THE GIRL AND THE MOUNTAIN
The Second Book of the Ice
Mark Lawrence

Copyright

HarperVoyager

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First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2021

Copyright © Mark Lawrence 2021

Jacket illustration © Jason Chan 2021

Jacket design © HarperCollinsPUblishers Ltd 2021

Mark Lawrence asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008284800

Ebook Edition © April 2021 ISBN: 9780008284824

Version: 2021-04-06

Dedication

Dedicated to the memory of George Lebon with whom I misspent some of the best parts of my youth.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

The Story So Far

Chapter 1: Thurin

Chapter 2: Quell

Chapter 3: Yaz

Chapter 4: Thurin

Chapter 5: Quell

Chapter 6: Yaz

Chapter 7: Thurin

Chapter 8: Quell

Chapter 9: Yaz

Chapter 10

Chapter 11: Thurin

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14: Quell

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17: Yaz

Chapter 18

Chapter 19: Thurin

Chapter 20: Quell

Chapter 21: Thurin

Chapter 22: Yaz

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35: Thurin

Chapter 36

Chapter 37: Yaz

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Acknowledgements

Also by Mark Lawrence

About the Publisher

The Story So Far

For those of you who have had to wait a while for this book I provide brief catch-up notes to book one, so your memories may be refreshed and I can avoid the awkwardness of having to have characters tell each other things they already know for your benefit.

Here I carry forwards only what is of importance to the tale that follows.

Yaz and her brother, Zeen, found themselves in the Pit of the Missing as a result of developing powers that, while useful, made them too weak to survive the extreme cold of Abeth’s icy surface. There are four old bloods that show in a small minority of children:

 gerant (which means you grow very big)

 hunska (which makes you very fast)

 marjal (which can give you some of a variety of lesser magics, like command over shadows, water, air, rock, fire, etc. – sometimes more than one of these)

 quantal (which can give you major magics, including accessing the vast power of the Path, and the ability to weave the threads of existence to achieve more subtle manipulations of people and things).

Under the ice Yaz met the Broken – a tribe formed from those who survived the fall down the pit. She also met the Tainted – members of the Broken who had been taken over by devils/spirits that dwell in the black ice.

In the rock under the ice are the remains of Vesta, a city built by the Missing – a race that left Abeth before the four tribes of man (gerant, hunska, marjal, and quantal) arrived. The Missing purified themselves before they vanished by carving out their impurities, their undesirable traits: anger, selfishness, jealousy, and other evils. These evils have since escaped the vaults and polluted both the ice and now the Tainted. The leader and most powerful of these spirits is called Theus.

The Missing’s city is also the source of stars and iron, both of which the Broken mine and scavenge. The stars are glowing spheres that seem to be a power source used by the Missing. Yaz has an ability to manipulate the stars, an ability seemingly shared only by a small number of the priests. The priest who threw Yaz’s brother down the pit wanted Yaz to join the priesthood and has worked to recover her from the Broken.

Before Yaz escaped from the pit she drove the spirits out of the Tainted, returning the possessed people to the Broken. Theus was defeated.

Important figures from book one:

 Yaz, ~16 years old, part of the Ictha clan, quantal with the special ability to control the stars

 Zeen, ~12 years old, part of the Ictha clan, hunska, Yaz’s brother

 Thurin, ~18 years old, born under the ice, marjal with powers over water and fire. Thurin was possessed by Theus. Theus later agreed to leave him after striking a bargain with Yaz

 Erris, ~5,000 years old. As a young man he was lost in the undercity, millennia ago, before the sun weakened further and ice covered the planet. The city adopted him. It’s unclear whether Erris is really alive or just a memory kept by the city. He now inhabits an artificial body that he built with the city’s help

 Quina, hunksa, a quick-witted, sharp-tongued girl, ~15 years old

 Maya, marjal, a shadow-worker, member of the ice’s most warlike clan and no stranger to killing, ~13 years old

 Kao, gerant, well over 6 feet tall and powerfully built though only 12 years old

 Quell, ~17 years old, part of the Ictha clan. Quell was going to ask Yaz to marry him just before she jumped into the pit. He followed her in later

 Theus (age unknown), a spirit made from most of the undesirable traits of one of the Missing

 Taproot (age unknown), an ancient simulation of a man named Elias Taproot who was brought to Abeth by one of the four tribes of men that settled the planet together, arriving after the departure of the Missing

 The regulator (age unknown), a priest responsible for selecting children to be thrown down the pit

 Eular (age unknown), an old, eyeless man who appears to be part of the priesthood who live in the Black Rock but also to spend time living among the Broken who believe him to be one of them.

The priests of the Black Rock – the only mountain known to rise above the ice – exercise authority over the ice tribes. They are the only ones with access to iron and trade it with the ice tribes for furs and food.

During her time in the pit Yaz discovered that the priests give the Broken vital salt and in exchange the Broken recover iron and stars for the priests.

In addition to the small-scale conflict between Yaz, the Broken, the Missing, and the priests of the Black Rock there is a much larger, older, underlying conflict. Parts of many of the Missing’s cities survive under the ice, and each has its own controlling mind, though these have fallen into madness in the millennia since the Missing left. The most powerful of these city minds is called Seus. Seus is engaged in a conflict with Taproot. Taproot has told Yaz that there remains a thin green corridor around Abeth’s equator that the ice has yet to swallow. Seus wants the ice to cover it but Taproot wants to stop that happening. They’re fighting each other through the ancient networks, though Seus is much more powerful.

Yaz has a needle that contains a fragment of Taproot’s personality and will guide her to a more complete copy of the man.

