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Copyright
HarperVoyager
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
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HarperCollinsPublishers
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First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2021
Copyright © Mark Lawrence 2021
Jacket illustration © Jason Chan 2021
Jacket design © HarperCollinsPUblishers Ltd 2021
Mark Lawrence asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008284800
Ebook Edition © April 2021 ISBN: 9780008284824
Version: 2021-04-06
Dedication
Dedicated to the memory of George Lebon with whom I misspent some of the best parts of my youth.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
The Story So Far
Chapter 1: Thurin
Chapter 2: Quell
Chapter 3: Yaz
Chapter 4: Thurin
Chapter 5: Quell
Chapter 6: Yaz
Chapter 7: Thurin
Chapter 8: Quell
Chapter 9: Yaz
Chapter 10
Chapter 11: Thurin
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14: Quell
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17: Yaz
Chapter 18
Chapter 19: Thurin
Chapter 20: Quell
Chapter 21: Thurin
Chapter 22: Yaz
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35: Thurin
Chapter 36
Chapter 37: Yaz
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Acknowledgements
Also by Mark Lawrence
About the Publisher
The Story So Far
For those of you who have had to wait a while for this book I provide brief catch-up notes to book one, so your memories may be refreshed and I can avoid the awkwardness of having to have characters tell each other things they already know for your benefit.
Here I carry forwards only what is of importance to the tale that follows.
Yaz and her brother, Zeen, found themselves in the Pit of the Missing as a result of developing powers that, while useful, made them too weak to survive the extreme cold of Abeth’s icy surface. There are four old bloods that show in a small minority of children:
gerant (which means you grow very big)
hunska (which makes you very fast)
marjal (which can give you some of a variety of lesser magics, like command over shadows, water, air, rock, fire, etc. – sometimes more than one of these)
quantal (which can give you major magics, including accessing the vast power of the Path, and the ability to weave the threads of existence to achieve more subtle manipulations of people and things).
Under the ice Yaz met the Broken – a tribe formed from those who survived the fall down the pit. She also met the Tainted – members of the Broken who had been taken over by devils/spirits that dwell in the black ice.
In the rock under the ice are the remains of Vesta, a city built by the Missing – a race that left Abeth before the four tribes of man (gerant, hunska, marjal, and quantal) arrived. The Missing purified themselves before they vanished by carving out their impurities, their undesirable traits: anger, selfishness, jealousy, and other evils. These evils have since escaped the vaults and polluted both the ice and now the Tainted. The leader and most powerful of these spirits is called Theus.
The Missing’s city is also the source of stars and iron, both of which the Broken mine and scavenge. The stars are glowing spheres that seem to be a power source used by the Missing. Yaz has an ability to manipulate the stars, an ability seemingly shared only by a small number of the priests. The priest who threw Yaz’s brother down the pit wanted Yaz to join the priesthood and has worked to recover her from the Broken.
Before Yaz escaped from the pit she drove the spirits out of the Tainted, returning the possessed people to the Broken. Theus was defeated.
Important figures from book one:
Yaz, ~16 years old, part of the Ictha clan, quantal with the special ability to control the stars
Zeen, ~12 years old, part of the Ictha clan, hunska, Yaz’s brother
Thurin, ~18 years old, born under the ice, marjal with powers over water and fire. Thurin was possessed by Theus. Theus later agreed to leave him after striking a bargain with Yaz
Erris, ~5,000 years old. As a young man he was lost in the undercity, millennia ago, before the sun weakened further and ice covered the planet. The city adopted him. It’s unclear whether Erris is really alive or just a memory kept by the city. He now inhabits an artificial body that he built with the city’s help
Quina, hunksa, a quick-witted, sharp-tongued girl, ~15 years old
Maya, marjal, a shadow-worker, member of the ice’s most warlike clan and no stranger to killing, ~13 years old
Kao, gerant, well over 6 feet tall and powerfully built though only 12 years old
Quell, ~17 years old, part of the Ictha clan. Quell was going to ask Yaz to marry him just before she jumped into the pit. He followed her in later
Theus (age unknown), a spirit made from most of the undesirable traits of one of the Missing
Taproot (age unknown), an ancient simulation of a man named Elias Taproot who was brought to Abeth by one of the four tribes of men that settled the planet together, arriving after the departure of the Missing
The regulator (age unknown), a priest responsible for selecting children to be thrown down the pit
Eular (age unknown), an old, eyeless man who appears to be part of the priesthood who live in the Black Rock but also to spend time living among the Broken who believe him to be one of them.
