Yaz suddenly found her island of the present crowded with returning past and future. She had been falling. She had been hunted and been hunting. “I need a star to save Zeen and the others!”
“Big picture!” Elias snapped his fingers irritatingly in her face. “I just told you Seus wants to close the Corridor, ice over the green zone, and kill well over ninety-nine percent of all humanity on the surface of this planet.” His eyes flitted to her collar. He reached out to tap a finger to the needle there. “You need to use this to find me. A better me who can use—who can help you to stop Seus!”
Yaz stepped back and fixed Elias with a hard stare. “Big picture” wasn’t a phrase she had ever heard spoken but somehow she understood the sentiment. It was the same mind-set that saw children sacrificed to the greater good, that saw awful deeds against the few to preserve the many. Maybe it was right or maybe it was wrong. Yaz left that for the gods to decide. But whatever they decided, her course was fixed, right or wrong. “I’ll care about your fight when I’ve finished mine. Now send me back!”
“Send you? Dear girl, you brought yourself.”
“Then how do I—” But the words were slurring from a mouth whose cheek was pressed to cold stone and a tongue that tasted blood. Her vision blurred and the great red star about which the others had orbited swung back into view out of the darkness.
Time passed and the circle of illumination from her star, now lying just beyond the tips of her outstretched fingers, began to surrender to the growing glow of at first half a dozen large symbols, themselves manifesting like stars from the general darkness of a night sky. Soon there were scores of them, lighting a chamber in which all the peoples of the gathering could have assembled without rubbing elbows.
Yaz got to her feet, groaning and wiping fresh blood from her mouth. She was back in the chamber into which she had fallen while escaping the hunter. The rest of it could just have been the result of banging her skull too hard against the floor. Her head and chest competed to see which could ache the worst.
“Hello?”
The vastness of the chamber swallowed the word. By way of an answer the dark mouth of one of the many side shafts lit from within with crimson light. A hunter emerged moments later, hooking black claws around the exit and hauling itself into the room in a single smooth motion that brought it crashing to the stone floor five yards below. The same hunter that had pursued her down so many falls.
A sigh escaped Yaz’s lips. She called her star to her hands and began to advance on her foe. She had few illusions about her chances of beating the creature, but the time for running had passed.
This hunter resembled a giant black crab with a complexity of many-jointed legs bearing up a body three times as wide as Yaz was tall. One arm massively outweighed two smaller ones on the other side. Where those two had fingers like tentacles the other sported a claw large enough to snatch up a gerant and snip him effortlessly in two.
Whether surprised by her advance or recovering from its drop the hunter remained where it was, close to the base of the wall, its iron carapace backed almost against another of the several dozen identical entrances.
Yaz advanced in a straight line, save where she tracked around one of the shafts that opened in the floor. She held the star out in front of her, smaller cousin to the one she could sense powering the monster ahead. In its light she saw the river that runs through all things, wider and clearer than she had ever seen it before, its power hidden but terrifying even in the hints and rumours it offered to her eyes. The star she had recovered in the city chamber had once more opened the river to her. She feared it more than she feared the hunter though. If she touched it the river could flood through her in half a heartbeat, filling her with energies beyond her capacity to own. She would sooner stick her hand in a forge pot than dare the river like this.
The hunter rose on its legs as Yaz closed the remaining distance between them. It lifted half a yard and raised its huge claw still higher, regarding her with mismatched glass eyes, gleaming darkly at the ends of two small articulated arms.
“You’re going to be mine.” Yaz spoke the words through gritted teeth as she exerted her will through the star in her hands, seeking to influence the one pulsing amid the ironwork body looming over her.
The crab advanced in quick, stuttering steps, the weight of it scoring the stone in every place that one of its sharp legs set down. The claw, big enough to squash Yaz flat, now hung poised above her head. She felt the creature’s heart with her mind, a fiercely defiant fire refusing her command. Yaz ground her teeth and raised a hand toward the claw as it descended.
“No!”
The crab hesitated, the iron bulk of it groaning as its forward momentum arrested. In the next instant its heart-star flared, deep-red light shone from every joint, and a bright pain blossomed in Yaz’s head. Something brittle fractured in her mind and she fell, blood running from her eyes. The massive claw following her to the ground.
Before the claw’s jagged teeth could close around her the whole of the monster jolted. Yaz heard an awful squealing and a swift series of snapping sounds. Then, with sudden violence, the entire crab burst into pieces. An eye hit the ground close to Yaz’s head and shattered, scattering broken shards over her. A section of its carapace bounced just past her, its edges gleaming where the thick iron had been torn. Yaz saw the claw skitter across the ground before toppling down one of the shaft openings, swiftly followed by several lengths of cable and a glowing star almost the size of a newborn’s head.
