The Girl and the Stars

by Mark Lawrence

  “You’ll learn to ‘just know.’” Arka walked to the door, beckoning for them to follow. “It can take a while, but you have the rest of your lives to learn.”

  9

  IN THE STORY days the first of men, Zin, who climbed from the sea to Mokka’s tent, rose from his sleeping hides and found himself old. He saw in his hands the lines that told a lifetime. With a sigh he set down his dagger-tooth beside the many kettan he had carved in the long night. Zin left his shelter and saw a brittle dawn in the east. The cold had bound itself tight across the ice. A knowing came then into the first of men, a shout and a whisper, carried by the cruelty of the wind, borne by the strangeness of the sea. This would be his last day. And so Zin walked into the whiteness that was the world, seeking to know what had become of his many sons and daughters.

  Though he had grown old Zin bore the wind and the miles upon his shoulders and in the morning of his last day he found three of the four tribes that had sprung from his seed. In the west the Axit had grown broad, their eyes dark, their hearts fierce, and they knew him not. They followed the seas and their fine nets caught small fish in great number and variety. With octar ink his Axit sons tattooed the flames of dragons’ tails across their necks, licking up over their cheeks. Their threats cracked the ice. His daughters wore bones through their eyebrows and came running before their men with spears in hand.

  In the east the Quinx had found a dog and it had become many, as dogs will when fed. Zin’s Quinx sons were tall and wore their hair in warrior braids. His daughters there drove dogsleds and with their teams hauled even the Green Whale from the sea. No memory of Zin remained in all of the Quinx. They prized stone beads from such rocks as the Gods in the Sky sometimes cast upon the ice, and because he wore none they counted Zin as lesser, despite his age and the whiteness of his beard.

  Far to the south Zin’s Joccan sons walked beneath strange stars in such heat that sometimes molten ice would run and flow even outside a tent and delight the children before it froze again. Joccan wives painted their eyelids black and their hair grew in many shades. The Joccan had forgotten the face of their father and replaced the stories of their mother with lies of the green world that only the gods know.

  At last, growing weary, with the sun falling, Zin turned north and walked to the lands where the cold is born and where it hunts. Here the ice grew hard, the landscape fractured, the voice of the glaciers sharper, louder, more fierce. Zin’s Ictha sons turned their pale eyes toward his approach and were amazed for the first of men came among them bare chested and they knew him for their father and wept. And as the sun descended on the last day of the first man his children of the north feasted him with harpfish and tuark and the eggs of the great loach, and sang the oldest songs that told of his love for Mokka and the days of his youth when Zin had taught his offspring what secrets of the sea the gods had given into his care.

  And come the night the Ictha gave back to the sea that had birthed him all of Zin save that which they held in their hearts.

  * * *

  YAZ STOOD WITH the others outside the food hall. She found her shoulders hunched and forced them to relax. It wasn’t cold. It was just the strangeness of the place, the twilight gloom, the glistening ice sky lit with its own stars, the constant dripping, and on all sides shadow-wrapped buildings full of strange angles and built from gods knew what. Here and there the occasional star-stone hung, alive with light and whispers, drawing Yaz’s eye, reminding her of the star she held on the previous night, burning in her hand, its song pulsing through her.

  Arka coughed for attention. “There are six main tasks we turn our hands to here. On the surface we all did everything. Here we choose a role and we stick to it. You can change, but not from one day to the next. We have . . .” She raised her hand and spread the fingers, closing the first one as she began. “Harvesters, who seed, protect, and collect the fungi. Hunters, who catch rats for meat and skins, and blindfish from the rivers. Scavengers, who gather metal and building material from the city. Smiths, who melt down the metals and work them into new forms. Miners, who hack star-stones from the ice.” With four fingers and a thumb closed in, Arka now held a raised fist. She brought it smacking down into the palm of her other hand. “And warriors, who keep us safe from the Tainted.”

  “The warriors don’t have to do anything except fight?” Kao asked.