The priests of the Black Rock – the only mountain known to rise above the ice – exercise authority over the ice tribes. They are the only ones with access to iron and trade it with the ice tribes for furs and food.
During her time in the pit Yaz discovered that the priests give the Broken vital salt and in exchange the Broken recover iron and stars for the priests.
In addition to the small-scale conflict between Yaz, the Broken, the Missing, and the priests of the Black Rock there is a much larger, older, underlying conflict. Parts of many of the Missing’s cities survive under the ice, and each has its own controlling mind, though these have fallen into madness in the millennia since the Missing left. The most powerful of these city minds is called Seus. Seus is engaged in a conflict with Taproot. Taproot has told Yaz that there remains a thin green corridor around Abeth’s equator that the ice has yet to swallow. Seus wants the ice to cover it but Taproot wants to stop that happening. They’re fighting each other through the ancient networks, though Seus is much more powerful.
Yaz has a needle that contains a fragment of Taproot’s personality and will guide her to a more complete copy of the man.
Book one ended with an escape from the pit via a long shaft that Thurin helped melt through the ice. Yaz and others were lifted in an iron cage via a long cable. The priests of the Black Rock were hauling the cage up.
In the cage were: Yaz, Zeen, Erris, Maya, Kao, and Quell. Quell had a knife in his side. Thurin was unable to get into the cage and has been left behind. Quina was missing, presumed captured by one of the priests’ mechanical star-driven hunters.
Maya climbed up the cable as the cage was rising. Yaz went up after her. When Yaz got to the top, ahead of the cage, she found the Regulator and Eular there and no sign of Maya. Eular used magic to send Yaz to sleep and the Regulator told the acolytes raising the cage to let it drop the two miles back into the caverns below.
CHAPTER 1
Thurin
There had been a great fire and there had been a great flood. Both are forces of nature that sweep clean, that wipe the slate and promise a new beginning. Thurin had been the cause of the fire and of the flood. And yet both had failed to wash away his desire to be with Yaz of the Ictha: the girl for whom the stars shone brighter.
Thurin stared up at the miles-long hole stretching vertically through the ice to a world that he had never seen. It seemed impossible that he had driven the fire that melted it. The release of his fire-talent, of energies that had built inside him for years and years, had hollowed him. The subsequent battle with the Tainted had left him bruised, bitten, and torn. And almost immediately after that he had used the full extent of his ice-work in a desperate attempt to ensure Yaz’s brother joined her escape.
Even as he wondered what it was that still kept him upright, Thurin found himself collapsing to the floor. The last image to remain with him was of Yaz’s impossibly white eyes locked on his as the cage rose ever further and vanished into darkness.
‘Wake up!’
Thurin rolled to his side, groaning. A pleasant heat wrapped him and for a beautiful moment he thought himself at home in his mother’s house within the settlement. He tried to cling to the illusion but it slid through his grasp, leaving only pieces of the darker dreams that had haunted his sleep, ones in which Theus stood above him pulling puppet strings to make him dance to a tune that was not his own.
‘Still with us? Good.’
Thurin cracked open an eye. A fierce glow, distorted by his blurry vision, stole detail from the scene but he saw enough to tell that he was lying in one of the forge sheds. Lengths of chain and a variety of tools hung from the support beams. ‘Kaylal? That you?’
‘It is.’ The young smith clapped a hand to Thurin’s shoulder. ‘Takes more than a hundred screaming Tainted to put me down.’
Thurin struggled to sit. All of him hurt. Bites and scratches that he hadn’t noticed before now cried for his attention. ‘You’re all right?’
‘Well, I lost both legs …’
Thurin smiled at the old joke. Kaylal looked as bad as he felt, both eyes blackened and puffy, his ear torn and bleeding, bruising round his neck. Still, the greatest of his hurts was the loss of Exxar. The rest of his wounds would heal. ‘It’s good to see you. How did I get here?’
‘Arka had the wounded carried to shelter. The worst of them are at the settlement.’ Kaylal hauled himself up a chain to gain his work stool. ‘Your friend Yaz left in spectacular fashion, I’m told.’
‘She’s your friend too.’ Thurin scowled, angry at his own evasion.
Kaylal shook his head. ‘I lost Exxar and there’s no getting him back. Yaz has only been gone half a day. She’s up there.’ He pointed. ‘It’s a journey that took even me almost no time at all.’
‘I’m told it’s harder on the way up.’ Thurin stood, groaning at the stiffness in his limbs.
‘Seriously, though, you need to do something, Thurin. I saw how you looked at her. What will it be like spending the years to come always wondering where she is, what she’s doing?’
