In the larger chambers debris from raids on the Broken lay scattered. Precious iron and other building material scavenged at great cost from the city had been strewn carelessly. Twice they encountered some sort of construction: boards, one standing vertically, the other horizontal like a table, with chains at the corners or strong wire. Both of these were bloodstained and about them knives, broken glass, and other jagged pieces of metal sat close at hand. Yaz looked away and hurried by, trying to force her imagination to silence.
It took longer than they had to spare to find the furthest cavern and convince themselves that no other extended further into the flow of the ice. The chamber was dry and the low roof creaked constantly as hair’s width by hair’s width the unimaginable weight of ice advanced toward the city. A black frost clung to every wall like the fuzz of hair on a baby’s head. Clearly enough heat must find its way to the chamber to periodically melt the ice back just enough to fight its advance, but it must be a battle that ebbed and flowed. Currently the ice seem to be winning, crushing the chamber ever smaller.
The unfocused hatred that infused all of the black ice was fiercer here, a wild anger bubbled all around her despite the presence of her star. Yaz could feel it trying to get in under her skin. And more than that, she felt watched, as if the demons here were more intensely aware of her presence than anywhere else.
“How could Kao have seen anything in here?” Erris wondered. If he felt the weight of evil here he showed no sign of it.
“The demons see more than we do.” Yaz urged more light from her star. Even as she did so the frost began to bleach, catching the starlight and turning crimson.
Erris went to the rear where the ice sloped to the ground and he had to crouch to advance. “The blackness likes to go against the flow. It should have been swept a hundred miles from the city by now.”
The cold had a bite to it here at the limits of the caves and Yaz enjoyed the star’s warmth in her hands though her weakness shamed her.
“I can see something . . .” Erris said, setting his brown hands to the jet-black ice, seemingly untroubled by the malice frozen there.
“You can?” Yaz wondered quite how much his eyes could see and what other gifts the Missing had given him. “What is it?”
Suddenly Erris lurched backwards, sprawling on the floor, and when he spoke it was with a trembling voice.
“Big.”
30
BIG?” YAZ ASKED. She went to help Erris to his feet, all the time keeping her eyes on the black sloping wall of ice. Something in there had scared Erris. That was something she’d not seen before. “Just ‘big’?”
“Yes.” Erris shrugged free of her grip, a little embarrassed perhaps. “Very big.”
Yaz stretched her aching body and pressed her hands to her forehead, hoping somehow to push back the pain that would soon blossom behind it. She forced a confidence she didn’t feel into her voice. “Let’s have a better look then.”
Once more she pushed the star into incandescence, driving its heartbeat ever faster, its song more shrill. She hid her face behind her arm and directed the light forward. Even so she saw the black bar of her arm bone through closed eyes. The pain that had taken root behind her forehead sent thorned tendrils deeper, as though trying to split her brain in half. At last she broke off with a gasp, willing the star to stillness and finding that she had to fight it this time, as if it had gone into panic and wanted nothing but to run and run until it destroyed itself.
When Yaz opened her eyes she saw that the frost had melted from the walls, leaving them slick with running water, and that on two sides she had driven the blackness back many yards, leaving clear ice marbled with ghostly white fractures and flaws. Directly in front of her, however, the ice had cleared little more than a spear’s length and a great intrusion of blackness remained, resisting the light. The sight of it carried a new weight of terror that had been absent when all the ice lay black.
“I said it was big.” Erris spoke from behind her.
The blackness reminded Yaz of a great thumb pushing toward her, several feet clear of the rock, rising to many times her height, wider than the entire chamber it was aimed at.
“That thing can’t be part of Theus . . .” Yaz couldn’t keep the horror from her voice. If it truly was part of him she wasn’t sure she dared reunite him with it.
Erris said nothing, only came to stand at her shoulder, tilting his head in curiosity.
