The Girl and the Stars

by Mark Lawrence

It was obvious that the slope couldn’t be the work of nature, but how men or any other could have made so long, broad, and even a surface Yaz couldn’t say. Neither could she explain why the ice hadn’t simply scoured it away.

  The ice-free slope led down across a rocky hillside at an even gradient, sometimes cutting into the bedrock, sometimes rising above it on a different kind of stone. About halfway down, two black pillars flanked the rampway, each taller than a man. Yaz could only imagine they held their own heat and that the advancing ice that had erased the city simply melted around them, leaving them unscathed in their own bubbles.

  To either side of the descent ice walls glittered, glowing with stardust, the occasional brighter star twinkling amid the constellations. The cavern that the slope led down into was vast, a hundred times larger than the largest Arka had yet shown them. The glow came most strongly on the west side where the walls stood shining with the spoils of the ice’s theft, the glittering remnants of a city full of stars. Clearly the ice had once ground its way across the city of the Missing, which had been standing here long before the original four tribes of man beached their ships on this world. All that remained now was scraped rock and strange scars.

  “It’s beautiful,” Maya breathed beside Yaz.

  “It is.” The ice glowed in a million shades. The air was frosty here, as cold as it had been in Eular’s small cave out on the margins on the far side of the Broken’s territory. The constant sound of dripping had faded then gone and Yaz hadn’t noticed it leave. For a moment even the ice itself was quiet—no distant groans, no creaking, just a frosty silence. Yaz found the stillness more beautiful in its rarity than even the swirling wonders her gaze tracked across the walls. A peace that held the breath in her lungs. Holy perhaps. After a life lived leaning into the wind she could imagine that silence housed its own gods.

  In that moment, standing beneath the vast ethereal ceiling of the city cavern, Yaz decided that this would be her new life. She and Zeen would remain with the Broken. She would refuse the regulator’s claim on her.

  “Why’ve we stopped?” Kao glanced over his shoulder then pushed to the front. He looked as though he might be about to whistle for the echo, but a dark look from Arka diverted him into another question. “Where’s the city?”

  “What remains is under the ground in tunnels and chambers carved through the rock.” Arka pointed toward the middle of the chamber. “There are a great number of ways into it in that area.”

  “What about the hunters?” Quina asked.

  “They are generally deep in the complex, roaming the regions where there is still material to be scavenged, which is where they will find scavengers to hunt. If they try guarding some of the entrances we just use an alternative. But one hunter did come out today so we will go carefully.” As they descended the long slope Arka began to point to locations on the cavern floor. “At the first sign of a hunter we run and we hide. We do not all hide in the same place. To hide you want to get deep. You’ve already seen what kind of reach they have. The best spots are marked with purple splodges. These are the ones I’m pointing out to you. But any hiding place is better than none.”

  “Hunters are made of metal,” Yaz said. “Why do they chase us? Can they eat flesh?”

  Arka paused before answering. “Nobody knows. They carry their victims away and we don’t see them again. Not even their bones.” She drew in a deep breath. “It’s overconfidence that gets you captured. They take the best of us. Those who delve deepest and have been scavenging the longest. Those who start to think they’re too good at scavenging to ever get caught. Those who oppose them when they roam into our caverns.” She frowned as if assailed by a painful memory. “But hunters are certainly not the only danger down in the city. I’ve known scavengers lost to cave-ins, to strange machinery, gas, explosions . . . or just plain lost and unable to find their way back. It’s big down there. Much bigger than what you see up here. A world below ours just like we are a world below the ice clans.”

  As they drew nearer to the two gateposts a pressure began to exert itself on Yaz. At first a mental pressure, a reluctance to advance, and then a physical one where the air itself pushed against her. None of the others appeared to feel it.

  Yaz pressed on even as the two black posts swallowed her vision, driving everything around them into insignificance until only they and she remained. Both seemed a hundred feet tall, a thousand, taller than the Black Rock itself, and as they grew the space between them diminished, stealing away the possibility of progress.

