The Girl and the Stars

by Mark Lawrence

  “The stars!” Yaz blurted. “The stars can help you!”

  “The stars did this. The stars broke us apart. Even now, like this, they hurt us.”

  The sounds of struggle diminished around Yaz as the Tainted brought her friends down. Only Quell remained on his feet, his bruised face running crimson from a scalp wound. He wrestled with a gerant while a woman, her face almost as red but from demon-stain rather than blood, beat at his shoulders and head with a large thighbone. The unaccustomed fury on Quell’s face made Yaz fear that the demons were already in him. Surely they would be soon.

  “I know the stars hurt you! I’ve seen it!” Yaz fought to keep her voice steady and loud. The knife pressed at her throat, a cold, hard line. “The stars drive demons back through the ice, but the strongest are last to retreat. Couldn’t that help your search? If a star drives back the tide, pushes away the multitude, wouldn’t the last to go be most likely to be fragments of you?”

  Theus stood back to regard her. Close by, another Tainted threw himself at the back of Quell’s knees and he finally went down beneath the gerant still grappling him.

  “That’s . . . not entirely stupid.” Theus seemed taken aback. He took the knife from her neck and toyed with the blade. “It would take a big star though, to have much of an effect.”

  “I have one. From a hunter.” Yaz shook her arms free of the gerant’s grip.

  “A star that large would break you,” Theus said. “Not that I care but it would let the many in the black ice flood into you and you’d be useless to me.”

  “No, I can resist it.” Yaz reached toward her fallen star and it shot back into her hand. “You’ve already seen what I can do.”

  Theus’s face twitched, a snarl on his lips, wild anger, raw hatred, and something else holding them back but just barely. He answered through his teeth. “I will think on it.” He took a coil of hide rope from Thurin’s pack, forcing his face to calmness. “For now give me your wrists.”

  Yaz shrank back. “No.”

  Theus looked meaningfully across to where Quina stood, stretched between two Tainted, each holding a wrist in two hands. Both of the men were bleeding from gashes that she had apparently cut into them. A third Tainted, this one a young girl, had recovered Quina’s knife and came to stand in front of the trapped hunska.

  “Present your wrists or the little one there will show us all what you people keep inside your bellies. It’s actually quite surprising, though rather disgusting. You wouldn’t believe the length of intestine that can be pulled—”

  “Here.” Yaz raised her crossed wrists. “Just do it.”

  24

  WHERE’S KAO?” YAZ could see nothing. The cave to which they had been dragged was cold, dry, and utterly dark.

  “They must have taken him a different way.” Yaz hardly recognised Quina’s voice and realised the girl must be trying not to cry.

  “This is bad.” Petrick sounded utterly dispirited.

  “How are we going to escape?” Quell asked at her side. From the strain running through his words Yaz guessed he was trying to break his bonds again.

  No one answered and even though she couldn’t see them Yaz felt that each of the others was looking her way. She’d never asked to be the leader but it seemed that that was what came when you convinced people to follow your ideas. She had brought them here, hunting her brother, and somehow had acquired responsibility for all their lives.

  “I don’t know.” They’d made her leave her star, reduced to a faint glow. None of her friends had weapons. They were all tied, and blind once more in the dark. Lost. She wanted to ask their forgiveness but knew that she didn’t deserve it and that asking would remove the last strand of their hope. “I think my offer was a good one. I hope Theus agrees to it.” But whether the creature inside Thurin was sufficiently rational to see where its best interests lay Yaz was far from sure.

  They lapsed into silence. Yaz found herself shivering, the cold having as much to do with it as her fears did. Working with the stars really had removed the last traces of Ictha resilience from her. She shuddered to think what havoc the winds above the ice would wreck upon her weakened body.

  She thought about how shockingly thin Zeen had looked. Yaz had never seen starvation before she threw herself into the Pit of the Missing. The wind up above wouldn’t allow anyone to grow thin. The cold would kill a person long before their ribs began to show.

  Time passed in its slow way. None of them had much to say and the ice spoke into the silence between them, its groans seeming a lament.

