The Girl and the Stars

by Mark Lawrence

  Yaz nodded.

  “So they must have a way of hauling it from these caverns to the surface, and it won’t be up that twisting slanting shaft from the pit. The loads would snag and get caught. And it’s too exposed—half a dozen local clans come to pray there at different times across the year. The secret would never have kept so long. All we have to do is find out where and when the next load goes up, and we go up with it!”

  Yaz’s eyes widened. She had only been away from the surface for a few days but already it felt like a lifetime. The idea that she might return was a dream. Part of her didn’t even want to step back out into the wind. That part of her had kept quiet until this moment, but it spoke now, surprising her. “I can’t go back.”

  “Of course you can. The regulator passed you. You weren’t pushed into the pit, you . . . fell.”

  “I can’t go back without Zeen.” It wasn’t just about Zeen, not now, maybe not even when she jumped. Something was wrong with the world, with everything, when being less than perfect, less than the tribes’ idea of perfect, just meant giving up on people, throwing children into a hole in the ice. Yaz knew that in her core, felt it blood to bone. Bringing Zeen back with her would mean something larger than just saving one child. Like a crack spreading across a cliff face it would be the start of something. The start of something larger beginning to fall. “He’s my brother.”

  Quell rolled his eyes upwards as if about to appeal to the Gods in the Sky, but finding only ice above him he sighed. “Kazik rejected him. There’s no life for him with the Ictha, Yaz. The wind—”

  “The wind might kill him, yes. But do you think the priests don’t lie? They certainly keep some pretty big secrets!” She swung an arm to encompass the chamber and the scars of the Missing city all around them. “Zeen needs to be given the choice. He might choose to stay or to come with us and see whether the wind really will kill him.”

  Quell shook his head. “Fine . . . But I’m going to advise him to stay here. And it ends with Zeen. I’ve seen you with your friends. We can’t bring them all back. They’ll probably try to stop the whole thing anyway.”

  “Oh.” Yaz hadn’t realised that Quell had already watched her. Something in the way he said friends hinted at a jealousy she wouldn’t have suspected he had in him. She appreciated his reluctance to approach them though. The gerants especially looked very intimidating. Yaz’s first encounter with Hetta wasn’t something that would ever fade from her memory.

  “So, where is he?” Quell asked.

  “With the Tainted.”

  “The who?” A raised eyebrow.

  “The Tainted. They live in the black ice. It drives them mad.” Said out loud it sounded as impossible as reaching the surface.

  “And they’ve taken Zeen?”

  “He’s one of them, probably.” Yaz walked back to the hunter’s star. “If we get him back then this will drive the taint out of him. But we’re going to need help.”

  Quell blinked. He drew a deep breath, and then gave a nod that made Yaz wonder if there had to be a storm or if sometimes love just stole up on you. “Alright. Let’s do it.”

  * * *

  YAZ HID THE hunter’s star in an ice-filled hollow close to the cavern wall. They watched as its warmth began to melt a path down. The water would refreeze above it, and with the glow dimmed by Yaz’s will, there would be nothing to betray it save the aura. According to Quell, at its edges that aura felt more like a suggestion to keep away. The sort of feeling that might unconsciously slip into a man’s mind and turn him along a different path.

  Quell led the way back up the long slope, past the gateposts, which remained silent, and into the chamber beyond. Yaz took out Pome’s star for additional light. She paused and raised it level with her head. The blue of it reminded her of the brittle blue of Pome’s eyes and it struck her that despite his slight build and relative youth he was perhaps the most dangerous of those beneath the ice with her. Even the largest of the gerants presented a knowable threat but Pome, with his faction and politics and ambition, could be capable of anything. She hardly knew him but it was clear he had generous measures of both pride and cruelty, a dangerous combination. He clearly had the skill to sway others with his words. A power that was both small and large at the same time. But what other magic he might hold from the corruption of blood that had seen him thrown down eight years before she didn’t know. Shadow-weaving? Ice-working? Or something more deadly and held secret?

