images?”
“Nothing.” Arka shook her head. “Nothing that lasted. But their lives were very different from ours. Eular thinks many of their possessions and their art may have been temporary and changeable, and their records locked away in ways we can’t understand. We do know though that they were of a similar size to us.”
“How?”
“Many of their chambers were of a size that would suit us. Their stairs also fit our stride.” Arka looked around. She had not stopped looking around since they had stepped out onto the flatter ground. “Stay vigilant. Allow a wonder to seduce your eye and a hunter may take that moment to pounce.” She waved them on, pointing out holes to hide in as they advanced.
Finally they reached the fractured edge of a large hole leading down into a darkness punctuated with individual points of starlight. A warm draft rose from the void, the first wind Yaz had felt on her face since her fall down the pit.
“The heat tells us that there are still many stars down in the city,” Arka said. “And the cavern tells us that our efforts have had minimal impact on that total.”
“How?” Quina scowled, clearly hating not to be able to work it out for herself.
“It isn’t dripping,” Arka said. “Only the east wall runs, where the advancing ice melts away at exactly the rate it advances. A stream carries the water off. The rest of the cavern is in equilibrium. The warmth just enough to sustain it.”
The rising air carried a stale smell along with muted undercurrents as alien as those of the forge huts. Yaz sniffed it with suspicion while trying to concentrate on what Arka was saying about minding their heads on the low ceilings.
“You wets are all terrible at climbing, and there’s really nowhere safe for you to practice, so this is it. Think about what you’re doing, where your hands are, where your feet are. This isn’t the ice.”
Arka carried on talking. Hulking beside Yaz, Kao muttered, “I should be on the ice. Not in a hole going into a deeper hole.”
Quina on his other side snapped back, “Seriously? How was any of this a surprise for you? Did you not notice that you were twice the size of your playmates? Your parents should have been preparing you for the gathering long before you came to the pit.”
“Perhaps his clan thought it a kindness not to tell him,” Yaz muttered. “Maybe all the adults knew and none of the children.” She had lived with the burden of the knowledge since her first gathering and it had soured the years left to her among her people. Ignorance might have been less cruel.
Arka took out an iron rod, longer than the one Pome had used to hold his star, and scooped a star from a small depression near the entrance. With its light to guide them she slipped easily down past the stone jaws and began to climb the slope of broken rock beneath.
Yaz let Kao go first. If he fell she wanted to be above him not below. Maya followed, nimble footed.
When it came to her turn to climb, Yaz found herself in immediate difficulty. She had lived her life on the level with nothing in her path but pressure ridges in the ice. The descents to the Hot Sea and the others that opened periodically when underwellings of warm water melted through the glacial sheet were treacherous things but the Ictha lowered themselves on hide ropes. Here she had no rope, only a complex, ever-changing surface to negotiate. By the time she reached flat ground again every limb trembled and sweat ran in trickles inside her furs.
“Gods in the Sea! I’m glad that’s over.” Yaz clambered down to join Thurin.
“Over?”
She saw that they were crowded on a ledge and that the steep slant of the tunnel continued, considerably closer to vertical than to horizontal. She peered over into the darkness. “How deep does it go?”
“Nobody knows. Scavengers say they’ve been as deep as the ice is tall, but I’m not sure how they could tell that.” Thurin offered a crooked smile. “It’s hard work. I’ve been down before