The Girl and the Stars

by Mark Lawrence

  “I jumped.” It sounded silly when she said it now.

  “After a friend?” Eular asked. “There’s nothing like friendship for pulling someone down a hole. Or out of it.” He smiled and turned his head, and though his sockets held no eyes Yaz could tell that the old man’s gaze was a distant one. “My first friends are dead now, all of them, taken by the years. It’s one of the prices paid in the process of becoming old. But I remember them. Oh yes. Every day. The games we played, the fun we had, tears shed. We are victims of our first friendships. They are the foundations of us. Each anchors us to our past. The blows that drive those nails home are randomly struck, but they echo down all our days even so.”

  “It was my brother. I jumped after my brother. To protect him.”

  “To protect him? You thought he would survive the fall?”

  “I . . .”

  “Aim for honesty with others, girl. But never, ever lie to yourself.”

  “He did survive. I came to save—”

  “Only the truth, child. Your life will run that much smoother if there are no untruths between your heart and your head.” Eular rubbed both hands across his face, slowly, and ran gnarled fingers up among the white tufts of his hair. “I have been young and now I am old and it amazes me how long the journey was and how swift. Everything every elder has ever said to you about getting old is true . . . and none of it will mean anything to you until you have made the journey for yourself.”

  “The pit has a pull to it . . .” Yaz remembered the dark gullet, endlessly patient, endlessly deep. A threat, a challenge, an invitation. “When the regulator didn’t push me . . .”

  “Part of you felt robbed?”

  “Most of me felt relieved.” Yaz shook her head. There had been regret as well as relief, though she could only understand the latter. “But then he pushed Zeen.”

  “And your brother is with the Tainted now.”

  “Yes.”

  “And has Kazik tried to get you back yet?”

  “He sent me a message. He told me to come back by myself.”

  “Those messages will become more urgent and insistent if he discovers that you have a power over the star-stones.”

  “But you said all the priests are quantals . . .” Yaz frowned. “Why would he be so eager for one more?”

  “Many of the priests have some quantal blood in them, but for most of them it’s just a touch. Even Pome may have a small touch of it. One of the reasons he so resents his life down here. He feels he should be up there, living in the Black Rock, a lord of the ice!

  “A few of the priesthood are half-blood quantals. I don’t know if any of them are full-bloods. And even among full-bloods any level of mastery with the star-stones is rare.”

  “What are the stars?” Yaz asked, wondering what the priests did with them, why the tribes had never seen even their dust.

  “Things of the Missing. The heart of their civilisation,” said Eular. “Our ancestors made similar stones. The largest of them sat deep within the ships that sailed between the stars and brought us to Abeth. Shiphearts they are known as. The Missing also used these star-stones, heart-stones, core-stones—call them what you will—to power their cities, before those cities were abandoned. And as the ice ground over what was left behind, it scattered the stones. Most were broken into many pieces, but a star-stone is always a sphere, break one in half and you have two spheres, grind it to dust and you have many tiny spheres. The flow of the ice has long since carried away anything from the city that was aboveground, but the stones’ heat means the ice can’t carry them far. They sink and are caught amid the bedrock’s folds. This is why we are here. This is why the priests give us what little they do to keep us from dying too swiftly. Iron and star-stones.” He sighed. “If you want to return to the ice then speak with Tarko. Tell him about the regulator’s message.”

  “I’m not going back without my brother.” The words burst out without permission. Even with Zeen at her side Yaz wasn’t sure she could go back. Not now. Not after seeing all this. And how would Zeen live up there in the wind if what they said about being broken was true? “I mean it.”

  Eular chuckled at the defiance in her voice. “Did I ask you to?”

