The Girl and the Stars

by Mark Lawrence

  Quell grinned. “Good to go?”

  Yaz nodded. She had questions. A thousand of them. But getting to the surface beat them all. Even so she couldn’t take her eyes from him. Although he was alone Quell brought the Ictha with him. The world that saw her and Zeen as broken, the world she had fallen from, now stood before her, hale, hearty. Had he come to lead her back to her life? A life that Quell had stood at the midst of like the centre pole of a tent from which all else depended. Before her drop he had said that he loved her, that he wanted to build a future with her. He brought that sense of calm with him, that sense of security that she had somehow thought was throttling her only to miss it from the moment they parted. How was he here? And why was her joy at his arrival tempered by shades of regret she could neither name nor explain. She answered his grin with a smile of her own. “Let’s go.”

  “I didn’t come in this way, but it looks as safe as any.” Quell took the lead, spear levelled before him. “There are signs on the floor to show—”

  “I know.”

  He glanced back at her, flashing that smile she’d known all her life, white teeth pinked with blood from her punches. “Of course you do. Sorry.”

  Within a hundred yards they reached a turning into the cavern that Yaz had seen from the corridor windows. Quell breathed a sigh of relief and stepped out, waving her to join him. The water from Quell and the starlight reaching down through the square holes above combined to squeeze a last turn of speed from her and she shuffled forward almost at a jog. She could smell the ice, scent her freedom from the long dry nightmare of the Missing’s city.

  “Come on.” Quell bent low and hurried across the chamber toward the ramp of broken stone that would take them to the edge of the more distant hole.

  Yaz followed, her mind crowding with the questions to be asked. How could Quell have possibly found her in such a maze of rooms? How did he even get below the ice?

  The silence seemed larger in the vaulted space, their footsteps an intrusion. They passed beneath the larger, inaccessible hole, both of them bathed in starlight, and skirted the pit before approaching the slope. One last scramble and they would be free of this place.

  When the hunter rose from the slope ahead of them, shouldering aside small boulders, debris streaming from its black carapace, Yaz stumbled to a halt, choking down a sob at the unfairness of it all. This one looked a lot smaller than the hunter that had left the city, but its armoured body was still as large as three men. It moved cautiously over the uneven gradient on half a dozen many-jointed legs. Something about it reminded Yaz of the crabs that Clan Zennik take from the Infrequent Sea, the serrated pincers on its two reaching arms perhaps. The thing glowed from within, red light escaping the chinks in its armour and illuminating the base of each leg where it joined the body. The crash of tumbling rocks and the clatter of metal on metal sounded shockingly loud after so long in the city’s endless peace.

  Quell looked tiny standing between Yaz and the hunter, his bone spear clutched in both hands, but he stood there unflinching even so. Yaz moved to join him, empty-handed, she couldn’t run, not again, and not without Quell. She hoped the end would be quick.

  Yaz had covered half the ground between her and Quell before something caught her foot and she went sprawling. She twisted to free herself and saw with horror another, far larger, hunter rising from the pit, a nightmare of waving arms reaching out over a behemoth’s body of black iron plates and other makeshift armour. A fierce red light lanced through every gap. A metal tentacle had snared her leg from her foot most of the way to her knee. The appendage was disturbingly reminiscent of the right arm that Erris had built himself, but dark and pitted with corruption.

  “Get off me!” Yaz caught up a loose stone and hammered at the coils about her leg.

  The hunter jerked her across the rock toward the pit it was still rising from. A scream tore its way from Yaz’s lungs as she slid toward the edge of the hole, where huge claws now gouged the stone, seeking purchase. She braced her feet against the nearest claws, determined not to go over without a fight. These hunters weren’t like the soldier that the city had sent chasing her through walls, firing its spikes. She had only glimpsed that one before it destroyed Erris but it was not like this creature. Erris had said these were the work of the thief who had stolen significant stars from the depths of the city and so enraged it. An image of the regulator flashed across her mind even as the hunter hauled on her. Erris had said the thief who took the stars generations before was script-burned. The regulator bore scars that looked like letters—Yaz saw the burn marks with her mind’s eye: script had been seared across the man’s scalp and face. The regulator was old too, old beyond the memory of any elder, and unchanging with the years. Regulator Kazik had stolen the stars that the city mourned and made these monsters around them . . .

