“She thinks we can’t resist her without her furs.” Another girl.
More laughter. A slightly hysterical edge to it. Yaz reminded herself that they were children and she an adult. And that the pit had taken them all from their lives. If they didn’t laugh they would cry. She shook her head, trying to press a smile from her lips. It was funny, she guessed, to find herself next to naked in the Pit of the Missing and to still be sweating.
“That’s all I can get off without a knife.” Yaz walked back out wearing only the black mole-fish skins that her mother had sewn her into at the onset of the long night. “At least they got a good wash today.” More laughter.
Arka sighed and shook her head. “Ictha!”
Yaz moved closer to the burning heat of the pot until the skins began to steam. The mole-fish hides had been softened with nagga venom, giving them a velvety feel, but they resisted water and wouldn’t stay wet for long. Yaz stretched. She had never felt so warm and lacked any inclination to ever step away. Then, remembering herself, and feeling the black-haired boy, Thurin, trying not to look at her, she hunched again, to present as small a target as she could for others’ stares.
Arka called to the three now naked among the hanging skins. “There are capes at the back, to wear when you’ve hung your clothes to dry. Then come out here and join us.”
* * *
MAYA AND YAZ sat with the iron pot between them; the huge boy and a black-haired girl completed the circle, the heat making their faces glow. Arka and Thurin sat further back, knees drawn up before them. The boy, Kao, had shrugged his cape from his shoulders and gathered it around his waist. His arms were so thick with muscle that it had to fight for space along his bones, heaping itself up. He watched them all with disdain from blue eyes that sheltered beneath a yellow fringe.
“The old man made a mistake.” Kao’s voice rumbled deeper than Yaz’s father’s. “I don’t belong down here. I’m as strong as any man in the Golin clan. Stronger than most. I’m not some broken thing. I don’t belong here with you . . .”
“Us what?” The dark girl was called Quina. Her face reminded Yaz of a hawk, eyes like black stones.
“Rejects.” Kao spat the word. “There’s nothing wrong with me. I’m going to climb out and throw that scrawny priest down his own hole then—”
“If you can climb out of the pit it shows that Kazik was right about you,” Arka said. “If you can’t then maybe he was wrong, but nobody will ever know. It’s the perfect system.” She raised a hand to forestall Kao’s hot reply. “But I would enjoy watching you do it.”
“Me too.” Yaz hadn’t intended to speak but the words left her mouth. She dropped her gaze as the others glanced her way. In the heat of the moment she had forgotten that not only was she bare-handed before strangers but she was showing more of her skin than an Ictha sees on their wedding night.
“In any event,” Arka said. “We are all here, rightly or wrongly, and there is no returning to the surface. My task is to educate you in the ways of the Broken so that you can become useful and earn your keep. Our lives are . . . hard. You will have noticed that fewer of us grow old than even the Ictha.”
Yaz bowed her head as the others looked her way again. She hadn’t spotted even a single greyhead among the Broken. At perhaps thirty Arka looked as old as any of those Yaz had seen.
“There should be more of us,” Quina said. “I saw a dozen pushed and there were many still behind me.”
“Did the hetta eat them all?” Maya asked, round-eyed. Yaz guessed her to be the youngest of them, around thirteen. Quina might be fifteen. Kao her own age or a year younger. Despite the size of him his was a boy’s face.
“Where did you hear about Hetta?” Arka frowned at Maya and glanced toward Yaz.
“The boy said it.” Maya looked nervous. Yaz suddenly wondered why the girl was the youngest of them. Most got the push at their first gathering. There should be plenty of smaller ones. “Petrick. He said a hetta got someone . . .”
“Hetta is one of the Tainted. A wild one even for them. A rogue. She hunts alone,” Arka said, and beside her Thurin, dry and fully clothed, shivered despite the heat. “And to understand the Tainted you have to understand that the stories told to scare little children are true. The black ice is real.”