  “They patrol and practice their weapon skills. Actual fighting is rare, thankfully, but still too frequent for us to replace our losses.”

  “I’m going to be a warrior!” Kao nodded as if the matter were settled.

  “First we do the tour,” Arka said. “Spend some time seeing what goes on here. Sometimes the dullest-sounding tasks are more interesting than the most exciting. Harvesters always have something to do, warriors can find themselves bored, then terrified, then bored.”

  “A warrior! Not grubbing around with those . . . plants,” Kao said.

  “They do get to eat as many as they like . . . as long as no one sees them do it.”

  Kao’s truculence weakened as opposing desires waged war. Arka allowed herself a small smile then led them on. “First we visit the foundry!”

  * * *

  “THE FOUNDRY IS the closest area to the main pit shaft that we still hold.” Arka had led them for what felt like an hour and couldn’t have been anything like that. “Can any of you guess why we keep such valuable industry out here where the Tainted contest us?”

  “To show them who’s boss,” Kao grunted.

  “It’s too difficult to move?” Maya asked.

  Yaz frowned, puzzled.

  “The heat,” said Quina. “It needs to escape without drowning you or bringing the roof down.”

  “Fast brain as well as fast feet,” Arka said.

  At the exit to the low cavern they had been traversing Arka led the drop-group past three gerants and a short dark man heading in the opposite direction. One of the gerants must have been close to nine feet in height and was built like a bear. All three of them wore metal plates linked together by iron rings, each plate no bigger than Yaz’s hand so that together they formed a flexible metal skin over the warriors’ chests, arms, and upper legs. Rust patterned them like frost rings on a closing sea.

  The smaller man wore no armour. All four carried iron spears, not bone shafts tipped with an iron blade but iron throughout. And at their hips they bore huge knives with small arms spreading from the hilt.

  “Swords,” Thurin said, seeing her surprise.

  Arka led them on through a perfectly round tunnel that went up and later down, gently undulating through the ice. Broken rock had been scattered on the floor to give purchase in the steeper sections. There seemed no way to account for the conflicting gradients. Meltwater would only flow down.

  Arka paused where one tunnel pierced another, listening.

  “How are these tunnels made?” Yaz had seen similar ones before, shortly after crawling from her drop pool.

  “Coal-worms.”

  “What-worms?” Yaz knew of worms that swam beneath the ice surrounding the Hot Sea but none of them were much longer than her arm and she didn’t think they burrowed.

  “Coal.” Thurin waved his hands. “Black rock, but not like the mountain. Eular says it used to be forests . . . trees . . . and you can burn it just like whale oil.”

  Thurin said whaleoil, as if it were one word and he had little idea of what a whale or oil was. Which Yaz supposed was true. “Good for burning but hard to light, Eular says . . .” He looked at Arka for support.

  “Coal-worms eat coal. They generate heat and melt their way through the ice. Though mostly it’s the young ones who travel, looking for new deposits. The big ones only move on when they’ve exhausted the seams.”

  “Lucky for us a big one chose to head where we’re going then!” Yaz said.

  Arka frowned. “This was made by a baby. Pray you never mee
t a full-grown worm.”

  * * *

  “WHAT WERE YOU?” Yaz kept close behind Thurin in the tunnels and asked her question quietly.

  “What was I?”

  “You know, hunter, harvester, warrior—”

  “I was a miner. Mostly.” Thurin glanced back at her, his face curiously lit by bands of stardust in the ceiling just above them. “Ice-workers have to be. Well, they are ‘encouraged.’ Miners produce most of the stars that we give to the priests. But the biggest stars are scavenger finds. Like the one we . . . the one that lights the settlement cavern. And those are dangerous.” His voice carried the warning. “Not all the Tainted were stolen from us. Some went willingly. A star can do that to you. A big one. They break your mind up and fill you with demons.”

  “What sort of demons?” little Maya asked from behind Yaz, proving to have sharper ears than expected. She was shy but curious, always watching. “What do they look like?”

