The Girl and the Stars

by Mark Lawrence

  “That thing is the city?” Yaz was horrified to think it already held her in its clutches.

  “What? No! This city is Vesta. A cracked and broken thing. Seus is far to the south, its mind much more intact, though sadly still afflicted with a kind of madness. Seus has poisoned a great many cities and closed the paths between them. Once upon a time I could travel from city to city in the space between two heartbeats. What I need—”

  The light of the fire dimmed and Yaz’s breath plumed in the air between them.

  “He’s found us.” Elias’s voice took on a note of urgency. “Listen to me, this is important.” A white tracery of frost began to form across the walls, tendrils of ice reaching out across the planks. “Whatever bad thing is chasing you out there, Seus is worse. Whatever plot you find, dig deep enough, scratch away enough layers, and you’ll find Seus at the bottom.” The hut began to groan as if a great weight were being loaded upon it. Yaz found herself shivering, truly cold for the first time since leaving the north. “He’s closed all the ways. I can’t reach him. You need to take me to him, Yaz.”

  “He’s right outside . . .” As if to underscore her point some large timber surrendered to mounting pressure and the hut shook, ice scattering across them as it broke from the low ceiling. The fire was nothing now, hardly an ember clinging to its glow.

  “You need to take me to where he lives. To the city. And not this me. There’s too little of me here.” He handed her something. A small silvery needle not more than an inch long.

  “I don’t understand.”

  Elias went to the door. He glanced back at her with a narrow smile. “I’m a man of many parts, Yaz. I’ve been many things. Juggled many rings at once.”

  “Juggled?” Yaz was finding it hard to talk, her face a frozen mask, the air so cold she could feel it fraying her lungs with each breath.

  “My first-ever job was to find out how the world worked—” Seeing her blank and pained expression he waved the matter aside. “Never mind.” He set his hand to the icy door. “If you live long enough to understand the battle you’re in—the big one, not the little one—then use the needle and find me.”

  “Where are you going?” Yaz asked it through chattering teeth.

  “Outside. Seus needs something to kill while you escape.”

  “You can’t just—”

  “Watch me.” And in the next moment he was through the door, outlined for a moment in the cold blaze of a day like no other. The door shut. An awful scream rang out and then everything was darkness and silence.

  * * *

  “ARE YOU THERE?” Yaz could see nothing, feel nothing save that there was ground beneath her feet and that the incredible cold had left, leaving only the memory of a shiver.

  “I am.” As Erris spoke beside her a faint glow started somewhere within the complexity of his chest where things Yaz could only think of as metal bones and metal teeth pumped and threshed.

  “I was somewhere strange! There was a man called Elias and—”

  “You arrived at the same time I did,” Erris said. “And we still need to hurry.”

  “Where are we?” The increasing glow outlined a small cubic chamber, wholly empty. Another place to die? The new reality overwrote images of frozen forests and sky monsters. Yaz turned to inspect the stonework behind her. “I can walk through walls!” It came out half laugh, half gasp.

  “You can walk along paths the Missing provide for you, even if they happen to lead through walls, yes. I wouldn’t try it on other walls, or too far from a sizable star-stone.”

  “So, where are we?” Yaz returned her gaze to the room.

  “A junction. We need to leave . . . this way.” Erris crossed the room in three strides and set a hand to the wall. “And quickly, before the city realises what we’re doing and starts to make things difficult.”

  “Vesta?” Yaz asked.

  Erris frowned. “Yes. How did you know that name?”

  “I told you there was this man and—”

  “You were intercepted. It’s a danger when you travel this way without proper understanding, and there are powers that watch for strays. Come on. We need to go.” He beckoned her to him.

  Yaz joined Erris then pressed her forehead to the stone below the point where his fingers touched the wall. She noticed a gleam in her hand and found she held a silver needle, clutched tight between finger and thumb. Without comment she stuck it through the hides over her collarbone.

  “Quickly would be better . . .”

