were too close.
“Why would it help us if that was the case?” Thurin shook his head.
“Accident?” Quina didn’t believe it. Yaz could tell by her voice.
“We can ask Taproot when we find him,” Erris said. “All we’ll find out by staying here is how many other avatars Haydies has to send against us.”
“Others?” Yaz’s heart sank. Suddenly she remembered Erris’s arm and limped across to see how bad it was. Her collision with the wall had done something to her hip, she discovered. “Can you move it?” His flesh was the same colour as his skin and torn flaps of it hung from black iron bones.
“Not really.” He lifted the arm a few inches. It made disturbing noises, some like tortured metal, others . . . wetter. “I’ll see what repairs can be done when we’re somewhere safer. We need to go.”
Yaz looked around at the wreckage of the boat, registering for the first time the scale of the disaster. “We can’t leave the fish.”
Their catch from the crater was still frozen in a single battered lump. It could just be carried by one person but not for any great distance.
“Let’s make a sled and Zox can drag it.” Quina snatched up an unbroken board and a handful of stray wires.
Yaz nodded. “Quickly though.” She turned to Mali, who was still clutching the battered pan. “You did well with that!”
Mali allowed herself a small smile. “I’ll carry it for you.” She shoved it through her belt.
“Break off a fish for Mali, Thurin,” Yaz called. “And remember, she still needs water. We all will soon.”
When Quina handed Mali the battered frozen fish, a young greenfin, the girl looked at it with faint horror.
“Quint esta et?”
“What is it?” Yaz echoed in surprise. “A greenfin.”
Mali took it gingerly as if it might bite her.
“Tell her it’s a fish,” Erris suggested.
“She’s not an idiot,” Yaz said, before adding, “It’s a fish.”
“Oh . . .” Mali turned it one way then the other.
“You . . . you’ve seen a fish before? Right?” Yaz asked. She felt as if she were asking whether Mali had breathed air before.
“Oh yes.” Mali nodded.
“You see!” Yaz said to Erris. “She said yes.”
“In pictures,” Mali added.
“In pictures?”
Mali nodded again. “But I’ve never eaten one. I’ve never even seen the sea.”
Yaz found her mouth hanging open. “The sea? You said ‘the’ sea, like there’s only one . . . And you’ve never seen it? How . . .”
“The Sea of Marn. It’s nearly fifty miles from the convent and I’ve never been to it. They say you can see it from the plateau on a clear day, but I’m not that sharp-eyed.” She shrugged. “I suppose there are other seas somewhere. Past the Kingdoms of Ald I think there’s Nebbon and then you have to sail to reach . . . whatever’s next. Mistress Academia would beat me if she knew I’d forgotten!” She still held the fish as if it were some kind of weapon.
Yaz swallowed her astonishment. “You’re supposed to eat it.”
“But it’s not cooked . . .” Mali held it closer to her mouth. “And it has eyes.”
“They’re the best bit.” Yaz turned away in case the green lands had some sort of taboo on watching people eat like the Quinx clan did.
A short while later they set off again, Zox dragging a sled made of three boards wired together. The remaining fish and the hot pot sat on the sled, lashed in place with spare reins now that Zox’s had been shortened. They’d added some furs and boards to the load, along with the fishing gear. The remaining six stars now floated ahead of them, directed by Yaz’s will.
Yaz paused at the entrance of the sloping tunnel the hound had been guarding. The way lay dark ahead of them, the stars hanging in the middle, their light barely touching the walls. She could imagine that while all the hells of legend might not lie down there, at least one of them did, maybe more. Zox halted beside her, Mali behind him, clutching her pan once more.
“Come on.” And Yaz led the way down.
It grew warmer as they descended and it had already been warm enough to melt ice. Yaz tried to keep her attention on the passage ahead, directing her stars into any nook or side passage. Her thoughts kept returning to the fight with the avatar. She’d come through a series of desperate battles since she had plunged into the Pit of the Missing. Hetta had attacked her almost immediately. And several times she’d thought that she and her friends were doomed. Quite a few of them had died along the way: Petrick, Kao, and Maya prime among them. She was tired of her life being suspended on such a slender thread. Even though the Ictha walked on the edge of survival every day, at least there had been the feeling that they would survive, that there would be more days to come, years enough for family, time to love, see children grow, pass something on to those who would come after.
