The Girl and the Mountain

The door grated open and the dust fell from her hand, grey and lifeless. A man stood in the doorway, silhouetted by the lanterns of the two armoured figures behind him.

‘I heard you were awake.’ Eular stepped into the room, seemingly confident in his blindness.

For a vivid moment Yaz saw herself wearing the iron pot on her fist and punching the old man full in the face. The vision faded, but not the anger. ‘Where are my friends? Where’s Zeen?’

‘Back in the undercaves with the Broken.’ Eular’s words were mild where Yaz’s had been hot.

‘I heard you say to drop them!’

‘A figure of speech.’ Eular waved the idea away. ‘The descent is fast but the cage slows towards the end and comes to a gentle rest.’

The tension in Yaz’s jaw eased a fraction, backing away from the level where it felt her teeth might shatter at any moment. She hoped what he’d said was true. ‘Why?’

‘Why?’ Eular echoed. He advanced into the cell and one of the armoured men followed him in.

‘Why … everything?’ Yaz realized she wasn’t cold. The air held a warmth at odds with all the stone heaped around her.

‘Straight to the big questions.’ Eular’s smile was fatherly, gentle beneath the eyeless horror of his face. Yaz found herself torn between pity and trust, but rejected both. She had been lied to by this man from the first moment they met.

‘So tell me the big answers to my big questions,’ she said.

‘You were wearing a new glove when I came in.’ Eular patted his way towards the bed and sat on it.

‘You can see?’ Yaz hadn’t imagined that he’d lied about that too, not with his hollow sockets to back his claim.

‘I can see stars.’

Yaz frowned. ‘Just stars?’

Eular shrugged. ‘Sometimes they illuminate a fraction of their surroundings for me. I knew about your experiment with the dust from the shape the stars formed.’

Yaz shook her head. ‘You’re not answering me!’

‘About the big questions?’ Again that smile which was so easy to believe in. ‘I’m stepping towards them by example. You were desperate and afraid. It drove you to experiment. I have little doubt that given enough time you would have found your way through that door and forged a new skill in the effort.’

‘So?’ Yaz had treated elders with respect her whole life. It was the Ictha way, to honour those who survived so long when the wind was a whetted knife always seeking to skewer those in its path. But Eular was like no elder she had ever met. And thinking of the wind as a knife brought with it the chilling reminder that Quell had been stabbed. She became aware that Eular had given up talking in favour of watching her with his empty stare. ‘So I would have found a new skill. So what?’

‘Have you not changed, Yaz? Changed beyond recognition in your short stay with the Broken, full of hardship and extreme peril as it was?’

‘I …’ She nodded.

‘And your friends? Have they not changed? Who was it that fired the coal seam? There were none capable of such work when I left.’

‘Th—’ Yaz bit off Thurin’s name, not wanting to offer Eular any answers. ‘They have changed, yes.’

‘Well, that’s the purpose of the caverns. That is the why.’ He spread his hands. ‘To change you. The truth is that it is not training which brings the old bloods to their full potential. The barriers that lie between us and what we could be are ones that can only be broken in the most extreme circumstances. True fear, true agony, true striving at the very edge of existence to save yourself, your friends, your family. There must be hope too. Always a sprinkling of hope.

‘We don’t mine stars or iron in the Pit of the Missing. We mine you. We make heroes. We make warriors.’

‘The hunters …’ breathed Yaz.

‘The hunters are there to chase you, to scare you. And when you’re ready, they are there to collect you.’

‘Quina’s alive? She’s here?’

‘Quina? The hunska girl from the Kac-Kantor clan? She came to the caves fast and left faster. Hunskas can be very quick to make the breakthrough. Always in a hurry.’ He smiled at his own joke.

A weight lifted off Yaz’s heart. She hadn’t spent long with Quina but somehow she felt like a truer friend than the few Ictha girls her age ever had. ‘Can I see her?’

Eular nodded slowly. ‘Later.’

‘And Quell! Quell’s hurt. He has a knife in him. How could you send him back down there?’ Yaz took an angry step towards the bed and the guardsman matched it with a step of his own. A large man, though not a gerant. He had pale eyes and a face that, like those of the Broken, had not been carved by the wind. ‘You sent Quell to die!’

Eular shook his head. ‘The Broken have healers, marjals with a talent for it. Gella is the best. You met her, yes? Quell is better off with the Broken than with any of the clans, the Ictha least of all. The Ictha would take the knife for the iron and leave the man bleeding on the ice with empty words about his heroic sacrifice.’

Yaz held her tongue at that. It was true that the Ictha could offer nothing to those too injured to pull a sled and pitch a tent. The harshness of their existence left no room for such compassion. ‘You still haven’t explained—’

Rapid footsteps approached down the passage and a woman arrived, hurrying past the guard outside. She came to a halt, her priest’s robes flapping, trying not to pant. ‘Strangers. Approaching the east gate.’

Eular stood smoothly, as though he were not an ancient whose knees should creak with every move. ‘Strangers?’ He smiled. ‘Remarkable.’

And with that he turned to go. ‘I must ask you to stay here, Yaz.’

Yaz made to follow. ‘I don’t want—’ But the guard pushed her back and the heavy door slammed shut.

‘Strangers …’ Eular turned at the window. ‘I may have spoken more truly than I knew when I called you an agent of change.’

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