The Girl and the Stars

by Mark Lawrence

  Yaz tried to hide her surprise in a question. “Why didn’t it stop you then?”

  Erris shrugged. “That was my talent. You quantals might get all the fire and the glory, but we marjals sometimes manifest curious talents. Nobody ever stopped me going anywhere. Not locks and doors. Not ship-tech security. Not even a Missing script wall.”

  “Eular said the marjals had lesser magics . . .”

  Erris’s smile showed all his teeth. “There’s no such thing as magic. If a thing is part of the world, part of how it works, then it’s real and obeys laws just like gravity and electricity do.”

  “I . . . don’t know these words.” Yaz shook her head. “And magic is real!”

  Erris held up his hands, a placatory gesture. “You win.” He looked around, a sadness entering his eyes. “I loved it here. Out in the countryside. I never knew it at the time. It was the kind of love that you grow into, familiar, taken for granted. Like a mother’s love. You feel it most when it’s gone.”

  “But it’s not gone.” Yaz saw something white and yellow among the green at her feet and crouched, fascinated, finding more of the small wonders. “What are these?”

  “The grass? Oh, you mean the daisies. They’re flowers. A type of plant. Have you really not seen . . . No, well, I suppose it’s all ice and snow now.”

  From the treeline black dots rose, a swirling cluster of them. “Gulls?” Yaz ventured.

  “Birds. Gulls are a type of bird. Those are starlings, I think.”

  The starlings swooped over, shoaling like fish, sharp calls piercing the air. In their wake Yaz became aware of a world of other sounds that her overwhelmed mind had paid no attention to. A myriad of birdsong, some raucous, some lilting, some rising in breathtaking complexity, the notes a shower of liquid joy.

  The beauty and strangeness of the place reached into Yaz and twisted something deep within her chest. She found her eyes misting, ridiculously close to tears. She gritted her teeth against it. “I don’t understand. How can this be here?”

  “It’s not.” Erris walked past her to stare at the distant ruins. “I made it for you.”

  “I was falling!” The assault on her senses had somehow driven that fact to the back of her mind. She got hurriedly to her feet.

  “Would you like to go back?” Erris asked. “It’s nicer here. We could stay. I could show you the world that was. It’s as missing now as the ones who built those towers over there.”

  “I want to stay.” Something fluttered past her, like a bird that was all wings, no bigger than her palm, bright and filled with colours. “But I need to go. My brother is in danger—”

  “Those others are safe enough. It was only you the city took against.”

  “Zeen wasn’t with them. He’s somewhere else. Somewhere worse.” Yaz frowned. “And why me? Why did those symbols come? What did I do that was so wrong?”

  “The city is very old, very damaged. It mostly sleeps. When it acts it’s instinctual more than anything. The script is its voice. Once it was enough to keep away anything—people, rats, even flies and ants and things too small to see. But all that’s faded away, gone by the by. Just the headlines remain, the most important directives, and those were always to keep away whatever was most like the Missing, whatever might be capable of following them.”

  “I’m like the Missing?” Yaz looked down at herself just to check she hadn’t changed in this strange place. “And why would they want to keep themselves away?”

  “The ones most like them have the most potential to abuse the power left in the cities. For humanity that means quantals. The city tried to keep you out because you’re a quantal. It should have worked too. The real question is, why didn’t it?”

  “I want to go back now.” Yaz was far from sure that she did, but duty led her tongue. She knelt again, running her fingers through the grass, touching the complexity of the daisies, pressing the warm soil beneath. Now that her eyes had begun to accept the sights, and her ears the strangeness of the sounds, her nose started to register the scents of Erris’s world, rich and varied, a melody in themselves, as varied as the birdsong. “I have to go back.”

  Erris turned to look at her, lips pressed against regret. “I don’t know if I will ever be able to bring you here again.”

  Yaz bowed her head. The sun warmed her neck. Something black and orange and no bigger than her thumbnail buzzed lazily past. “I can’t stay.” She couldn’t explain it to him. It was more than Zeen. She had been a part of something her whole life and now she was a broken piece, unable to go back, unable to move on. She wanted to ask him why he had done this to her, offering her a happiness she didn’t deserve. She didn’t know how to dream on her own, she had never allowed herself to. Dreams were selfish, a luxury the Ictha couldn’t afford. And yet here she was, in the middle of one so golden she could never have imagined it. She would give it back if she could. It was too beautiful. A poison that would sit in her heart, aching through the years. “I have to go back.”

  In the next moment Yaz’s hands were against dusty stone, the same stone that pressed against her knees. Her fingers remembered the grass. The green world still filled her mind. She lifted her head and stood. A chamber of the Missing, lit by a light that cast no shadows. Unlike the rooms Arka had led her through, this one was crowded with objects, all of them unfamiliar, all grey with dust. Scores of . . . things . . . some larger than the largest man, some smaller than a child, many of them complicated with dozens of parts, wheels, rope-like attachments, glassy panels . . . many of them looked broken, though quite what made her think that Yaz couldn’t say. She found herself standing in a clear area at the centre of the room with the chaos heaped toward the four corners. Set in one wall were three rectangular windows spaced evenly in a row between floor and ceiling, each giving a view into a blackness so complete that it seemed to suck at the light.