  “Are you alright?” Quina asked beside her. The girl reached to set a hand to Yaz’s arm, bird-quick, tentative, the contact broken as soon as it was made.

  “Y-yes,” Yaz lied. She found herself at the back of the group, stumbling. Grinding her teeth together she set her gaze firmly on the floor before her feet and focused on taking the next step. She couldn’t let them leave her here for Pome to find. And what she needed to save Zeen lay down there, in the city under the city.

  Even with her head down she could see the gateposts in her mind, huge with forbidding. “I can . . .” Each step came harder, the pressure building along with a vibration in the marrow of her bones that quickly turned into pain. Yaz didn’t even know why she was fighting it, and hiding the fight. She felt that she must be bleeding, from her eyes, her nose, blood sweating from her skin. You couldn’t battle so hard and not bleed.

  Zeen! The city held the stars that would save him. In that instant she saw him falling, felt herself jumping, and knew why she was fighting. For her brother, but not just for him. It was more than that. She was fighting against . . . against everything, against the system that saw children thrown away, against the thinking behind it, against the ice itself. And suddenly the pain and pressure were gone and she was falling.

  13

  YAZ?”

  Yaz opened her eyes to find Thurin trying to lift her into a sitting position. Behind him a line of backs presented themselves as the others stared at the gateposts to either side of the long slope. A purple fire filled both posts, as though they were glass rather than the black iron they had seemed to be. For a moment she felt very conscious of how close Thurin was to her, arms around her. The dark eyes locked to hers were full of concern. She felt the nearness of him, the warmth of him.

  By the time Yaz got to her feet, refusing Thurin’s arm, the effect within the posts had died to flickers within the blackness.

  “I tripped. I’m fine.” Yaz brushed at her knees and elbows.

  Thurin looked back along the smooth ramp then returned his gaze to her, saying nothing.

  “Perhaps it’s to do with the hunter escaping,” Arka was saying. “I’ve seen a hunter chase a scavenger right to the posts then stop as if they’ve hit an invisible wall. It’s very difficult for a hunter to leave the city and when they do they return to it quickly. But if the gateposts are broken and won’t hold anymore . . .” She shuddered. “Things will be very different.”

  Arka carried on, sparing only a frown for Yaz and seeming to accept that she had simply fallen. Instructions on hiding places came thick and fast now, with special mention for the gerant-sized ones, though Kao could likely still squeeze into those used by people of more regular size.

  At last they came to the more level ground. Here the bedrock had been scraped by the ice’s teeth for eons as it moved slowly toward the Frequent Sea many miles to the west. Despite this toothed erosion having carried on for untold millennia the rock still bore testimony to the vanished city. Everywhere it lay scarred with shafts of different rock revealed as depressions or prominences depending on the hardness of their composition, some like worn teeth jutting a yard or more into the air. In other places there were holes rimmed with rust, or metal columns reaching down into the rock, the exposed lengths torn and bent in the direction of the ice. All of it fringed with frost.

  “What kind of buildings must they have been to have
had foundations like these?” Thurin asked. “I’ve seen it before and it still amazes me.”

  “Foundations?” Yaz looked away from the stone “tooth” she had been examining.

  “Your tents are held to the ice with pegs, so I’m told.” Thurin tilted his head.

  “Yes, or the wind would take them.”

  “Well.” He gestured around. “These are the city’s pegs. The Missing just drove them deeper than the Ictha do.”

  Yaz opened her mouth but found no reply. Instead she gazed up at the distant ceiling, trying to imagine what the dwelling places of the Missing must have been like.

  “What about the Missing themselves? Do we know how they looked?” Yaz had always been fascinated with the figures that some of the elders would carve from whalebone and whale teeth. In the darkness of the tent on the long night Mother Karrak could whittle away at a bone to reveal men and women inside, kettan figures, so detailed that come the dawn the Ictha would gather and laugh, recognising themselves and their family among those freed from the ivory. Perhaps the Missing had left a similar record. “Did they leave 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 and I’m glad of it, but I wouldn’t want to do it every day.”