  “You made that star roll to your hand,” Quell said. “Back in the city, when I was failing to keep you quiet.”

  “I was going to brain you with it.” Yaz exerted a little pressure and the star’s song changed ever so slightly. She held the star between thumb and finger. Stay. She lifted the finger, lowered the thumb, withdrew her hand. And the star remained, though it started to rotate slowly.

  Quell’s eyebrows rose. “They do that?”

  “Apparently.”

  Yaz took a step back and the star followed, as if its instruction were relative to her rather than the world. She laughed. Slowly the star began to move around her on an orbit she could almost see, as if it were following a thread so fine that it dwelt just beyond the edge of vision. Yaz pursed her lips then shrugged. It would keep her hands free.

  “The man I took this star from might want it back. He doesn’t like me very much. He could be trouble if we meet him out here.” Yaz remembered the look on Pome’s face when her light had found him, stalking Arka’s band in the shadows, others with him. Pome hated her, she was sure of that. How much danger that might put her in she was less sure of. “We’ll be fine once we’re with the others back at the settlement.”

  They moved on together, the star winding its way about her and lighting their surroundings where the ice grew dark. Even there, though, she kept the star dim, not wanting to draw unfriendly eyes their way. They drank from standing pools, the water delicious after their long dry time in the city. Yaz tried raw fungi, choosing only those she remembered as safe. They tasted better cooked but her stomach was too hungry to care about her mouth’s opinions. She felt she was already losing weight, as if the bulk that sustained the Ictha on the ice were deserting her as other changes came fast and furious. Soon she would be a skinny wretch, too narrow to withstand the wind. She chomped at another tough fungus cap with focused dedication. Quell waited impatiently and hurried her on at the first opportunity.

  Quell crossed each cavern as if he were still stalking the Broken, moving around the edge in a crouch, pausing frequently to listen, staying out of the light. Yaz followed in his footsteps, aiming for stealth. None among the ice tribes were hunters though. Nothing lived on the ice save the rare predators that, like the humans, moved from one temporary sea to the next. Should even one of the main seas stay closed for a season people would start to die. If it remained closed for two seasons whole clans might vanish.

  Quell paused at a turning in a coal-worm tunnel, listening. “I miss my spear.”

  “They’re good people, Quell. They’re just children from the tribes.”

  “I saw one of your ‘children’ who must have been ten feet tall and looked like he could wrestle a hoola.” He moved on.

  “Well, some of them are grown-up children. The Broken have been living down here for generations.”

  “Some of them didn’t know when to stop growing up,” Quell murmured. He raised a hand to halt her and caution silence.

  “What is it?” Yaz tried to whisper but the tunnel made hissing echoes of it.

  Quell said nothing, only sniffed.

  Yaz breathed in deeply through her nose. There it was, a familiar scent reminding her of her arrival on the Broken’s shores. Blood.

  18

  THE BODY LAY sprawled in a grove of blue-grey fungi, broken stalks and crowns scattered all around it. Somehow it was this desecration, this waste of something edible in a land of hunger, that
drew Yaz’s eye first. The anger and horror about that she could fit inside her mind. A dead person though, someone she had spoken to not long before, that was something more difficult to wrap her thoughts around. She had seen the dagger-fish take her youngest brother, Azad. She had fought to keep him in the boat, and had lost, but she had not seen him die—his body never came back from the sea. She had yet to come to terms with the image of Jaysin’s head swinging from Hetta’s belt. And now this.

  “He’s huge . . .” Quell walked around the gerant, trampling more fungi.

  The spear that had killed him remained, the haft jutting from his back. Yaz imagined that whoever had driven it through him had lacked the courage to recover it before the man was truly dead, and lacked the time to wait for it to happen. Jerrig was dead now though. The harvester lay in a pool of his own blood, half across the sack he had been filling. His massive ten-foot frame curled around his wound.