  “Imagine all your hate broken away from you and given its own voice,” Thurin said. “Living under your skin as a separate thing. Or all your greed, or lust. I’ve seen it happen, once. A demon made just of you. Crawling over your body like a stain. That’s what it looks like, just a stain, no bigger than your hand. A taint. So be careful around the stars. Even the smaller ones. They weren’t made for us. They aren’t good or evil. Just dangerous. Like fire.”

  * * *

  THE COAL-WORM’S TUNNEL eventually descended to the bedrock again and connected with a melt chamber. The air was warmer than back at the settlement, the dripping faster; small streams wound their way across the rock, vanishing beneath the ice at the chamber walls. Yaz led them past more warriors into a cavern lit by half a dozen bright stars whose light revealed a collection of sheds beside a lake, and above them a ceiling that funnelled up into a steep but slanting shaft vanishing into darkness.

  “This is where I fell,” Quina said, her narrow face growing tight at the memory.

  “Me too. But I made a bigger splash!” Kao slapped his belly and chest.

  “What’s that smell?” Maya sniffed. Ever since coal-worms had been mentioned she’d been jumpy. It was hard to remember that the timid child came from the Axit. If she had not been dropped she would soon have worn their bone piercings through her eyebrows and, allegedly, beneath her furs, blood tattoos recording the clan’s victories over past enemies. Walking close behind Maya it seemed to Yaz that something odd happened each time the girl flinched at a new sound. A subtle change, so slight it might just be imagination. The twilight seemed to flinch with her, as if just for a moment the shadows themselves drew in their breath. Maya sniffed again. “What is it?”

  Yaz inhaled slowly through her nose. The air smelled of blood and fire and harsh, alien scents with sharp angles to them. “I don’t know.”

  “Metal, being melted down,” Arka said.

  “Metal melts?” Yaz blinked.

  “If you get it hot enough. A lot of things do. Even rock!” Arka took them toward the huts.

  As they drew closer a man in a thick hide apron emerged. The skin on his bare arms glistened with sweat and black smudges decorated bulging muscle. He grunted at Arka and took two handfuls of random metal pieces from the bin beside the hut. The mixture included toothed wheels of unblemished silvery metal, thin black wire in coils, and rusting iron rods with traces of some coating that had been stripped away.

  “That’s Ixen. He doesn’t say much.” Arka caught the door before it closed and took them inside.

  The heat hit Yaz like a blow and she staggered beneath it. The shed was a longish hall whose central feature was a large bowl of what looked like stone, supported on thick chains that ran to the ceiling. Ixen dumped his collection of metal pieces into the bowl, discarding one and adding some more iron rods from a nearby stack.

  “It’s like cooking,” Arka said. “You have to get the mixture right.”

  While Ixen added his finishing touches a bony woman, also in a scorched hide apron and little else, came from the rear of the shed to lower a heavy sigil-covered pot on another chain so that it nestled among the scrap.

  “That pot looks like it’s iron but it’s not. It can get hot enough to melt all the other metals in there without melting itself.”

  “So . . . how did you make it?” Quina asked.

  Arka frowned. “That happened before my time. But I guess we’d be in trouble if we lost it.” She frowned again. “Though we do occasionally find metal it can’t melt.”

  The woman with the skull-like face took a pole with a scoop on it and began to move stars from a box to one side, dropping them one by one into the grey pot. As she added them each ceased its shining and instead the sigils on the pot began to emit a redder glow along with a fierce heat. Yaz backed off, not wanting to cause the stars to burn too bright and drive the sigils to incinerate them all.

  “It’s the heat,” she said as Arka looked her way. “I can’t take it.”

  Yaz retreated outside the shed and Arka followed to stand in the doorway.

  “I’ve seen it all before, many times, but I never get tired of watching the molten metal being tipped out. It’s like liquid fire. Ixen makes ingots and also pours various shapes for the other smiths. Almost all of it goes to the priests.”

