40
Yaz and the others followed Zox back through the maze of passageways and chambers towards the long slope that the triple-headed hound had guarded. It had been easy to see Theus in Zox when he’d stood upright like a man. On all fours it was hard not to think of him as Zox, a loyal and silent dog.
She didn’t know how to feel. Theus was a monster who had abducted Zeen, enslaved scores of the Broken, overseen murder, cannibalism, and torture. He was also responsible for saving their lives at least twice, probably more, and this most recent time from the threat of eternal torment.
“Why do you need us?” She was tempted to kick Zox to get Theus’s attention but realized she would only hurt her foot. “Why are you doing this?”
“I gave my reasons. You weren’t listening?” he growled, more dog-like than Zox had ever been.
“You didn’t tell it all,” Yaz said.
“An age ago I came to this city in chains.” Theus led them up the long slope. “But it was in Vesta that they tore me apart. That’s where they chipped away my sins one by one—and I had many of them, according to my fellow men. They called my kind criminals and terrorists because we didn’t share their vision of a utopia beyond. We didn’t care that the sun was dying and the world would freeze. We were prepared to stay to the bitter end and remain ourselves.
“I wasn’t always that way. My parents were rebels and I rebelled against their rebellion as the young often do. Each generation disappoints the one before. I left the ice—we had ice back then too, but only in the far north. I went to the cities. I even tried the purification of my own free will. In the city of Airees in the sweltering equatorial heat I let them take a core-stone to me and carve out the first of my so-called failings. I knew immediately that they had lessened me. I knew that whatever I had gained was less than what I’d lost. But in those final days, with most of us gone and the remaining few preparing for the last departure, there was no room for choice, no time for different opinions. Nobody was to be left behind. I took back what I’d lost and I ran but they caught me here and took me overland to Vesta where the difficult cases were dealt with. Forced purification is a rough business: they cut out more than they needed to, just to be sure. The pale shadow that was left of me, Prometheus, went willingly with them, thanking them for their help. And I was left in pieces, rotting in the containment vats with a million other dirty fragments.
“I need to be whole again so I have to follow my brothers and sisters into their utopia and reclaim what was taken. To follow them I need to open an ark. But the four tribes were clever. When they understood what the cities were doing to them they got into the last of the arks and hid the controls of their moon inside. What better defences against the weapon the Missing had left their servants than one of the Missing’s own strongholds? And they locked it in their own way intending that nobody could ever unlock it again.
“I need Taproot because he was there at the time. He knows what they did. He knows the modifications they made, the defences they installed, and how to manipulate them once the ark is unlocked.
“And how did they lock the ark? They brought four of their shiphearts—the same as the largest of our core-stones, designed to push ships between the stars—and they used them to form a barrier that could only be opened by bringing the four shiphearts together. But then they broke the shiphearts into fragments and neither they nor the cities had the capacity to restore them. That was a technology that had been lost to the tribes and a skill that had departed with the Missing.
“So I need you, Yaz, because the core-stones broke me and my power over them has deserted me. I need you because on all of Abeth the only person closer to the Missing than me . . . is you.”
“I’m not . . .” Yaz shook her head. Ictha tales about Mokka and Zin watching from the shore of the black sea when the four boats beached were all well and good. But Mokka and Zin weren’t truly the Missing!
“The Missing are a fifth tribe,” Theus said. “Part of the first wave to leave humanity’s home world an age before those who came here from the four systems. I was part of the final ascension that emptied Abeth long before the new tribes arrived, but some of my parents’ sect escaped the purification and managed to hide in the northern ice. It’s not a place to thrive. Their descendants remained a handful, leading primitive lives. I don’t know when or how they met the newcomers but they were not recognized and in time their bloods mingled, though their line stayed in the north.
“So, Yaz, just as Mali is a quantal full-blood, and your swift friend here is a hunska prime, you are a Missing half-blood, heir to the stars as you call them, possessed of rare skills that are going to unlock the ark for me.”
Yaz lifted her head expecting to see the others looking at her as if she were some never-before-seen creature from the ice, but instead found that they had all come face-to-face with the black gate that had first spat them out into the undercity. She flew the largest of her stars forward to touch the ring, opening the way.
“Let’s go.” Erris stepped through and vanished.
