* * *

QUELL MADE SLOW progress, pausing to watch for any signs of hunters before darting on to the next cover. Yaz caught up with him amid a small forest of metal girders, bent by some ancient flow of ice that had defied the upwelling heat, yet unrusted by the years, subject only to a slow powdery corrosion.

The collective song of the stars overhead, tiny and numberless, pervaded the whole cavern. Yaz hadn’t noticed it on her previous visit but her sense for such things had sharpened. The ancient refrain filled the silences between the groaning of the ice. Amid the girders it seemed closer to a dirge than Yaz had ever heard it. The unvoiced chorus somehow sketched the city that had once towered here, suggesting form and shapes, eulogising lost beauty.

“What I don’t understand”—Quell cut across her contemplations—“is if the regulator made the hunters—and the fact that he gave one to Pome seems to back up what you learned in the city—then why on Abeth would he set them to guarding the city and killing the Broken? They’re attacking the very people trying to gather the iron the priests need for trade.”

Quell made a good point. So good in fact that it overcame Yaz’s resolve not to talk to him. “They take them.”

“What?”

“The hunters take the Broken that they get hold of. Nobody knows what they do to them. The bodies aren’t found.”

Quell pressed his lips into a flat line—it was the way he looked in the tent. Lamplit, considering a difficult move in the game of eight. “Well, it still doesn’t make sense.”

* * *

MAYA WAITED FOR them at the crack through which Arka had first led them down into the city chambers. She stood staring down into the darkness below. “We don’t have any food.”

“Or water,” Quell replied.

“It doesn’t matter.” Yaz took the regulator’s star from her pocket, held it out over the edge of the chasm, and let it fall. She looked slowly from Quell to Maya. “You both turned out to be different from the person I thought you were.”

Quell winced. “Yaz—”

“I haven’t changed though. Somewhere in all that escaping and running away I forgot who I was.” She looked out over the ice-scoured rock, scarred by the city’s foundations. “I threw myself down here after Zeen and I’m not going anywhere without him. Or,” she said, “any of the others. I’m taking them all back.”

“That’s madness, Yaz.” Quell reached for her, but thought better of it and let his arm fall.

“It would take a miracle to get them out of Theus’s clutches,” Maya said.

“Yes, it will.” Yaz gazed back at the long slope. “But while I was down in the city I met someone who knows all about miracles.”

26

   I’M GOING DOWN into the city to find my friend.” Yaz looked at the others, daring them to object. “Maya, you’re going to the settlement to scavenge water flasks, heat pots, salt, and anything else that could come in handy on the ice. Quell, you’re going harvesting. Bring as many fungi as you can find and pile them up somewhere discreet. When you’ve got a really big heap team up with Maya and start bringing material for shelters and sleds. Lightweight boards and the means to join them together. The settlement must have plenty to spare.”

“If you’re going into the city, I’m coming with you,” Quell said.

“No. You’re going to do what I said.” Yaz turned and looked behind her, stretching out a hand. “This is coming with me.” The hunter’s star rolled from the distant hollow she had placed it in after freeing it from the ice. It looked as if it were a ball of iron still cooling from the forge, glowing a dull red in places, a darker red elsewhere, almost black. Maya and Quell backed away along the chasm edge as it approached, a little smaller than Yaz’s fist, its heartbeat the pitter-patter of a child’s.

“I still don’t see how this Edris—”

“Erris,” Yaz said.

Quell scowled. “Erris. I don’t see how one man is going to—”

“You’ll understand when you see him.”

“He’s like a hunter but friendly?” Maya asked.

“It’s more complicated than that. But yes.”

Maya frowned. “Couldn’t you just . . . build your own hunter with that?” She nodded to the red star that had rolled to a stop at Yaz’s feet. “I mean you seem so good with the stars and you say the regulator built them . . .”

“I don’t know how long that took him,” Yaz said. “It’s not something I know how to do.” And besides, she didn’t want to build monsters like the regulator had. She wanted friends beside her. If she could get Erris to come with her the Tainted would be powerless against him.

“This is madness,” Quell said. “We don’t need to do it. We can just go back.”

“Doing what you ask would put my mission at risk,” Maya said.

Yaz picked up the hunter’s star and let it glow more brightly. She narrowed her eyes at Maya. “You said you came after us in the black ice because you needed us to complete your mission. Or did you just need me? Were you hoping to trade me to the priests if you couldn’t escape to tell your discoveries to the Axit? Hoping if they had me they might not care about letting you run off to die on the ice.” Yaz felt another weight settle on her already heavy heart. She’d thought Maya had come back for them all, out of loyalty and friendship. “Well, the priests will be waiting. And I’m not coming without the rest of us.”

Maya at least had the grace to look shamed and studied her feet for a moment.

“Just do what I asked,” Yaz said. “You both know it’s the right thing to do.” She set the hunter’s star orbiting her and lowered herself over the edge of the chasm onto the narrow path Arka had shown them.

She met their eyes one last time, Maya’s then Quell’s, and then stepped out of sight. She descended slowly, trying to focus on the climb as the path soon vanished and she had to clamber down over fractured rock. Stray thoughts kept intruding though: Quina reaching out to save her from a fall, Kao wolfing down his first hot meal, pausing only to complain about his burned mouth and shovel in more food, Petrick dancing around Hetta as he led her away, Thurin’s smile as he lifted water from a puddle to show her his magic, the rippled light moving across his face. One day she wanted to see him work fire.

She thought of Zeen too, so proud of his knowledge about the Black Rock. Knowledge that now seemed like tiny grains of grit on an endless gravel bank. Even little Azad visited her thoughts, happy and laughing in the boat on the day before the dagger-fish took him.