  Yaz wriggled her way to Quina and found her shivering. They huddled together for warmth, saying nothing. Quina’s silence heightened Yaz’s sense of guilt. She liked Quina. She liked her quick mind and her humour though it often came with a sharp edge. Given more time they could have been close friends. Quina who had saved her from falling to her death in the city. Quina who despite her toughness had stolen that wooden bead and kept it close to her heart, hoping those who valued the trinket more than they did her might recover them both. Quina who always had something to say . . .

  Quell worked at his bonds but without light, a weapon, and direction there seemed little to be gained in freeing hands and feet save some modicum of pride and a little comfort.

  Whispers spoke in Yaz’s head, hate-filled, mocking, urging violence, telling her that she had killed her friends. Sometimes it was hard to tell which voices were her own. She had led her friends to their death. The black ice pressed on her though no part of her body touched it. Soon it would find a way inside them. Petrick was already muttering as though he were responding to voices inside his head.

  “Stay quiet!” A new voice hissed at Yaz’s ear, and for a long moment she was unsure if it were inside her or just very close by. A blade began to saw at the hide strips around her wrists. “And be quick when I tell you to move.”

  “Maya?” It seemed beyond reason that little Maya should be here.

  “Sssh!” The girl moved on to the bonds around Yaz’s ankles. “We don’t have much time. I had to kill one of them.”

  Kill? For a moment Yaz wondered if Maya had been taken by a demon. She sounded very different from the timid child who hardly seemed to have stopped trembling from her drop.

  Yaz rubbed her wrists and waited for Maya to free the others. “How can we get out?” she whispered as the girl returned to her.

  “I can see in the dark,” Maya murmured. “And you have this.”

  Something soft swung against Yaz’s hands. A wrap of rat skin on the end of a long cord. She fumbled with it, already sensing the quiescent star inside. Pome’s star, recovered from the chamber where they had been captured. Maya had dragged it behind her to avoid its effects.

  “Keep it hidden until we need it,” Maya said. “Take hold of me. I’ll lead you out.”

  Quell’s hand patted for Yaz’s belt, the others shifting positions to form a line.

  “Wait!” Yaz hissed. “What about Zeen, and Kao . . . and Thurin?”

  “They’re lost. Finished.” Iron ran through Maya’s voice. “In war you have to learn to let go.”

  Yaz suddenly understood that this was Maya’s clan speaking through her. The Axit remembered their days of war and taught the arts of it with a fervour, as though it were as important as knowing how to fish or how to pitch a tent against the wind. “I can’t let go of them.” Yaz reached for the girl, finding her small frame in the dark and taking hold. “You didn’t let go of us.”

  “I need you to complete my mission. Come on. Quickly. No talking.” She moved off, tugging Yaz along.

  Mission? Yaz bit back on her questions and moved as quietly as she could. The others weren’t lost. She couldn’t allow that. But she did need to escape if she were ever to be able to help them.

  Maya led them, making no sound herself. Yaz tried to emulate the girl’s stealth. Quell, Quina, and P
etrick managed to avoid stumbling or scuffing their feet behind her. They hadn’t gone far before Yaz smelled the blood and stink of whoever Maya had murdered on her way in. She prayed that it wasn’t Zeen, but didn’t ask.

  Yaz wondered why the demons from the corpse hadn’t invaded Maya, but maybe they required the killing to be done in a rage or motivated by malice in order to make the cracks they needed to find their way into someone. Yaz wasn’t sure that dispassionate murder was better though. If you were going to take someone’s life, shouldn’t it matter? Yaz didn’t know how to feel about this new Maya any more than she knew how to feel about the new Thurin. Both of them had revealed some hidden aspect that even though it left what she had known of them before unchanged, still changed who they were.

  Fifty yards further on Maya stopped and reached round to unhook Yaz’s fingers from her furs. “Wait.”

  She moved off ahead. Moments later a sharp sigh broke the darkness and something heavy slumped to the ground. Maya returned, smelling of blood. “Hurry.”