  Quell set a hand to the iron spear.

  “Quell!”

  “What? You don’t think we’ll need it?”

  “I think some of the Broken are warriors who’ve trained with weapons for years. They’re less likely to stick something sharp through us if we seem unthreatening.” Her voice carried less conviction than she had hoped it would. If Pome found them with the body he might well have them killed whether they were armed or not. “Besides. We should let him lie.”

  Quell shook his head. “Dead is dead. The ice will take him to the sea, and the gods will take care of him.” He hauled on the spear, using it as a lever to turn the corpse. The point emerged a handspan beneath Jerrig’s ribs. “He’s smaller than a tonnerfin. Shouldn’t be . . .” A grunt of effort as he drove the spear through the gerant’s body.

  “Quell!” Yaz winced and put a hand to her eyes. She had seen butchery before, enough blood to turn the sea red, but Jerrig . . . he wasn’t meat from the sea.

  “Done.” Quell hauled the bloody length of iron from the corpse and held it in crimson hands. His lack of concern surprised her, but perhaps to him this was a nest of dangers and Jerrig’s remains were no more a cause for sentiment than those of the hunter were.

  “When they see that in your hands there will be no end of questions . . .” Yaz frowned. “At least wash it.”

  “I will.” Quell nodded. “But now I’ll have an answer if whoever did this comes after us.”

  * * *

  THE PAIR OF them moved on with greater caution, every shadowed tunnel and dim-lit chamber seeming full of threat now. A spear could come winging out of the darkness at any moment. Yaz tried not to imagine Quell transfixed as Jerrig had been but the image kept returning.

  Chamber after silent chamber wore at Yaz’s alertness. When the ice groaned and creaked she would start and turn, nerves jangling. They picked paths through more groves of fungi, including some where Yaz remembered harvesters had been at work.

  In two places they smelled smoke, which was odd as Yaz had seen no fire at all since coming beneath the ice.

  “Where is everyone?” The whisper escaped her. It must have been one of the Tainted who killed Jerrig. Had they mounted an attack and driven the Broken back to some defensive line?

  Quell opened his mouth to reply but a distant scream preempted him. He exchanged glances with Yaz and led off in the direction of the cry. Sound carried strangely in the chambers and tunnels beneath the ice and the scream was not repeated. Soon Yaz found herself lost, or more lost than she had been before.

  “Did you see the black ice?” she asked. “When you were searching for me.” On the return from the city Yaz had found a route that avoided the taint Arka had led them through, but she wondered now if the blackness might be spreading elsewhere, fingering into the Broken’s territory like frost reaching across still water, drawing the Tainted with it, perhaps Hetta with them, the heads of Yaz’s friends swinging from her belt, their blood on her sharpened teeth.

  “I saw black ice, grey ice, red, green, all the shades of the icebow. But I couldn’t go in. There is no light in those places.”

  Yaz blinked but didn’t question the truth of the statement. The taint didn’t spread where there were stars, so beyond the fringes there would be no light to see it by. “We should go back. I can find the way to the settlement from where we found Jerrig.”

  Quell shook his head. “I know how to reach your friends from here. I spent a lot of days scouting this place, looking for you.” He led on.

  Yaz followed, her brow furrowed. Days? It was easy to lose track of time so far from the sun . . . but days? Unconsciously her fingers returned to the needle at her collar, physical proof of what she would otherwise consider a fever dream. Had Elias and Seus stolen days from her while they fought their secret battle?

  * * *

  “WHAT HAPPENED HERE?” The chamber before them lay strewn with broken ice, much of it glowing with stardust.

  Yaz looked up at the ceiling, no longer smooth but pitted and cratered, crisscrossed with ridges hanging like shattered teeth. “Ice-work.”

  Quell led the way around the edge of the cavern, the dimness and soft glow confusing to the eye. Frost hung in the still air. This wasn’t mining. There had been fighting here. An ice-worker had brought the ceiling down. Maybe Tarko had done it, or Thurin, or others among the Broken.

