The Girl and the Stars
It occurred to Yaz then that she would have to throw herself down another hole, and that this time she would have to choose. More than this, the quick death she had imagined, smashed against an ice floor, might now be replaced with drowning in a flooded shaft, blind and struggling to keep afloat, until exhaustion claimed her and water filled her lungs.
She didn’t want to do it. Now that the moment of passion had left her she found that she lacked the courage to throw herself into one of these dark holes.
Alone and trembling in the black Pit of the Missing, Yaz began to weep for everything that she had lost, and from the fear at how her life would end.
* * *
YAZ GATHERED HERSELF. Time had passed, she wasn’t sure how long but the cold was starting to seep into her. A true Ictha would hardly have noticed but she had begun to shiver. She considered her options. Returning to the surface was not one of them. Even if there had been a flight of stairs carved into the ice she couldn’t return . . . What would the tribes think of that? They would push her back in or send her wet out into the wind to die. Yaz remembered the peculiar excitement in the regulator’s eye. He might welcome her. He might even keep the tribes from harming her . . . But there were no steps, just hundreds of yards of near-vertical ice running with meltwater.
“No.” Her options were to remain in the chamber and to see whether she froze before she starved, or to continue the pursuit of her brother, a pursuit that only chance had delayed.
Yaz peered at the hole before her. It seemed that the faint glow was coming from the ice itself. Her hand made a black shape before her eyes, too dim for definition. Fear returned as she inched toward the wet, yawning mouth. She didn’t want to die. It had been easy to throw herself after Zeen in the heat of the moment. In the cold of the cavern it was almost impossible to release the anchor provided by her knife and to let the drop take her.
“I can’t.” But she had no choice.
Yaz ground her teeth together and pulled the point of her blade from the ice. She returned it to its sheath as she started to slide feetfirst toward the hole. Even certain death couldn’t stop an Ictha caring for what little they owned.
A moment later she plunged once more into devouring night.
3
THE FALL WAS almost all vertical this time with only glancing blows from the walls to punctuate a terrifyingly long drop. The shock of impact was so violent that Yaz knew she had hit ice and was smashed beyond recovery. A moment later, though, she was thrashing in deep water, seeking the surface to replace the air that had been hammered from her lungs.
Yaz broke clear with a heaving gasp, both arms still churning the water about her. She gave a cry of frustration. Her worst fear had been realised. She would drown in the dark.
Yaz had learned to swim in the Hot Sea of the North. For much of the year hot upwelling from the ocean depths kept a circle of water open, nearly ten miles across. Like the three smaller seas to the south the Great Sea teemed with whales. Fish thronged there too, but it was the whales who had to return time and again for air after their long hunting trips beneath the ice.
Being able to swim was a curse. It offered hope. Yaz would still drown, but first she would struggle and suffer. The water she now swam in was only slightly colder than the Hot Sea. Not quite cold enough to freeze, but almost. She would be able to endure it for hours before exhaustion claimed her and the weight of her clothes dragged her under.
Yaz spluttered and reached for the wall of the shaft. If she stretched out her arms she should be able to touch both sides. Her fingers met no resistance and so she struck out in a random direction hunting the edge. Three or four strokes brought no contact. She stopped, spluttered for breath, and shook her head to try to get the water out of her eyes. The sound of meltwater splashing down came from behind her now rather than all around.
Perversely it was lighter at this depth than it had been in the chamber far above. The walls had a faint glow to them and seemed much further away than she had thought they would be. Yaz swam toward the edge and realised that she was in another chamber rather than a shaft.
When she banged her knee on something hard Yaz gave a startled cry, missed a stroke, and began to flounder. It was then that she realised the water had grown shallow. Moments later she crawled out onto a shore of black rock, still yards shy of the glowing ice walls.
Yaz lay gasping, as much from the shock of it all as from the battering she had taken. Her body felt like a singular bruise, her ribs hurt, and she was cold. “Zeen.” She spoke her brother’s name through gritted teeth and forced herself back onto hands and knees. The ground beneath her was rock, scoured into ridges. Apart from pieces collected from the peak of Black Rock and shown at the gathering, Yaz had never touched raw stone before, just the smooth pebbles the Ictha kept for luck and the ones that Mother Mazai wore on a sinew about her neck, polished to a high shine and shot through with lines of colour.
She crawled further from the pool, water streaming from her parka, dripping from the black veil of her hair. Where the ice walls rose from the bedrock it was light enough for Yaz to count her fingers. They trembled with more than the chill. Her options had narrowed from a quick death crashing into ice at the bottom of a fall or a slower death drowning in a hole back to the slowest of all, starvation.
“Zeen!” She bellowed it and the loudness of her own voice made her flinch. The fall of water overrode any echoes and there was no reply. “Zeen!”
Yaz frowned and leaned toward the ice, almost close enough for her forehead to rest against it. She squinted, trying to see where the light came from. It wasn’t the red of sunlight, this was a more varied, richer illumination carrying undertones of blues and greens. Close to the wet surface the ice was clear, further back it became misty and fractured. Buried in the body of the ice like a constellation of cold stars were motes of light, none of them seeming any larger than her smallest fingernail, most considerably smaller. The larger ones burned more brightly, though none of them by itself would illuminate much more than her palm if it sat in her hand.
The ice-locked constellations exerted a hypnotic draw. It was the smell that finally broke their spell. Yaz looked away and sniffed. Blood. The scent of slaughter. She stood, wincing, and scanned the chamber. The pool dominated, the excess flowing away lazily on the far side along a channel with just a few inches of clearance. The beach onto which Yaz had crawled occupied a third of the perimeter, the pool lapping up against the ice elsewhere. A pair of tunnels led away from the beach into the ice, smooth and carved by meltwater.
Yaz went to the nearest tunnel. She crossed the rock like an old woman. Not that anyone got truly old on the ice, but Yewan, her father’s eldest brother, was past fifty and starting to slow. She felt like he looked, stiff, making each move with care as if avoiding hidden hurts.
The blood looked black, spattered across the glowing tunnel walls. This had been an attack, not the butchering of some animal. Yaz touched a finger to one of the larger splats.