This long trek though, towards a goal of her own choosing, compelled by her own insistence . . . it was as insane a gamble as throwing herself after Zeen, but driven by no more reason than her own selfish desire to see something other than ice. And unlike Thurin and Quina, unlike little Maya, who would never see the end of the journey, Yaz had already seen the green world. Erris had shown it to her. Why was that not enough? Why was she inflicting this on herself, and on the others?
“Got you!” Erris caught her as she fell, tripped by a ridge in the torn stone floor. Even one-armed he was more able than her. His grip on her arm swung her around to face him instead of kissing the ground.
“Thank you.” She looked at his hand on her arm then glanced at Thurin approaching with Quina and Mali. Thurin could have caught her with the power of his mind if he’d been closer and quicker. “You asked if we really wanted to do this,” Yaz said. “Back before we stepped into the gate.”
“I did.” Erris released her.
“And my best answer was that we had no choice at this point,” Yaz said.
“It was.”
“Well, it wasn’t a good answer. We should have a choice. We do have a choice.”
The others drew level and stopped to listen. Even Zox.
Yaz bit her lip, trying to force thoughts that were almost too big for her brain into something as small as words. “Back there on the ice, when we were starving, when we had no shelter . . . when we were all dying . . . I closed in on myself. I left you. I’m sorry—”
“You didn’t!” Quina protested.
“I did. It was Erris who got you, Thurin, and Maya into the sled. Erris and Zox who pulled you. Even though they were both exhausted. And I did what the Ictha do when it comes to the sharp end of things. I narrowed my vision until there was only me, only one direction. I dug in and kept going. Because it’s what we do.” Yaz found she had tears in her eyes. A foolish waste of water in a dry place, her inner Ictha chided. “I told myself that I’m never doing that again. I told myself that the Ictha selfishness—the drive that enables us to survive where nobody else can—was the same thinking that put my brother in the Pit of the Missing. I vowed to break that way of thinking. It’s beneath us. Survival has a value, has a price—but if that price is too high then it shouldn’t be paid, because what you purchase at such a cost is worthless.
“If I had reached the sea and survived but left you, my only friends, dead behind me on the ice, I would have spent however long I had left wishing that I had died there too, trying to help you. Mali did that. You saw her! She stayed with her people.”
A single tear left a glistening track across Mali’s cheek. She bowed her head.
“But this last week, following Taproot’s directions, aimed all the while for this city, I’ve been thinking, wondering. Why should that change end with the people in front of me? Why should I only risk myself for the people I can see, the people I can reach out and touch?”
Quina stepped closer, saying nothing, close enough that her shoulder pressed against Yaz’s.
“This green world we’ve walked so far to find . . . all of it is at risk. Taproot’s enemy wants the ice to swallow it. And all of Abeth is growing colder year by year. One day, probably long after our children are dead, nobody will be able to endure the ice—not even the Ictha. I’ve been thinking that we should help them, the people we’ve never seen, the children our children will love and that we’ll never know. And here, in this place built by a broken mind dedicated to suffering . . . here’s where I needed to say all of these words that have been filling me up on the ice. It’s a choice. It is a choice. If there were no choice it wouldn’t mean anything. We could go back. We could try. We could head north to our clans or press on south to the green. And even if we die on the journey it will be a death we know, far cleaner and more merciful than anything we’ll find here under the ground. But I chose to take the risk, face the danger, and do something good. Something that will make the Gods in the Sky hold their breath, and the Gods in the Sea still the waves. All my life I’ve been bound by my duty to the Ictha, closed off by it, kept safe by it. Survival at any cost. I’m done paying.” She drew a deep breath. “Sometimes you have to make a choice.” She looked from Erris to Thurin, one calm despite his injury, watching her with understanding eyes, an eternity of waiting trailing behind him, the other dirty, grazed, his shock of hair in disarray, his expression conflicted, the intensity of his stare probably a match for hers. They were both babies compared to Erris, however young he might look. “I’m choosing . . . to take on hell. And you can choose to follow me or find your own path.”
Zox took the opportunity of the pause to plod on, noisily dragging the board-sled behind him.
“What he said.” Quina followed Zox.
Erris smiled and walked on, raising his good arm to pat Yaz on the shoulder as he passed. A brotherly gesture.
Thurin kept her gaze. “You taught me to fly, Yaz. I’m going where you go.”
“I didn’t tea—” But Thurin was already following the others.
“I don’t need to understand what he says.” Mali nodded at Thurin’s back. “He likes you, that one.”
Yaz put her head down and pressed the foolish smile from her lips. She followed the rest. “Come on.”
