“No.” The regulator’s quiet announcement drew Yaz’s attention back to the line. His skinny old hand was clamped over Zeen’s face, fingers spread across the boy’s forehead and cheekbones. “Not you.” And with the slightest shove he sent Zeen stumbling back. For a moment Yaz’s brother stood, caught on the edge of balance, his arms pinwheeling, and in the next he was gone, sliding down the steep slope of the gullet then pitched into the near-vertical darkness of the ice hole. He fell with a single short cry of despair.

Silence.

Yaz’s face had frozen in shock, her voice gone. The thousands stood without sound. Even the wind stilled its tongue.

It should have been me. It should have been me.

Still no one spoke. And then a single high keening broke the silence. A mother’s cry from somewhere far up near the crater’s rim.

It should have been me.

The Ictha endure. They act only when they must. They guard their strength because the ice does not forgive failure.

It should have been me.

Yaz glanced at the blue sky, and in the next moment she threw herself after her brother.

2

   AT FIRST YAZ slid, then the black throat of the pit was before her and in the next moment she was falling, all the air escaping her lungs in a hopeless scream. The blind rush of dropping through empty space stole all her thoughts. Her body contracted against the inevitable impact. She grazed a wall, grazed another, continued hurtling down with the ice scraping at her all the way. She was sliding again, moving at impossible speed, every part of her clenched in terror. When she hit bottom all her bones would shatter.

The ice wall pressed on Yaz, and in doing so made her still more aware of her awful velocity. Suddenly the pressure increased, everything spun, and somewhere in the spinning she lost herself.

    There are stars in every darkness.

 They are the mercy of the Gods in the Sky.

* * *

YAZ JERKED IN shock, crying out and thrashing her limbs. She was lying in water deep enough to reach her mouth. Coughing and spluttering she tried to orient herself, slipped, and went face-first into the pool. A moment later she was on all fours, choking. The water seemed to be about four inches deep and she was soaked. To be wet on the ice without a tent and dry clothes to hand was a death sentence. A hysterical laugh burst from her. She shook the water from her hair and looked for the light. There was no light, no distant circle of sky above her, just a velvet darkness filled with the constant sound of dripping.

Yaz got to her knees, trying not to slip. She patted herself. All of her hurt a little, none of her hurt a lot. It seemed impossible that she could fall so far and break no bones.

“Hello?” She whispered it and wasn’t surprised when no one answered. “Zeen!” Loud enough to be heard over all the dripping.

Nothing.

Yaz knelt and blinked at the darkness. “Zeen . . .”

It wasn’t cold. Even wet she could feel the warmth rising around her. Enough warmth to melt this great pit and to keep it open despite the relentless flow of the ice. “Hello?”

Darkness didn’t scare her, not in and of itself. In the many months of the polar night there was never sufficient oil to light all the tents, no matter how many whales were caught and rendered while the Hot Sea remained open. She longed for a flame now though.

“Why am I not dead?”

Now that she thought about it Yaz realised that she had slid most of the way rather than dropped. Whatever heat had melted the hole it was a heat that stayed put while the ice continued its slow journey. The hole must slant.

She knelt and listened, her mind racing, pursuing erratic thoughts. She wanted Zeen. Long ago she had let their younger brother die. Her weakness had let him die. Now in the blackness a vision of Azad returned to her as he had been at four when Zeen was eight and she was twelve.

“I’m sorry.” Spoken to the empty space around her.

She wanted light. She needed to see.

Among the Ictha three elders were charged with carrying the flame. Three heavily shielded and slow-burning lamps, such that if disaster caused any one or two of them to go out the fire could still be relit. If the Ictha lost their flame it would be a journey of months to find another clan who might rekindle them. But there were no elders in the pit and nothing to burn in this wet hole even if she had fire.

Mother Mazai had a thing called glass, clear like diamond ice but refusing to melt even above a lamp flame. It had been fashioned into a disc, fat at the middle and thin at the edges. One summer she had shown Yaz that it could gather the sun’s red light into one bright spot that would burn against her palm. In the far south, Mother Mazai said, the sun blazed so hot that the bright spot the glass made could light a lamp wick.

Yaz shook the memories from her head. Despite being soaked in meltwater she was still dazed. The fall had rattled her brain around in her skull.

It occurred to her that somehow the darkness was not total. A variation in the blackness hinted at shape and form, though none of it made much sense. Perhaps some fraction of the day’s light filtered down through the ice . . . though it seemed hard to believe given how far she must have fallen. Even so, as she moved her hand before her face she had some sense of it passing.

“What have I done?” She moved slowly, feeling ahead. Even on all fours she felt unstable on the wet ice.

It seemed that she was in a large ice cave, its smooth floor dimpled with shallow pools. After just a few yards she found the first of several slick throats where the meltwater drained away, gurgling into unknown depths. The first was large enough to swallow a child, the second would have taken a man and his sled too. There appeared to be no walls as such, just the floor curving smoothly up until she could make no progress.

The illumination was fainter than starlight and seemed to come from all directions at once. It gave Yaz the impression that the chamber was a bubble trapped in the ice. She wondered how many times she had circled it when she shot in along the main vent. If each of the darker patches was a hole then it was amazing that she had missed them all.

“Zeen?” She shouted his name, realising that one of the ice shafts that had failed to capture her must have swallowed him.

Yaz crawled to the nearest hole. The smooth slope made approaching dangerous—a little too far forward and she would start to slide. She fumbled at her belt for her knife. The blade was a tooth from a dagger-fish. The same kind that had dragged Azad from the boat. She could never draw it without thinking of her lost brother.

Using the knifepoint to gain a little purchase Yaz moved closer to the hole, lying flat on the ice now. She listened, trying to untangle any meaning from the constant dripping and the chuckle of distant water. “Zeen!”