  Yaz bit back a retort and once more she opened herself to the currents of the hidden river. A moment later they swept her away.

  There were no more interceptions. No gaps at all between pressing against one wall and stumbling away from another.

  Erris led them through a series of junction chambers. He said he was threading their way through holes in a network that was supposed to keep them in. The fourth, fifth, and sixth transitions became progressively more difficult, Yaz having to let the current tear at her before the stone would surrender, and having to battle to win free of the wall at the end of their journeys. Each time they emerged the song of the void star sounded more distant, a host of competing voices beginning to rise above the depth of its refrain.

  “From here we walk.” Erris pointed across the large hall, now lit by the light that Yaz had woken from Pome’s star. “The main thing we have to worry about is—”

  Yaz found herself shoved from behind as if by a strong gust of wind.

  “Ah hell.” The wind that was not a wind even set Erris staggering forward.

  “The main thing we have to worry about is . . . ?” Yaz prompted.

  “Right behind us.” Erris turned to face the wall they had just emerged from. “I can slow it down. But not for long. You have to run.”

  “I’m not running.” Yaz stepped beside him, staring at the blackness where his face should be. She wanted to see those dark eyes of his, both young and old, with a thousand years and more behind them. “I can help!”

  “No, you can’t.” Erris swept her back with one arm, his strength alarming. “Run!” He shouted the word loud enough to leave her ears ringing. The wall was fuzzy now, like the last ice before the sea shows itself.

  “But . . .”

  “This pile of junk isn’t me, Yaz.” Erris slapped a hand to his silver chest. “When it’s destroyed I’ll go back to the void. Just run. Please. And don’t come back.”

  Something within the stone roared. A black shape began to press into being in the space between Erris and the wall. With a sudden rat-a-tat-tat black spikes hammered out of nowhere, piercing Erris’s steel skin. The shape, becoming more definite, reached out for him. Yaz began to run, the squeal of tearing metal chasing her across the hall.

  She reached the far doorway and turned into it just as half a dozen black spikes hammered into the wall behind her.

  Yaz ran on, pursued by what sounded like an avalanche of metal. A hideous scraping noise underwrote the thunder behind her, as if somehow whatever was left of Erris continued to cling to the monster, trying to anchor it.

  For a long time Yaz focused only on speed, always taking the smallest exit, always heading upwards when presented with a choice. Soon the sounds of her own panic—the rasp of her breath and the pounding of her heart—drowned out any other noise. Finally she tripped and fell, too exhausted to rise from the floor. She lay, hunting for breath, and when she found it there was nothing to be heard but her breathing. She was alone in the vast labyrinth of the city, with neither Erris nor Arka to help her.

  * * *

  YAZ SAT, RUBBING her ankle. By starlight she saw that at some point the rock had moved and created an unexpected step across a room. This had been what tripped her. The pain in her ankle made her remember Kao hobbling along after his fall. She hoped Arka had led him and the others to safety.

  A
fter a time Yaz got to her feet and limped on. She wondered how far the others might have got. It didn’t seem that she had been delayed very long. If she knew the way to go she might even beat them out. First out or last, though, she knew it would be a different Yaz that hauled herself back beneath the ice sky of the great cavern. She had seen a thing that she had never thought to see, and something amid the gentle swaying of those trees had found its way into her heart. Her imagination burned and every wild thought seemed edged with possibility.

  For now, though, the floor held most of Yaz’s attention as she walked, and her ears strained for any hint of hunters or the black monster that had chased her. In these endless halls the only thing that would save her from death by thirst or a violent end in a hunter’s claws would be the marks left by scavengers to show the way.

  When she came to the first decision point and saw the scratches at the base of the wall Yaz gave a broken gasp. She shocked herself by nearly breaking into tears for the second time in a day. Until she saw the small arrow she hadn’t allowed herself to acknowledge how much the thought of being lost here had terrified her. The scratches looked quite fresh, not scuffed and almost worn away like those Arka had shown them. It meant she was still deep in the city, almost at the limits of the scavengers’ explorations.