With a groan Yaz rolled over into a sitting position and began to scramble back. It looked as if some dark core remained amid the wreckage of the hunter. Even as she watched, it seemed to unfold, shedding iron cables, metal plates, toothed wheels, and a great blue-black spring coil. The thing revealed amid the hunter’s ruin was something almost human and perhaps only a little taller and wider than Hetta or Jerrig, though cast in black metal. It followed a careful design rather than the seemingly improvised hunters that the regulator had created. And although Yaz had never had a clear sight of it before she knew exactly what it was: the assassin that the city had sent to stop her escape. On that occasion only Erris’s sacrifice of his own iron body had slowed it sufficiently for her to escape.
The assassin had torn into the hunter’s back and emerged from its wreckage. The hunters were the regulator’s doing and now the city had risen against them. Though it seemed that the avatar the city had sent was focused on Yaz. The hunter had merely been an impediment, stealing its prey.
The assassin raised its hand toward her, fingers extended and tight together. Yaz realised that even if she thought she could master the city’s creation where she had failed to master the regulator’s, the only star that she could hear was the one in her hand. Whatever powered this killer it was something new, something over which she had no influence.
With a soft click four black points appeared at the ends of the extended fingers. The next two things happened simultaneously. Four black darts shot toward her with the same velocity that had seen them hammer into stone on their last encounter. And Yaz plunged both arms into the river that flows through all things. For a moment she became one with the universal current, the awful power flowing through her with a force that should strip the flesh from her bones. In the next moment the river rejected her and she lay gasping in the same place she had been before though it seemed to her that she had been carried a great distance. The energies still inside Yaz made her feel like a plucked harp string resonating to the note of creation. Her body wanted to break apart, to stride off in a dozen different directions, each part carrying away a different piece of her mind. She stood, shuddering like a flag in the wind, scarcely noticing the four flattened pieces of black metal that slid from her lap. The spent projectiles tumbled down across the shield of golden light that encased her and struck the ground with ringing tones. Yaz and the assassin faced each other, one golden, one
dark.
Yaz thought of her friends, of her purpose, of Thurin and Zeen trapped amid the black ice. With a great cry, half rage, half ecstasy, she managed to grab the tatters of her being and drag them back into a unity. She became united, drawn more definitely into the world than she had ever been before, understanding at the same time how very close she had come to dispersing across the surface of her stolen power like oil spilled across the face of the sea.
Yaz spread her hands, cupped, half-surprised not to find them full of fire. Something invincible ran through her veins, her lungs didn’t need to draw breath, her muscles screamed with a strength that could easily tear her asunder. When she took a swift step forward, the black assassin took a swift step back.
Yaz struck. Not with her hands, but with everything that was in her, a blast of something white and black and chaotic and loud. The force of it flung the assassin away like a child’s toy, hurling it yards back on a rising line to hit so high up the wall that Yaz couldn’t have reached it with her fingertips.
Her opponent fell back to the ground, face forward, hitting with a clang like an iron bell. A rain of fractured stone pieces rattled down around it from the impact crater high above them. Yaz stood, trembling, watching the inert, gently smoking form at the base of the wall. She was glad it was dead. She had, in that one act of violence, discharged herself, shedding everything the river had given her. It would be at least a day before she saw the river again. A week before she could touch it with anything even approaching safety.
Yaz slumped, the fear leaving her body and uncovering all her aches and pains as it retreated. Exhausted, Yaz turned to examine the closest of the downward shafts.
The scrape of iron on stone turned her sharply back around and reversed the tidal flow of her terror. A great metal hand twitched. Joints groaned in protest and the assassin slowly levered itself up, turning its blank face toward her once more. Even in her fear she wondered for a moment if she were looking into the face of the Missing. Had the city crafted its assassin in their image?
The assassin stood and stepped toward her, limping on one leg, grinding metal on metal. It smouldered here and there, the energies she had unleashed on it still sparking across the formerly glossy exterior, now deeply scored and etched in almost geometric scar patterns. It held its hand out and the fingers shuddered, but the black spikes that would have torn through her didn’t come. The mechanism that threw them seemed broken.
Part of her wanted to turn and run. To throw herself down yet another shaft. But she didn’t want to die with her back to the thing. Exhaustion wanted to put her on her knees, but that wasn’t an option. Not for an Ictha. She would meet death standing.
She raised her star, thinking perhaps to throw it. She had felt ready to die before, back there beneath the black ice, but maybe that had been the weight of the demons’ malice crushing her spirit. Now she was anything but ready. She had unfinished business. People that only she could save.
Yaz wasn’t ready but she understood she had nothing left. Just holding her arms out before her with the star was taking all her strength.