With a sigh Yaz drove a beam of intense light from her star, feeling a corresponding spike of pain being driven back into her head. Her brain already felt as though there were a ravine opening inside it like the one in the bedrock, dividing the Broken from the Tainted. She aimed the beam at the centre of the black mass, expecting to clear it piece by piece, but the crimson circle merely burned across the surface.
“Try the edge,” Erris suggested.
Yaz played the beam slowly across the blackness, moving first to one edge then scanning to the other. Here and there it would nibble away a touch of the blackness before encountering the huge and resilient core. As she moved the light she began to get a sense of shape, an idea of the fearsome contours of the thing. The darkness was vast, ten thousand times larger than any of the demons she had freed before, and ten thousand times more resistant to the star’s light. What the thing might do to her when released didn’t bear thinking about. With such power added to his being Theus would have no reason to hold to their agreement.
Suddenly she began to laugh.
“What?” Erris looked at her as if she’d gone crazy.
“Don’t you see it?” She played the light across a steep slope and into a gaping chasm at the front of the blackness.
“I saw it before you did . . .” Erris frowned. “But why is it funny?”
“It’s a whale,” she said simply.
Erris’s frown deepened, rucking furrows into the smoothness of his brow. Then, eyes widening, he saw it. “That’s a mouth?”
“Yes.” The mouth in question was large enough to swallow a boat. One of the city’s hunters would make a mouthful. Quite how such a creature had come to be taken up by the ice, or what forces had lifted it from the sea to be carried across the rock, Yaz had no idea. “It’s one of the great whales, the largest that visit the Hot Sea.” Yaz had only ever seen the back of a great whale as it broke the surface for air. The flowing, rolling surge of the creature had taken her breath. She’d thought it must stretch fifty yards or more. Her father said that once, in his youth, such a whale had leapt from the sea, half of its body clearing the waves and towering over his boat as if it were the Black Rock itself.
“What a thing . . .” Erris sounded awed despite having lived a thousand years amid the wonders of the Missing. “Does it have teeth?”
“I don’t know.” The Ictha had never landed so great a beast. Like ice storms they were a force of nature that you merely let pass and hoped to survive. Yaz tried to shine her light in search of some sign of teeth. But exhaustion rose in her like a wave, carrying her to the floor.
“Yaz!” Erris nearly caught her but her weakness had taken him by surprise. Instead he helped her to sit with her back against the cleared ice, and crouched beside her, his face a mask of concern. “Are you sick?”
“I . . . I just need a short rest.” Embarrassed, Yaz tried to turn the conversation in another direction. She looked toward the frozen whale. “It’s said that Zin, the first man, was swallowed by a great whale and lived for forty days and forty nights in its belly before his escape.”
“Who?” Erris gave her a curious look.
She met his look with surprise. “Zin!” Erris might have been born long ago but not before the first man. She told the tale.
* * *
HUA, LEAST OF all the Gods in the Sea, made Zin, the first man, from salt water, the bones of a tuark, and the skin of a whale. While Aiiki, least of all the Gods in
the Sky, made Mokka, the first woman, from ice, clouds, the whispers of four lost winds, and a colour stolen from the dragons’ tails.
Zin and Mokka lived upon the ice in a tent twice as tall as a man and as wide as a harpoon throw. They pitched it for years at a time, for in those days Hua concerned himself with the affairs of men and kept a hot sea open even during the fiercest of winters, and Aiiki sang her songs so that the winds sheathed their claws and kept their fangs hidden.
When their food ran low Zin and Mokka would take it in turns to go out upon the sea in their white boat while the other stayed to carve kettan from the teeth of lesser whales, cutting out the forms of the children they would have, children who would carry the story of their lives far across the ice, to be told until the last star burned red and faded from the sky.
Zin and Mokka waited for their children for untold years, long enough for the touch of fingers to wear the first of their kettan smooth once more, erasing the story that the knife had set there, long enough for stars to turn from white to red and fade like embers into nothing. But still no child came to their tent.
