With a bored gesture the regulator beckoned the next in line.
“I’m scared.” Zeen’s hand found hers. He had been scared all along of course, but this was the first time he’d spoken the words.
* * *
THE WORLD TURNS whether we will it or not and everything, longed for or feared, comes to us in time. The queue leading to the regulator advanced slowly but it didn’t stop, and at last Yaz’s world narrowed to the point toward which it had spiralled for so long.
“Yaz of the tribe Ictha and the clan Ictha,” the regulator said. He never needed to be told name, clan, or tribe. The other tribes had several clans, but in the north they shrank to the same thing.
“Yes,” she said. To deny your own name was to cut a small piece from your soul, Mother Mazai said.
The regulator leaned in toward her. He had the familiar white-pale eyes of her own clan and seemed unconcerned by what the southerners called cold. The burns across his face, head, and hands looked as if he had been branded with some kind of writing, but with lines of symbols at differing angles and sizes, overwriting each other into confusion. He leaned toward her, showing his teeth in something that was not a smile.
“Yaz of the Ictha.” He took hold of her hand with hard, pinching fingers.
His scent was unfamiliar, sour and as different from the Ictha as the dogs had been. He was old, stringy, gaunt-faced, and looked displeased with the world in general.
The regulator had not touched Yaz on her first visit. Now he seemed unwilling to release her. The tattered strips of his cloak blew about them both and for a moment Yaz considered what would happen if she grabbed them when the time came that he threw her down. The image of his surprise at being hauled in with her struck through Yaz’s fear and she struggled to suppress the burst of hysterical laughter that was pushing to escape her.
“You’ve seen it, haven’t you, girl?” He looked up from his inspection of her hand and met her eyes.
“N-no.” Yaz shook her head.
“You should have asked ‘what?’ All the ice tribes are terrible at lying but the Ictha are the worst.” The regulator ran his tongue over the yellowing stumps of teeth worn down by years. Without warning he jerked Yaz’s hand to his face and began to sniff at her fingertips. She tried to pull away, disgusted, then realised that if he were to release her as she tugged she would fall back with only the slick gullet of the pit to receive her.
“Seen what?” she asked, too late to be convincing.
“The Path that runs through all things.” He let her go with a last sniff. “The line that joins and divides. Seen it and . . .” His gaze fell to the hand she now clasped to her chest. “And touched it.”
“I didn’t . . .” He was right though. She didn’t know how to lie.
“That makes you rare, child. Very rare.” Something ugly twisted on the regulator’s thin lips: a smile. “Too good for the pit.” He nodded to the other side of him. “You stand over there. You’ll come with me to the Black Rock.” Excitement tinged his voice. He had thrown children to their death without affording them the respect of caring. But now he cared.
So, numb and trembling, with her wrist still pale where the regulator had gripped her, Yaz moved on. She stood on the flat ice of the tier watching without seeing while the others shuffled forward one place. She had survived. She was grown and equal to any in the clan. But still she stood here, forbidden to return to where her parents waited. To where Quell waited. Her gaze tracked back up the stepped ice, across the sea of faces, toward the heights where the Ictha families stood.
“No.” The regulator’s quiet announcement drew Yaz’s attention back to the line. His skinny old hand was clamped over Zeen’s face, fingers spread across the boy’s forehead and cheekbones. “Not you.” And with the slightest shove he sent Zeen stumbling back. For a moment Yaz’s brother stood, caught on the edge of balance, his arms pinwheeling, and in the next he was gone, sliding down the steep slope of the gullet then pitched into the near-vertical darkness of the ice hole. He fell with a single short cry of despair.
Silence.
Yaz’s face had frozen in shock, her voice gone. The thousands stood without sound. Even the wind stilled its tongue.
It should have been me. It should have been me.
Still no one spoke. And then a single high keening broke the silence. A mother’s cry from somewhere far up near the crater’s rim.
It should have been me.
The Ictha endure. They act only when they must. They guard their strength because the ice does not forgive failure.
It should have been me.
Yaz glanced at the blue sky, and in the next moment she threw herself after her brother.
2
AT FIRST YAZ slid, then the black throat of the pit was before her and in the next moment she was falling, all the air escaping her lungs in a hopeless scream. The blind rush of dropping through empty space stole all her thoughts. Her body contracted against the inevitable impact. She grazed a wall, grazed another, continued hurtling down with the ice scraping at her all the way. She was sliding again, moving at impossible speed, every part of her clenched in terror. When she hit bottom all her bones would shatter.
The ice wall pressed on Yaz, and in doing so made her still more aware of her awful velocity. Suddenly the pressure increased, everything spun, and somewhere in the spinning she lost herself.
There are stars in every darkness.
They are the mercy of the Gods in the Sky.
* * *
YAZ JERKED IN shock, crying out and thrashing her limbs. She was lying in water deep enough to reach her mouth. Coughing and spluttering she tried to orient herself, slipped, and went face-first into the pool. A moment later she was on all fours, choking. The water seemed to be about four inches deep and she was soaked. To be wet on the ice without a tent and dry clothes to hand was a death sentence. A hysterical laugh burst from her. She shook the water from her hair and looked for the light. There was no light, no distant circle of sky above her, just a velvet darkness filled with the constant sound of dripping.