Kao snorted with laughter, Maya paled, Yaz quietly made the sign invoking the protection of both the Gods in the Sky and the Gods in the Sea. Quina, however, just nodded.
“The Ictha have never seen such a thing,” Yaz said.
“Nor have the Golin.” Kao leaned into the heat. “Because there is no such thing.”
“My people have seen it in the south. Far to the south. A grey scar in the ice, black at its heart.” Quina narrowed her eyes at Kao, daring him to dispute her.
“It is rare for black ice to reach the surface. But down here it exists.” Arka turned toward Thurin as if checking on him. His gaze had fallen to his hands and he made a slow study of his fingers, a twitch in his cheek giving the lie to this show of disinterest.
“They say if you walk on the black ice it fills you with terrors,” Quina said.
“And if a man touches it”—Maya’s voice trembled—“it can make him murder his children.”
“The Tainted are people who have touched the black ice?” Yaz asked, and once more she saw Jaysin’s head dangling by the hair from Hetta’s belt.
“Worse.” Arka looked grim. “They swim in the pools that form where it melts.”
Maya gasped. Yaz, an adult grown, allowed herself no expression of horror but drew her knees up under her chin, feeling even now the touch of Hetta’s vast hand as it had closed around her lower leg and begun to pull her toward those teeth.
Thurin had grown still and very pale. And he was pale enough to start with. “It takes more than a touch of the black ice to taint most people. There are spirits in the ice, looking for a way inside you, looking for cracks. Anger will let them in, cruelty, greed, any weakness, even fear will invite them in eventually.” He stood and turned to leave.
“Thurin. Sit.” Arka motioned for him to return.
“And the Tainted do worse than swim in the black pools.” Thurin had his back to the others now. “They drink from them.” And he walked away, with Arka’s demands that he stay ringing in his wake.
“What’s up with him?” Kao snorted.
Arka made no reply and they joined her in silence, soaking up the heat until at last a distant clanging reached the cave. Arka cocked her head to listen then relaxed. “It’s the signal for night. We keep our own cycle down here. I’ll take you to the settlement. You can collect your clothes here tomorrow.”
“What about Zeen?” Yaz was no longer sure why she had thrown herself down the pit. In the moment she did it, it had seemed that it was for her brother, though quite how it might have helped she couldn’t have said. But now, against all odds, she really did have a chance to help him and she was damned if she would just shut up about it and go to sleep.
“The Tainted have him,” Arka said.
Even though she had guessed the answer a cold fist still clenched around Yaz’s heart. “Then I need to find him before they eat him.”
“They won’t eat him.” Arka shook her head. “They are vile but none are quite as crazed as Hetta. They’ll taint him along with the rest of those they caught from today’s drop.” Arka stood to go. “You don’t have to worry about finding your brother, Yaz. You have to worry about him finding you.”
Yaz got hurriedly to her feet and caught Arka’s shoulder. “There must be a way to save him.”
The woman turned, the scars on her face very white against heat-reddened skin. “Oh, there’s a way. It’s just very hard, is all. It’s a lot easier to taint someone than to untaint them. I’ve been here twenty years and only seen it work once.”
“Then I need to meet that person,” Yaz said. “The one
who was saved.”
Arka pulled free and started toward the door. “You already have,” she said. “He’s called Thurin.”
6
ARKA LED THEM from the ravine back into the ice caverns. Their footsteps echoed through the endless twilight, each breath steaming up before them. To her amazement Yaz saw that what she had first thought to be fallen lumps of ice scattering the floor of these long halls were in fact something very different. Roundish objects, in shades from white through grey and brown, lay here and there, varying in size from an eyeball to a head, all of them smooth skinned, some beaded with water drops.
“What are they?” she asked as they drew closer to a place where scores of them clustered.
“Are they dangerous?” asked Maya, moving closer to Yaz.
“Rocks,” Kao declared.
Quina reserved her judgment.