  It seemed to Yaz that rather than the gerants with their seven-foot iron greatswords, it might be a small girl with murder in her heart and impressive marjal shadow-work that was the deadliest thing under the ice. At least the deadliest thing with a pulse.

  Maya called another halt. “Pome’s hunter is still rampaging,” she hissed. “It was on the edge of the taints’ territory not long ago. That might be why you were tied and left. So they could try to deal with it.”

  Far off Yaz began to hear the clash of metal on metal, perhaps a hunter running. It grew a little louder then slowly faded.

  Maya led off again. They moved faster now. At one point Yaz banged her head on the low ice ceiling and filled the darkness with her own personal stars. She carried on, cursing silently.

  The malice-soaked darkness clawed at them as they moved from chamber to chamber. Sometimes Maya doubled back, sometimes she had them squeezing through tunnels almost too tight for Yaz and Quell. On two more occasions Maya left them to scout ahead. Whether any more killing occurred on these trips Yaz didn’t know. Twice, when Maya was with them, unearthly screams rang out close at hand, shattering the silence. And always the black ice was heaping doubt upon their shoulders, filling them with the certainty that escape was as far away as it had ever been. Yaz even found herself half convinced that Maya was deliberately leading them in circles.

  In some of the warmer chambers the ice was melting. The first splat of black water hit the back of Yaz’s neck and ran beneath her hides, freezing and yet burning at the same time. Whispers filled her mind, the words almost loud enough to hear. She ignored them, worried that to pay them attention might be to invite the demons under her skin.

  With Maya looking out for them Yaz worried less about Tainted rushing unseen upon them and more that it might be Quina or Petrick who turned on them, driven mad by demons just as Zeen had been. Quell she didn’t worry about. He hadn’t succumbed even when fighting for his freedom in the heart of the black ice and her worry that he might have done now shamed her. The idea that Quell could be turned seemed as crazed as the thoughts that the demons tried to ignite within her skull. Her life stood on several pillars, and Quell’s steadfast loyalty had proven more sturdy than the devotion of her parents or the solidity of the ice.

  They moved on and it seemed to Yaz that some grey hint of light had insinuated itself about them. Even the malice of the ice felt blunted. Behind them, distant but not distant enough, a roar of primal rage echoed through the caverns. A moment later another howl rang out, louder and closer.

  “We need light and speed,” Maya hissed.

  Yaz tore her star from its pouch and woke its light, keeping it at a level that wouldn’t blind them after so long without sight. The ice had greyed to the point that it returned enough of a glimmer for them to avoid running into walls. They raced on with Maya in the lead, her sense of direction seemingly unerring even under the stress of pursuit.

  Another hundred yards of panting and sprinting and they came blinking into the twilight of the ravine. The ice bridge stood only a short way off, the hidden river churning far below.

  Maya led the way along the narrow rock ledge between the ice and the ravine. Yaz found herself wanting to shout at the girl to hurry while at the same time not wanting to move so swiftly across wet rock with the terrifying drop to one side and the dull malice of the grey ice wall to the other.

  Maya reached the bridge and started to cross just as the Tainted began to boil out from tunnels and cavern mouths all along the dark side of the ravine.

  “Run!” Maya shouted and followed her own advice, almost slipping from the bridge before she reached the relative safety of the far side.

  Yaz released her fear in a wild scream and ran across the narrow span of wet ice. Quell pounded along after her.

  “Yaz of the Ictha!” Theus’s voice boomed out, somehow louder than the roar of the hidden waters below them. “We have a deal!”

  Yaz turned to see Theus standing at the place they had emerged from only a few moments earlier while the Tainted rushed past him. A couple of yards ahead of him a lean man in ragged skins paused to fling Quell’s iron spear, arching his whole body into the throw like an Ictha whaling on the Hot Sea. The length of iron arced over the heads of the Tainted in front of him, passing by the ear of a gerant closer to the bridge. Yaz saw the whole of the weapon’s trajectory in a frozen moment, lacking any time to move or even scream.