Yaz got to her knees, trying not to slip. She patted herself. All of her hurt a little, none of her hurt a lot. It seemed impossible that she could fall so far and break no bones.
“Hello?” She whispered it and wasn’t surprised when no one answered. “Zeen!” Loud enough to be heard over all the dripping.
Nothing.
Yaz knelt and blinked at the darkness. “Zeen . . .”
It wasn’t cold. Even wet she could feel the warmth rising around her. Enough warmth to melt this great pit and to keep it open despite the relentless flow of the ice. “Hello?”
Darkness didn’t scare her, not in and of itself. In the many months of the polar night there was never sufficient oil to light all the tents, no matter how many whales were caught and rendered while the Hot Sea remained open. She longed for a flame now though.
“Why am I not dead?”
Now that she thought about it Yaz realised that she had slid most of the way rather than dropped. Whatever heat had melted the hole it was a heat that stayed put while the ice continued its slow journey. The hole must slant.
She knelt and listened, her mind racing, pursuing erratic thoughts. She wanted Zeen. Long ago she had let their younger brother die. Her weakness had let him die. Now in the blackness a vision of Azad returned to her as he had been at four when Zeen was eight and she was twelve.
“I’m sorry.” Spoken to the empty space around her.
She wanted light. She needed to see.
Among the Ictha three elders were charged with carrying the flame. Three heavily shielded and slow-burning lamps, such that if disaster caused any one or two of them to go out the fire could still be relit. If the Ictha lost their flame it would be a journey of months to find another clan who might rekindle them. But there were no elders in the
pit and nothing to burn in this wet hole even if she had fire.
Mother Mazai had a thing called glass, clear like diamond ice but refusing to melt even above a lamp flame. It had been fashioned into a disc, fat at the middle and thin at the edges. One summer she had shown Yaz that it could gather the sun’s red light into one bright spot that would burn against her palm. In the far south, Mother Mazai said, the sun blazed so hot that the bright spot the glass made could light a lamp wick.
Yaz shook the memories from her head. Despite being soaked in meltwater she was still dazed. The fall had rattled her brain around in her skull.
It occurred to her that somehow the darkness was not total. A variation in the blackness hinted at shape and form, though none of it made much sense. Perhaps some fraction of the day’s light filtered down through the ice . . . though it seemed hard to believe given how far she must have fallen. Even so, as she moved her hand before her face she had some sense of it passing.
“What have I done?” She moved slowly, feeling ahead. Even on all fours she felt unstable on the wet ice.
It seemed that she was in a large ice cave, its smooth floor dimpled with shallow pools. After just a few yards she found the first of several slick throats where the meltwater drained away, gurgling into unknown depths. The first was large enough to swallow a child, the second would have taken a man and his sled too. There appeared to be no walls as such, just the floor curving smoothly up until she could make no progress.
The illumination was fainter than starlight and seemed to come from all directions at once. It gave Yaz the impression that the chamber was a bubble trapped in the ice. She wondered how many times she had circled it when she shot in along the main vent. If each of the darker patches was a hole then it was amazing that she had missed them all.
“Zeen?” She shouted his name, realising that one of the ice shafts that had failed to capture her must have swallowed him.
Yaz crawled to the nearest hole. The smooth slope made approaching dangerous—a little too far forward and she would start to slide. She fumbled at her belt for her knife. The blade was a tooth from a dagger-fish. The same kind that had dragged Azad from the boat. She could never draw it without thinking of her lost brother.
Using the knifepoint to gain a little purchase Yaz moved closer to the hole, lying flat on the ice now. She listened, trying to untangle any meaning from the constant dripping and the chuckle of distant water. “Zeen!”
It occurred to Yaz then that she would have to throw herself down another hole, and that this time she would have to choose. More than this, the quick death she had imagined, smashed against an ice floor, might now be replaced with drowning in a flooded shaft, blind and struggling to keep afloat, until exhaustion claimed her and water filled her lungs.
She didn’t want to do it. Now that the moment of passion had left her she found that she lacked the courage to throw herself into one of these dark holes.
Alone and trembling in the black Pit of the Missing, Yaz began to weep for everything that she had lost, and from the fear at how her life would end.
* * *
YAZ GATHERED HERSELF. Time had passed, she wasn’t sure how long but the cold was starting to seep into her. A true Ictha would hardly have noticed but she had begun to shiver. She considered her options. Returning to the surface was not one of them. Even if there had been a flight of stairs carved into the ice she couldn’t return . . . What would the tribes think of that? They would push her back in or send her wet out into the wind to die. Yaz remembered the peculiar excitement in the regulator’s eye. He might welcome her. He might even keep the tribes from harming her . . . But there were no steps, just hundreds of yards of near-vertical ice running with meltwater.