Book one ended with an escape from the pit via a long shaft that Thurin helped melt through the ice. Yaz and others were lifted in an iron cage via a long cable. The priests of the Black Rock were hauling the cage up.

In the cage were: Yaz, Zeen, Erris, Maya, Kao, and Quell. Quell had a knife in his side. Thurin was unable to get into the cage and has been left behind. Quina was missing, presumed captured by one of the priests’ mechanical star-driven hunters.

Maya climbed up the cable as the cage was rising. Yaz went up after her. When Yaz got to the top, ahead of the cage, she found the Regulator and Eular there and no sign of Maya. Eular used magic to send Yaz to sleep and the Regulator told the acolytes raising the cage to let it drop the two miles back into the caverns below.

CHAPTER 1
Thurin

There had been a great fire and there had been a great flood. Both are forces of nature that sweep clean, that wipe the slate and promise a new beginning. Thurin had been the cause of the fire and of the flood. And yet both had failed to wash away his desire to be with Yaz of the Ictha: the girl for whom the stars shone brighter.

Thurin stared up at the miles-long hole stretching vertically through the ice to a world that he had never seen. It seemed impossible that he had driven the fire that melted it. The release of his fire-talent, of energies that had built inside him for years and years, had hollowed him. The subsequent battle with the Tainted had left him bruised, bitten, and torn. And almost immediately after that he had used the full extent of his ice-work in a desperate attempt to ensure Yaz’s brother joined her escape.

Even as he wondered what it was that still kept him upright, Thurin found himself collapsing to the floor. The last image to remain with him was of Yaz’s impossibly white eyes locked on his as the cage rose ever further and vanished into darkness.

‘Wake up!’

Thurin rolled to his side, groaning. A pleasant heat wrapped him and for a beautiful moment he thought himself at home in his mother’s house within the settlement. He tried to cling to the illusion but it slid through his grasp, leaving only pieces of the darker dreams that had haunted his sleep, ones in which Theus stood above him pulling puppet strings to make him dance to a tune that was not his own.

‘Still with us? Good.’

Thurin cracked open an eye. A fierce glow, distorted by his blurry vision, stole detail from the scene but he saw enough to tell that he was lying in one of the forge sheds. Lengths of chain and a variety of tools hung from the support beams. ‘Kaylal? That you?’

‘It is.’ The young smith clapped a hand to Thurin’s shoulder. ‘Takes more than a hundred screaming Tainted to put me down.’

Thurin struggled to sit. All of him hurt. Bites and scratches that he hadn’t noticed before now cried for his attention. ‘You’re all right?’

‘Well, I lost both legs …’

Thurin smiled at the old joke. Kaylal looked as bad as he felt, both eyes blackened and puffy, his ear torn and bleeding, bruising round his neck. Still, the greatest of his hurts was the loss of Exxar. The rest of his wounds would heal. ‘It’s good to see you. How did I get here?’

‘Arka had the wounded carried to shelter. The worst of them are at the settlement.’ Kaylal hauled himself up a chain to gain his work stool. ‘Your friend Yaz left in spectacular fashion, I’m told.’

‘She’s your friend too.’ Thurin scowled, angry at his own evasion.

Kaylal shook his head. ‘I lost Exxar and there’s no getting him back. Yaz has only been gone half a day. She’s up there.’ He pointed. ‘It’s a journey that took even me almost no time at all.’

‘I’m told it’s harder on the way up.’ Thurin stood, groaning at the stiffness in his limbs.

‘Seriously, though, you need to do something, Thurin. I saw how you looked at her. What will it be like spending the years to come always wondering where she is, what she’s doing?’

Thurin stretched, imagining he could hear his leg bones creaking. He knew Kaylal was right and it scared him. He moved closer to the forge pot, still radiating residual heat despite being empty. ‘The Broken need me.’

‘That’s just an excuse. We have Arka. We have our people back from the taint. And if this whale is really there …’

‘It is. Getting it out of the black ice will be a problem, but I saw it. I never believed the stories when they said how big those things are!’

Kaylal grinned. ‘I want to see it too!’

Thurin echoed his friend’s smile. It seemed madness for the two of them, neither having any memories of the ice, to be discussing his going to the surface. But if ever there had been a time for madness it was here in the days since Yaz’s arrival.

‘I don’t know how to follow her.’ Thurin said it in a small voice. It seemed a sorrier excuse than being needed here. But the truth was that two miles of ice was a daunting barrier. It wasn’t as if anyone had ever overcome it before Yaz made her escape.

Kaylal laughed. ‘They say you’re the one who made that hole in the first place. If that’s true then surely you can get yourself up it. I doubt they’ve been able to close it off yet.’

Thurin frowned. ‘Maybe …’ He bit his lip. ‘It would be dangerous though. Very.’

‘Oh, well. Better stay then.’ Kaylal took down one of his hammers and began to inspect the open chain links scattering the table before him.

‘Heh.’ Thurin shook his head. ‘Everything has been dangerous since she came. I guess I’ve got a taste for it now.’

Kaylal reached out behind him and took hold of something dark and heavy that he tossed to Thurin.

‘Exxar’s cloak?’ Thurin stroked a hand down over the garment: double-layered rat-skin. It had taken an age for Exxar to barter for the furs.

‘He was never warm enough.’ Kaylal managed a smile.

‘I can’t—’

‘Take it. I heard it’s chilly up there.’

Thurin swirled the cloak around his shoulders and started towards the door. He paused to set a hand on Kaylal’s shoulder. ‘You’ll look after them all for me, won’t you?’