  “But the regulator wants—”

  “What do I care for what the regulator wants?” Eular rapped his knuckles on the frozen pool again. “All of the Broken are like this water, child. Long overdue for change and yet unable to change. And now you have fallen among us and I think that the change will come swiftly and that nothing will ever be the same again. That includes you, Yaz. You have the potential for greatness, but first you need to change yourself. Not by degrees, but all at once, like the pool. Dangerous, maybe, but it’s something that couldn’t happen up there in the monotony of your old life.”

  11

  WHAT IS IT you want me to do?” Yaz had lived her whole life taking direction. From Mother Mazai, who led the clan from one sea that was closing to the next that would open. From her parents. From the wind and ice themselves. To survive as part of a people all working together was hard. To survive alone, impossible. In the darkness of his cave the blind man seemed to offer direction and something within Yaz yearned to take it.

  “I have advised Tarko and those that came before him. And here we are. The Tainted grow in number and the Broken diminish. Soon all who are dropped from above will fall into their hands.” Eular pursed his lips. “But as to what to do . . . it was my advice and the actions of our leaders that brought us here. What we need is an agent of change. Someone with new thinking that follows their own direction. Who told you to jump into the pit?”

  “Nobody.”

  “Keep listening to nobody.”

  “And what do the priests tell you, about the Tainted?” Yaz asked.

  “The priests have not communicated with us for generations,” Eular said. “Not since the hunters woke in the city.”

  “Woke?”

  “Maybe our scavengers dug too deep. We don’t really know what returned them to life. All we know is that one day they were there, roaming the city, hunting any that ventured in the abandoned chambers. And today I hear that another one has passed the gateposts and attacked us in our own caverns.”

  Yaz frowned. “What is it that you want though? Freedom? To climb out into the open?”

  “Gods no!” Eular laughed. “It has been a very long time since my fall. Longer than most here have lived. But I remember that the surface is a cruel place, that the air is never still and is full of teeth, that the only food is to be found in bottomless depths of water. I will never return there. But some here might. They should at least have the choice, no? What we need is change.” He turned to face her and smiled. “Your eyes are fresh. Your mind unchained by our struggles. What do you think we need?”

  Yaz frowned and thought. “For the priesthood to speak with us, aid us against the Tainted and the hunters, let our families know we still live and to tell them of the service we render to the tribes. To be treated as human, not some waste thrown into a hole, gone and forgotten.”

  “Well and good.” Eular nodded.

  “So . . .” Yaz stopped herself from saying, what should I do?

  “Go back to Arka. Do what you feel you must. Maybe nothing will come of it. Maybe the regulator will claw you back to the surface and nothing will change here, we will continue to die. But”—and he smiled—“the star-stones sing louder when you are near, and that is a thing so rare that it is not in the memory of the Broken. So . . . we shall see. Sometimes even the blind must wait and see.”

  “Thank you.” There seemed little else to say.

  “Before you go: tell me about the others in the drop-group.”

  “They’re all outside with Pome and Petrick,” Yaz said. “You can speak with them yourself . . .”

  “Humour me.”

  “Well, you know T
hurin.”

  “I’m not sure I do. That’s why he is here. It has been a very long time since anyone was reclaimed from the taint. Many of the Broken do not believe it to be something that can be truly cleansed. They worry that the evil is still inside him, deep in his bones, waiting for its moment to return. They think him vulnerable to the demons in others and will not place their trust in him.”

  “I trust him.”

  Eular nodded. “But then again you need to. You need to believe that Thurin has been saved so that you can believe that your brother can also be saved.”

  Yaz clenched her teeth against a hot reply and before the tension in her jaw eased she found herself wondering if Eular were not simply using her description of others to shine a light on herself. “Maya is the youngest, perhaps thirteen. She seems kind and timid. A gentle soul. But sometimes I find her watching me and I wonder if there’s more to her . . .” Yaz remembered that Maya hadn’t seemed scared of Hetta, not until the end. “I think she must be marjal. She can pull the shadows around her and hide.”

  “She would make an excellent spy, would she not?”