Zox plodded after him. Quina spared Yaz an unreadable glance then darted in, followed by Thurin. Taproot flowed along in their wake.
“Mali?” Yaz gestured for the girl to precede her.
“I . . .” Mali clutched at her stump, wincing.
Yaz understood. “You lost a hand last time. I’m sorry.”
Resolve tightened Mali’s face; she bowed her head and rushed through. Yaz took a last quick glance at the dusty halls of Haydies and stepped through after her.
“Let there be light!” Taproot clapped his hands silently as Yaz’s stars popped into being under the black dome. Yaz found herself lying on the gate’s own blackness. She rolled to the side, clambered over the edge, and got to her feet.
“What now?”
“Seus’s monsters. After that, if we survive, more walking.” Thurin looked around him, unenthused. “Lots and lots more walking. The food won’t last.”
“It might if the eidolon kills enough of us,” Quina volunteered with false brightness.
“I’ve had enough walking,” Theus growled. “Taproot. All these lovely gates. Which one did you use to spy on the girl? You must have had a gate reasonably close to her.”
Yaz was about to object to being spied on but then realized that Theus must have meant Mali.
Taproot shuddered and vanished. “This one,” he called from where he’d reappeared somewhere near the middle of the field of upturned gates. “But Seus has all the routes blocked. Even watching through them is dangerous.”
Zox walked out to join him, his heavy feet strangely silent on the black floor. Suddenly remembering her thirst, Yaz brought one of her stars to the ground away from the others. The black floor vanished in a circle, exposing the ice a yard beneath. She willed the star to heat and began to melt a pool.
“Thurin?” She pointed to the problem. If she left the star there the others couldn’t approach the pool she was making. If she took it away then the floor would seal over.
“At your service, Lady Missing.” He tilted his head, a roguish grin taking the sting out of the title.
A moment later the meltwater began to rise in a silvery snake that wound its way through the air. Yaz remembered when Thurin had hesitantly tested his power back in the Broken’s caves to lift a puddle around his hand. It seemed like a lifetime ago.
The snake broke into glistening spheres, almost like Yaz’s stars, and with concentrated effort Thurin directed them separately to Yaz, Quina, Mali, and himself. They drank from the air, marvelling in the goodness of cold water on a dry throat.
“Now Taproot will tell us we’ve taken sustenance in the black dome and must return here every third day to attend to his ghostly needs,” Quina said.
But Taproot was bent over the distant gate with Zox beside him, still harnessed to the sled bearing their meagre possessions. The dog’s nose almost touched the blackness of the gate.
Yaz and the others went to join them.
“Is it night there?” Erris asked.
Thurin snorted. “How can it be night there if it’s not here?”
Yaz nodded. She couldn’t see the sky but she knew that at this time of year with the nights so short another day would have dawned outside the dome. “Is it later there? Didn’t you say the gates lead anywhere and anywhen? Maybe this one leads to tonight. Or last night!”
Zox raised his head to look at her. “That function survives in very few gates. And backwards travel is always ill advised. Plus, it generally requires a core-stone far larger than any you possess. But Erris is correct—it could be night in one place and day in another. Your world is a ball spinning on its axis.”
While Yaz grappled with the idea, Theus set one of Zox’s heavy feet on the nearest sigil, which lit immediately. “I’ve found a path through. It may not last for long. Seus is hunting us.”
“We just . . . ?” Yaz looked at the black circle. It didn’t seem right somehow. They had enslaved themselves to this task for so long, endured so many days toiling across the ice, leaning into the jaws of the wind, come so close to death, so close to the limits of their endurance, and covered barely a quarter of the distance; and now, here in this city lost in the vastness of all that ice, the Missing offered the chance to devour all the remaining miles in one step. It felt like cheating. It felt like an insult to Maya’s journey. To their own efforts. “It just . . .”
“Feels wrong?” Theus asked, lifting his head to stare at her through Zox’s eyes. “My parents agreed with you. Technology is a wedge that separates us from reality. This gate removes the meaning from distance, from whatever it is that walking from one place to another earns you. It’s the thin end of a wedge that separated my people from their humanity. The same wedge that split me from me.”
Quina knelt and set her fingertips to the dark surface of the gate. “I don’t want to walk there. It’s so close now.”