‘I will, brother.’ Kaylal put down his hammer and laid a calloused hand on top of Thurin’s. ‘And we’ll be here if you need a place to come back to. Now go and get her.’

Thurin returned to the city cavern, passing through cave after cave where the Broken wandered in numbers greater than he’d ever seen them. Those reclaimed from the taint outnumbered the Broken who had remained free, but they were intermixed now, families reunited. There were greetings from people who remembered Thurin as a baby, and others he recalled from his childhood. Some, taken more recently, rushed to hug him, trying to drag him off to this or that celebration. The joy that Yaz had left in her wake was just starting to sink in. The Broken were only now beginning to truly believe that this was no dream, that it was something real that couldn’t be taken from them.

Each invitation, each reunion, weakened his resolve; each was a hook sunk into his flesh and needing to be torn free if he was to continue to his goal. It would be so easy to stay, so easy to resume the familiarity of his life, to enjoy the improved future within the company of his extended family. But Thurin knew that if he turned from his course, if he surrendered to what was easy, then Yaz would haunt him all his life, however long it might be. A great ‘what if’ hanging over his head year after year.

And so he came to the city cavern and crossed the puddled expanse of stone, the iced-over remnants of the flood cracking beneath his feet. He walked among the abandoned wealth of iron, the wreckage of broken hunters, discarded armour, weapons cast aside. He gave a wide berth to the pit into which Theus and the other tainted gerants had fallen when Yaz collapsed the floor beneath them into a chamber of the undercity. He assumed that the pit remained full of the bodies of those who had fallen amid a tumult of shattered rock, but he had no wish to see the truth of the matter for himself. The families of the dead would come for them soon enough.

Thurin spotted a lone figure poking among the debris of Pome’s hunter, Old Hanno, who after Eular had to be the oldest of the Broken at well over fifty. He raised his hand in greeting. Apart from the two of them the ruins stood deserted.

Thurin came to a halt beneath the wide throat of the hole that stretched up through the roof of the city cavern to the surface of the ice, allegedly miles above. The stardust marbling the ice illuminated the first twenty or thirty yards of the shaft in a dim multi-hued glow. Beyond that, only darkness, no hint of the sky that the stories told of. Most of Thurin’s friends had memories of the surface, but none of their words really painted a picture in his mind, or even made sense. What held this ‘sky’ up? How high above the ground was it? Where were the walls? Thurin sighed and guessed that if his plans succeeded then he would soon see for himself and being an adult he would understand what the Broken had failed to explain from their childhood recollections.

A deep breath calmed him a little. Another deeper breath, exhaling the tension. Thurin’s power to work the ice came from his marjal blood. Next to shadow-work the elemental skills were the most common to manifest in marjals. He had been strong with water and ice since his early years. By the age of ten he had been able to weaken the cave walls, allowing the gerants to dig through much more swiftly in their hunt for stars. The talent had slowly strengthened as he grew and used it daily with the mining crew, but it still hadn’t been anywhere near as strong as Tarko’s.

That had changed when Thurin returned from the Tainted. Something had shifted within him; some barrier had broken. He found himself capable of new feats. And in the week since Yaz’s arrival it had seemed that some hitherto unsuspected barrier had broken each day. In the fight with Hetta he had held her off by seizing the water that suffuses all humans. Yaz’s arrival had heralded a sequence of life-or-death situations, and in each new extremity Thurin had clawed his way to some fresh height, unlocking more strength, his ice-work at last becoming equal to that of their former leader. Perhaps even surpassing it.

Another deep breath and Thurin reached for his power. The idea had come to him when he thought about how he had saved Zeen. The boy had lost his grip as the cage accelerated upwards towards the shaft. Thurin had reached out with his ice-work, his mind taking hold of Zeen’s blood. Thurin had lifted the boy and sent him in pursuit of the cage, letting him grab the bars once more.

Now Thurin turned his ice-work inwards, taking hold of the water in the blood that ran through his own veins, the water that suffused his flesh. You only had to see how solid a corpse would freeze to know how much of us is water. With a small grunt of concentration Thurin lifted his feet clear of the rock. It was easier than he had feared, yet still hard enough to make him worry that sustaining the effort for as long as was necessary might be beyond him.

He rose slowly into the air with the sense that he was balancing on the narrow top of an invisible, ever-growing tower. The pressure needed to raise his bodyweight pushed back on some elastic part of his mind, some focus of his talent that would stretch and stretch again, providing whatever effort was demanded of it … right up to that moment when suddenly too much had been asked and without warning it might snap.

Empty yards piled up beneath his feet. The ground grew more distant, the roof closer. With the ice ceiling looming above him on every side, Thurin found himself seized by a swift and unexpected terror. The distance yawning beneath his feet seemed to exert a pull all of its own. The invisible tower on which he balanced became an unstable stack of loosely connected parts, piled way too high. The rocky expanse bearing the city’s scars demanded that he rejoin it with crushing speed.

A panicked burst of power sent Thurin rushing into the shaft, and in its rapidly narrowing, rapidly dimming confines the distance beneath him was quickly tamed. Within a short time, all that could be seen below him was a shrinking circle of light that yielded no impression of the fall it concealed.

Within a hundred yards the darkness wrapped Thurin completely and from then on he was simply a dot of warmth rising blind through the night, grazing the ice walls from time to time, and wondering if the seemingly endless shaft would spit him out into the world above before gravity’s pull overcame his willpower and dragged him screaming back to a quick but ugly death.

Up, always up. Thurin lost track of time. The pain built behind his eyes until he also lost all sense of where he was going and why. Up and up. And the hurt kept getting worse.

