be the end of the world. Some wept. Some tore at their hair. And then the wind blew again and it was as if that moment of stillness had never been.
Yaz shed her sodden outer hides. Her best sealskins were still stored on her sled. The Ictha would make good use of them. She peered back at Arka around a hanging coat. ‘I need a knife.’ She said the words through gritted teeth.
‘Hey! We’re not that dangerous!’ A girl’s voice from among the drying clothes, Maya perhaps.
‘I am!’ A boy. Laughter followed that one.
‘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 towards 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 towards 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 towards 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