  Yaz reached out for the star hidden inside the huge hunter, seeking it with her mind. She knew it would be big but she had commanded Pome’s star to dull its light. She had even made it float above her hand. Maybe she could— The fierceness of the hunter’s star took her by surprise. It was like a fire. Not the flame of a lamp but the savage roar of fire let loose as she had once seen it when old Vallak and his wife had set their tent alight in the long night.

  “No!” The shock of that raging from the star loosened her grip for a moment and now she found herself among those iron claws, clinging to them, her legs over the drop as the tentacle tried to tug her free.

  Yaz strained to keep her place and reached out with her mind, struggling to influence the star burning deep within the hunter’s makeshift bulk. She could see it there, hear its heartbeat slow and powerful like that of a resting man, but she could no more touch it than she could pick up ingots red with heat in the forge, no more oppose it than she could turn the ice winds with her own breath. Hope escaped her and her grip on the claws to either side of her began to fail.

  Quell came into view, shouting and flailing with his spear. It was not the rescue Yaz had hoped for. He came backwards, dragged like her by a tentacle of many overlapping iron rings that bound both his legs. The hunter lifted him from the ground and he dangled head-down before it, caught in a beam of red light that lanced out from where something like an eye opened in the main body. Yaz now heard not only the heartbeat of the star inside but its song also, wordless, violent, broken.

  “Yaz!” Quell spotted her. Twisting, he lifted his body and somehow drove his spear into the hunter’s eye. A metal shutter slammed across the opening, shattering the spear. Broken pieces dropped away, trailing their bindings.

  In one smooth motion the hunter swung Quell against the rocks as an Ictha might brain a fish, the impact brutal and crunching. Yaz craned her head back to see where he lay. The world turned around her, that slow rotation, as old as the night. Zeen had fallen into the pit and guilt had pulled Yaz after him. That had been a moment like no other. Quell lay with his arms and face to the rock, blood leaking beneath him. This was her second moment. All her anger, all her frustration, all her outrage twisted together in a white heat pinning her to the instant. She reached toward the intolerable fire dwelling within the hunter’s armour and took hold though it burned her. She found no give in the hunter’s star, no possibility of overcoming the stone that bound and animated it, and yet she refused to let go.

  Quell! It had killed Quell!

  The world retreated. Yaz no longer knew or cared if she were still clinging at the edge or being hauled away into the depths.

  It had killed Quell!

  Quell who knew the secrets of her life and whose calm stitched together the pieces of her, those she liked and those she did not, into something worthy of his devotion.

  It had killed Quell!

  Something broke within her. Something that was not meant to break. And with it came new strength and new weakness. Suddenly the balance of the struggle shifted, and with a vast effort that brought blood run
ning from her mouth and from her eyes, she struck the hunter’s heart a blow.

  The hunter fell with the slow inevitability of ice cliffs calving into the sea, its heart stunned, limbs slack as the beat sought to reemerge from a confusion of irregular fluttering. Yaz came back to herself with the claws tearing gouges into the rock on either side of her while the beast fell away. She was falling too. Her hands caught the craggy edge as she jolted over it. A shake and a twist of her leg and the slack metal coils around her shin released their grip. Her own hold proved firmer and with a scream of effort she hauled herself back onto level ground.

  The second, much smaller hunter stood over Quell’s inert form, one jagged pincer reaching down for his neck.

  “No.”