CHAPTER 2
Quell

Quell lay in the rising cage surrounded by stacked boards from the settlement and carelessly heaped fungi. The knife in his side pinned him to each moment, the pain both sharp and at the same time a dull, pervading ache. It hadn’t hurt going in. The sight of the hilt, tight against his flesh, had astonished him.

The weakest among the Tainted had been more dangerous than Yaz thought, but she had been right to try to stop him swinging his axe at them. Even now he would rather be lying here, waiting to die, than sitting unharmed and carrying the memories of children he had hacked apart. There are prices worth paying to stay alive, and others not worth paying.

The regulator’s price for saving Yaz’s life had been one Quell had been prepared to pay. He had thought her dead already. The weight of sadness that he’d had to carry from the Pit of the Missing on the day she fell had been more than he thought he could bear. He still told himself that she fell. For her to have thrown herself down seemed to speak of a willing destruction of the bond that he thought had grown between them. He had been going to ask her to walk with him for the rest of their days. To share a tent and raise children of their own. If she had jumped rather than fallen … what did that mean? He should have been the rock she clung to, her comfort in the face of Zeen’s death. Instead it seemed that her own life had been the price that she was ready to pay to escape him.

Yaz’s mother had climbed from the crater as though she were a dead woman walking only out of habit. Yaz’s father, a man given to silence, had cracked open in a way he had not before, even when the dagger-fish took his youngest son. Yaz’s uncle and her mother’s cousins had had to wrestle her father from the crater while all the time he fought and raged against the Gods both in the Sea and in the Sky.

Lies and deceptions had seemed a small price when Regulator Kazik had taken Quell aside and spoken those two golden words. ‘She lives.’

Quell’s task had been a simple one. To locate Yaz and then use the tiny star the regulator had given him to summon an early collection of iron in the city chamber. He was also to introduce himself to the blind man, Eular, and pass on the regulator’s regards and cryptic messages, saying nothing of that to anyone else.

For the price of that small deception Quell would get to return a daughter of the Ictha to stand beneath the sky once more. A daughter restored to grieving parents. And then, only then, when they stood free upon the ice again, would he be able to ask the questions that had burned inside his chest ever since she fell. Only then would he have been able to ask her to share his life.

Of course now he lay dying. Even if the priests returned him to the Ictha he would just be a source of sorrow for them as they enacted the ritual of farewell and left him alone on the ice with salt and a cube of harp-fish for his hunger.

Worse still, he lay dying while forced to look up at the stranger who so fascinated Yaz, dark of eye and skin where the Ictha were copper-skinned and so pale of eye that the white and the iris became almost the same thing. The man seemed both impossibly strong and impossibly fast, matching Zeen’s superhuman swiftness and exceeding the strength of the Ictha manyfold. And the cruellest blow might be that he had the calm confidence Quell had sought all his life. Quell’s own reserve had cracked at Yaz’s fall and had started to desert him in earnest the moment his rope had snapped and he began his own fall into the midst of the Broken.

Even now, Erris was examining Quell’s wound, probing around the knife with his fingers as if they could somehow see deep into the surrounding flesh.

‘I was wrong,’ Erris said. ‘Given what’s been cut it would be better to leave the blade in place until we are somewhere warm with more resources.’

‘Just take it out,’ Quell grunted.

Erris shook his head. ‘You would bleed to death. Quite likely before we even get you out of this cage.’

‘Go and help Yaz then!’ Quell’s anger rose. Erris had stayed only to help him. And that had meant leaving Yaz to climb the cable on her own in pursuit of Maya.

‘I can’t see her at all now.’ Zeen sounded worried, staring up the cable after his sister, towards the distant circle of sky above them. During the long, slow ascent the boy had oscillated between joyous excitement at his return to the surface and abject terror that the regulator would simply deliver him to the depths again. In the excited moments Quell saw glimpses of the child who had marched south to the Black Rock with him. He hoped that child would return in full back on the ice and manage to leave the horrors of the Tainted in the hole in which they belonged. Though how Zeen might survive in the teeth of the wind, broken as he was, Quell didn’t know. Perhaps Yaz could persuade the priesthood to find a place for him within their mountain halls. She would have to deal with the priests of course. Quell had never thought her plans of a trek into the vast expanse of the southern ice anything but fantasy. The regulator would be waiting for them at the head of the shaft. And the magic of the priests was known to be unstoppable. Even this Erris would be put on his knees before it. The enchantments of the priests had held two dozen clans in check for generations.

‘How far above us do you think she is?’ Zeen asked again.

‘Too far,’ rumbled Kao. He held up a hand against the far-off circle of light and tried to squint past it. He too sounded scared. Despite the boy’s great size Yaz had assured Quell that he was hardly older than her brother.

The cage continued its smooth upward journey. The walls of the shaft were close on every side now and the cage scraped along one wall, spitting pulverized ice over all four of them. The white circle of sky grew ever larger, breaking the darkness into twilight. Quell began to see detail in it, some kind of structure over which the cable must run. He knew a moment’s fear for Yaz then – had she been dragged over the crossbar? But no, if she had come to grief in such a manner she would have fallen back.

The sound of the wind moaning across the open mouth of the shaft began to reach them. Already it seemed colder. Quell gave thanks that this was not the north. His skins were still damp from the flood that had poured out when Thurin had melted the passage. In any true cold it would be a death sentence.

With less than a hundred yards of shaft remaining, the cage came to a sudden halt.

‘What’s happening?’ Zeen got to his feet.

‘Nothing good,’ Kao muttered.

Quell struggled to sit but Erris laid a hand to his chest. ‘Remain still.’