  Yaz wiped the chilling sweat from her brow. “If you can make that much heat why do you need miners? Surely you can just melt the stars from the ice and make any tunnels you need just like the coal-worms do?”

  “I thought Quina would be the first one to ask that question.” Arka rubbed at the scars running down her cheek. “It’s a question of profit and loss. When the stars are used to drive sigils they’re eaten away by it; the star you take out is smaller than the one you put in. It’s rapid for small stars. A pot will consume handfuls of dust just to make a little heat. And slow for bigger ones. But even with our largest stars we would find less of value in what ice we melted than the pot had consumed in order to melt it. It’s like life up top. Every decision is about what you gain and what it costs you.” She glanced back. “He’ll be pouring soon. Come and watch if you’re not going to faint.”

  Yaz stayed outside after Arka returned to the furnace heat of the interior. She walked slowly to the shore of the lake, wondering. She knew what her decision to throw herself down the pit had cost her. She had less idea about any gains, but if she didn’t find Zeen then it was all loss. The Ictha had cast him aside but to her he was still clan, still valued, and she would find him irrespective of loss and gain. It seemed to Yaz that if she had allowed them to throw her brother away without protest, as if he were worthless, or indeed if she had stood by and watched any child be thrown into that hole and said nothing, then something of herself would have been thrown away too, something more valuable than what she had lost by acting.

  Thurin had said that the stars could split away the worst parts of a person and give them new voice. Yaz knew that watching the regulator toss children into the pit split away something good within those who watched and confined it to a place every bit as dark and silent as the hole into which those children vanished. She couldn’t say how she knew this or how she held to it in the face of the harsh arithmetic that governed life upon the ice. But she did know it, blood to bone, however much she might long for the blissful ignorance that seemed to enfold the rest who watched that day.

  With a start Yaz realised that she had reached the shore of the lake and wet her toes in the shallows. It grew rapidly more deep, lit from beneath by stardust drifting against ridges in the rock, but the constant rain of meltwater from above rippled the surface too much for a clear view of the depths. Even so, it held a beauty and a peace: black rock, ice in every shade of pearl between white and clarity, the marbled seams of stardust glowing in all the colours that can be broken from the light. Beneath the many-tongued voice of falling water lay a distant glacial groaning, as timeless in its way as that of the wind.
Yaz let the wonder of the place enfold her. The serenity—

  *Bang* *Bang* *Bang*

  Yaz started forward in surprise and stepped further into the shallows, soaking one foot in near-freezing water.

  *Bang* *Bang* *Bang*

  The hammering came from one of the other sheds and Yaz, irritated at the intrusion, stalked over, every other step a squelch, to see what warranted such a din. With her hands at her ears she leaned in through an open doorway.

  A young man stood surrounded by tools and pieces of metalwork hanging from the rafters. He held a small but heavy hammer in one hand and the other steadied the sword blade he was working on. The glow from a small furnace pot picked out the topography of his well-muscled chest and arms. But the angles of his jaw and cheekbones beneath a half-wild mop of lustrous red-black hair were what stole the breath from Yaz’s lungs. She understood that the arrangement of some men’s features were more pleasing to the eye than others. Quell had been her friend first before any other attraction grew between them, but when working with the clan on the ice his face drew not just her eye but those of the other young Ictha women. Her mother called Quell handsome. The beauty of the man before her, however, had a magic to it that reached inside and made her ache.

  The hammering stopped. Yaz had been spotted. The man offered her a smile, half-shy, half-amused, and beckoned her forward.

  “You’re from the drop-group.” Not a question. How else could she be here?

  “Yes.”

  “Arka’s showing you around?” He looked past Yaz to the door as if expecting more company. “Sorry. Am I shouting?” He lowered his voice. “After the hammer everything seems too quiet.”

  Yaz grinned. “We Ictha say after the north everything seems too warm.”

  The man frowned. “Ictha? Oh, is that your clan?”