Thurin stretched, imagining he could hear his leg bones creaking. He knew Kaylal was right and it scared him. He moved closer to the forge pot, still radiating residual heat despite being empty. ‘The Broken need me.’
‘That’s just an excuse. We have Arka. We have our people back from the taint. And if this whale is really there …’
‘It is. Getting it out of the black ice will be a problem, but I saw it. I never believed the stories when they said how big those things are!’
Kaylal grinned. ‘I want to see it too!’
Thurin echoed his friend’s smile. It seemed madness for the two of them, neither having any memories of the ice, to be discussing his going to the surface. But if ever there had been a time for madness it was here in the days since Yaz’s arrival.
‘I don’t know how to follow her.’ Thurin said it in a small voice. It seemed a sorrier excuse than being needed here. But the truth was that two miles of ice was a daunting barrier. It wasn’t as if anyone had ever overcome it before Yaz made her escape.
Kaylal laughed. ‘They say you’re the one who made that hole in the first place. If that’s true then surely you can get yourself up it. I doubt they’ve been able to close it off yet.’
Thurin frowned. ‘Maybe …’ He bit his lip. ‘It would be dangerous though. Very.’
‘Oh, well. Better stay then.’ Kaylal took down one of his hammers and began to inspect the open chain links scattering the table before him.
‘Heh.’ Thurin shook his head. ‘Everything has been dangerous since she came. I guess I’ve got a taste for it now.’
Kaylal reached out behind him and took hold of something dark and heavy that he tossed to Thurin.
‘Exxar’s cloak?’ Thurin stroked a hand down over the garment: double-layered rat-skin. It had taken an age for Exxar to barter for the furs.
‘He was never warm enough.’ Kaylal managed a smile.
‘I can’t—’
‘Take it. I heard it’s chilly up there.’
Thurin swirled the cloak around his shoulders and started towards the door. He paused to set a hand on Kaylal’s shoulder. ‘You’ll look after them all for me, won’t you?’
‘I will, brother.’ Kaylal put down his hammer and laid a calloused hand on top of Thurin’s. ‘And we’ll be here if you need a place to come back to. Now go and get her.’
Thurin returned to the city cavern, passing through cave after cave where the Broken wandered in numbers greater than he’d ever seen them. Those reclaimed from the taint outnumbered the Broken who had remained free, but they were intermixed now, families reunited. There were greetings from people who remembered Thurin as a baby, and others he recalled from his childhood. Some, taken more recently, rushed to hug him, trying to drag him off to this or that celebration. The joy that Yaz had left in her wake was just starting to sink in. The Broken were only now beginning to truly believe that this was no dream, that it was something real that couldn’t be taken from them.
Each invitation, each reunion, weakened his resolve; each was a hook sunk into his flesh and needing to be torn free if he was to continue to his goal. It would be so easy to stay, so easy to resume the familiarity of his life, to enjoy the improved future within the company of his extended family. But Thurin knew that if he turned from his course, if he surrendered to what was easy, then Yaz would haunt him all his life, however long it might be. A great ‘what if’ hanging over his head year after year.
And so he came to the city cavern and crossed the puddled expanse of stone, the iced-over remnants of the flood cracking beneath his feet. He walked among the abandoned wealth of iron, the wreckage of broken hunters, discarded armour, weapons cast aside. He gave a wide berth to the pit into which Theus and the other tainted gerants had fallen when Yaz collapsed the floor beneath them into a chamber of the undercity. He assumed that the pit remained full of the bodies of those who had fallen amid a tumult of shattered rock, but he had no wish to see the truth of the matter for himself. The families of the dead would come for them soon enough.
Thurin spotted a lone figure poking among the debris of Pome’s hunter, Old Hanno, who after Eular had to be the oldest of the Broken at well over fifty. He raised his hand in greeting. Apart from the two of them the ruins stood deserted.
Thurin came to a halt beneath the wide throat of the hole that stretched up through the roof of the city cavern to the surface of the ice, allegedly miles above. The stardust marbling the ice illuminated the first twenty or thirty yards of the shaft in a dim multi-hued glow. Beyond that, only darkness, no hint of the sky that the stories told of. Most of Thurin’s friends had memories of the surface, but none of their words really painted a picture in his mind, or even made sense. What held this ‘sky’ up? How high above the ground was it? Where were the walls? Thurin sighed and guessed that if his plans succeeded then he would soon see for himself and being an adult he would understand what the Broken had failed to explain from their childhood recollections.