Mali limped after her and they walked on together. “Do you have a . . .” Yaz glanced towards Thurin’s back instead of finishing her question.
Mali grinned and shook her head. “Where I live it’s all girls, and if I wanted something more than a friend I’d want a boy. That’s not going to happen, though. I’m to be a nun, and when we grow up we marry the Ancestor—our god.” Her eyes fell to the stump she held before her, showing the first hint of self-pity in all this time. “Who would want me now anyway? I’m broken.”
Yaz looked at the darkness all around them, the violence worked on the walls, the probably doomed band heading down into hell. She shook her head, smiling at the conversation they were having. “We’re all broken, Mali.” She put an arm around the girl’s shoulders. “If we get out of this remind me to tell you about Kaylal, the most handsome boy I ever met.”
The tunnel led down a considerable way and at one point Thurin drew their attention to seeping water that would otherwise have been passed unseen. Mali hurried to it as fast as her frostbitten feet would let her. The flow was too slow for her to collect it in the pan she still had hold of but Thurin wouldn’t let her press her mouth to the stone and try to lick up what she needed.
“A moment.”
Mali’s face when the water lifted from the rock in a thin veil and spun itself into a sparkling thread was quite comical. She opened her parched mouth and let the tiny airborne stream feed itself onto her tongue.
By the time Mali had drunk several mouthfuls Yaz was feeling quite dry herself. But there was no time for them all to drink. They moved on. For the first time Yaz became aware of a distant beat, so slow that many chambers could be crossed between two thuds, so deep that it resonated through the length of her spine. A void star. Far beneath them, the dark heart of Haydies was measuring out their time.
“Wait.” Erris caught Yaz’s shoulder.
“What?” They were on a new layer of the city now. By Yaz’s calculations it should be the level where Taproot had said they would find the box he needed.
Erris’s injured arm whined as he pointed with it. “The wall.”
Up ahead Yaz’s stars had pushed the darkness back a good fifty yards, but one clot of shadows clung stubbornly to the scarred rock. Yaz found herself about to ask Maya what her shadow-sense made of it but she bit down on the words before they could escape her. Instead she returned three of her stars to shine upon the patch of night they’d failed to shift.
The darkness flattened against the wall until it resembled nothing more than a black door. A door through which something started to push itself, a dark shape resisting the starlight, swallowing it whole and returning nothing. Quina’s knife made a zinging noise as it cleared the sheath. “Wait,” Yaz told her.
The shape continued to push out, as if the darkness were a thin hide that could be stretched with sufficient effort. A man’s shape. A thin man trying to press out into the world. And suddenly he was there, the darkness snapping back and vanishing, releasing Taproot’s ghostly form among them.
“That,” he said, “was unpleasant.” He brushed at his sleeves as if whatever had held him might still be clinging to his body here and there.
“Where have you been?” Yaz glanced up the tunnel in case something might be coming for Taproot.
“Haydies returned me to my torment.” Taproot shivered. “He considers everyone who arrived with the original landing to be an invader. And the punishment . . . well . . . you can see his deteriorating mind has gone much older than Old Testament!”
Yaz blinked at him, not understanding.
“Well.” Taproot straightened his ghostly clothes. “I escaped him before and I escaped him again. Not entirely this time, of course, because I’m still here in his quaint little underworld. But I reckoned you would want guiding to what we need. So, let’s be at it then. Quick-smart. Haydies may not be the brightest candle in the temple but hunting us down won’t take him forever. Our only advantage is that he doesn’t know where we’re heading. He’ll be making sure we can’t leave the city. Beyond that he’s quite patient. The chase is, after all, part of the torment. Hope is sometimes the cruellest knife in the torturer’s collection.”
“Let’s go.” Yaz gestured for Taproot to lead the way. She’d resigned herself to whatever happened and now she just wanted to get on with it. Fear was tracking her, the kind that chews away at resolve and leaves a person less than they want to be. If they stood still for too long it would catch up with her.
“It’s actually not far from here.” Taproot spun on a heel. “But you’re going the wrong way. You passed the turn back there.”
Erris caught up with the ghost. “If Haydies’s servants have torn this place back to the bedrock, how is there going to be some untouched box just lying around for us to pick up?”
“Because, dear boy, I was captured a very long time ago, before Haydies lost most of his remaining marbles and ordered this redesign. And back in those days there were still a few toys left down here. Some of it the works of the Missing that they left behind—but most of it technology subverted from our own people, because the Missing didn’t leave their servants much apart from the means to take over new technology. And I hid a few trinkets away.”
