the giant hauled her down.
She grabbed the rope, a crude thing of twisted hide strips studded with knots, and turned to check her opponent. To Yaz’s surprise the giant hadn’t advanced. A much smaller figure danced around her, throwing fist-sized stones. The missiles seemed only to annoy the giant but when she lurched towards her assailant the boy just danced away. His speed and timing were breathtaking.
‘Climb!’ A girl’s voice, high above. ‘Bring the rope with you!’
Yaz reached up, taking hold just above a large knot, and began to climb. It was not something she had done before. The ice tends to be flat. But fortunately the Ictha are strong and what she lacked in technique she replaced with muscle power. A short way off the ground Yaz reached down, groaning as her bruised body complained, and grabbed a lower section of the rope to tuck into her belt. Then, bringing it with her, she continued upwards. She had to assume the boy had another means of escape. If he could run as swiftly as his dodging implied then the giant would have no chance of keeping pace.
Yaz reached the top of the rope in darkness. For some yards she had been climbing alongside an ice wall, presumably a vertical shaft in the roof of the cavern. Hands reached out to help her over the lip. More hands than she had expected. A number of strangers crowded around her, drawing her back from the hole.
‘Zeen?’ Yaz asked. Nobody answered, they only hustled her along, blind in the dark. Yaz frowned, then stopped moving. She braced herself against the slickness of the ice. ‘How did you do all this? Make a rope? Get up here? We weren’t that late to the gathering. You couldn’t have been more than an hour ahead, maybe two.’
Suddenly there was light. All around her figures shielded their eyes, some gasping as if it had been unexpected for them too. Shadows swung as the light moved, a bright point held between two prongs at the end of an iron rod clutched in a young man’s fist. Yaz squinted and could see that the source of the glare was one of the stars she had seen locked in the ice, though this was a larger one, considerably larger than her thumbnail. Despite its dazzle Yaz found herself staring at it, ignoring what its light revealed. It looked like a hole in the world, opening onto some bright place. For a moment the air seemed full of whispers just beyond hearing, the space between them strange and echo-haunted, as if a heavy stone had dropped, rippling the fabric of everything.
A cough broke the spell.
Six strangers surrounded Yaz. She spun around. Zeen was not among them. Two were younger than her, two around her own age, one a man in his twenties, carrying the light, and beside him a scar-faced woman in her thirties perhaps.
Yaz’s frown deepened. What was a grown woman doing here?
‘We had more than an hour’s head start on you, girl,’ the woman said. ‘The younglings came down last gathering.’
Yaz blinked. ‘Four years?’ Four years in the blackness. Four years under the ice.
The woman coughed a bitter laugh. ‘I’ve seen five drops since that old bastard gave me the shove. It’s still Kazik, is it?’
Yaz nodded. Kazik had been regulator even before her grandmother’s testing.
‘Shame. He’s lived too long.’
Yaz looked about her at the others. All of them were lean, cheeks hollow, eyes bright, all grimy, all wrapped in gut-sewn skins. The two boys of her own age held makeshift clubs, smoothed stones the size of a fist lashed with hide to the end of bones that looked suspiciously like the thighbones of a large man.
‘My brother?’ She held a hand to indicate his height. ‘Where is he?’
The others looked down, their mouths in grim lines. Yaz grew suddenly cold, stomach knotting, a twitch coming to her cheek. The scar-faced woman shook her head. ‘Hetta got him.’ She pursed her lips in the direction of sympathy. ‘Nearly got me once.’ She indicated the parallel lines scored across her face as if torn by claws. ‘Nearly got you too.’
‘No.’ Yaz drew a breath, understanding. ‘That was Jaysin. Zeen is bigger.’ As she said it the anger rose in her again. Little Jaysin, timid, eager to please, now torn apart and half eaten. ‘The giant didn’t have Zeen. It was Jaysin’s head on her belt.’
‘Gerant,’ the young man with the light said.
‘What?’
‘Gerant, not giant. The ones that grow too big. They’re gerants.’ The harsh shadows made something sinister of his face.
Yaz shook her head. She didn’t care about that. ‘My brother?’
‘He must have come down somewhere else,’ the woman said. ‘The shafts change between gatherings. We can’t cover them all. We didn’t expect anyone out here, but Hetta must have known somehow. She’s cunning, that one.’
‘The taint told her.’
Yaz glanced back, it was one of the younglings that had spoken, a fair-haired boy now holding his hand to his face in mimicry of Hetta’s black stain. Yaz had never seen hair so pale before, but then she had seen a dozen new things in less than an hour. She turned back to the woman. ‘My brother. Zeen. He’s all I care about.’
The woman nodded, biting her well-bitten lower lip. ‘The other search parties might have got him.’
‘Or the Tainted did,’ whispered the young girl standing beside the fair boy.
The woman shrugged. ‘We’ll join up with the rest of the Broken and find out.’ She held up a hand as Yaz started forward. ‘Once we’re sure the regulator has finished.’
‘He has,’ Yaz said. ‘The Ictha were the last clan. And I was near the end.’
‘Three Ictha.’ The man with the light looked at the woman. ‘I can’t remember the last time there was even one.’
The woman shrugged again. ‘Two now. Or maybe just one. We’ll go find out once Petrick is back.’
‘The boy who attacked the giant?’ Yaz asked. ‘Gerant.’ She corrected herself at the young man’s frown.
Back down the tunnel something rattled. ‘Speak of the devil.’ The woman nodded to the girl who had whispered about ‘the Tainted’. ‘Jerra, go let the rope down.’ The girl ran off into the darkness. ‘Check first!’ the woman called after her. ‘And don’t fall down the hole.’
The woman turned back to Yaz. ‘I’m Arka. That’s Pome.’ She motioned towards the hard-eyed young man with the star. There were other names but somehow they didn’t stick. Zeen was the only name she wanted to hear.
The girl, Jerra, and the boy Petrick, who close up didn’t look much older, came hurrying back, the girl clutching the rope. Yaz wondered how it had been secured. Her mind always threw in tangential questions at unhelpful moments.
‘Hetta?’ Arka asked. Yaz saw the cannibal’s mouth descending towards her leg again, drool hanging from pointed teeth.
‘Still raging.’ Petrick grinned. ‘I lost her in the threads. The new girl stuck her good. Hand and foot!’
Yaz frowned, her hand returning to her side where her knife should be. Even now the loss weighed on her.
‘And the pools? Any more arrivals?’
Petrick shook his head. ‘Think that’s our lot.’
‘Let’s go then.’ Arka led the way, Pome at her side, holding his light-stick aloft as though he were some grand official at a clan ceremony.
Yaz followed, her mind still spinning. Twenty years. That’s how long Arka said she’d been down here. Twenty years. It was as far beyond Yaz’s imagination as a tree. Or the thin green belt the gods were said to have put around the world’s waist, a place where the oldest tales said there was as much life on the land as in the sea.
Arka took the group along a series of tunnels. Many were clearly the work of meltwater but others seemed