“And there you have it,” Theus said. “Sometimes the wedge is just too useful not to use.”
Thurin and Erris stepped over the rim of the gate to stand on the darkness. Quina and Mali joined them.
Yaz bowed her head. “This will take us to the green world?”
“If you hurry.”
Yaz looked at Taproot and held up the box they’d recovered from the undercity. “How do we get you in?”
Taproot eyed the box. “Take care of that. I’m transferring into it. It’s no longer safe to leave a copy of myself here. So that box is about to become infinitely more valuable. Destroy it and I’m gone. Forever.”
Yaz pursed her lips. “But how do we—”
Taproot clicked his fingers and vanished.
“Oh.” Yaz wrestled the box into an inner pocket of her underjacket then followed Zox into the circle. High above them Yaz’s stars followed in slow circles, giving the dome’s false sky its own constellation. “Ready?” she asked.
“Ready.”
The stars plunged and a moment of rushing confusion followed, a galaxy seeming to hurtle past and through Yaz, taking both an age and less than a heartbeat. She stepped out onto a hard floor amid a blaze of starlight and a confusion of fragmented stone.
Yaz found herself on her hands and knees, somewhat dizzy, a little nauseated. Pieces of rock rained down around her, thin plates, spinning spears of the stuff, brittle and shattering on impact with the stony floor beneath her. The others surrounded her, shielding their faces, all save Zox, on whom the stone pieces broke as if they’d hit the floor.
They were in a cave festooned with flowstone. Stone icicles hung from the ceiling and sprang up from the floor. It seemed as if the debris was the same stuff that must have coated the gate and somehow been blown off by the energies accompanying their arrival.
“Move away from the gate,” Theus told them.
Not following his own instructions, Theus had Zox return to the ring, reaching up it with his forelegs and standing on his rear legs. He manipulated several of the symbols. “No point advertising our arrival. This gate still has some temporal capability.”
He walked Zox away and as he retreated every piece of broken stone rose smoothly from the ground, shattered fragments joined, larger pieces retraced their tumbling flight through the air. Collisions replayed, breaks repaired, and with one deeply satisfying “thunk” a thousand shards hit the metal gate simultaneously, re-forming its flowstone cladding and festooning it with the icicles that Yaz somehow knew to call stalactites and stalagmites.
“This is it?” Quina was the first to speak, disappointment evident in her voice. Yaz’s stars hung at a comfortable distance, illuminating a large chamber that appeared to be natural, carved by some long-vanished river.
“It’s warm at least!” Yaz pulled off her outer hides, then started on the next layer.
“We need to get to the surface,” Thurin said. “Find out where we are.”
“I don’t suppose you know the way?” Yaz asked Theus.
“Ask the construct.” Theus aimed Zox’s head towards Erris. “He’s supposed to be good at getting out of places.”
Erris shrugged. “I got out of Haydies, didn’t I?”
“I got us out of there!” Theus boomed.
Erris shrugged again. “All I know is that I was in there. I wanted to get out. And here I am. I don’t make any rules about how I get into and out of places.”
“Lead on!” Thurin swung a hand towards the far end of the cavern.
“Hmmm.” Erris turned on a heel. “This way.” And set off in the opposite direction.
“You could be wandering randomly until we find a way out or die,” Quina exclaimed as Erris looked up at the dead end. An ancient rockfall had blocked the narrow passage. They’d been walking for hours, climbing sometimes.
“Or I could be leading us on the most direct route through a fiendishly difficult labyrinth,” Erris replied. “I suspect we’ll never find out.” He raised his good arm, one finger extended to indicate an opening in the wall a few feet above his head. “Let’s try that way. Or, if anyone has any better idea, we can do it their way. It’s not an exact science.”
Mali tapped Yaz’s arm with the back of her fingers. “There are caves like these beneath my convent.” She frowned, looking around at the water-smoothed walls. “I’ve explored them before. With Nina. We’re not supposed to but . . .”
“Do you know the way out?” Yaz asked. “Do you recognize anything?”
Mali frowned. “I’m not sure. There’re lots of caves we haven’t been into. And everything looks different with the starlight. We had a lantern . . .”
“‘Not sure’ sounds more convincing than Erris right now,” Yaz said. “Where would you go, Mali?”