“So how is this moon that keeps the Corridor open in the ice still working if Seus wants to bring it down?” Yaz asked, bracketing Taproot with Erris.
Taproot fluttered a hand at her. “Our ancestors weren’t idiots. They soon understood what was being done to them. They locked the arks off from outside influence in ways that even the Missing’s weapon—their ability to subvert other technologies—has found hard to overcome. Also, it’s only recently that Seus’s madness grew to the point at which he considered the ultimate solution to the Missing’s desire for privacy to be genocide. Before that the moon was not considered a threat and was left to do its job. Now, though, Seus has turned the weapon against the last functioning ark and slowly he’s been chipping a way through its defences. Which is something the original designers had not considered possible. The only thing that will save us is to get a dedicated intelligence on the inside to restructure the ark’s barriers to meet the challenge. Of course . . . that means raising those barriers first, so I can get in.”
Yaz reached out to stop Taproot but her hand just passed through his shoulder, leaving her feeling slightly foolish, and slightly tingly. “You’re saying that not only do we have to get you out of here and across thousands of miles of ice . . . we have to raise barriers that have defied the most powerful city mind armed with the one weapon the Missing left to their creations—the weapon that laid the original tribes of man low?”
“Well, yes.” Taproot turned back towards her. “That’s why I chose you. It wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment thing, you know. I’d been waiting the best part of ten thousand years for you to come along. All the me’s, all the fragments of me scattered across this planet, have spent that whole time hunting for someone who can open the star door.”
“And you think I can?” Yaz felt the weight of that expectation settle on her shoulders.
“Maybe.” Taproot sketched out a host of invisible doubts with flicks of his quick, long-fingered hands. “You’re the best I’ve seen. Young Maliaya Glosis here is another remarkable talent. The odds against having the two of you in the same millennium are pretty large. Within a few years of each other, astronomical. But while her potential for manipulating the core-stones is remarkable, her greatest skills lean towards Path-work and thread-work.” He began to walk on. “First things first, though.”
Taproot led them through a series of tunnels and chambers, all curiously empty, despite distant screams echoing through them from time to time. Thurin, Quina, and Mali followed Yaz and Erris, Zox clumping along behind them, loud as all the rest put together.
“The box is in there.” Taproot halted at the mouth of a dark chamber. “I’m not going to lie to you. The part of me that sent you here had no idea of the circumstances I live under. If he had, then he would not have sent you. The fact is that, despite appearances, Haydies has a tight hold on the undercity this deep and he’s not going to let us go. My tricks are very limited here. So if we’re going to somehow escape . . . you’re going to have to surprise me. Sorry.”
Yaz had carried the knowledge with her. They had stood before a hall full of gods, been at their mercy. Yes, they’d escaped Seus’s clutches, but only because Haydies had claimed them. How could they possibly prevail? But even so, to hear Taproot say it out loud forced a deep sigh from her. The ice gave an illusion of freedom, the choice to walk forever in any direction. But it seemed that she had been channelled here whichever way she’d turned.
She sent her stars through the archway, illuminating the hall beyond. It looked an unlikely place to hide a box, especially so that it would remain undiscovered and undamaged through the violence that had torn the builder-stone walls down to the bedrock.
Taproot walked in, his feet, fashioned from light, making no sound on the stone. The others followed him.
In the middle of the chamber Taproot stopped and clicked his fingers, generating an actual noise. A hole opened in the air about level with his knees and a white box dropped through. Before the box bounced on the torn rock the hole it had fallen through vanished.
“If you would.” Taproot gestured to the box.
Yaz bent to pick it up. It was a cube with rounded corners, not dissimilar to the shape Zox could fold into. She couldn’t tell what it was made from but the white stuff was warm, smooth, hard, and glowed faintly from within. “Is it big enough?” She ran a speculative eye up the length of Taproot’s body.
“Dear girl, that device could store enough data echoes like me to populate worlds.”
Something buzzed past Yaz’s ear.
“Ouch!” Quina slapped at her neck. Her hand came away with a small smear of blood across the palm. “Son of a bitch!” Something tiny buzzed away from her. Then suddenly the air was full of the things, too fast and too small to be seen properly, biting and scratching as they whirred past.