  Following the markings led Yaz by efficient routes to a series of stairs, natural fissures, and vertical shafts hung with ropes. With cables, to be more accurate. Steel cables, some with plastic coatings. Yaz wondered how these words came to be in her head. They belonged to Erris. She frowned and moved on.

  This deep there were no concessions to trainee scavengers and the climbs demanded both a level of skill and a tolerance for heights that Yaz didn’t possess.

  “I’m not scared of heights. I’m scared of drops.” Yaz pushed the words out past gritted teeth as she hauled herself over the lip of a shaft taller than ten trees stacked one atop the next. Sore-handed, arms aching, she lay with a dry mouth and wondered for the hundredth time just how deep she was. Only her Ictha strength was keeping her alive, her grip compensating to some degree for her lack of talent when it came to scaling natural rock or tackling a hundred yards of dangling cable. It definitely helped that she could draw up the whole of her body weight with one arm.

  Yaz pulled herself away from the mouth of the shaft then got to her hands and knees, groaning. She had come to the city in the hopes of securing a star large enough to safely drive the taint from her brother. She was leaving empty-handed and half-alive, knowing that the city while still a city was also a being that would use all its resources to prevent her returning. More than that, her efforts to escape had somehow bound her into a conflict between unknown gods that lived beyond reality. And now, in that strange somewhere, a being called Seus, that was both the mind of a distant city and, from what Yaz could see, also a dark god, had marked her for destruction.

  “These things too the wind shall take.” Yaz found comfort in the old saying. Cursing at herself to muster the required strength she stood and moved on.

  A dozen more rooms, sections of corridor, and she started up another square spiral of steps, seemingly endless. Her legs ached now, the repetition of unfamiliar action melting the endurance from her thighs. She hoped she was returning to sanity, to clarity, and something more familiar. It seemed that the deeper into the world you fell the more unreal things became.

  The only thing to take comfort in was a lack of the glowing symbols that had opposed her on the way in and finally driven her to fall. She hadn’t seen a single one in all her wandering.

  Yaz rested on the stairs, half dozing, haunted by dreams of water. Eventually, feeling little better, she carried on, stumbling from time to time. Exhaustion had her mumbling to herself, promises and threats. The faces of her family came to her, distant, as if it had been years since she had seen them. She thought of Quell, then of Thurin, then of Erris. She wondered where Zeen was now, how the taints passed their time; she worried for him, for little Maya who she hardly knew, for Kao who she hardly liked, limping his way from the city.

  And with a start she discovered that without realising it she had stopped climbing stairs and shuffled into a corridor pierced on one side by small windows through which a faint light was bleeding. Yaz stopped at the first, too narrow to climb through, and looked out onto a rocky cavern lit from above by faint shafts of starlight. The illumination reached down through two square holes in the ceiling. The “sky” of the great city chamber must be above those exits. The air was colder here, fresher. Hope rose in her, a fire licking up along her bones. The far wall of the cavern was a steep, rocky slope that led almost to the smaller of the two exits and in the uneven floor a shadow-filled pit reached back down toward the depths.

  Relief floated away her exhaustion. After so long in the dead and dusty halls of the Missing, Yaz had begun to think she might never emerge, that the signs were a lie to deceive her, and that she would die, choking on her thirst, without ever seeing the ice again.

  Yaz heard the noise as she turned her head from the window shaft. Something scraping stone. A foot? She turned swiftly, sending the light of her star lancing down the corridor behind her. Nothing but retreating shadows and dark doorways. The passage was surely too narrow for a hunter to move along at speed, but Arka had said they could reshape themselves to squeeze through unexpectedly small gaps . . .

  Silence. An old silence. Yaz’s breath plumed before her. She dimmed her star to a glimmer, not wanting to advertise her movements, and advanced on soft feet. One pace, five, ten. There it came again, the slightest scrape. Somewhere ahead of her now . . . A prickling ran down her spine, sweat in her palms although she had thought herself too dried out for that. A hunter was stalking her. With freedom so close, with the voice of the ice whispering to her. To be caught here after so long climbing from the depths would be too cruel. Yaz wished she had kept the iron bar from Erris’s room of broken wonders.