Quell would have told him to find a sea and jump in it, but the pain from the knife became so sharp that he had to lie back in any event. He remembered the crash as the empty cage had hammered down on the city after the flood. He remembered the emptiness in the regulator’s eyes as he pushed children into the Pit of the Missing. ‘They’re going to drop us.’

Quell’s words seemed to crystallize a truth that they all already knew. Erris was first to act. Almost too fast to follow he snatched up one of the stakes with which Yaz had planned to anchor their shelter. Next he took the heavy iron mallet that had fallen between two stacks of boards. With a single blow and a strength that even the largest gerant surely could not match, the man drove the stake a good two-thirds of its eighteen-inch length into the wall of the shaft, leaving the remaining six inches jutting out through the gridded bars of the cage wall.

‘Zeen, you help.’ Erris stuck another into place on the other side with two swift blows.

Zeen, moving as fast as Erris, began to supply the man with stakes, allowing him to focus on placing them and driving them home.

‘That will hold us!’ Quell tried to raise his voice between the hammer blows as Erris set a fifth stake. The cage was heavier than its contents, but even its substantial weight should be secure with five deep anchors.

‘You’re forgetting the cable!’ Erris said, accepting a sixth stake from Zeen.

Even as he spoke the cage jolted and settled heavily on the stakes. The cable above them began to fall, dragged down by its own weight, bowing against the shaft walls and then coiling down on top of the cage in a shower of broken ice. The metal cable began to mount up on the cage housing with frightening speed. The weight of it must be incredible and there were the best part of two miles’ worth of it still to come. Within moments the light had died to a fraction of what it had been.

Erris drove the last of their stakes home. Already the ice around them groaned as the increasing weight strained against the hastily sunk anchors.

‘I have to get up there before too much cable comes down.’ Erris snatched up both the awls they’d brought with them in case new holes had to be made in the boards during repairs.

Quell watched Erris climb. He wondered if the man would be able to find a way out of the rapidly growing mass of cable overhead. If not the weight would increase until the six stakes tore loose and they all made the long fall to their deaths.

Erris moved fast and exerted his enormous strength to push a way through the coils of iron cable. More quickly than Quell had imagined possible, he was gone, leaving them in darkness with the continuing thunder of descending metal overhead.

‘Can he do it?’ Zeen asked.

‘Climb out, you mean?’ Kao asked.

Quell tried to imagine it. A hundred-yard wall of smooth ice with cable rushing down just a yard from it. Erris would be relying on the two thin awls, hauling himself up by strength of arm alone, his whole weight, which according to Kao was far more than it should be for a man that size, depending on first one of the spikes then the other. ‘Yes, he can do it.’ It seemed a reasonable lie to tell, bringing comfort to the two boys, and if he was wrong then it would all be over soon enough.

They waited, blind and helpless. The sound of piling cable grew muffled as the thickness built above them. The stakes groaned alarmingly, the ice around them beginning its inevitable surrender to the mounting pressure. Quell could feel that he was bleeding again. Something had moved the knife. Perhaps the jolt earlier as they tried to drop the cage, or maybe Zeen had knocked it while scrambling for the stakes. Either way, his lifeblood was running from the freshly opened wound once more.

‘What does it mean?’ Zeen asked the darkness. ‘Yaz wouldn’t have let them drop us.’

‘They must have taken her,’ Kao answered in a hopeless voice.

‘Or lost her and done this out of spite or to lure her back.’ Quell spoke in gasps around the pain of his injury. He had never thought to die stabbed by a knife worth more among the Ictha than all of the possessions he had gathered in his life. But now it seemed instead that his end would come beneath a weight of metal greater than that owned by all the clans combined. He doubted anyone from the ice had ever died a grander death. And still he wanted to live, to fish the hot seas, to wait out the long night, to father children of his own.

The cage lurched downwards, just a fraction, but enough to bring cries of alarm from all three of them. One of the stakes must have gone. The other five were holding. For now.

‘It’s stopped …’ Zeen croaked.

Quell wondered what he was talking about. Of course it had stopped, or they would all be falling.

‘The sound,’ Kao said.

Save for the groaning of ice there was no noise from above.

‘It might—’ Quell bit off the words. It might be just that too much now lay atop them to hear through. But why not let the other two think Erris had made it out? Maybe he truly had.

They waited in the dark with the creak and complaint of the ice all around them, sometimes a deep far-off sound that reverberated in his chest, sometimes high-pitched and close, like the sudden fracturing of something brittle. Already, even after just a few days, Quell had grown as used to the sounds as he had been to the ceaseless moan of the wind.

With a groan of his own he raised himself a little, resting his shoulders against the board stacks. He could feel Kao and Zeen’s silent fear, and as the only adult among children he felt he should offer what comfort he could, even if it was only distraction from their fate. ‘More adventure than you ever wanted, eh, Zeen?’ The boy had lived for tales of danger and discovery.

‘Hells yes …’ Zeen managed a broken laugh. ‘I could use some boring right now. Just set me to repairing tent hides or waxing runners. I don’t mind.’ He sighed. ‘I want Yaz back.’

‘Don’t you worry about her,’ Quell said. ‘She’s strong. Stronger than all of us.’

‘She let the dagger-fish take Azad …’ Zeen’s voice trailed off.