  Yaz placed her feet as carefully as she could but still the broken ice announced her, crunch, crunch, crunch. Everything else remained silent. The glaciers held their tongue. No screams. Just Yaz and Quell, their slow advance betrayed with each step.

  “Wait . . .”

  Quell stopped and turned his head slowly to look back at her, a question in his eyes.

  Yaz held herself motionless, listening hard. She was sure she had heard something, an echo almost, like the soft crunch of a footstep that was not her own and not Quell’s. She reached out with her mind to the tiny stars in the ice heaped all around her, its glow so faint it lit her to the knee and no further. Quell they lit only to the ankles.

  Though they were like dust, each star was a perfect sphere and sang its own song, dipping only now and then into the register in which her brain could detect it. Their heartbeats were a faint whining. Yaz spoke to them and with one voice they answered, their glow elevating to a fiercer light that lit the chamber, throwing strange diffuse shadows in all directions.

  In one spot the shadows held on, a mist of darkness shifting reluctantly before the light that should have dispelled them. Quell turned and in the same motion drew back his spear arm for the throw.

  “No!” A voice from the thinning shadow.

  Yaz threw herself to the side and brought Quell down into the crushed ice, throwing glowing crystals into the air. Both of them rose together, spitting the stuff from their lips.

  A small figure stood where Quell would have thrown his spear. Darkness still clung to her but was streaming away as they watched. “Yaz! Where have you been?”

  And in the next moment as Yaz got to her feet little Maya rushed to hug her, the last of the shadows trailing from her long brown hair.

  19

  YAZ LET THE girl hug her until the questions each had for the other forced some space between them.

  “Where have you been?” Maya got in before Yaz.

  “In the city. I . . . fell . . . I had to come back up before I could escape. It took hours.”

  “Hours?” Maya tilted her head and studied Yaz’s face. “You’ve been gone three days.”

  Yaz turned to look at Quell. He shrugged. “I would have said a week, but I lost count of time. I ran out of food. I ended up eating those . . . things . . . off the ground.” He made a disgusted face.

  “How—” But Erris had said something about time running differently in the void. “What’s happening? We found Jerrig dead. Are the Tainted attacking?”

  “Jerrig?” Maya’s face crumpled. She looked down to hide her tears. “He
was only good.”

  “Who did it?” Yaz asked. “Maya, we need to know!”

  Maya looked up, her eyes drawn to Quell as if noticing him for the first time. “Who’s he?”

  “That’s Quell. He’s a friend.” Yaz waved Maya’s attention back to her. “What is go—”

  “How is it doing that?” Maya’s mouth stayed open, her eyes tracking the dim blue glow of the eyeball-sized star as it continued its slow upward spiral around Yaz’s shoulders.

  “It just does. They do that.” Yaz snatched the star from the air and tucked it into a pocket. “What is going on?”

  “It’s Pome,” Maya said. “He’s killed Tarko and he’s trying to take over.”

  Yaz tried to say something but found her mouth too dry. Eular had said she was like the stone he’d told her to drop into the pool. One touch and the whole body of water had begun to freeze before her eyes, ice spreading out in all directions from the point of contact. An agent of change. The blind man had called her that. She had dropped into the Broken’s world and now everything was changing around her whether she wanted it to or not. “Is Thurin safe? Are the others safe?”

  “Thurin?” Quell asked.

  “The others,” Yaz said. “Are they all safe?”

  “Nobody is safe!” Maya suddenly spun around, checking the entrances. “It’s too bright here. We have to go.”

  Yaz dimmed the stardust, returning the chamber to its previous gloom, mottled with the faint, coloured glow of the dust bands. “Not until I know what’s happening. Where is everyone?”

  Maya drew a deep breath. “It’s war. They’re fighting among themselves. Pome and his people are based around the forge pool. Arka and Eular are holding out against them at the ravine where the drying cave is.”