Yaz could now see two points of light in the direction she’d aimed her finger. Far across the dark cavern. Hard white light of a kind she had never seen. Not the soft red of sunlight or the warm orange of flame.
‘With me!’ Thurin shouted. ‘Run!’
Yaz took off after Thurin, the others following, all but Quina who had gone off ahead and become lost from sight in the gloom. ‘What is it?’
Thurin saved his breath for running. Yaz pounded after him, praying no unseen fold of the rock would trip her, and from behind came a growing clatter of hard feet hitting stone, a clattering and a clashing and a thrashing. Whatever the thing was it was gaining on them at a frightening rate. In seconds it would be on them, and with the cavern wall looming ahead they had nowhere to run in any case.
‘In! Crawl!’ Thurin reached the cavern wall at a point where the base failed to quite meet the floor, leaving a narrow gap between ice and rock. Yaz threw herself after him, cutting her hands on the grit to save tearing the knees from her leggings. Skin grows back, hides don’t, was an old Ictha saying.
‘Deeper!’ Ahead of her Thurin was on his chest, scraping further in.
Kao and Maya launched themselves after Yaz and a heartbeat later their pursuer hit the wall with a thump that shivered through the ice. A shower of pulverized fragments fell in a white veil across the entrance to the gap.
‘Quick! Get in deeper!’ Thurin sounded desperate.
‘I can’t!’ Kao’s thick body was jammed two yards short of Yaz’s position.
‘Grab hold!’ Yaz had already half turned to wedge herself deeper and now turned further to reach back for Kao’s outstretched hand. Behind the boy she could see what seemed a forest of black legs through the clearing debris.
‘Pull!’ Kao screamed.
Yaz hauled, trying to anchor herself, but Kao proved more tightly held and instead they only succeeded in dragging her forward a few inches.
Behind Kao’s scrabbling feet something large and black clanged against the rock and a blinding white eye filled the crevice with light.
‘Try again!’ Thurin shouted and above Kao a layer of ice several inches thick shattered and fell away as Thurin exercised his power.
Yaz hauled and Kao lurched forward.
Through slitted eyes Yaz could see a variety of limbs invading the gap, some sinuous like black metal tentacles, others rigid and articulated, iron arms with too many elbows and skinning knives for claws.
Kao jerked his foot back as one of the clawed arms reached for it.
Thurin shouted behind them. ‘Back further! It opens up!’
In a nightmare of squeezing and pushing Yaz and Kao burrowed deeper until at last, as Thurin said, the ice roof lifted slowly, then swiftly, and they found themselves in a bubble the size of an Ictha tent, the almost-dark broken by the faintest glow from the walls.
‘What in the long night is that thing?’ Yaz almost had to shout to hear herself above the grinding and fracturing noises coming from the cavern wall even though it was now separated from them by ten yards of ice.
‘A hunter from the city,’ Thurin said. ‘It shouldn’t be here. They hardly ever leave the ruins.’
‘But what is it?’ Yaz demanded.
Thurin only shook his head. Behind him the glare from the hunter’s eyes was a diffuse white glow reaching through the yards of ice.
Yaz crouched down to peer back the way they’d come. The hunter had lifted its head to get in close and was reaching for them blind. The longest of its arms raked the rock two yards shy of their chamber but could reach no further. The only light now was a deep red one, so deep it was almost black at times, radiating out from between the plates of armour covering the creature’s body. Yaz couldn’t make sense of the thing; it looked like a random collection of segmented pieces joined together. ‘How long will it stay?’
‘I don’t know. It’s not supposed to be here.’
‘City?’ Yaz looked up, suddenly realizing that Thurin had mentioned a city. ‘What city?’ Men had had cities before the ice swept them aside. The legends said so.
‘A city of the Missing,’ Thurin said. He leaned back and shook his head. ‘You really don’t know what goes on down here at all, do you?’
‘No!’ Suddenly she was angry. ‘And neither did you before you were pushed down the pit, so don’t play so high and mighty with us!’
‘I wasn’t pushed.’ Thurin said it so softly she wondered if she had misheard him above the hunter’s clawing. He’d thrown himself down, like her?
Kao snorted, recovering some of his composure. ‘Of course you were, you lying sack of—’
‘I was born here.’
‘How long do we have to stay here?’ Kao had been pacing for what seemed like hours. One pace, two pace, turn. One pace, two pace, turn.
‘I don’t know.’ Thurin had given the same reply the last several times and it didn’t seem to stick.
‘Try sitting,’ Yaz suggested from where she sat.
Kao made no reply. He seemed more scared of the narrowness of the space confining him than of the hunter outside. And he had been pretty scared of that. Yaz didn’t blame him there. No amount of muscle is going to make a difference against a creature of iron with knives for claws. But fear of enclosed spaces was not something the Ictha knew. Anyone who couldn’t spend three months inside a tent would not last long among her people.
Outside, the grinding continued as it had continued the whole time.
‘Will it dig its way to us?’ Maya asked, eyes wide in the darkness.
Yaz would have said no, nothing could, but the sounds did seem to have grown louder, as if the beast were actually making progress. Certainly when it reached in every so often its claws seemed to scrape the rock much closer to their hiding place each time. Either it was burrowing through ice at a remarkable rate or its limbs were growing longer!
‘The others will come,’ Yaz said. ‘Quina will have told them.’
‘Unless that thing got her,’ Kao said.
Yaz shook her head. ‘Then Arka would have sent someone to check on us already. Arka said we should hurry.’
‘They’ll all know by now,’ Thurin agreed. ‘One way or the other.’
‘So they come and find us and …’ Yaz still marvelled that they were being attacked by a mass of iron that would outweigh all the metal owned by even the largest of clans. Her life could soon be ended by a sharp-edged heap of treasure of incalculable value. ‘How do you beat these things?’
‘We