“Fungi. They grow where the stones . . . the stars . . . give enough warmth.” Arka bent to pick up a small one from the shadow of a larger one. It made a faint tearing sound as if it were attached to the rock.
“It’s an animal?” Yaz wondered why it didn’t run away.
“A plant. You can eat them.” Arka took a bite from it and winced. “These sort taste better cooked.”
“Plant?” Maya asked. Yaz thanked her silently, not wanting to always be the one showing her ignorance.
“Plants . . .” Arka waved her hands at the things helplessly. “They don’t move and they don’t bleed but they live . . .”
“Like a tree,” Quina said quietly, rolling something small between her fingers.
Arka frowned. “I don’t know about those. But Eular says plants grow anywhere that there is warmth and water and light. He says everything living depends on them for food.”
“I bloody don’t,” Kao growled. “I eat meat like everyone else.”
“Yes, but the fish you take from the sea eat plants or eat other fish that eat plants and—”
“There are plants in the sea now?” Yaz asked.
“Yes and—”
“But there’s no light under the sea,” Quina said.
“Well . . .” Arka grew flustered. “There must be . . . Eular knows these things. Ask him!” She thrust the rest of the fungus ball into Quina’s hand and strode away. “Come on!” As she walked she offered more advice on the mysterious world of plants. “The brown ones aren’t bad raw. Brown ones with reddish spots will have you vomiting blood for a week. Purple ones will kill you. We weed out the bad ones from the groves but out in the more distant caves you’ll find them, sometimes mixed in with the good ones.”
* * *
THE SETTLEMENT SAT in an enormous cavern whose entire roof glowed faintly with innumerable stars. Instead of tents, angled to resist the wind, the Broken lived within strange, blocky dwellings fashioned from a variety of materials each more foreign than the next. Glass was the only building material Yaz recognised, gleaming in ill-advised openings in walls. Many of the walls were made from what might be rock but was lighter in colour than that underfoot and shaped into blocks much like those the Eskin clan made from snow to construct shelters.
“Do we have to sleep in one of these?” Maya’s voice echoed Yaz’s own mistrust of those hard flat roofs and sharp angles.
“Is there nothing you’re not afraid of, girl?” Kao snorted. “No wonder Clan Axit wanted to drop you down the pit!”
Maya put her head down and said nothing. The Axit were the largest of all the clans and many said they all thought themselves kings of the ice. Although life in the wastes left no room for war the Axit had a reputation for fierceness. Blood and more blood had been spilled in the long ago and some said they trained in secret for a war still to come. Yaz gave Kao a hard look until he coloured and turned away.
Yaz couldn’t tell how large the settlement was, only that it seemed to cover a bigger area than the Ictha used when pitching their tents. Perhaps there were more of the Broken than she had first thought. Or maybe there had been more of them in the past.
As they drew closer to the buildings Yaz sniffed at the familiar smell of humanity, stronger here than in camp where the wind scoured the ice between the tents. She saw figures moving in the gloom, making their way along the clear pathways between the various structures. Closer still and she heard the drip drip drip of water on rooftops. Every surface close to horizontal glimmered with a light so subtle that the eye almost missed it, stardust falling with the meltwater.
Arka directed them to a low building, one of the first they reached. “You’ll all be sleeping in this barracks tonight. And I will be in that hut over there.” She pointed to a smaller structure whose door faced the barracks door. “To keep an eye on you.”
Arka followed them into the barracks. Unlike some of the other buildings this one had none of those glass-covered openings, a fact for which Yaz was grateful. A single small star-stone hung from the roof support in a wire cage, providing a weak light. A dozen bedrolls had been laid out on pallets of the same stuff the walls were made of. The rolls themselves were patchworks of worn skins, sewn and resewn to the point that Yaz wondered if she would wake to find hers in a hundred pieces. She didn’t recognise the fur, not hoola or harp whale.
