The Girl and the Stars

by Mark Lawrence

  “You’ll understand when you see him.”

  “He’s like a hunter but friendly?” Maya asked.

  “It’s more complicated than that. But yes.”

  Maya frowned. “Couldn’t you just . . . build your own hunter with that?” She nodded to the red star that had rolled to a stop at Yaz’s feet. “I mean you seem so good with the stars and you say the regulator built them . . .”

  “I don’t know how long that took him,” Yaz said. “It’s not something I know how to do.” And besides, she didn’t want to build monsters like the regulator had. She wanted friends beside her. If she could get Erris to come with her the Tainted would be powerless against him.

  “This is madness,” Quell said. “We don’t need to do it. We can just go back.”

  “Doing what you ask would put my mission at risk,” Maya said.

  Yaz picked up the hunter’s star and let it glow more brightly. She narrowed her eyes at Maya. “You said you came after us in the black ice because you needed us to complete your mission. Or did you just need me? Were you hoping to trade me to the priests if you couldn’t escape to tell your discoveries to the Axit? Hoping if they had me they might not care about letting you run off to die on the ice.” Yaz felt another weight settle on her already heavy heart. She’d thought Maya had come back for them all, out of loyalty and friendship. “Well, the priests will be waiting. And I’m not coming without the rest of us.”

  Maya at least had the grace to look shamed and studied her feet for a moment.

  “Just do what I asked,” Yaz said. “You both know it’s the right thing to do.” She set the hunter’s star orbiting her and lowered herself over the edge of the chasm onto the narrow path Arka had shown them.

  She met their eyes one last time, Maya’s then Quell’s, and then stepped out of sight. She descended slowly, trying to focus on the climb as the path soon vanished and she had to clamber down over fractured rock. Stray thoughts kept intruding though: Quina reaching out to save her from a fall, Kao wolfing down his first hot meal, pausing only to complain about his burned mouth and shovel in more food, Petrick dancing around Hetta as he led her away, Thurin’s smile as he lifted water from a puddle to show her his magic, the rippled light moving across his face. One day she wanted to see him work fire.

  She thought of Zeen too, so proud of his knowledge about the Black Rock. Knowledge that now seemed like tiny grains of grit on an endless gravel bank. Even little Azad visited her thoughts, happy and laughing in the boat on the day before the dagger-fish took him.

  Yaz reached the stone beam that crossed the gap and would take her to the first of the Missing’s chambers. The hunter’s star slowly swung into her vision, following its orbit, and she became aware of its unearthly song, a wordless refrain that had been there all along, unmooring her thoughts and letting them drift.

  She fought for focus and crossed into the exposed chamber on the other side, a dusty rectangular box of poured stone, older than the ice caves but lacking their ever-changing beauty.

  * * *

  YAZ MADE HER way steadily, alert for hunters, descending at every opportunity. She didn’t know where Erris would be but she knew he would be deep. She just hoped she found him before she found the creature that the city had fashioned to destroy her. Its assassin. It made the regulator’s hunters look like fingerfish next to a shark—and not just any shark, one of the black kind that rarely surfaced but when they did drove all the whales from the Hot Sea.

  She knew the undercity to be vast and her search hopeless, but for one thing. If she went deep enough she believed that Erris would find her. The star she held would act as a beacon for the watching minds that lurked in the depths of the undercity. Erris would find her. Or something else would.

  The monotony of stairs and shafts and endless dusty halls nibbled at her vigilance and once again her thoughts began to drift with the red star’s song. Her resolve came and went in waves, iron at the peaks, rotten with self-doubt in the troughs. Quell’s desire that she return to the surface might lie in parallel with the priests’ but it was also his own, born of love. And here alone in the empty home of the Missing she could call Quell’s motivation what it was. He loved her and in the name of that love had dared a world unknown and undreamed of and full of danger.

  The thought brought a smile to her lips but did not turn her around. It brought a question as well. Did she return that love? Did an answering passion burn inside her too? Did she even know what love was? Once Quell had been everything she wanted. Everything she could imagine. Her everything . . . but that was also the crack through which a cold wind blew. She had known so little. Her options had been so few. The course of her life had run before her with a frightening certainty. The inevitability of her life had appalled her. And yet when anything had happened to threaten that surety—Azad’s death showing how thin the ice beneath your feet can be, her growing strangeness reeling her toward the pit like a fish on a hook of its own making—when those things had challenged her certainty it too had terrified her.

  Yaz wondered at her refusal to return to the regulator, a man whose wisdom her clan respected, a man whose judgment held such sway that her own parents had watched him topple their son into the black throat of the pit and had done nothing. Yaz had no regrets at following Zeen, though she didn’t fully understand why. But then does anyone fully understand themselves, or even want to? Wouldn’t that be very dull?

  “No,” she breathed, finding herself at a four-way fork with no memory of the choices that brought her there. “No.” She did have a regret about following Zeen. She regretted not hauling the regulator down with her.

  “No.” She spoke the word again. Louder this time, marvelling at the roundness of it in her mouth, the taste of its defiance. “No.”