Zin set out upon the sea and he called to Hua who had made him and asked why he had been given no son. Mokka went bare-armed upon the ice and she called to Aiiki who had made her and sang her lament for the daughter who had never come.
But it was not Hua who answered Zin upon the waves. Instead, the greatest God in the Sea rose from unknown depths. Hoonumu, he who dwells beneath the light. Hoonumu rose in the form of a great whale, black as night and twice as vast. And the whale swallowed Zin without answer, taking him and his white boat into the void that was its belly.
And it was not Aiiki who answered Mokka but Allatha, the greatest God in the Sky, she who first sets the stars aflame and who snuffs each of them out when their time has been spent. Allatha descended in the form of a snow hawk with wings of ice and flame. She told Mokka that she had asked for a gift larger than the world, for birth is a kind of fire, and there is no gift more precious than fire. It cannot be given back, it can spread unchecked, it grows without limit, able to destroy worlds and leap the black chasms between them. Hua and Aiiki had made between them one man and one woman. But if Hoonumu and Allatha gave Mokka children then there could be more men and more women than fish in the sea or birds in the sky.
Mokka said only that she would pay the price, for the ice had always been lonely even with two. And the Gods in the Sky and the Gods in the Sea said that if she could bring her man from the belly of a whale then ever after she could bring a child from her own belly.
It took her forty days, and how she did it is another story in and of itself, but Mokka succeeded, and in saving Zin she opened her womb and became the mother of us all.
* * *
“I CAN STAND now.” Yaz pushed away the hand Erris offered. He might have the strength of the Missing in his arms but she would not allow him to think her weak. Mokka had brought Zin from the belly of the beast and Yaz too had saved a man, bringing Erris from the depths of the void star at the city’s heart and out from far beneath the surface. One day she would show him to the Gods in the Sky. She caught herself thinking of them in the roles of Mokka and Zin and pushed a foolish smile from her face.
“We should go,” Erris said. “There’s nothing here.”
“Apart from enough meat to feed a clan, and just yards away from people so starved their ribs look as if they are trying to escape.” She stood looking at the bulk trapped within the ice before her. “With this the Broken wouldn’t need what the priests send them. They could go for months, years even, without scavenging, without sending iron to the Black Rock. They could make new bargains from a position of strength.”
Erris raised his brows, smiling. “Quite the politician, aren’t you?”
Yaz didn’t know the word but somehow she had a sense of it, presumably from the strangely drawn-out time she’d spent in the void with Erris. “There’s something else.”
“Yes?”
Yaz approached the ice and the behemoth it held. That sense of being watched remained, along with an intense hunger, almost jealousy, as if what watched her envied everything she had, from her star to her skin, and wanted to tear all of it from her. “I didn’t clear them all.”
Erris glanced around. “The ice is clear. And if that whale is a ‘demon’ . . . well, we could be in trouble.”
“It’s not a demon but it’s the perfect place for one to hide.” Yaz summoned the dazzling beam of starlight once more and scanned the whale methodically, straining to see any irregularities. Her strength had started to wane and the agony in her head had built to a crescendo when, as the beam slid yet again through the black-on-black openness of the whale’s toothless mouth, it seemed as though there were something there, a dark star floating as if in the act of being swallowed.
“Found you.” She let the beam linger, seeing in the midst of it a black sphere resisting the light.
“It’s Theus?” Erris asked.
“It’s already lasted longer than any of the others we’ve discovered so far.”
“Shouldn’t you call him then?”
Despite her pain and exhaustion Yaz continued to focus the star’s light on the demon in the whale’s mouth. Part of her wanted to see just how much the thing could take. Another part feared uniting something so powerful with the creature that dwelt inside Thurin. “Is this a good idea, Erris?”
“You’re asking me?” He spread his hands. “This is all new to me. I don’t know any of the people involved. When I was last here”—he swung his arm at the rock and ice—“all this was fields.”