  Petrick, at the start of the bridge and just yards ahead of those leading the chase, saw the spear, as did Quina ahead of him. Both of them, having hunska blood, rotated with inhuman speed, twisting their bodies since the ice wouldn’t give them the traction to turn.

  The gleaming spearhead cut through the air toward Petrick’s chest. He found himself unable to move out of its way but somehow in a blur of motion he managed to deflect its flight so that it merely scored his ribs, passing beneath his armpit.

  For a moment Yaz thought Petrick had won clear of the danger. His momentum carried him on toward the middle of the bridge but the shove he’d given the spear to turn its course had unbalanced him too. Again a heartbeat stretched into a paralysed age as Yaz watched the boy begin to fall with painful slowness, one foot slipping over the edge, arms pinwheeling.

  Incredibly, Quina had turned and was running with fierce determination toward both Petrick and the Tainted. It seemed impossible that she would reach him though. The dark-haired girl ran faster than Yaz thought any human could, her feet sliding on the ice, lunging for Petrick’s outstretched hand.

  Suddenly the moment released Yaz and ripped her scream from her.

  Petrick fell, the horror on his face swallowed by the black mats of his hair rising around his face. The gap between his fingertips and Quina’s narrowed to inches, then suddenly yawned wide and he was gone.

  Quina, unable to halt her advance on the ice bridge, leapt at the leading Tainted, a broad-shouldered woman, and kicked off from her chest. The action sent the woman back into her fellows, spilling one into the ravine, and sent Quina sliding back across the bridge onto the safety of Yaz’s side.

  Yaz made her star a blaze of light and threw it into the cavern mouth behind her to block the way against the Tainted as Quina raced through. After that they ran, all of them flat out, Quina vanishing ahead, Maya falling behind, until at last, after many caverns and hundreds of yards, Yaz found her resolve and came to a halt. Quell pulled up alongside her, composed and ready where she was a breathless mess.

  “We shouldn’t stop,” he said.

  “But Maya!”

  “She does things to the shadows. They won’t find her.”

  The shouts of the Tainted were very distant now. Either the star had held them back until it burned itself into nothing or they had managed to bypass it but been delayed.

  “We should go,” Quell said.

  “Wait. She can’t be
far behind.” Part of Yaz wanted to keep running, and not just to put distance between her and the Tainted, but to stop the truth of Petrick’s death catching up with her. Quina would feel it badly too; she had liked Petrick, sought time in his company. Perhaps she was still running from her grief somewhere far ahead of them.

  “Let’s at least move to the wall then.” Quell stepped away from the centre of the chamber. “Can you dim the light in here?”

  “Petrick fell!”

  “I saw.” Quell nodded grimly, black against the bands of stardust running through the ice chamber.

  “We should—”

  “We need to get out of this place, back onto the ice where we belong.”

  “I need to go back for Zeen. And the others. I need to save—”

  “You can’t save everyone, Yaz. You just can’t. I don’t like that this place exists any more than you do. But it’s here for a reason. Nobody down here would survive on the ice. There’s nowhere for them to go. Even if the the ice does run out thousands of miles to the south . . . none of them could ever get there.” Quell raised his open hands, muscles straining against each other as if he were trying to claw the truth from the air itself and make her see it. “We can save ourselves. I thought we could save Zeen. We tried and we failed. The rest of them we were never going to be able to help.”

  Yaz shook her head. “I don’t accept that. I can’t accept it.”

  “We need to forget this hole. Everything will be alright again once we’re out. The regulator said—”

  Yaz looked at him sharply. “The regulator said what?”

  Quell frowned and rubbed his forehead as if it pained him. He shook the question away and beckoned her to join him by the ice. “Make it darker!”

  Yaz stayed where she stood out in the open. “Quell—”

  The sound of running feet interrupted her. One person with a light footfall. “Maya?”

  As though summoned by her name Maya came hurrying out of the gloom, trailing shadows into the chamber, her knife in her fist, the blade bloody.