  “Erris?”

  Yaz. The word pulsed through the chamber.

  “Erris?” She turned, trying to identify the source of the voice.

  I’m here. In the void.

  The answer emanated from all directions but something turned her around to face the three dark windows. “I never told you my name.”

  I watched you with your friends.

  “Where are you?”

  In the void. Which is another way of saying that I don’t know. A sigh. This is why I wanted to talk to you where we were.

  “I don’t understand. Why don’t you just come out?” Something about the darkness scared Yaz. The way it drew her eyes and made her forget about time. It shared a lot with the stars, which often seemed to be holes into a world of light. The windows seemed to be holes into a darkness that existed outside the world. “Are you trapped?”

  The sigh came again and Yaz could picture the dark youth standing in grass, bathed in sunshine, a crooked smile on his lips.

  I fell too, Yaz. A long time ago. I became lost beneath the city and it hardly knew I was here. I fell into the void. I think it was the city’s heart when the Missing were here. Now . . . it’s something different. I can make worlds in here. But I can’t leave. Sometimes . . . sometimes I think that I’m not really alive anymore, that I haven’t been alive since I fell, that I’m just a memory of me. A memory the city keeps.

  Yaz stepped slowly toward the lowest window and crouched before it. The dark seemed like the surface of a pool. How deep it might be and what might reach out of it to seize her she couldn’t say. Gathering her courage she set her hands to the sill and leaned in toward the blackness. It had a song to it, like the stars in the ice and the script on the walls. A slower song, wordless and discordant. A song full of sorrow and loss. “What do you do in there, Erris?”

  At first I did everything. I watched stars being born. I watched them die. I walked the world, but it was always an empty one. I saw the ice come . . . These days I sleep mainly. Just like the
city does. I sleep and wait for something to happen. For there to be an end.

  “Then I came,” Yaz whispered.

  Then you came. And the city woke me up. I think it wanted me to speak to you. I don’t think it knows how anymore. Maybe it never did. Perhaps that’s why it kept me . . . or remembered me. To speak with you.

  “What does it want you to say?”

  Ah, well, there my theory breaks down. The city doesn’t speak to me so I don’t know for sure. I can sense its moods though and it’s still angry about the last time.

  “The last time?” Yaz turned from the unnerving darkness.

  Another, like you. Another quantal came and defied the wards. He didn’t get far before he was driven off, script-burned. Not nearly as far as you, but he found core-stones that earlier scavengers had missed. Whole ones, not fragments. And he used them to build entities slaved to him and not to the city.

  “Entities?”

  The constructs. The things that stalk and trap your people.

  “The hunters?” Yaz glanced around as if one of the monstrosities might be concealed among all the broken parts crowding the chamber. The idea that they had been constructed by a man rather than by the Missing amazed and horrified her. Who would do it, and why? And what did script-burned mean? The only person she’d ever seen with burns was the regulator himself. “When did this happen?”

  Recently. Very recently. Let me check . . . oh.

  “What?”

  Two hundred and seven years ago. I hadn’t meant to sleep for that long.

  “Two hundred years ago? And the city is still angry?”

  Yes. With you.

  “With me? But that was before I was born! Years before.”

  I’m sorry about that. Erris did sound sorry. But the city . . . well, it’s not rational. Not in the way we are anyway. It’s damaged, confused, angry.

  “You sound like the city is a person.” He sounded as if he cared for it too.

  She is. A broken person. Older than she was ever meant to be. He paused. I think she loves me in her way. We’ve been together a long time. So many of the other cities have gone dark and they can’t talk to each other anymore.

  “The cities talked to each other?” Yaz clamped her jaw, aware she was just questioning everything he said.

  Once they did. Something haunts the ways now. A bad thing. Another pause. Anyway, she couldn’t stop you coming in so instead . . .

  “Instead what?”

  She doesn’t mean to let you leave.

  15

  I NEED TO get out!” Yaz spun around, too fast to see if there were any exits, then turned again, this time slowly enough to see that there were none. Or if there were any that they must be hidden behind all the artefacts. Remembering her fall she looked up, expecting to see some kind of shaft above, but found only a ceiling of plain stone. “Where’s the door?”

  There’s no door.

  “Where did I fall through?”

  Things work differently in the deep city, Yaz. Some of the Missing liked to live simply—they had houses, places to walk, doors . . . Some even rejected all the wonders of their technology and lived on the ice far to the north, much as your people do now. But they didn’t hunt because they needed to. They didn’t need food and shelter like we do. Like you do anyway. They only used doors because it reminded them of who they once were. The Missing didn’t walk away from Abeth, they didn’t set sail into the heavens. They left in a different kind of way—

  “I need an exit, Erris, not a history lesson.”

  To leave this room you would have to walk through the wall. Without the city helping you.

  Yaz moved to the wall beside the windows, one of the few places she could reach it. She ran her hands against the stone. “There’s a hidden door?”

  No.

  “But you said . . .” Yaz tried to remember what Erris had said. “Oh . . .”