Again the frown. “Maybe that side passage we passed back there. Nina and Jossi and I left marks but perhaps not as many as we should have.”
“I don’t know what she’s saying,” Quina said, “but I vote we follow Mali.”
“Me too,” Erris said. And, on seeing several accusing stares turned his way, added, “What? I don’t know how this works. But we’ll get out. You’ll see.”
Mali took them back to the turning and they followed a passage so narrow that the sled and the thawing fish had to be abandoned. Yaz, like Quina and Thurin, insisted on carrying as many of the fish as they could, filling their pockets.
“It will just rot in the heat,” Erris told them. But even though she believed him Yaz couldn’t leave them.
Zox squeezed through the tightest part of the passage, scraping the sides, clawing the rock and breaking pieces of it off as he advanced.
“Here!” Fifty yards on Mali identified the first of her marks, a few scratches on the stone, easily missed. “I’m . . . home.” Her voice choked with emotion. Yaz didn’t need their bond to tell that the girl was thinking of the three others who wouldn’t be returning with her, or ever again.
The girl led them on, saying little, finding her marks with increasing frequency.
Suddenly in the space of a few dozen paces the air grew warmer still and Yaz could smell unfamiliar scents. There was a glow ahead, growing stronger as they advanced, until it outshone the stars moving before them.
They stumbled out into the light, blinded by it, hands pressed to their eyes.
“Careful! Careful! It’s very steep here. You could fall.” Mali sounded serious.
Yaz told the others, “There’s a track. It’s just a few yards. Until then be very careful.”
They felt with their feet, picking their way half-blind over rocks until they came to a flatter area. The warmth reminded Yaz of the drying cave. A wind that could hardly be called a wind caressed her bare skin. A dozen aromas filled the air, overwhelming her, alien but inviting. There were sounds too, not the moan and howl of the wind but . . . she didn’t know what, the quiet voices of many different things combining into one gentle murmur.
Yaz spread her fingers a little, looking down and wincing against the brightness. They had emerged from a narrow crack in the rock and clambered over a rock slope onto what looked like a trail cleared for use. The idea that any path would be trodden so often as to become a thing in its own right was new to her and she let it distract her before the greater newness could overwhelm her. There were rocks all around. The path led steeply up and steeply down, snaking across the face of what was almost a cliff. This was how her mind had first imagined a world without ice. Take away the ice and you’d find the stone or sea that lay beneath.
“Oh.” Quina gave a soft cry, as if she had sustained a wound to the heart. “It’s too much.”
Yaz withdrew her hands, blinking, and looked where Quina was looking. They were partway up an almost vertical cliff on a path that wound back and forth across it. And their elevation offered a view so alien that it pressed Yaz back until she stumbled and fell against the steepness behind her. It was too much. Green on green, forests, fields, roads, isolated farmhouses, a distant city, puffy clouds. Without the vocabulary she’d taken from Erris, Yaz would have been unable to divide what she saw into almost manageable pieces. Quina, struck by the sudden entirety of a world she had never quite believed in, could only stand in awe.
“It’s too much,” Quina repeated, and she reached out as if in this place she no longer understood the difference between near and far and might thread her fingers among some distant trees. She hitched in a rapid breath and burst into tears, a broken thing collapsing to the ground. Mali followed her down, putting an arm about her and speaking her meaningless words in a soft voice.
Thurin stood as if gravely injured and worried that any motion might bring his blood spilling out. Only his eyes moved, his gaze here, then there, then returning. Tears cut rivulets through the grime that clambering over debris in Haydies had coated him with.
“I had forgotten,” Erris said, awestruck. “I thought I remembered everything. I thought the simulations were so perfect . . .”
Yaz wanted to laugh and cry at the same time. The world about her was so full and the fullness within her had nowhere to go. What Erris had shown her had felt real and wonderful, and even now she couldn’t pinpoint its failing. But it had been a pale shadow of this. The gentle wind carried music with it. Somewhere close by a songbird was trilling out its tiny heart, spilling notes across the slopes. Yaz and the others stood, their faces growing stiff with emotion, spilling more tears that wouldn’t even freeze in this southern heat.
Slowly Yaz looked up. “The sky’s full of birds,” she breathed.
Mali glanced towards the clouds, frowning; then laughed. “That’s not full. I’ll take you to the woods and show you full.”