‘They need me to dig through ice. I can dig faster than three gerants put together. For a tenth of the food ration.’ Thurin forced a smile and patted his narrow stomach. ‘I like the digging too. If I don’t use my ice-work regularly then the energy builds up inside me and when I do eventually use it … well, it can be dramatic.’
Yaz looked around at the echoingly large space about them. ‘These caverns are huge. Why is it so important to dig new ones?’
‘For these.’ Thurin turned back towards the wall, thrusting his hand out. High up the ice shattered and the brilliant star fell within a cloud of glowing fragments to strike the rock beneath.
‘Should you have done that?’ Yaz glanced back towards the settlement, alarmed. For all that she wanted to find Zeen she knew she needed help from the Broken. Getting banished on her first night would cap off, with one stupid move, a day’s journey that had started with another very stupid move.
‘Relax. It’s us ice-workers who put the things up there in the first place and they’re always being re-sunk. All of the stars generate a very small amount of heat even without sigils around them. They sink through the ice very slowly. The tiny ones, little more than dust really, sink so slowly that the current of the ice can lift them. The big ones all end up on the bedrock given time.’ He advanced on the star as he spoke until he was reduced to a silhouette with the light streaming all around him.
Thurin’s steps grew slower and closer together as he approached the star, almost as though he were fighting to make progress against a great wind. Yaz could hear the strain in his voice when he spoke. ‘This is the largest of the stars we use as lights. People don’t like to get near them, especially the bigger ones, so we use smaller ones in town.’
‘You … you’re not worried someone will steal it?’ Yaz wondered if that might be exactly what he was doing right now.
‘The Tainted? No, the Taints can’t abide them. Won’t go near one if they have a choice.’ There was real pain in Thurin’s voice now, and still he had a yard to go if he were to pick the stone up.
‘What are you doing?’ Yaz called, squinting into the light. ‘Why are you doing it?’
‘Proving … something … to … myself.’ Thurin took another step then fell back with a cry.
‘Thurin!’ Yaz ran to help him as he crawled away, the light flaring behind him.
‘I’m all right.’ Thurin pushed her hand from his arm and staggered up.
‘You don’t look all right.’ He looked like a rag that’s too worn to be used as anything but stuffing. She glanced towards the star, still blazing on the rock. ‘How can you put it back if you can’t even touch it?’
Thurin waved a tired hand at the star and the water rushed from the puddle to set it rolling back against the ice wall. He made a fist and twisted it. Somehow the ice drew the star half into it and began to lift it. Fascinated, Yaz edged closer while Thurin continued the slow upward flow of the ice, raising the star above her head towards its former position. Creaks, groans, and small splintering noises accompanied the star’s gradual ascent, the ice protesting just as it did on a larger scale as the great sheets moved across the rock.
Glancing back Yaz could see the effort it was costing Thurin. In the twilight she could almost see the threads of magic connecting Thurin to the wall. Suddenly he faltered, the gossamer network of his magic fell apart, and with a sharp retort something high above Yaz snapped.
The star fell, hit the rock, and rolled, coming to a halt by the side of Yaz’s foot. She heard Thurin cry out in shock then find his words ‘Get away! Quick!’
The star blazed so bright Yaz could see nothing but its brilliance. The power and nearness of it sang in her bones, a wordless roaring, beautiful but wild enough to drown in. Despite its smallness and outpouring of light the star seemed a wider and deeper hole than that into which she had thrown herself only hours before. Unable to stop herself Yaz crouched and reached to pick the thing from the floor. The light made black lines of her finger bones and a rosy haze of the flesh around them. Her whole hand tingled, then burned, then closed around the star, so small that she could almost hide it within her grasp.
‘Be still,’ she told it for it seemed to her that the star was a racing heart, beating beyond its limits. And suddenly the blaze vanished, replaced by a molten reddish glow like that of the setting sun. There was a silence too. She had barely heard the star’s song before, but now that it was gone the air seemed to ache for its return. Yaz looked for Thurin and saw nothing but blackness swimming with after-images.
‘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