When Yaz opened her eyes she saw that the frost had melted from the walls, leaving them slick with running water, and that on two sides she had driven the blackness back many yards, leaving clear ice marbled with ghostly white fractures and flaws. Directly in front of her, however, the ice had cleared little more than a spear’s length and a great intrusion of blackness remained, resisting the light. The sight of it carried a new weight of terror that had been absent when all the ice lay black.

“I said it was big.” Erris spoke from behind her.

The blackness reminded Yaz of a great thumb pushing toward her, several feet clear of the rock, rising to many times her height, wider than the entire chamber it was aimed at.

“That thing can’t be part of Theus . . .” Yaz couldn’t keep the horror from her voice. If it truly was part of him she wasn’t sure she dared reunite him with it.

Erris said nothing, only came to stand at her shoulder, tilting his head in curiosity.

With a sigh Yaz drove a beam of intense light from her star, feeling a corresponding spike of pain being driven back into her head. Her brain already felt as though there were a ravine opening inside it like the one in the bedrock, dividing the Broken from the Tainted. She aimed the beam at the centre of the black mass, expecting to clear it piece by piece, but the crimson circle merely burned across the surface.

“Try the edge,” Erris suggested.

Yaz played the beam slowly across the blackness, moving first to one edge then scanning to the other. Here and there it would nibble away a touch of the blackness before encountering the huge and resilient core. As she moved the light she began to get a sense of shape, an idea of the fearsome contours of the thing. The darkness was vast, ten thousand times larger than any of the demons she had freed before, and ten thousand times more resistant to the star’s light. What the thing might do to her when released didn’t bear thinking about. With such power added to his being Theus would have no reason to hold to their agreement.

Suddenly she began to laugh.

“What?” Erris looked at her as if she’d gone crazy.

“Don’t you see it?” She played the light across a steep slope and into a gaping chasm at the front of the blackness.

“I saw it before you did . . .” Erris frowned. “But why is it funny?”

“It’s a whale,” she said simply.

Erris’s frown deepened, rucking furrows into the smoothness of his brow. Then, eyes widening, he saw it. “That’s a mouth?”

“Yes.” The mouth in question was large enough to swallow a boat. One of the city’s hunters would make a mouthful. Quite how such a creature had come to be taken up by the ice, or what forces had lifted it from the sea to be carried across the rock, Yaz had no idea. “It’s one of the great whales, the largest that visit the Hot Sea.” Yaz had only ever seen the back of a great whale as it broke the surface for air. The flowing, rolling surge of the creature had taken her breath. She’d thought it must stretch fifty yards or more. Her father said that once, in his youth, such a whale had leapt from the sea, half of its body clearing the waves and towering over his boat as if it were the Black Rock itself.

“What a thing . . .” Erris sounded awed despite having lived a thousand years amid the wonders of the Missing. “Does it have teeth?”

“I don’t know.” The Ictha had never landed so great a beast. Like ice storms they were a force of nature that you merely let pass and hoped to survive. Yaz tried to shine her light in search of some sign of teeth. But exhaustion rose in her like a wave, carrying her to the floor.

“Yaz!” Erris nearly caught her but her weakness had taken him by surprise. Instead he helped her to sit with her back against the cleared ice, and crouched beside her, his face a mask of concern. “Are you sick?”

“I . . . I just need a short rest.” Embarrassed, Yaz tried to turn the conversation in another direction. She looked toward the frozen whale. “It’s said that Zin, the first man, was swallowed by a great whale and lived for forty days and forty nights in its belly before his escape.”

“Who?” Erris gave her a curious look.

She met his look with surprise. “Zin!” Erris might have been born long ago but not before the first man. She told the tale.

* * *

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 and Mokka lived upon the ice in a tent twice as tall as a man and as wide as a harpoon throw. They pitched it for years at a time, for in those days Hua concerned himself with the affairs of men and kept a hot sea open even during the fiercest of winters, and Aiiki sang her songs so that the winds sheathed their claws and kept their fangs hidden.

When their food ran low Zin and Mokka would take it in turns to go out upon the sea in their white boat while the other stayed to carve kettan from the teeth of lesser whales, cutting out the forms of the children they would have, children who would carry the story of their lives far across the ice, to be told until the last star burned red and faded from the sky.

Zin and Mokka waited for their children for untold years, long enough for the touch of fingers to wear the first of their kettan smooth once more, erasing the story that the knife had set there, long enough for stars to turn from white to red and fade like embers into nothing. But still no child came to their tent.

Zin set out upon the sea and he called to Hua who had made him and asked why he had been given no son. Mokka went bare-armed upon the ice and she called to Aiiki who had made her and sang her lament for the daughter who had never come.

But it was not Hua who answered Zin upon the waves. Instead, the greatest God in the Sea rose from unknown depths. Hoonumu, he who dwells beneath the light. Hoonumu rose in the form of a great whale, black as night and twice as vast. And the whale swallowed Zin without answer, taking him and his white boat into the void that was its belly.

And it was not Aiiki who answered Mokka but Allatha, the greatest God in the Sky, she who first sets the stars aflame and who snuffs each of them out when their time has been spent. Allatha descended in the form of a snow hawk with wings of ice and flame. She told Mokka that she had asked for a gift larger than the world, for birth is a kind of fire, and there is no gift more precious than fire. It cannot be given back, it can spread unchecked, it grows without limit, able to destroy worlds and leap the black chasms between them. Hua and Aiiki had made between them one man and one woman. But if Hoonumu and Allatha gave Mokka children then there could be more men and more women than fish in the sea or birds in the sky.

Mokka said only that she would pay the price, for the ice had always been lonely even with two. And the Gods in the Sky and the Gods in the Sea said that if she could bring her man from the belly of a whale then ever after she could bring a child from her own belly.