Yaz covered her eyes as several of the small creatures flew at them. Mali and Thurin were cursing and yelping too. Erris’s hand snapped out to trap one of the things between thumb and finger. He held it out for Yaz to inspect between the gaps in her shielding hands. A tiny winged metal horror. Like a flying hunter but on a much smaller scale. The air was full of them. The one squirming in the vise of Erris’s fingers even had a tiny star at the heart of it.
“Enough!” Yaz focused on the dancing field of minute stars all around her. With a sharp twist of her mind she sent them all hurtling towards the same spot, yanking them from their myriad trajectories. They hit with a muted crunch, forming a fist-sized ball of sharp-edged iron.
A second wave of the things filled the air, these ones larger than their predecessors, some as big as thumbnails. At the same time the entrance to the chamber began to fill with a silent, glowing river of ghosts. Pale wraiths bearing horrible wounds and injuries. With them came bones, complete articulated sets of human bones; the word “skeletons” drifted into Yaz’s mind from Erris’s vocabulary. The Ictha never saw people’s bones, for flesh doesn’t rot on the ice, but here was the last hard truth that lay beneath everyone. Thin metal strips ran the length of the bones and some wonder of the ancient days had been used to breathe a false life into them so that they could stalk forward, bony hands extended as though for an embrace.
Yaz wrenched the stars from the next wave of small demons. Some few remained though, animated by other technologies, and several of these darted towards her face. With a single swing of her pan, Mali interposed herself, hammering three demons out of the air. But more were coming, with wingspans as wide as her palm.
On the pitted and scored walls Missing script was beginning to show, wrapping itself over the ridges, filling the hollows with golden light. More words of sorrow, fear, and despair. Yaz could feel the weight of their influence bearing down on her, pressing her spirit into the floor.
Behind the ghosts and the skeletons, other more monstrous shapes were entering the room. Creatures not unlike the winged terrors assaulting Yaz and her friends, but big as gerants and sculpted from black iron, built like the avatar hound with three heads, immune to Yaz’s skills and stronger by far than Erris.
Behind the demons, bowing to come through the high entrance arch, came Haydies, more human than he had appeared in the hall of the gods, wearing a cloak of smoking darkness, one in which horrors constantly appeared and dissipated. He also carried a tall black staff a good four yards in length.
Yaz found herself on her knees, driven there by the power of the script painting itself through the rock and across the walls. Despair, fear, sorrow. Too great a burden to stand beneath. The others were also on their knees. Quina joining Zox on all fours, weeping and slapping at the tiny demons with bloody hands. Even Taproot and Erris had fallen.
“Enough of this foolishness.” Haydies’s voice fell among them like rocks. “Submit to your punishment.” The script brightened still further, binding their emotions, spelling out their fate.
Yaz found tears in her own eyes as she reached to support Thurin, bowed beside her, his hands on the gouged stone before him. They were beaten. She was beaten. There had never been anywhere to run from her fate.
“Prostrate yourselves!” The boom of Haydies’s voice echoed through the chamber. He raised his staff above his head.
As Yaz fought to remain on her knees, rather than collapse upon the floor, she saw out of the corner of her eye that Zox had raised his head. To her amazement, he rocked back, rotating his joints through hitherto unused angles so that he stood on his hind feet. Extending one long black claw with a dexterity wholly at odds with his rugged construction, he began to trace complex shapes in the air. Where his claw moved it seemed to tear the air, letting golden light leak through. In the space of three heartbeats Zox had written out a line of Missing script that hung in empty space. Immediately the pressure of the script on the walls lessened somewhat, the crushing sense of defeat easing.
“What mockery is this?” Haydies boomed.
Zox continued to write defences, weakening the sorrow and terror that the pulsing walls projected onto Yaz and her companions.
Haydies levelled his black staff at the dog and strode forward, pushing demons and skeletons aside, and the ghosts flowed around his legs like a pale tide. “How would a mere construct dare to use the high script of the Miss—”
A deep voice issued from Zox, speaking a language that broke the air in strange ways. With Mali’s speech Yaz could pick out the words even though she understood none of them. This was more like a river of structured sound, almost a song, almost a poem.
“I can not only write the Missing’s script,” Zox continued, using words Yaz knew and a voice she thought she should know. “I speak the language.” He spread his forelegs—his arms as Yaz now thought of them—hands level with his waist, and all his claws sprang out to their full extent. “If you fashion yourselves as gods from a stolen culture then think of me as a Titan. The race of your fathers. Conveniently, I was once known as Prometheus.”