  She moved on, all her senses tingling, sure that unseen eyes watched her progress. She stopped, listened . . . nothing. A sigh emptied her lungs. She was being foolish. She began to walk again.

  The attack came from behind. From a doorway she had already passed. The room beyond had been empty! Yaz found herself caught and hauled back with implacable power. She yelled despite herself and fought to escape. The thing that held her exceeded her Ictha strength. Even so she tore free, sacrificing furs and loosing a scream as another appendage reached for her mouth.

  With an energy that she thought long exhausted, she opened her stride to run. For a moment she thought she’d won clear. Hunters have a long reach though. Yaz made it ten paces before something closed around both legs and brought her to the floor. She twisted and fought, pounding at the shape that reached over to pin her down. Somewhere in all that thrashing struggle two realisations managed to find space amid the panic crowding her mind. Firstly that not all the yelling was coming from her, and secondly that whatever she was fighting was not made of metal.

  “Yaz?” A male voice.

  “W-who . . .” Yaz stopped thumping the fur-laden shape. “Thurin?” It felt too solid for Thurin, not huge enough for Kao. She groped for her star only to see that it had rolled to the wall and lay there glimmering, its light breaking out softly here and there like foam on the ocean.

  “It’s me, Yaz.” As if that would be enough.

  Yaz stretched her arm toward the star and her mind reached further. It started to roll toward her open hand and as it rolled the light broke from it, bright enough now to show her attacker’s face. Black hair, straight and thick, reddish skin across broad cheekbones. Strong, even features, eyes as pale as her own, the irises like sea ice.

  “Quell . . .” Pome’s star rolled into her open hand and she closed her fingers around it.

  Quell grinned, a white smile, and wiped the blood from his nose where her fist must have caught him. “I came to save you.”

 
“How . . . Why . . . You attacked me!”

  Quell got off her and offered his hand to help her up, glancing over his shoulder as he did so. “There’s something down here with us. I wanted to pull you aside and stop you shouting. Keep you quiet until you understood.” He kept hold of her hand as she found her feet. “But we seem to have ended up with the exact opposite.” He winced. “You pack quite a punch!”

  “But how are you here?” Quell didn’t fit in the world of the Missing or the Broken any more than a shark belonged on the ice. Everything was wrong, and everything was right at the same time. He smelled of home. Of the Ictha. Of the life she had fallen from. Of seas and ice and sled oil and noisy tents. A world away from dry and ruined cities with broken minds.

  “Come!” Quell pulled her back toward the doorway he’d lunged out of and she let him take her. Quell took his spear from its place leaning against the wall on the other side of the doorway. The length of hide-bound whalebone looked fragile compared to the iron spears of the Broken, but she knew Quell could skewer a submerged lungfish at fifty yards and haul it back to his boat on the attached line. Even so, against the beasts that haunted these passages neither kind of spear offered much protection. “We should get out of here.” He seemed nervous but not so nervous that he didn’t notice how weak she looked. He stopped suddenly and took her shoulders in his hands, studying her face. “Are you . . . You’re too dry.” He shrugged off his pack and dug into it, cursing. “Everything melts in this damned heat.” He pulled out an empty-looking water skin and a small lump of ice that Yaz guessed had been a lot bigger recently. “Here.” He handed her both.

  “Thank you.” From its weight the skin might still have a mouthful left inside. Yaz held it in trembling hands, terrified she might spill some. She set the bone spout between parched lips and drank. The water tasted wondrous, like life pouring into her. She took it in three small swallows then bit off a piece of ice to suck. The Ictha knew about thirst. The wind killed those lost on the ice, but they died thirsty. Without whale oil and a tent there was no way to melt enough to drink. “Gods, I needed that.”