  Was she refusing to leave her friends just for that desire to reject . . . everything? Everything from the cruelty of a society that threw their broken children away, to the harshness of existence in the caverns where Broken and Tainted were locked in struggle, battling for different masters. Was she saying no to the inarguable necessities of life in a world of ice and brief seas? But you can’t just say no time and again. You need an alternative. Another answer.

  Erris had shown her the green world. She had been the first Ictha to see anything like it; her parents had seen nothing even close, nor theirs, nor any along a long chain extending untold generations into an unchanging past. She had seen it and although she had never imagined such a thing she knew within moments that it was right. It was where she belonged. Where they all belonged. She knew that it was her answer, even though it was an answer that made no sense. It had continued to make no sense right up to the point that Quina had put into her hand a small wooden bead and with it a story of a man travelling an unimaginable distance from the south. The green world stood against the world of ice and all its cruelties, just like she now stood against the options offered to her.

  * * *

  YAZ FOUND THAT she had come to a halt before a great glowing symbol on the rear lichen-covered wall of an arched hall. The lichen almost obscured the symbol like a thick, rough skin, scaled with disease. The script wall had opposed her on her first journey into the city, its defences becoming ever stronger as she travelled deeper. This time she’d seen only symbols like this one, heavy with lichen, indicating they were part of the city’s normal complement rather than freshly generated to oppose her.

  “It’s easier this time.” She wondered if the city had now accepted her, or was perhaps luring her in deep before closing its jaws around her. Either way she needed to be noticed because the Broken had searched the city for generations without uncovering even half of it, and so the chances of her finding Erris were vanishingly small. He would definitely have to find her instead.

  Yaz knew that on her previous visit it had been the city’s opposition to her that had drawn Erris’s attention. That meant she had to wa
ke the city again. She would have to prod the bear in its lair, and hope that she could cope with what came next.

  Lacking instructions Yaz decided to experiment. She took the red star in her hand and began to trace the symbol with it, reaching up above her head to start at the outermost coiling line. She scored the star’s smooth surface through the shaggy lichen along the faintly glowing lines of the symbol. Everywhere her hand went the symbol blazed more brightly behind it, until at last the whole thing shone with enough light to illuminate the chamber. Other smaller symbols began to show now, as if the light had leaked from the larger one into their dry channels. A host of tiny script now shone weakly from the rear wall and as Yaz approached it she heard music. Not the wordless song of the stars that seemed to belong to a voice, but a complex spiralling melody, at turns sad then joyous, the sounds of instruments though none that Yaz had ever heard.

  Ghosts filled the room, phantoms that she almost saw, like words spoken just beneath the threshold of comprehension. An impression of dance. Graceful whispers haunting the emptiness of the air. Fading then gone.

  Yaz found herself in the darkening hall with a tear on her cheek and a profound sense of loss. This had been a place of music and light and movement once, unimaginably long ago, and now only the sorrow of the vast city’s crumbling mind remained.

  She moved on, hoping to encounter some other way of drawing Erris’s attention.

  * * *

  THE FIRST SIGN of the hunter was a variation in the song of the star in orbit around her. Yaz heard a harmonising, as though a second voice had joined the first. And then, as she focused her thoughts on the problem she became aware of its heartbeat, very faint but growing stronger. With the heartbeat came an idea of direction, and, as she strained her senses, she became aware of other hearts still fainter and more distant. She wondered how she and Quell had wandered into two hunters as they tried to leave the city. All she’d had to do was listen and it was there for the hearing.

  The hunter drew closer, moving at speed, an urgency in its heartsong. Yaz took a narrow turn and followed a long stair upwards even though her destination lay far below. The hunter continued to close, its direction swinging around her in a manner that indicated it to be racing through the empty rooms at reckless speed.

  A wide shaft, down which scavengers had hung cables, offered her a quick descent of two hundred yards. She reached the bottom with her arms limp and trembling. The strength of the Ictha had left her and she wondered at how the other tribes survived with such weakness in them.

  A metallic clatter echoed down the shaft after her, the hunter growing ever closer. With a curse Yaz began to run, bathing the corridor ahead of her with red light, alert for any narrow passage or crack through the foundations of the city by which she might escape.

  She reached another shaft, narrower and deeper than the first, hung with a single thin cable, secured by an iron peg hammered into the poured stone floor.

  “Gods in the Sky!” Yaz’s arms felt like jelly. She wasn’t ready for another long climb.

  A crash far back along the corridor told her that the hunter had reached the bottom of the earlier shaft.

  Seized by a sudden idea Yaz snatched the red star from the air and held it in both hands. She willed it to rise and let it do so until her arms were stretched out above her. She could feel the pressure of it against her interlocked fingers. Grinding her teeth she commanded the star to rise and at the same time hauled down on it. The thing nearly escaped her to go hammering into the ceiling, but she held it back, just barely, standing on tiptoes.

  A red glow insinuated itself into the far end of the corridor. Growing brighter until the black bulk of the hunter emerged, hooking its claws all around the edge of a doorway to haul itself through. The star inside it shone in bright crimson lines through every joint and chink in its iron armour. The heartbeat of this hunter was slower than that of the one she had shattered to gain the star currently trying to lift her from her feet. A bigger star, a bigger hunter, a more deadly threat.