  Yaz reached out for the hunter’s star, smaller and less fierce than the other one’s, its heartbeat that of a child. She reached out and twisted, ignoring the broken pain that flooded through her. Between one moment and the next the hunter fell apart, lurching back as it did. All that remained were its constituents, a pile of ill-matched junk, more than a scavenger might show for a year’s work. The star-stone rested amid the pieces, a dull red with darker patches drifting over it—clouds across the face of a dying sun.

  Slowly, spitting blood, Yaz crawled to Quell’s side. Pieces of the hunter lay scattered around him, toothed wheels, iron plates, black wires, all of it sharp with an unnatural stink that clawed at her throat.

  Too weak to move him she lay down at his side.

  Once when she had fallen ill Quell had stolen cubes of harpfish from Mother Mazai’s tent. They had eaten them together in his boat, rocking amid the mists of the Hot Sea with the water steaming all around them.

  Yaz closed her eyes. There had been a time, before she was old enough to go out and fish, that she had thought of water only as molten ice. But the vastness of the sea changed all that. The largest of them, the Hot Sea, stood ten miles and more across in some seasons. Her father had once told her the waters of the sea ran beneath more ice than the rock did. How he knew that she didn’t know, but her father spoke very seldom and when he did it was never to give voice to a lie.

  Her weakness felt like a sea now, and she sank into it, even her thirst not enough to keep her afloat. But when she heard the groan beside her Yaz opened her eyes again and rolled her head to the side. “Quell?”

  “D-did . . . did I get him?”

  “Yes.” She couldn’t help smiling.

  “Good.” Quell levered himself up, his face bloody. “Don’t think I could take more than two or three others though.” He moved with caution as though every part of him hurt. He should be dead but the toughness of the Ictha was a thing of legend.

  “Just need to . . . rest a while yet.” He lowered himself back to the rock with a gasp and a wince. “Are you okay?”

  Yaz considered the question. Something inside her had broken and she didn’t know what. She did know that she had begun to shiver though. For the first time since she had jumped into the pit and escaped the wind the Broken’s caverns felt cold.

  17

  HERE!” QUELL REACHED a hand down to pull Yaz from the undercity.

  Yaz grabbed hold and in a moment stood beside him in the great starlit cavern. Quell immediately recoiled, a confused horror etched across his face. He ended up sprawled on his backside, yards away, trying not to retch.

  “Sorry. I’m so sorry.” In her other hand Yaz held the smouldering star-stone that she had taken from the destroyed hunter. “I forgot. I—”

  “It’s fine.” Quell shuddered. “Just give me a moment.”

  She moved away from the hole and crouched, shivering in her torn furs. Even a star the size of the one she’d taken from Pome made most people uneasy close up. This star had driven the hunter, supplied its energy, bound the pieces of it into some semblance of life. It weighed twenty times what Pome’s did. Calmed by her will the hunter’s star glowed a sullen red with patches of darkness moving slowly across its surface.

  “I don’t understand how you can touch that thing . . .” Quell winced and returned to the side of the hole. “I get the horrors if I go anywhere near it. Like my thoughts are breaking.”

  “I don’t know.” She did know. It was in her blood. If she cupped the star in both hands she could almost completely surround it. Its song filled her then, clearer than ever before, as if there might be words to it, as though if she only took the time they might reveal their meaning. She felt its fire burning at the edge of her mind, giving whispering voice to parts of her that normally held their tongue. But even touching this star was nothing like as bad as being however many tens of yards she’d been from the void star. “I don’t know how I can stand it. I just can.”

  Yaz huddled, clutching the star to her in both hands. It had a warmth to it and she was colder now than she had ever been save in the long night.

  “It seems a shame to leave all that.” Quell was peering down at the scattered ruins of the hunter. To the Broken it was a scavenger’s dream but to the Ictha it was a greater wealth in metal than the entire clan owned. More than they could trade for over three generations.

  “You’ll find they value things down here differently. A lot of things. Not just iron.” Yaz set the hunter’s star down in a hollow in the rock and came to stand beside Quell where he crouched at the edge. “Mother Mazai says we’re never free until we can walk away from what we want carrying only what we need.”