Yaz grudgingly took his point. She went to where the cavern roof lowered before rising into a larger chamber and shouted Theus’s name. Returning to the rear wall of the cave she set her star to melting a path to the demon.
By the time Theus prowled in, with other Tainted haunting the shadows behind him, Yaz had almost reached the resistant clot of darkness and the floor was awash with meltwater. He looked in astonishment at the whale, now lit by the star that had almost entered its mouth.
He recovered himself swiftly. “Another candidate?”
“The strongest so far.” Yaz watched him warily, remembering how swiftly he had set his knife to her throat the first time he showed himself.
“A veritable Jonah,” Theus breathed.
“Who?” Yaz asked.
Theus waved the question away.
Yaz coaxed the star to radiate more heat then had it rise to let the pulse of black water pass beneath it. She had the star follow the water out quickly while Theus strode forward with ill-concealed eagerness to plant both palms into the pooling darkness.
The effect was immediate. Theus stiffened, raising his head to show a strained but rapt expression, the tendons in his neck standing out like cables. He began to suck in an enormous breath, accompanied by a disturbing moan, and the veins in his wrists mottled a greenish black, the colour flowing up toward his elbows before being lost beneath his skins. His body shook and it seemed that even the rock beneath him trembled as if in premonition of some seismic shift.
Yaz’s star burned in her hand now, still uncomfortably hot, and for a mad moment she thought of bringing it down on the back of Theus’s head in an overarm swing. But however terrifying the creature before her might be it was also Thurin, and it would be Thurin’s skull that shattered.
Something was coming. Something big. Racing toward them as if the fields that Erris remembered were all that surrounded them. Yaz found herself needing to breathe yet unable to fill her lungs until the tension, building like a storm cloud piled miles high, finally peaked and broke.
Theus leapt to his feet with arms wide and a scream so loud it seemed it must splinter something vital inside his chest. A shock wave threw Yaz off her feet and staggered Erris. All around them the ice shattered and fell, a white rain turned bloody in the starlight. Yaz fo
und herself on her back with chunks of broken ice hammering all around her. For a moment she thought that the cavern had collapsed and she would lie buried beneath an unknown tonnage of glacier. But the deluge stopped, leaving the rock six inches deep. Some part of whatever energies had been released inside Theus during his reunion must have escaped through Thurin’s ice-work. He stood now, frost in the black of his hair, staring at the hands he had raised before him, as if marvelling at himself, or perhaps just at the new perspective offered to him now that he was one piece closer to something whole.
Yaz got to her feet, shedding sheets of ice fractured from the ceiling. “You got what you wanted. Now give me what you promised.”
Theus raised his head to reveal a face the colour of an old bruise with wholly black eyes and a dangerous grin. “Find another piece of me and then I’ll let them go.”
Yaz woke the star in her hand. “Now!”
Theus flinched but didn’t retreat. “You want this boy that much?” he sneered.
“I want my friends. I want my brother. I want to leave this place and go back up to the ice.” With each “I want” she pushed more light from the star until its heart pounded, close to breaking free.
Theus raised an arm to shield his face and backed a few paces. “Life is easier down here. I was on the ice once.” He sounded surprised to hear himself say it.
“You’re lying. This was all fields and forest. I’ve seen it.”
Theus shook his head, continuing to back away from the light. “Each time I add to myself I recover fragments of memory, and some of the things that once seemed nonsense become comprehensible. I’ve been many places. All across this world. But I started my journey in the north. My parents . . . I had parents . . . they were of a sect that turned its back on technology. They lived in the far north. As a baby they took me to see . . .” He paused, fingers moving as if trying to assemble some lost truth from thin air. “. . . a wise woman . . . a witch! As a baby they took me to see a witch!” He shook his head again. “So many broken pieces . . .”
The Girl and the Stars Page 33
