style="font-size:15px;"> ‘What have you done?’ Thurin, aghast, speaking from her blindness.
‘I asked it to be quiet.’ Yaz blinked and was relieved to see Thurin as a dark shape moving against a less dark background.
‘You shouldn’t be able to do that!’ He sounded scared. Amazed, but scared. ‘Make it work again.’
Yaz went right up to the wall and held the star above her at arm’s length, stretching. She pressed it to the ice. ‘Make it go in.’
Thurin’s magic fluttered around her and the ice swallowed the star as easily as if she were pressing it into fresh snow. ‘It’s still not working!’ he hissed.
Yaz stepped back. The star’s red glow gave the ice around it a bloody hue. ‘Sing,’ she told it. And in an instant the light returned, bright as it had ever been.
‘Come on!’ Thurin grabbed her shoulder, nails biting into bare skin. ‘We need to go back.’ He pulled her with him. ‘Pray nobody saw that!’
Both of them stumbled into the settlement, exhausted. Yaz found herself unable to stop yawning and Thurin seemed barely able to stand. ‘Working the ice … takes something out of me.’ He straightened with effort.
Yaz just nodded and followed as he led off again. Her sight had yet to recover entirely and the cavern’s twilight pulsed around her. Amid it all a mysterious clot of shadow moved across her vision like a person wrapped in night.
‘I’m not normally so weak,’ Thurin muttered. ‘But when I was …’
‘With the Tainted,’ Yaz supplied.
He nodded. ‘My ice-work got used, but it wasn’t me using it. I was a passenger in my own body. I’m out of practice at being me … if that makes any sense.’
Yaz said nothing. Part of her was thinking of Zeen, demon-haunted, wandering out there somewhere in the black ice. The other part ran Thurin’s words through her mind. Out of practice at being me. She felt adrift. She had, for her entire life, been a small but vital part in a single organism dedicated to survival against the odds. Just like every other member of the Ictha she’d carried out her duties in the certain knowledge that should she fail they would all suffer. On the edge of extinction every mistake carried a fatal edge, every waking moment had a purpose, every hour was occupied. It seemed strange that after what should have been a fall to her death she had for perhaps the first time in her life a chance to practise being her.
On the outskirts of the settlement Thurin turned and looked out across the great cavern sleeping in its own starlit twilight. A dozen openings led from it into other caverns or tunnels. ‘It’s pretty, but seriously though, don’t wander off.’
‘I might get lost?’ asked Yaz, trying not to bristle at the suggestion she couldn’t look after herself.
‘You might get taken.’ Thurin made a flat line of his mouth. ‘Hetta will only eat you. Theus haunts the dark, and those they can’t fill with demons …’
‘What happens to them?’
Thurin turned away. ‘Sometimes we hear them screaming, even here. It can last for days. They do it to tempt us out there.’
Yaz hung her head. The shadows and starlight seemed suddenly less beautiful and she shivered despite the warmth.
Thurin led off wearily without saying more.
They reached the barracks and almost fell through the door. Yaz found the energy to close it behind them, noticing as she did so that the door to Arka’s hut stood ajar. She wondered for a moment if the woman had watched them return together. She decided that she was too tired to care, about anything, and crawled beneath her thin blanket with a sigh. She thought of this Theus, this nightmare creature waiting for them in the darkness, and was sure she would lie awake until the next day. But she was asleep before she drew her next breath.
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 climbed from the waves and scaled the great cliffs to find that Mokka was there on the heights before him and had already set her tent. Zin asked if he might enter for the wind was a stranger to him and cruel. Mokka knew the wind as she knew herself and let the man come within, for he would die without.
Zin brought fish from beneath the water and he ate to restore his strength. Mokka asked if she might eat for the sea was a stranger to her, showing its face but rarely. Zin knew the waters as he knew himself and let the woman eat, for she had known only hunger.
Hua and Aiiki were the least of all the gods and neither spoke nor touched, but the children of their minds came to walk all corners of the world, and their work was in its way as mighty as that of any in the sky or in the sea.
None walk ice but for the sharing of Zin and Mokka. None survive there alone for the wind is cruel and the sea is a stranger. All their children are taught this lesson in their cradle hides. To forget this is to forget ourselves. To forget this is to go into the ice before your time.
A clanging sound drew Yaz from the depths of her dreaming. An alien noise. The Ictha owned little metal and what they did own came from the priests of the Black Rock, iron pins that could be driven into the ice where bone would prove unequal to the task, knife-blades for those who could afford the trade goods demanded for such things. Yaz’s uncle owned an iron knife but it had been her grandfather who purchased it with the horn of a narwhal and a stack of bundled tuark skins as tall as himself. Even so, Yaz had heard the sound of metal on metal before: it clanged.
CLANG.
Yaz sat abruptly then clutched her blanket to her. On all sides her fellow newcomers were sitting up, remembering where they were, and realizing that they had no idea what to do until someone arrived to tell them. Yaz drew up her legs and hugged herself, not against the cold but against the memories of the previous day.
The clanging stopped but Arka failed to appear.
‘What was that?’ Maya asked.
‘It’s to wake up the day shift.’ Thurin yawned and stretched. ‘Not that we have nights and days down here. But Tarko likes to keep things ordered.’
‘So, we’re awake.’ Kao hulked in front of the star-lamp throwing everyone into shadow. ‘Where do we go for breakfast?’
The others grinned but Kao’s answering scowl showed that he wasn’t joking, and now that Yaz thought about it she discovered herself to be ravenous. She went to dip a hide cup into the water bucket at the end of the barracks and drank. The bucket was made of no substance she knew. The water tasted clean but everything here was strange, nothing felt right.
‘Where did all the young ones go?’ Quina asked suddenly.
‘They fell to the Taints,’ Thurin answered in a quiet voice.
‘She