Quell growled. ‘I didn’t see your brother get taken. I heard the cry and he was gone when I turned. I saw Yaz leaning over the side with her arms in the waves. Then I saw the boat turn over. And then I saw it go down. Now, I’m not saying it wasn’t a dagger-fish, just that no dagger-fish I’ve ever seen or heard about could take an Ictha canoe under. It had to have been the biggest damn dagger-fish to swim the sea. More likely a whale-eater looped a coil round your brother and pulled him under. What amazes me isn’t that something like that would snatch Azad but that anyone, even an Ictha, had the strength to hold on to him so tight that the whole boat would be dragged under. The aprons were in place. No water was getting in past Yaz and not even that much where Azad had been. You’ve no idea how much force it takes to pull a canoe down when it’s full of air. I’d be astonished if a dagger-fish could manage it, but think of this: it had hold of Azad, not the boat, so the only thing dragging that boat down was Yaz, by not letting go. I know I couldn’t have held on.’

‘What happened next?’ Kao asked in an awed breath. ‘How did she get out?’

‘I thought she was gone too.’ Quell winced at the memory. ‘The sea was calm, just a few bubbles rising. I couldn’t even see the boat. I knew she was gone. I was shouting for the others. I …’ His voice caught in his throat. He hadn’t the words to say how it had felt just watching the water where she vanished. It had been as if he was drowning too.

‘Jex and Jax had arrived in their boat and were shaking their heads. She’d been gone forever. She had to have drowned by then even if she wasn’t eaten. Jex was just saying how sorry he was and suddenly something broke the water nearby, like a breaching whale, launching nearly clean out of the waves. We paddled towards it through the mist. And there she was, unconscious, flopped over in the canoe. The air trapped inside had shot it back up once she let go. That’s Yaz for you. That’s how strong she is. And she tells it like a dagger-fish just took a bite, dragged Azad off and she left him to his fate.’ He shook his head in the darkness. ‘I think something broke in her that day. I think that was the day she started to change. Started to become … what she is now.’

They sat in silence for a long moment after that. Just the blind dark all around them and the groan of the ice. Quell gathered himself. ‘What about you … Kao, isn’t it? What clan are you?’

‘Golin!’ A half-hearted Golin chest-thump sounded in the dark. ‘Best there is …’

Quell knew the boy was wondering if they might ever take him back. Privately, Quell thought there was more chance of finding the green on Yaz’s crazy quest. The Golin were famous sticklers for rules and regulations. The code had kept them alive in the wastes and they in turn kept the code alive.

Quell changed subject to keep the lad from brooding. ‘What do the Golin fish in those southern seas of theirs?’

‘Southern?’ Kao bridled, as Quell had known he would. ‘The Golin are the best fishers on the ice. We follow the Wandering Sea and our boats are longer than a full-grown red shark.’

Kao carried on, talking about species both known and unknown to Quell, boasting as boys will, showing his enthusiasm for the hunt, telling of the time a sheerfish had bitten off his paddle without even enough of a jerk for him to know that the blade had gone.

Time passed, and Zeen was telling Kao about the pranks young Ictha played with the dry ice at the end of the long night, when Quell realized that for the first time in an age he could make out a dim outline of the boy. Their own long night had come to an end. Looking up he saw a weak light fingering through gaps in the coiled mass of cabling. Even as he stared the illumination grew stronger, more yards of cable lifting.

‘Quick, Kao. Find that hammer and be ready to pull those stakes when the cage tries to rise. A solid upstroke on each should work them free.’

The cable above them continued to snake away, until at last the final coil unwound and the whole thing became taut. The cage jolted upwards.

‘Get them free!’ Quell coughed.

‘What if it’s a trick? To get us loose then drop us again?’ Kao hesitated.

‘Just do it!’ If Quell had to lie in the cage with a knife in him for the rest of his life then he would rather that be a short time than a long one.

Kao hammered and tugged and a dozen blows set them free. Immediately they began to rise.

The daylight intensified rapidly. Quell found himself shocked by its brightness and was soon squinting at the world through the gaps between his fingers. The noise of clanking metal grew louder and louder as they rose. Suddenly they were in the open, the wind knifing through the bars to steal their body heat. Kao and Zeen began to shiver immediately, but Quell, even in his damp skins, welcomed the freshness of it. The air in the caverns had felt dead to him; the air in the city smelled of decay. The wind, though, that was a living thing. Not a friend but an adversary that reminded him he too was alive, even with the blade bedded in his side.

A dark hand reached out and slipped a hook through the cage bars. The clanking that had ceased now resumed and the cage was dragged to the side, beginning to lean at an angle away from the iron frame that stood over the shaft mouth and about which the cable slid on a wheel.

‘Don’t let anything fall out!’ Quell barked. ‘Quick!’

Zeen took him at his word and moved with lightning speed to prevent the fungi and smaller tools rolling across the now-sloping boards and out through the cage bars.

Erris climbed the outside of the cage and fixed another hook, higher up this time. He returned to a huge piece of winding gear, toothed iron wheels stacked in brain-aching complexity. Erris set both hands to an iron bar standing out horizontally from the central mechanism and placed his feet in small pits in the ice for traction. He began to circle the device, pushing the capstan bar; there was more clanking. His progress turned the wheels within wheels, and somehow released some of the main cable while drawing the newly attached cable in close. The net result was to stand the cage on its base beside the shaft.

Quell struggled to sit, cursing all the gods he knew by name. The expanse of the ice greeted him, endless, white, haunted by the wind. The only landmark was the Black Rock, thrusting through the glacial sheet, a vast fist of stone not more than a few miles distant. The shaft mouth with its winding gear and gantry was deserted, though Quell noticed a smear of crimson not far from the mechanism, and a scatter of droplets around it. Someone had bled here.