  “That old woman is too wise for her own good.” Quell looked up with a forced grin. “Perhaps we could just take a—”

  “Quell! What are you even doing here? I mean how did—”

  “I told you.” He got to his feet, half a head taller than her, wider. He smelled good. Like home. “I came to save you.”

  “You didn’t jump into the Pit of the Missing? Not for me. That’s madness.”

  “Of course not. Jumping in would be crazy!” He offered her a wry smile. “I stole just about every rope the Ictha have. And a dozen sets of dog harnesses from the Quinx and the Axit.”

  “Quell!” The Ictha never stole.

  “Well, I borrowed them. Quietly. While everyone was sleeping after the final night of the gathering, drunk on ferment. They can have them back. Well . . . most of them can, I expect.” Quell pursed his lips. “I tied them all into one long rope. You should have seen it, Yaz. It would have reached from the top of the ice cliffs to the bottom of the sea!”

  “You climbed down the pit?”

  “It started that way, yes.” A frown. “I tied the rope to an iron stake and let it down, then started climbing. And climbing. And climbing. That is one deep hole! So, about three days later I’m hanging there in total darkness, my arms are half-dead, everything is soaking wet . . . And suddenly one of my knots gives way and I’m falling.”

  “Splash.” Yaz remembered the shock of it.

  “Exactly. And it seemed like I was falling, or sliding, forever. I don’t think that rope would have reached anywhere near the bottom even if it hadn’t come apart.”

  “And nobody found you?” Yaz imagined that so long after the regulator stopped his cull the pools would not be well guarded.

  “I decided to watch and wait. I’ve seen others in the caves, but they didn’t see me. Everyone seems very busy down here, like something important is going on.”

  Yaz stepped back to take Quell in. So familiar and yet so out of place. It seemed extraordinary. All of it. Not least that he would be so reckless, and for her.

  “Why would—” But she didn’t want to ask that question. Not now. She wasn’t sure that she was ready for the answer. She had asked her mother about love once, and her mother, a practical woman not given to sentiment, had pushed back her long hair, streaked with grey, in both hands and said that love was like a storm in the night. “You wake up in the morning to find that the world has changed. There’s a new landscape beyond the doors of
your tent, everything familiar yet different.” Yaz had wondered about that. With Quell there had been no storm. They had grown together, comfortable in each other’s company.

  “We can’t stay here.” Quell took a last look at the wealth of metal scattered on the rocky slope below the hole.

  “It might be better to stay,” Yaz said. “I’m not sure I remember the way back to the settlement. But the Broken come here every day, I think.”

  “Yes, but we don’t want them to find us.” Quell flexed his hands as if missing his spear.

  “We don’t?”

  “No.”

  “The Broken are our future now.” Immediately Yaz felt guilty. Quell had come for her, thrown away the life he loved. And for what? She was broken, there was no life on the ice for her. Maybe it was the star setting the point of its wedge to her mind but two voices spoke to her, equally loud. One told her she was a burden on the Ictha, her sacrifice necessary for the survival of the whole. Her weakness hadn’t only dragged her down but had now brought Quell low too. She didn’t deserve happiness. She could not be saved. It was her own voice and she believed it. The other voice was also hers and it told her that a whole that survived at the expense of its children did not deserve to continue. This voice told her that maybe, just maybe, she could be saved but that she could not be saved alone. If she deserved more than this then so did every child cast into the pit. She drew a deep breath. “The Broken are our future. There aren’t any other choices down here.”

  “Well, we can escape. That’s a choice.”

  “You think you can climb back out of the pit.” It wasn’t a question. Nobody could climb that. Not even Thurin with his ice-working. Not even Tarko, though their leader would be the least inclined to try.

  Quell’s old smile returned. He nodded at the hole beside them. “I think it’s pretty clear now that the priests don’t mine their iron from the roots of the Black Rock. And we both know that if you consider all the clans the priests trade a lot of metal over the year.”