  Yaz snarled in frustration and stepped to the lip of the shaft. “Gods save me.”

  Ignoring the cable at her feet she stepped off, trying to force the star in her hands upwards. For a moment she hung there, feet dangling in space, her body suspended below the star as its light pulsed bloodily through her hands. Then, slowly at first, she began to fall.

  About fifty yards from the ground Yaz understood that she was travelling down too fast. The stone floor rushed toward her at ankle-breaking speed. Grunting with effort she tried to force the star upwards more strongly. She slowed but not enough. With twenty yards remaining she reached out in desperation, trying to grab the cable flashing by her while retaining a hold on the slick ball of light with one hand.

  What happened next was too fast for her brain to make sense of it. She caught hold of something, had something ripped from her grasp, turned in the air several times, and hit hard.

  * * *

  YAZ LIFTED HER head slowly as if it weren’t already far too late for such delicacy. Crimson light swamped her vision and the taste of blood filled her mouth. She drew a slow breath into lungs from which all air had been driven at speed, and daggers stabbed her chest from both sides.

  The sound of iron clanging on iron got her crawling, blood drooling between mashed lips. She got through a doorway into the darkness of another room before the awful screeching began, the sound of the hunter’s claws as it dropped down the shaft she’d come from, scoring the four walls to tame its descent.

  Yaz reached back and her red star rolled after her, coming to a halt in her hand and illuminating the room beyond.

  Another dusty chamber, two doorways in the rear wall, a vertical shaft in the middle of the floor. Yaz crawled on. The doorways seemed too far away, the clattering clanking charge of the hunter too close. She rolled over the lip of the shaft, clutching the red star. Gravity reached for her with its implacable strength and yanked her away into the darkness of the fall.

  Once again Yaz hung from nothing but her will for the red star to rise. The fear of the drop filled her stomach while the pain of opposing it sliced through her head.

  She dropped into a huge chamber, slower than falling, more like a diver plunging into water. The starlight glowing scarlet through her hands made of her something like those strange fish that are sometimes carried from the deepest depths of the ocean by swift upwellings, the ones that hang in darkness, carrying their own light before them. The glow partially illuminated the nearest wall as she fell past it, the light painting red stone and black entrances. The chamber seemed to be something of a junction where dozens of shafts met, some opening at various heights along the walls, a similar number piercing floor and ceiling.

  Yaz hit the stone with an “Oooff!” that crumpled her into a ball of hurt and swallowed her vision amid a constellation of spinning lights.

  * * *

  FOR UNCOUNTED TIME Yaz hung among those lights in a bliss of forgetting. Without memory of destination or recollection of pursuit all urgency left her. She drifted, moved only by an idle curiosity. Stars . . . she floated amid the stars, not the red scatter dying in the black heavens above the ice but marbled giants that swung through the void in slow majesty. Close by, a huge crimson star burned like a banked fire, and just as Yaz could make stars orbit her this great star had smaller ones that orbited it. One among a dozen that spun about the dull heat of the red star caught Yaz’s eye, a ball of pearly white on white, all aglitter with the reflected light of the greater star, as if ice were burning. She drifted closer until she began to realise that even this small star was vastly bigger than her, its unending whiteness beginning to fill her vision. And at the last, as its shadow threatened to swallow her and she saw that it was larger than mountains or seas, she was able to make out a thin, dark line about its middle. The shadow deepened, the great red star falling behind the growing bulk of the white star, and in those
last moments of light the line about its middle turned from a black thread to something with a hint of thickness and a hint of colour. And that colour was green.

  The darkness engulfing the world became the shadow of a hand, and suddenly Elias stood there in a space with no walls, his clothes like Erris’s, being made of something that was neither hide nor fur.

  “Hello.” In his narrow, long-fingered hand he held the white star, barely large enough to cover his palm. He looked at her without recognition. “Who are you and what do you want?”

  “I’m Yaz of the Ictha. We met . . .” She tried to recall how long ago it had been. “. . . before.” A part of her purpose returned to her as she reached for her answer. “And I’m looking for a star.”

  “I can’t let you have this one, I’m afraid.” He held up the white ball. “I’m supposed to protect it.”

  “From Seus?”

  Elias twitched, worry entering his quick, dark eyes. “Yes.” He closed his hand around the star. “Elias Taproot, pleased to meet you, young lady. But you say we’ve met before?”

  “Yes. Then Seus came and . . .”

  “Ah. I must be all that survived. The basic framework, so’s to speak. Recent memory gone.” He frowned. “I can’t remember anything before . . . Well . . .” He held up the star again and studied it. “Put it this way.” The thin line broadened slowly into a wide green belt so that nearly a third of the world lay free of ice. “Since the world looked like this.”

  “Is Seus the winter?” Yaz whispered.

  Elias shook his head. “This world was always going to freeze in the end. He’s dead set against anyone slowing it down though.”

  “What does he want? To destroy the world?”

  “Never that.” Elias flashed a nervous smile. “Just all of your kind.”