‘Why is it so cold?’ Zeen hugged himself. It looked wrong, one of the Ictha bothered by a southern breeze, but Quell had seen great changes in both Yaz and her brother over their week or so beneath the ice. He could see no reason, though, why such changes should crowd into the space of a few days when for the year before their drop neither sibling had shown anything but the slight signs of their difference creeping upon them. Perhaps it had been the stars.

‘Kao and Zeen, if you could climb out first, I can help Quell.’ Erris’s voice broke the landscape’s spell and both began to climb, Zeen practically running up the bars. Kao, moving more slowly, found his hands sticking to the freezing iron.

Erris climbed in and Quell, knowing the feeling unworthy of him, began to hate the man even as he descended into the cage. Erris would carry him out of there as though he were less than a child, lifting a full-grown man of the Ictha with one arm, while Quell hung useless, trying not to scream as he jolted against the bars.

‘This isn’t good.’ Erris knelt to inspect where the knife stuck into Quell’s side. ‘I’ll have to try something.’ With a grimace he held his hand between them, squeezing thumb and forefinger together. Within a few heartbeats both digits began to smoke. With his other hand Erris pinched the side of the wound closed then ran the tip of his smoking finger along the joined edges. Where his finger passed, a dark brown strip the same colour as Erris’s skin now covered the redness of Quell’s skin and sealed the gash around the knife.

‘That should hold you.’ Erris reached around Quell and, with a father’s care, lifted him; then began to climb.

The nightmarish pain was thankfully brief and Quell lay gasping on the ice with Kao and Zeen watching anxiously over him while Erris returned for something from the cage.

‘What happened here?’ Quell asked when Erris came out again carrying boards and wire.

‘When I emerged there was no sign of Yaz or Maya.’ Erris set to work wiring three boards together. ‘Only six robed priests standing by the capstan. They ordered my surrender and then took up iron bars against me when I would not.’ Erris shrugged. ‘When they found that they couldn’t overwhelm me they retreated, dragging their wounded. They went that way.’ He pointed towards the Black Rock.

‘I think … I can see them.’ Kao shaded his eyes and squinted out over the fractured landscape of pressure ridges separated by ice flats. ‘Far off, still heading away.’

Erris worked to fashion a sled on which Quell could be dragged. ‘We’ll have to follow them.’

Zeen nodded, his mouth a flat, worried line.

‘Go to the Black Rock?’ Kao seemed aghast at the idea.

‘Yaz must have been taken there.’ Erris cast a dubious eye over the ice. ‘Besides, where else is there to go?’

‘I …’ Kao twisted his mouth. ‘I could strike out to the west and meet the Golin on the shores of the Lesser Sea.’

Erris looked incredulous but extended his arm out towards the west. ‘I wish you the best of luck with that. But I bet it’s warmer inside the Black Rock. In any event, I have to take Quell there. His only chance is to have the knife removed and then to rest somewhere warm with access to food and water.’

Kao bowed his head, still shivering. ‘I guess if Yaz needs us …’

And before long Quell found himself being dragged across the ice on boards made by the Missing from gods knew what, towards a forbidden mountain full of mystery.

CHAPTER 3
Yaz

Yaz woke with a groan. For a blessedly long moment she had no idea where she was. She wondered if she had somehow fallen back into the city, for wherever she had ended up there were no familiar sounds, no wind worrying at the tent hides, no cavern walls creaking as the ice edged forwards, no drip drip drip of meltwater. No sounds at all.

She sat up, still wrapped in ignorance, and found herself in a chamber not unlike those in the city of the Missing but hewn from the rock rather than walled with poured stone. She lay on a platform rather like a table with very short legs, the bedding a luxury of furs such as all of the Ictha together would be hard pressed to muster from their tents. A small iron pot of stardust provided very muted illumination.

The chamber had one exit, sealed by a heavy iron door with a small window in it. The sudden memory of Eular drove Yaz to her feet. The old man had been in league with Regulator Kazik all along. More than that, he seemed to be in charge!

Yaz reached the door in three strides. She stopped herself, fist raised to pound iron, a demand for release on her lips. Instead she pushed on it to confirm that it wouldn’t open. Nobody seals you in a room just to let you out when you tell them to. She returned to sit on the bed and gather her thoughts.

Eular couldn’t have spent his whole life with the Broken and yet be a high-placed priest, possibly the highest of all and commanding the Black Rock. She had met him beneath the ice in that cave on the very margins of the air gap melted by the stars. He had lived alone, summoning his visitors and seldom mixing with the Broken … What had Thurin said about him? Eular could go for months without being seen. That had to mean he had a way between the surface and the caves. Maybe something like the iron-collection route but secret. Though how such an exit could be kept hidden from the Broken Yaz had no idea.

As Yaz sat, fractured memories began to emerge from the darkness that Eular had forced upon her, reassembling themselves into the story of her recent past. With sudden shock, Yaz remembered the cage. Her brother, Erris, Quell, and Kao hadn’t been far behind her, coming to the surface. The phrase ‘have them drop the cage’ returned to her, the last words that she’d heard before she passed out. In an instant she was there at the door, hammering on the metal, shouting for Zeen. If she could have touched the Path she would have blown the door off its hinges. But she’d drawn on her power too much recently and the Path lay beyond reach.

Yaz could see a rock-hewn tunnel and several more doors like hers, but nobody came to their dimly lit windows. She shouted until her voice grew hoarse, her cries echoing away down the passage. Scared and angry, she turned from the door, rubbing the side of her hand. Her eyes came to rest on the only thing of interest in the room. The small pot of glowing stardust.