Maya yawned and Yaz found herself suddenly exhausted. She had no idea how long had passed in the first ice chamber she’d dropped into. Would the gathering far above be in full swing or breaking up as the sun rose? For a moment the weight of all that ice seemed to crush her. She bore it though, along with the weight of sorrow for her mother and her father and Quell and maybe for some of the others she would never see again. Would they be grieving amid the celebrations, even though they were not supposed to? The music and the ferment were meant to help in the forgetting but she hoped they would each at least shed one tear for the girl they had lost.
“You stay here until I come for you.” Arka opened the door, pointing. “That hut way over there by the entrance to that side chamber. That’s where you go in the night. Nothing freezes down here so we don’t take care of our business near where we sleep. And nothing is wasted. What we have no use for helps grow the plants we eat.”
“The fungus eats dung?” Kao pushed up the blond mop of his hair in disgust. “And you eat the fungus?”
Arka shrugged. “You will too if you don’t want to starve. It’s the circle of life. The dead go into the pits too. It’s how life is. Eular says that on the ice that circle is broken because Abeth is dying. What you take from the sea does not return. But down here the cycle still turns life into death and death into life, and will do so as long as the stars shine.” With that she left them. Yaz sat, watching Arka walk away and wondering who this Eular was who seemed to know everything.
* * *
“WELL, I’M NOT eating that . . . muck.” Kao slammed the door behind Arka.
A low chuckle brought their attention to the gloom at the far end of the barracks where what had seemed to be a heap of bedding now raised its head.
“So this is where you ran off to.” Kao snorted at Thurin and shook his head. On the ice nobody stormed off in a temper. The wind would cool you down quicker than you liked, and if your anger took you out of view then you might never find your way back.
Thurin shrugged. “I have things to prove before they let me back.”
“Back?” Quina went to take a sleeping place not far from Thurin’s.
Thurin said nothing, only lay down and turned away. Maya went to take a place near the door.
“Not that one,” Kao said, looming over her.
Maya moved to another, and Kao scowled at her retreat. Yaz watched, wondering that someone so large would feel the need to push a small girl around. Kao could have made an issue of Thurin laughing at him, if he wanted a fight, but there was something haunting that one’s eyes that might give a mad dog pause.
Taking a pallet a good distance from Kao’s Yaz settled h
erself down. “I’m going to find my brother and rescue him from the Tainted.” She said it with more confidence than she felt and looked through the gloom at the shapeless heap that should be Thurin.
“If you see him you should run,” the heap replied.
“Arka told me that the rest are not as bad as Hetta,” Yaz said. “They don’t eat people.”
“Let them catch you and you’ll wish they had eaten you.” A long silence. “Theus is worse than Hetta. Much worse.”
It was as if Thurin were daring her to ask. She held her tongue. She wasn’t sure if it was pride that kept her lips sealed. Or maybe it was just knowing that since she had to go after Zeen it was better that she didn’t hear anything that might make it harder to leave.
Thurin told her anyway. “Theus has a plan. He leads them. All of them. Even Hetta is scared of Theus. He’s looking for something in the black ice. Been looking for it a long time. A very long time.”
“Who is he? What tribe? How old is he?” The man had taken her brother. Yaz found herself needing to know, however bad it might be.
Thurin didn’t speak for a while and the barracks seemed to hold its breath, as if the others were listening too and feared to betray themselves.
“Theus is as old as the body he wears. When I first saw him he was wearing Gossix, a boy I used to know.”
“Wearing?” Yaz shuddered. She could only think of a flayed skin, just as the Ictha wore the skin of mole-fish, the hides of tuark, and seal furs traded from the Triple Seas far to the south. “None of the tribes would—”
“Theus is not of the tribes.” Thurin’s voice fell to a whisper, haunted with memory. “He comes from the ice itself.” He seemed about to say more but the door burst open and light flooded in, chasing shadows to the corners.
“On your feet, drop-group!” Pome stood, revealed in the light of his own star.
He watched, hard faced, as they stood, Thurin last of all, favouring him with a dark look.
The Girl and the Stars Page 6