in close and was reaching for them blind. The longest of its arms raked the rock two yards shy of their chamber but could reach no further. The only light now was a deep red one, so deep it was almost black at times, radiating out from between the plates of armour covering the creature’s body. Yaz couldn’t make sense of the thing, it looked like a random collection of pieces, segmented together. “How long will it stay?”
“I don’t know. It’s not supposed to be here.”
“City?” Yaz looked up, suddenly realising that Thurin had mentioned a city. “What city?” Men had had cities before the ice swept them aside. The legends said so.
“A city of the Missing,” Thurin said. He leaned back and shook his head. “You really don’t know what goes on down here at all, do you?”
“No!” Suddenly she was angry. “And neither did you before you were pushed down the pit, so don’t play so high and mighty with us!”
“I wasn’t pushed.” Thurin said it so softly she wondered if she had misheard him above the hunter’s clawing. He’d thrown himself down, like her?
Kao snorted, recovering some of his composure. “Of course you were, you lying sack of—”
“I was born here.”
8
HOW LONG DO we have to stay here?” Kao had been pacing for what seemed like hours. One pace, two pace, turn. One pace, two pace, turn.
“I don’t know.” Thurin had given the same reply the last several times and it didn’t seem to stick.
“Try sitting,” Yaz suggested from where she sat.
Kao made no reply. He seemed more scared of the narrowness of the space confining him than of the hunter outside. And he had been pretty scared of that. Yaz didn’t blame him there. No amount of muscle is going to make a difference against a creature of iron with knives for claws. But fear of enclosed spaces was not something the Ictha knew. Anyone who couldn’t spend three months inside a tent would not last long among her people.
Outside the grinding continued as it had continued the whole time.
“Will it dig its way to us?” Maya asked, eyes wide in the darkness.
Yaz would have said no, nothing could, but the sounds did seem to have grown louder as if the beast were actually making progress. Certainly when it reached in every so often its claws seemed to scrape the rock much closer to their hiding place each time. Either it was burrowing through ice at a remarkable rate or its limbs were growing longer!
“The others will come,” Yaz said. “Quina will have told them.”
“Unless that thing got her,” Kao said.
Yaz shook her head. “Then Arka would have sent someone to check on us already. Arka said we should hurry.”
“They’ll all know by now,” Thurin agreed. “One way or the other.”
“So they come and find us and . . .” Yaz still marvelled that they were being attacked by a mass of iron that would outweigh all the metal owned by even the largest of clans. Her life could soon be ended by a sharp-edged heap of treasure of incalculable value. “How do you beat these things?”
“We don’t. We hide and eventually they go away.”
“And if they don’t?”
“Then someone draws them off. But they always go away in the end, and if you can make it to the long slope they hardly ever follow you past the gateposts.”
“So . . . why hasn’t someone drawn it off?” Maya asked. Now that they were in real trouble she sounded perfectly calm, no sign of the wide-eyed nervous girl from before.
Thurin didn’t speak for a moment, and then as if deciding on honesty: “I guess they’ve tried to draw it off but it just wants us more than it wants them. Sometimes that happens. It’s one of the reasons you won’t see many grey hairs among the Broken.”
Kao stopped pacing. “I’ve got to get out.” Muttered to himself as if it were a sudden realisation. “Got to get out.” He fell to his hands and knees and began to crawl to the gap.