nothing but to run and run until it destroyed itself.
When Yaz opened her eyes she saw that the frost had melted from the walls, leaving them slick with running water, and that on two sides she had driven the blackness back many yards, leaving clear ice marbled with ghostly white fractures and flaws. Directly in front of her, however, the ice had cleared little more than a spear’s length and a great intrusion of blackness remained, resisting the light. The sight of it carried a new weight of terror that had been absent when all the ice lay black.
“I said it was big.” Erris spoke from behind her.
The blackness reminded Yaz of a great thumb pushing toward her, several feet clear of the rock, rising to many times her height, wider than the entire chamber it was aimed at.
“That thing can’t be part of Theus . . .” Yaz couldn’t keep the horror from her voice. If it truly was part of him she wasn’t sure she dared reunite him with it.
Erris said nothing, only came to stand at her shoulder, tilting his head in curiosity.
With a sigh Yaz drove a beam of intense light from her star, feeling a corresponding spike of pain being driven back into her head. Her brain already felt as though there were a ravine opening inside it like the one in the bedrock, dividing the Broken from the Tainted. She aimed the beam at the centre of the black mass, expecting to clear it piece by piece, but the crimson circle merely burned across the surface.
“Try the edge,” Erris suggested.
Yaz played the beam slowly across the blackness, moving first to one edge then scanning to the other. Here and there it would nibble away a touch of the blackness before encountering the huge and resilient core. As she moved the light she began to get a sense of shape, an idea of the fearsome contours of the thing. The darkness was vast, ten thousand times larger than any of the demons she had freed before, and ten thousand times more resistant to the star’s light. What the thing might do to her when released didn’t bear thinking about. With such power added to his being Theus would have no reason to hold to their agreement.
Suddenly she began to laugh.
“What?” Erris looked at her as if she’d gone crazy.
“Don’t you see it?” She played the light across a steep slope and into a gaping chasm at the front of the blackness.
“I saw it before you did . . .” Erris frowned. “But why is it funny?”
“It’s a whale,” she said simply.
Erris’s frown deepened, rucking furrows into the smoothness of his brow. Then, eyes widening, he saw it. “That’s a mouth?”
“Yes.” The mouth in question was large enough to swallow a boat. One of the city’s hunters would make a mouthful. Quite how such a creature had come to be taken up by the ice, or what forces had lifted it from the sea to be carried across the rock, Yaz had no idea. “It’s one of the great whales, the largest that visit the Hot Sea.” Yaz had only ever seen the back of a great whale as it broke the surface for air. The flowing, rolling surge of the creature had taken her breath. She’d thought it must stretch fifty yards or more. Her father said that once, in his youth, such a whale had leapt from the sea, half of its body clearing the waves and towering over his boat as if it were the Black Rock itself.
“What a thing . . .” Erris sounded awed despite having lived a thousand years amid the wonders of the Missing. “Does it have teeth?”
“I don’t know.” The Ictha had never landed so great a beast. Like ice storms they were a force of nature that you merely let pass and hoped to survive. Yaz tried to shine her light in search of some sign of teeth. But exhaustion rose in her like a wave, carrying her to the floor.
“Yaz!” Erris nearly caught her but her weakness had taken him by surprise. Instead he helped her to sit with her back against