Yaz walked slowly towards the pot, attuning her mind to the faint buzz of innumerable heartbeats. The tiny stars sang in harmonies, their song spiralling past the upper edge of Yaz’s hearing, even though she wasn’t listening to them with her ears. She held her hand out flat about a foot above the pot and made the twinkling dust rise in streamers to gather beneath her palm. When the pot lay empty, its contents hanging in a shifting mass below her fingers, Yaz slowly turned her hand and let the dust flow across her skin, a glowing glove of muted colours.

The door grated open and the dust fell from her hand, grey and lifeless. A man stood in the doorway, silhouetted by the lanterns of the two armoured figures behind him.

‘I heard you were awake.’ Eular stepped into the room, seemingly confident in his blindness.

For a vivid moment Yaz saw herself wearing the iron pot on her fist and punching the old man full in the face. The vision faded, but not the anger. ‘Where are my friends? Where’s Zeen?’

‘Back in the undercaves with the Broken.’ Eular’s words were mild where Yaz’s had been hot.

‘I heard you say to drop them!’

‘A figure of speech.’ Eular waved the idea away. ‘The descent is fast but the cage slows towards the end and comes to a gentle rest.’

The tension in Yaz’s jaw eased a fraction, backing away from the level where it felt her teeth might shatter at any moment. She hoped what he’d said was true. ‘Why?’

‘Why?’ Eular echoed. He advanced into the cell and one of the armoured men followed him in.

‘Why … everything?’ Yaz realized she wasn’t cold. The air held a warmth at odds with all the stone heaped around her.

‘Straight to the big questions.’ Eular’s smile was fatherly, gentle beneath the eyeless horror of his face. Yaz found herself torn between pity and trust, but rejected both. She had been lied to by this man from the first moment they met.

‘So tell me the big answers to my big questions,’ she said.

‘You were wearing a new glove when I came in.’ Eular patted his way towards the bed and sat on it.

‘You can see?’ Yaz hadn’t imagined that he’d lied about that too, not with his hollow sockets to back his claim.

‘I can see stars.’

Yaz frowned. ‘Just stars?’

Eular shrugged. ‘Sometimes they illuminate a fraction of their surroundings for me. I knew about your experiment with the dust from the shape the stars formed.’

Yaz shook her head. ‘You’re not answering me!’

‘About the big questions?’ Again that smile which was so easy to believe in. ‘I’m stepping towards them by example. You were desperate and afraid. It drove you to experiment. I have little doubt that given enough time you would have found your way through that door and forged a new skill in the effort.’

‘So?’ Yaz had treated elders with respect her whole life. It was the Ictha way, to honour those who survived so long when the wind was a whetted knife always seeking to skewer those in its path. But Eular was like no elder she had ever met. And thinking of the wind as a knife brought with it the chilling reminder that Quell had been stabbed. She became aware that Eular had given up talking in favour of watching her with his empty stare. ‘So I would have found a new skill. So what?’

‘Have you not changed, Yaz? Changed beyond recognition in your short stay with the Broken, full of hardship and extreme peril as it was?’

‘I …’ She nodded.

‘And your friends? Have they not changed? Who was it that fired the coal seam? There were none capable of such work when I left.’

‘Th—’ Yaz bit off Thurin’s name, not wanting to offer Eular any answers. ‘They have changed, yes.’

‘Well, that’s the purpose of the caverns. That is the why.’ He spread his hands. ‘To change you. The truth is that it is not training which brings the old bloods to their full potential. The barriers that lie between us and what we could be are ones that can only be broken in the most extreme circumstances. True fear, true agony, true striving at the very edge of existence to save yourself, your friends, your family. There must be hope too. Always a sprinkling of hope.

‘We don’t mine stars or iron in the Pit of the Missing. We mine you. We make heroes. We make warriors.’

‘The hunters …’ breathed Yaz.

‘The hunters are there to chase you, to scare you. And when you’re ready, they are there to collect you.’

‘Quina’s alive? She’s here?’

‘Quina? The hunska girl from the Kac-Kantor clan? She came to the caves fast and left faster. Hunskas can be very quick to make the breakthrough. Always in a hurry.’ He smiled at his own joke.

A weight lifted off Yaz’s heart. She hadn’t spent long with Quina but somehow she felt like a truer friend than the few Ictha girls her age ever had. ‘Can I see her?’

Eular nodded slowly. ‘Later.’

‘And Quell! Quell’s hurt. He has a knife in him. How could you send him back down there?’ Yaz took an angry step towards the bed and the guardsman matched it with a step of his own. A large man, though not a gerant. He had pale eyes and a face that, like those of the Broken, had not been carved by the wind. ‘You sent Quell to die!’

Eular shook his head. ‘The Broken have healers, marjals with a talent for it. Gella is the best. You met her, yes? Quell is better off with the Broken than with any of the clans, the Ictha least of all. The Ictha would take the knife for the iron and leave the man bleeding on the ice with empty words about his heroic sacrifice.’

Yaz held her tongue at that. It was true that the Ictha could offer nothing to those too injured to pull a sled and pitch a tent. The harshness of their existence left no room for such compassion. ‘You still haven’t explained—’

Rapid footsteps approached down the passage and a woman arrived, hurrying past the guard outside. She came to a halt, her priest’s robes flapping, trying not to pant. ‘Strangers. Approaching the east gate.’

Eular stood smoothly, as though he were not an ancient whose knees should creak with every move. ‘Strangers?’ He smiled. ‘Remarkable.’

And with that he turned to go. ‘I must ask you to stay here, Yaz.’

Yaz made to follow. ‘I don’t want—’ But the guard pushed her back and the heavy door slammed shut.

‘Strangers …’ Eular turned at the window. ‘I may have spoken more truly than I knew when I called you an agent of change.’

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