A deep breath calmed him a little. Another deeper breath, exhaling the tension. Thurin’s power to work the ice came from his marjal blood. Next to shadow-work the elemental skills were the most common to manifest in marjals. He had been strong with water and ice since his early years. By the age of ten he had been able to weaken the cave walls, allowing the gerants to dig through much more swiftly in their hunt for stars. The talent had slowly strengthened as he grew and used it daily with the mining crew, but it still hadn’t been anywhere near as strong as Tarko’s.
That had changed when Thurin returned from the Tainted. Something had shifted within him; some barrier had broken. He found himself capable of new feats. And in the week since Yaz’s arrival it had seemed that some hitherto unsuspected barrier had broken each day. In the fight with Hetta he had held her off by seizing the water that suffuses all humans. Yaz’s arrival had heralded a sequence of life-or-death situations, and in each new extremity Thurin had clawed his way to some fresh height, unlocking more strength, his ice-work at last becoming equal to that of their former leader. Perhaps even surpassing it.
Another deep breath and Thurin reached for his power. The idea had come to him when he thought about how he had saved Zeen. The boy had lost his grip as the cage accelerated upwards towards the shaft. Thurin had reached out with his ice-work, his mind taking hold of Zeen’s blood. Thurin had lifted the boy and sent him in pursuit of the cage, letting him grab the bars once more.
Now Thurin turned his ice-work inwards, taking hold of the water in the blood that ran through his own veins, the water that suffused his flesh. You only had to see how solid a corpse would freeze to know how much of us is water. With a small grunt of concentration Thurin lifted his feet clear of the rock. It was easier than he had feared, yet still hard enough to make him worry that sustaining the effort for as long as was necessary might be beyond him.
He rose slowly into the air with the sense that he was balancing on the narrow top of an invisible, ever-growing tower. The pressure needed to raise his bodyweight pushed back on some elastic part of his mind, some focus of his talent that would stretch and stretch again, providing whatever effort was demanded of it … right up to that moment when suddenly too much had been asked and without warning it might snap.
Empty yards piled up beneath his feet. The ground grew more distant, the roof closer. With the ice ceiling looming above him on every side, Thurin found himself seized by a swift and unexpected terror. The distance yawning beneath his feet seemed to exert a pull all of its own. The invisible tower on which he balanced became an unstable stack of loosely connected parts, piled way too high. The rocky expanse bearing the city’s scars demanded that he rejoin it with crushing speed.
A panicked burst of power sent Thurin rushing into the shaft, and in its rapidly narrowing, rapidly dimming confines the distance beneath him was quickly tamed. Within a short time, all that could be seen below him was a shrinking circle of light that yielded no impression of the fall it concealed.
Within a hundred yards the darkness wrapped Thurin completely and from then on he was simply a dot of warmth rising blind through the night, grazing the ice walls from time to time, and wondering if the seemingly endless shaft would spit him out into the world above before gravity’s pull overcame his willpower and dragged him screaming back to a quick but ugly death.
Up, always up. Thurin lost track of time. The pain built behind his eyes until he also lost all sense of where he was going and why. Up and up. And the hurt kept getting worse.
CHAPTER 2
Quell
Quell lay in the rising cage surrounded by stacked boards from the settlement and carelessly heaped fungi. The knife in his side pinned him to each moment, the pain both sharp and at the same time a dull, pervading ache. It hadn’t hurt going in. The sight of the hilt, tight against his flesh, had astonished him.
The weakest among the Tainted had been more dangerous than Yaz thought, but she had been right to try to stop him swinging his axe at them. Even now he would rather be lying here, waiting to die, than sitting unharmed and carrying the memories of children he had hacked apart. There are prices worth paying to stay alive, and others not worth paying.
The regulator’s price for saving Yaz’s life had been one Quell had been prepared to pay. He had thought her dead already. The weight of sadness that he’d had to carry from the Pit of the Missing on the day she fell had been more than he thought he could bear. He still told himself that she fell. For her to have thrown herself down seemed to speak of a willing destruction of the bond that he thought had grown between them. He had been going to ask her to walk with him for the rest of their days. To share a tent and raise children of their own. If she had jumped rather than fallen … what did that mean? He should have been the rock she clung to, her comfort in the face of Zeen’s death. Instead it seemed that her own life had been the price that she was ready to pay to escape him.
Yaz’s mother had climbed from the crater as though she were a dead woman walking only out of habit. Yaz’s father, a man given to silence, had cracked open in a way he had not before, even when the dagger-fish took his youngest son. Yaz’s uncle and her mother’s cousins had had to wrestle her father from the crater while all the time he fought and raged against the Gods both in the Sea and in the Sky.