The Girl and the Stars
At last, growing weary, with the sun falling, Zin turned north and walked to the lands where the cold is born and where it hunts. Here the ice grew hard, the landscape fractured, the voice of the glaciers sharper, louder, more fierce. Zin’s Ictha sons turned their pale eyes toward his approach and were amazed for the first of men came among them bare chested and they knew him for their father and wept. And as the sun descended on the last day of the first man his children of the north feasted him with harpfish and tuark and the eggs of the great loach, and sang the oldest songs that told of his love for Mokka and the days of his youth when Zin had taught his offspring what secrets of the sea the gods had given into his care.
And come the night the Ictha gave back to the sea that had birthed him all of Zin save that which they held in their hearts.
* * *
YAZ STOOD WITH the others outside the food hall. She found her shoulders hunched and forced them to relax. It wasn’t cold. It was just the strangeness of the place, the twilight gloom, the glistening ice sky lit with its own stars, the constant dripping, and on all sides shadow-wrapped buildings full of strange angles and built from gods knew what. Here and there the occasional star-stone hung, alive with light and whispers, drawing Yaz’s eye, reminding her of the star she held on the previous night, burning in her hand, its song pulsing through her.
Arka coughed for attention. “There are six main tasks we turn our hands to here. On the surface we all did everything. Here we choose a role and we stick to it. You can change, but not from one day to the next. We have . . .” She raised her hand and spread the fingers, closing the first one as she began. “Harvesters, who seed, protect, and collect the fungi. Hunters, who catch rats for meat and skins, and blindfish from the rivers. Scavengers, who gather metal and building material from the city. Smiths, who melt down the metals and work them into new forms. Miners, who hack star-stones from the ice.” With four fingers and a thumb closed in, Arka now held a raised fist. She brought it smacking down into the palm of her other hand. “And warriors, who keep us safe from the Tainted.”
“The warriors don’t have to do anything except fight?” Kao asked.
“They patrol and practice their weapon skills. Actual fighting is rare, thankfully, but still too frequent for us to replace our losses.”
“I’m going to be a warrior!” Kao nodded as if the matter were settled.
“First we do the tour,” Arka said. “Spend some time seeing what goes on here. Sometimes the dullest-sounding tasks are more interesting than the most exciting. Harvesters always have something to do, warriors can find themselves bored, then terrified, then bored.”
“A warrior! Not grubbing around with those . . . plants,” Kao said.
“They do get to eat as many as they like . . . as long as no one sees them do it.”
Kao’s truculence weakened as opposing desires waged war. Arka allowed herself a small smile then led them on. “First we visit the foundry!”
* * *
“THE FOUNDRY IS the closest area to the main pit shaft that we still hold.” Arka had led them for what felt like an hour and couldn’t have been anything like that. “Can any of you guess why we keep such valuable industry out here where the Tainted contest us?”
“To show them who’s boss,” Kao grunted.
“It’s too difficult to move?” Maya asked.
Yaz frowned, puzzled.
“The heat,” said Quina. “It needs to escape without drowning you or bringing the roof down.”
“Fast brain as well as fast feet,” Arka said.
At the exit to the low cavern they had been traversing Arka led the drop-group past three gerants and a short dark man heading in the opposite direction. One of the gerants must have been close to nine feet in height and was built like a bear. All three of them wore metal plates linked together by iron rings, each plate no bigger than Yaz’s hand so that together they formed a flexible metal skin over the warriors’ chests, arms, and upper legs. Rust patterned them like frost rings on a closing sea.
The smaller man wore no armour. All four carried iron spears, not bone shafts tipped with an iron blade but iron throughout. And at their hips they bore huge knives with small arms spreading from the hilt.
“Swords,” Thurin said, seeing her surprise.
Arka led them on through a perfectly round tunnel that went up and later down, gently undulating through the ice. Broken rock had been scattered on the floor to give purchase in the steeper sections. There seemed no way to account for the conflicting gradients. Meltwater would only flow down.
Arka paused where one tunnel pierced another, listening.
“How are these tunnels made?” Yaz had seen similar ones before, shortly after crawling from her drop pool.
“Coal-worms.”
“What-worms?” Yaz knew of worms that swam beneath the ice surrounding the Hot Sea but none of them were much longer than her arm and she didn’t think they burrowed.
“Coal.” Thurin waved his hands. “Black rock, but not like the mountain. Eular says it used to be forests . . . trees . . . and you can burn it just like whale oil.”
Thurin said whaleoil, as if it were one word and he had little idea of what a whale or oil was. Which Yaz supposed was true. “Good for burning but hard to light, Eular says . . .” He looked at Arka for support.
“Coal-worms eat coal. They generate heat and melt their way through the ice. Though mostly it’s the young ones who travel, looking for new deposits. The big ones only move on when they’ve exhausted the seams.”
“Lucky for us a big one chose to head where we’re going then!” Yaz said.
Arka frowned. “This was made by a baby. Pray you never meet a full-grown worm.”
* * *
“WHAT WERE YOU?” Yaz kept close behind Thurin in the tunnels and asked her question quietly.
“What was I?”
“You know, hunter, harvester, warrior—”
“I was a miner. Mostly.” Thurin glanced back at her, his face curiously lit by bands of stardust in the ceiling just above them. “Ice-workers have to be. Well, they are ‘encouraged.’ Miners produce most of the stars that we give to the priests. But the biggest stars are scavenger finds. Like the one we . . . the one that lights the settlement cavern. And those are dangerous.” His voice carried the warning. “Not all the Tainted were stolen from us. Some went willingly. A star can do that to you. A big one. They break your mind up and fill you with demons.”
“What sort of demons?” little Maya asked from behind Yaz, proving to have sharper ears than expected. She was shy but curious, always watching. “What do they look like?”