  She began to consider the . . . things . . . littering the room, moving slowly from one to another. The Broken would consider it a treasure, a great weight of metal to be melted down and given to the priests of the Black Rock in return for the necessities of life. Fish, salt, hides. It seemed a poor trade knowing how the clans prized even the smallest iron tool, but when you’re in a miles-deep hole perhaps any trade is a good one.

  “What is all this stuff? How did it get here?”

  I brought it here. Saved it from the scavengers. Most of it is broken, but there are useful parts . . .

  “But you said you’re stuck in there.” Yaz looked at the windows.

  I have my ways.

  “What’s this?” Yaz pulled aside some dusty boards made of nothing she recognised to reveal a black cube, its sides maybe eighteen inches. As she looked at it the black surfaces turned to white and then to a vibrant green.

  A thing.

  The green shaded into brown. The same dark shade that Erris’s skin held. A moment later Erris watched her from the cube as if each surface were a window onto the world of grass and trees and buzzing beasts that he had taken her to. “Hello, Yaz.”

  Yaz found that she had taken several steps back. “Hello . . . How are you in that box? How are you so small? And what is that?”

  “A butterfly.” Erris laughed and with a sweep of his hand the brilliant blue wings took flight from his shoulder. “The real question is how are we going to get you out of here?”

  “We?” Yaz felt a moment of hope. “You’re going to help me?”

  “Of course. I told you, I have a talent for getting into places, and out of them. Admittedly I’ve been stuck in the void for thousands of years, which may shed some doubt on my claim. But the void is something else again. Walking through walls, however, is mere child’s play!”

  Yaz knelt and reached out to touch the green world she could see once again. But her hands met a barrier, as if the cube were still there, walling her off from the warm breeze and the softness of the grass. “How can you help me through the walls? Do you have a hammer?”

  “I’m coming out to join you. Well . . . in a manner of speaking. Don’t be scared.”

  Yaz gave the small Erris a sideways look that dared him to suggest one more time that she might be scared.

  “Alright!” He held up his hands in a placatory gesture. “Then don’t laugh either.” The cube turned black again.

  “Laugh?” Yaz glanced about, her gaze coming to rest on the windows to the void. Something moved behind her. A grating noise. A shifting among the heaped detritus that Erris had somehow gathered.

  Yaz spun around. Pieces fell aside as the something rose, toppling cabinets, shedding layers of flexible sheeting, raising dust. The thing kept rising. A head? Some dark shape atop two shoulders . . . a metal arm reaching.

  Yaz stepped back sharply. “What . . .”

  A hunter was lifting itself from the chaos. Only it wasn’t quite a hunter. It had more of a man’s shape to it than those multilegged horrors, and although large, Yaz had seen bigger gerants.

  “Hello, Yaz.” The voice buzzed around the edges but it sounded like Erris. In place of a head a black sphere returning no light, the body beneath gleaming steel with complex moving parts exposed, the arms mismatched, one of jointed steel tubes, the other a flexible set of overlapping rings like the armour of an eel-shark. Both ended in hands sporting blunt digits rather than a hunter’s claws.

  Yaz gaped, openmouthed.

  “Well . . . laughing would be better than whatever this is.”

  Yaz realised she had backed against the wall and had a metal bar gripped in both hands, ready to swing. She didn’t even remember picking it up.

  “Erris?” She peered at the thing before her.

  “At your service.” Joints squealed and the not-Erris made a short bow. “This is how I escape the void. I built it myself and it took a long, long time.” Even with the
buzz and the crackle Yaz could sense in his voice an echo of the years spent. “I have a better one in another part of the city but that is far from here and I’m keeping it for a special occasion.”

  “We still don’t have a door.” Yaz put the metal bar down and stepped toward Erris, trying to see if there were eyes hiding in the black sphere of his head.

  “No, but we have you and you can walk through walls.”

  “I can’t.”

  “You can walk the Path, can’t you?”

  “The Path?” Yaz frowned. “Oh. You mean the river?” Eular had called it the Path, the source of the power that only those with quantal blood could reach.

  “The names are important, though you will have forgotten why on the ice where you have neither. A path or a river . . . both of them take you somewhere. There’s more to it than touching the Path. The trick is to walk it.”

  Yaz shook her head. “I touched the river today. And the day before. Normally I have to wait days before I can see it again. A week if I want to be safe touching it. Safe-ish.” Another shake of the head as she remembered how the power had nearly broken her apart when she faced Hetta. “There’s no way that I could—”

  “You haven’t noticed it yet.”

  “Noticed what?”

  The body that Erris had built himself owned none of the casual movement that a person had. It moved only when he willed it and stood statue still between. Now its stillness took on a new character, as if perhaps Erris had retreated to the void.

  “Noticed what? Are you even there?” Yaz resisted rapping her knuckles on the construct’s chest. “What am I supposed—”

  Listen!

  Yaz listened. Silence. No wind complaining. No drip of water. Not even the groan of ice. The song of Pome’s star whispered in the back of her mind, its heartbeat swift as drumming fingers. “I can’t . . .”