  “I . . .” Yaz hadn’t thought of Maya in those terms. “I guess so.”

  “And the others?”

  “Quina is hunska. I’ve never seen anyone move so fast. She’s clever too. And hard. I like her though.” Yaz hadn’t realised it until she said it but she did. There was something in the girl that reminded her of her brothers. “Her clan come from very far south. They have different stars!”

  “I have heard that if you go far enough to the south you will find that Abeth still wears a green girdle, a belt around the world where the ice has yet to reach.” Eular smiled. “But I don’t know what green is. Still, I should like to touch it.”

  Yaz hid a smirk before realising she didn’t have to hide it. For one so old to believe cradle tales amused her. “We can touch the rocks here. I’m not sure what would be gained to touch them and see the sky at the same time . . . or why they would be green.” Green was a colour she had seen only on the bellies of rainbow fish and the fins of emeraldine. It never lasted long after the fish were taken from the sea but it was pretty enough.

  “And the last of them, the boy?”

  “Kao,” Yaz said. “He’s bigger than any man among the Ictha but there’s no strength inside him.”

  Eular pursed his lips. “Give him time. I’m told he has seen only twelve winters.”

  “He’s twelve?” Yaz found her mouth still open and closed it. “That would explain a lot. I thought . . .”

  “Eyes are all well and good.” Eular nodded. “But it never pays to put too much faith in what they tell us. Listen too. Form slower judgments.” He nodded again, perhaps to her, perhaps to himself. “I will speak with Thurin next.”

  “Wait! I need to know how to save Zeen. Arka says the cleansing hardly ever works.”

  Eular nodded. “That is true, it often fails, and the tainted one is killed. Burned inside by the star-stones.”

  “So—”

  “I don’t know. But I do know that a quick, strong exposure leaving nowhere for the devils to hide works best. The process is most successful when the largest stones are used. The dust never works. For Thurin his mother managed to get five stones the size of the one Pome dropped just now. Those are rare. As is the influence to get the Broken to agree on their possible destruction in such a ceremony.”

  “And where could I find the biggest stars?”

  “The city or the ice. Though a month hunting the deep places of the city will sometimes yield as much as ten years mining the ice. And of course . . . each hunter has a star-stone at its heart, some so big you could hardly get both hands to meet around them.”

  Yaz stood slowly, trying to assemble the many pieces of information into some coherent structure in her mind. She had questions, most half-formed, and no idea if she would be allowed to return to ask them. Instead she asked an entirely new one. “You said the quantals see the . . . Path . . . was it?”

  “I did.”

  “But I see a river . . .”

  “You’ve lived your whole life in a place without rivers or paths. The mind imposes its own will on such things. But if it is a river, then my advice is not to let it carry you away. The quantal magics are not gentle and many with such power are consumed by it before they learn their own limits.”

  Yaz nodded then realised the gesture would go unseen. “Yes.” She bent to pick up Pome’s fallen star and the rod that had held it, seeing now the thin strands that had held the star in place. Metal wires rather than the sinew that the Ictha would use. “Thank you.”

  Yaz left the chamber, ducking beneath the icicles and entering the tunnel. The star blazed in her hand, too bright, glaring from the curving surfaces of the ice. She felt its rapid pulsing in her fingers, beating behind the star’s wordless, ethereal song. Blinking, Yaz raised the star to her mouth and whispered to it so that the light retreated, leaving a blue glow. The stone became a ball in which bright shades of sky marbled shades of sea, all in slow and rolling motion. Still blinking away afterimages she emerged into the chamber where the others waited.

  Pome stood closest at hand, watching Quina with predatory eyes. His look made Yaz remember what Arka thought of the disappearances of those that opposed the man. Yaz could believe it. She could see him trailing someone into the less walked caverns, knifing them in the back, pitching the corpse into a ravine, or leaving it for Hetta.