“No.” Her options were to remain in the chamber and to see whether she froze before she starved, or to continue the pursuit of her brother, a pursuit that only chance had delayed.
Yaz peered at the hole before her. It seemed that the faint glow was coming from the ice itself. Her hand made a black shape before her eyes, too dim for definition. Fear returned as she inched toward the wet, yawning mouth. She didn’t want to die. It had been easy to throw herself after Zeen in the heat of the moment. In the cold of the cavern it was almost impossible to release the anchor provided by her knife and to let the drop take her.
“I can’t.” But she had no choice.
Yaz ground her teeth together and pulled the point of her blade from the ice. She returned it to its sheath as she started to slide feetfirst toward the hole. Even certain death couldn’t stop an Ictha caring for what little they owned.
A moment later she plunged once more into devouring night.
3
THE FALL WAS almost all vertical this time with only glancing blows from the walls to punctuate a terrifyingly long drop. The shock of impact was so violent that Yaz knew she had hit ice and was smashed beyond recovery. A moment later, though, she was thrashing in deep water, seeking the surface to replace the air that had been hammered from her lungs.
Yaz broke clear with a heaving gasp, both arms still churning the water about her. She gave a cry of frustration. Her worst fear had been realised. She would drown in the dark.
Yaz had learned to swim in the Hot Sea of the North. For much of the year hot upwelling from the ocean depths kept a circle of water open, nearly ten miles across. Like the three smaller seas to the south the Great Sea teemed with whales. Fish thronged there too, but it was the whales who had to return time and again for air after their long hunting trips beneath the ice.
Being able to swim was a curse. It offered hope. Yaz would still drown, but first she would struggle and suffer. The water she now swam in was only slightly colder than the Hot Sea. Not quite cold enough to freeze, but almost. She would be able to endure it for hours before exhaustion claimed her and the weight of her clothes dragged her under.
Yaz spluttered and reached for the wall of the shaft. If she stretched out her arms she should be able to touch both sides. Her fingers met no resistance and so she struck out in a random direction hunting the edge. Three or four strokes brought no contact. She stopped, spluttered for breath, and shook her head to try to get the water out of her eyes. The sound of meltwater splashing down came from behind her now rather than all around.
Perversely it was lighter at this depth than it had been in the chamber far above. The walls had a faint glow to them and seemed much further away than she had thought they would be. Yaz swam toward the edge and realised that she was in another chamber rather than a shaft.
When she banged her knee on something hard Yaz gave a startled cry, missed a stroke, and began to flounder. It was then that she realised the water had grown shallow. Moments later she crawled out onto a shore of black rock, still yards shy of the glowing ice walls.
Yaz lay gasping, as much from the shock of it all as from the battering she had taken. Her body felt like a singular bruise, her ribs hurt, and she was cold. “Zeen.” She spoke her brother’s name through gritted teeth and forced herself back onto hands and knees. The ground beneath her was rock, scoured into ridges. Apart from pieces collected from the peak of Black Rock and shown at the gathering, Yaz had never touched raw stone before, just the smooth pebbles the Ictha kept for luck and the ones that Mother Mazai wore on a sinew about her neck, polished to a high shine and shot through with lines of colour.
She crawled further from the pool, water streaming from her parka, dripping from the black veil of her hair. Where the ice walls rose from the bedrock it was light enough for Yaz to count her fingers. They trembled with more than the chill. Her options had narrowed from a quick death crashing into ice at the bottom of a fall or a slower death drowning in a hole back to the slowest of all, starvation.
“Zeen!” She bellowed it and the loudness of her own voice made her flinch. The fall of water overrode any echoes and there was no reply. “Zeen!”
Yaz frowned an
d leaned toward the ice, almost close enough for her forehead to rest against it. She squinted, trying to see where the light came from. It wasn’t the red of sunlight, this was a more varied, richer illumination carrying undertones of blues and greens. Close to the wet surface the ice was clear, further back it became misty and fractured. Buried in the body of the ice like a constellation of cold stars were motes of light, none of them seeming any larger than her smallest fingernail, most considerably smaller. The larger ones burned more brightly, though none of them by itself would illuminate much more than her palm if it sat in her hand.
The ice-locked constellations exerted a hypnotic draw. It was the smell that finally broke their spell. Yaz looked away and sniffed. Blood. The scent of slaughter. She stood, wincing, and scanned the chamber. The pool dominated, the excess flowing away lazily on the far side along a channel with just a few inches of clearance. The beach onto which Yaz had crawled occupied a third of the perimeter, the pool lapping up against the ice elsewhere. A pair of tunnels led away from the beach into the ice, smooth and carved by meltwater.
Yaz went to the nearest tunnel. She crossed the rock like an old woman. Not that anyone got truly old on the ice, but Yewan, her father’s eldest brother, was past fifty and starting to slow. She felt like he looked, stiff, making each move with care as if avoiding hidden hurts.
The blood looked black, spattered across the glowing tunnel walls. This had been an attack, not the butchering of some animal. Yaz touched a finger to one of the larger splats.
The Girl and the Stars Page 3