  The next stage of the climb brought them through narrow sections which Yaz found it impossible to believe a hunter could have fitted along. The rock seemed to press on her from all directions, constricting her chest even when not touching it. She felt the weight of all that silent stone, stretching above her for hundreds of yards.

  “How could a hunter get out of here?” Quina asked the question for her.

  “They can reshape and rebuild their bodies.” Arka squeezed between two great blocks of stone. “It takes them a long time. But they can do it. Which is one of the reasons we need to draw them away when they have someone cornered in a hole. Because given enough time they will reach you.” She vanished through and called from the other side. “Also some of the ways in and out are wider than this one. We’re using this one to avoid hunters.”

  During the descent the character of the rock began to change, from some kind of natural fissure, broken open by the action of water and ice, to the strange stone of the long slope. They began to pass other openings, some square, some just new fractures and faults. Arka led them down into a ravine onto which rooms and chambers faced like open mouths, as if the bedrock had split wide and revealed them trapped in stone as bubbles are trapped in ice.

  “Many of these chambers may have been where the Missing lived.” Arka lifted her star to reveal one as they descended past it. “Others were meeting places perhaps, or storage rooms, or housed markets or workers. We really don’t know. But what we are here for is metal, star-stones, and anything else that can be carried away. There is very little here that you can pick up that will not be of use to us.”

  “There’s very little here that we can pick up,” muttered Yaz. The chambers she had seen were echoingly empty.

  “The Broken have been at this for generations,” Thurin said. “You have to go deep to find anything. Really deep. Some scavengers are gone for many days at a time.”

  “Careful here,” Arka called, leading the way across a stone beam that bridged the ravine down whose side they had been working their way.

  Even as Arka said it Yaz began to fall. She hadn’t even reached the beam but something snagged her foot and without it the rest of her started to tumble toward the yawning chasm.

  “Got you.” Quina’s hand fastened around Yaz’s wrist. She didn’t seem to have bothered with all the usual business of moving the hand through the space between where it had been before and where it now gripped her. Her speed was a kind of magic. She braced herself and hauled on Yaz so that she swung back into the rock face.

  “Oof!” Yaz pushed away from the rocks. “Thank you.”

  A small smile broke out on Quina’s narrow face, as quick as the rest of her, then gone, but in that moment it lit her up, the pinched look vanishing, replaced by something unguarded and happy. “It’s nothing. Watch your feet.”


  “But then I’ll walk into a wall.” Yaz grinned.

  “Which will hurt less than falling into a hole!” Another flash of a smile and then Quina was herself again, moving on.

  Yaz crossed the chasm, trying to ignore the dark pull of the fall to either side, and hurried on into the gaping chamber ahead. She paused to stare about. The space was nothing more than scarred grey walls joining at right angles, but she found herself snared by the idea that untold years ago the Missing themselves had walked here, spoken, lived, loved . . . if the Missing loved . . . and above them a city had towered, the sunlight falling on its people, the ice a distant threat . . .

  “Yaz!” Kao shouted. “Come on!”

  Yaz shook away remnants of the images that had filled her mind and hurried after the boy, last out of the room.

  * * *

  ARKA LED THEM on and on. Each echoingly empty chamber or dusty corridor led to another empty room or passage. As the dozens of chambers mounted through scores toward hundreds Yaz became increasingly aware that the place was a labyrinth and if she lost Arka she would never find her way back. Many of the chambers had three or more exits. Cave-ins blocked their advance at frequent turns, rubble piled to the ceiling. Everything looked much the same and Yaz had no idea how Arka could remember the way.

  As if reading Yaz’s mind Arka drew their attention to the floor. “Don’t forget, these arrows will guide you out.” She scuffed away some dust with her foot.

  Now that Yaz knew to look for them she could see the faint scratches.

  “These ones are very old. They need redoing. The real danger though is deep down. If you reach an unexplored area and don’t make your marks, or you get chased into unknown corridors, then you might find that getting out again is . . . difficult.” Arka rubbed her scarred cheek. “I spent seventeen days lost in the deep city once. My food ran out after ten. I’d been a day and a half without water when I finally crawled up the long slope.”