  Pome turned as Yaz came into view. “What have you done?” He stared in horror at the muted blue glow in Yaz’s right hand and the rod in her other. “You’ve broken it. You stupid child.”

  “I’m not a child. I passed the regulator’s inspection. Twice.”

  Pome looked up from the star, startled and sneering. “Everyone who drops is a child. And you’re still wet from the fall.”

  Behind him Petrick and Thurin looked worried, Petrick spreading his hands and guesturing down in a motion that told her to leave it, that this was a dangerous man she did not want to make an enemy of. She was a day old in a new world and Pome held sway among gerants who would twist off her head at his order.

  Yaz drew in a deep, slow breath. “I wasn’t dropped. I jumped. I am Yaz of the Ictha and you will treat me with some measure of respect or there will be a reckoning between us.” Before the astonishment of her drop-group Yaz strode across to stand before Pome, just feet between them, his face not so far above hers. “Your star.” She held it out to him, making it blaze.

  Pome ground his teeth together, cheek twitching at the star’s proximity. “It must have broken when it fell. It’s no use to me now.” He turned away. “I have duties to attend. Petrick, you can escort the other children back to Arka when Eular is done with them.”

  They watched Pome stalk away and nobody spoke until he was gone, then all of them tried to speak together.

  “Why would you do that?” Thurin asked.

  “Not clever.” Petrick shook his head. “Pome deserved it but a lot of the Broken listen to him, especially the warriors. He speaks of times when they will be more important than the other castes. So watch him. He holds grudges, that one.”

  Yaz studied the star in her hand, returning it to its sleeping state. The blue glow bled around her fingers. “He wants to kill the taints, doesn’t he?”

  “Yes.” Thurin nodded.

  “That makes him my enemy.”

  * * *

  WHILE THURIN WENT in to speak with Eular Yaz crouched and examined the star that Pome had abandoned into her keeping. It felt cold in her hand and yet they sank through the ice. But slowly. The heat given out must be a very small amount. She rolled it idly across the rock then brought it back. It seemed that trails were left in the air where it had passed, lines thinner than the finest hair, perhaps invisible to someone without the talent to see them, but there even so.

 
“Why doesn’t it shine anymore?” Maya had come away from the others, who were still muttering together.

  “I asked it not to,” Yaz said.

  “Do they speak?”

  “No . . . maybe . . . like the wind and the ice maybe. They speak but we’re not meant to understand it.” She rolled the star toward Maya but the girl shied away.

  “I can’t.” Maya shook her head. “When I get too close to them I get voices in my head. It scares me.”

  “So they do speak?” Yaz was intrigued.

  “No . . . I don’t think so. It’s like the voices are parts of me. As if the star were . . . breaking me apart.”

  Yaz bit her lip, thinking. She reached to retrieve the star, and finding it just out of reach she made to shift position. But, before she could move, the star somehow answered her desire and rolled to meet her fingers. No one but Maya saw and the girl looked at her wide-eyed. “What?” hissed Yaz. “You can pick up shadows and make a cloak out of them!”

  A grin escaped Maya at that and she shrugged her acceptance. “Everyone has some trick they can do. My sister’s friend could balance three fish bones end to end in a tower on the tip of his finger. I would rather have had a trick like that, one that meant I could have stayed with my family.” The grin faded once more.

  Yaz picked up the star again, the strange tingle of it buzzing beneath her skin. The whole thing no bigger than an eyeball.

  “What else can you do?” Maya whispered.

  Yaz wasn’t sure. Staring at the star she began to see hints of the river again. To her it had always seemed to be the reality behind the world. Eular had named it the source of the quantals’ power. She had never been able to see it again so soon after touching it. Always it hid from her, sometimes for days. But just around the margins of her hand she saw it, running into the star as if it were a hole. With an effort of concentration she pushed on the star without moving her hand. For a heartbeat it wobbled then slowly it rose. Just an inch or two before something in her mind slipped and the stone dropped back into her hand.