Without warning something struck the ground between her and the assassin. A something that must have fallen from one of the shaft openings on the ceiling. It hit fast as a thunderbolt but without any sound other than a slap like a palm against stone. Yaz blinked. A figure, a human figure, coiled against the impact, crouched between the towering assassin and Yaz, who realised only now that she was on her knees.
The star fell from Yaz’s hands as Erris unfolded from his crouch. Facing her, rather than the metal giant. Not Erris in his body of mismatched parts but Erris as she had seen him in the green memories of his life, tall, calm, his skin the same rich brown she remembered, hair close to his skull in tight black coils. He wore a white linen tunic and leggings. Yaz discovered that she knew the word “linen” and what cloth was. Something else that had slipped into her mind while wandering Erris’s memories with him.
“Yaz. I told you not to come back.” A sad smile played at the corner of his mouth.
Behind Erris the assassin took a step closer, now directly behind him. Erris’s head reached only just above its hips.
Erris turned and looked up at the assassin’s blank face. “I can’t let you have her.”
“How . . . how are you here?” Yaz struggled to her feet, heavy with exhaustion. “You said you didn’t have a body.”
“Actually, I said I had two. One better built than the other.” Erris kept his back to her.
“But . . . the other one was metal, like a hunter’s.”
“And this one has metal in it too.” Erris’s gaze remained on the blank plate of the assassin’s face, where symbols suddenly began to glow, many of them, flowing down over the iron like a slow waterfall.
“No!” Erris said.
The assassin backhanded him. A seemingly lazy blow but one that sent him flying across the expanse of floor. Yaz cried out as he fell into a shaft, but somehow his fingers caught the edge and heartbeats later he had hauled himself out.
The assassin reached for Yaz and she backed away. With impressive footspeed Erris returned to interpose himself. His face just inches before the iron fingers reaching for Yaz.
“You know how long it took me to build this body,” he said to the assassin. “How much of myself I put into it. How hard I worked to hide it from you.”
The iron hand closed like a trap around his head, engulfing it. Yaz staggered forward to grab one finger with both hands. She tried to pry it back but found no give in it.
“You don’t think breaking this body will break me?” Erris spoke beneath the assassin’s wrist. “You have held me too long. I have lived too long.” He was speaking to the city, to Vesta, not to the work of metal and magic that held him. Addressing the vast but broken mind that had kept him across all these centuries.
The symbols flowing across the assassin’s faceplate shone brighter now, painting themselves across Yaz. Every symbol on the walls glowed more strongly and the shadows, with no place left to hide, went scurrying down the nearest shafts.
“This isn’t what you were made to do,” Erris said.
The fingers moved fractionally, beginning to squeeze. Erris gasped as if in pain. “There. I’ve done it.”
In that instant every one of the thousand symbols on the walls, ceiling, and floor burned red. The assassin opened its hand and released Erris’s head. The script continued to flow over its face.
“I’ve bound myself in here,” Erris said. “This is all I am. I’ve finally escaped you. I can live or die but I can’t go back.”
A tone like metal being torn screeched out from the assassin’s chest and Yaz had to cover her ears. The voice was nothing human and yet the hurt in it, the depth of its sorrow, threatened to carry her away like a wave stripping fishers from their boat.
“I understand that I can’t return if I leave.” Erris hung his head. He turned and reached for Yaz’s hand. She let him take it and folded her fingers into his. His flesh felt warm. Almost human. But not quite. “Yaz will come with me.”
The symbols pulsed again.
“She will not return. Will you, Yaz?” He met her eyes.
“I . . .” She found that she didn’t want to say so. Even though it was a place of emptiness and death it also held mysteries and answers. The idea that she might never come again, that all these secrets would be locked away from her forever, somehow seemed too much to ask, even though she had been inches from death and didn’t stand much further from it now. “I will go as far away as I can get.”
Erris began to lead her toward the mouth of the nearest horizontal shaft. They walked quickly and quietly beneath the glow of the symbols’ scarlet fire.
“What did you do?” Yaz hissed, afraid that if she spoke too loud it might somehow make the city change its mind.
“I used the only currency I had,�
� Erris said. “Myself.” He glanced back at the assassin. “I have been a part of the void so long, even as the city’s mind fell apart, that I think it values my existence. A kind of love, if you like.”
Behind them a clang rang out and looking back Yaz saw that the assassin was literally falling to pieces, coming apart now that its purpose had been served. A maelstrom of emotions swept over them, sorrow, anger, loss. Yaz’s own feelings floated on that tide, leaving her hollow, walking like a dead man, tears running from her eyes, her breath hitching in her chest as she fought against sobbing.
The whirlwind of feelings began to subside as they entered the corridor. Their footsteps echoed before them and, as the entrance receded behind them into a square of red light, the star orbiting Yaz began to provide their illumination. As it circled it sent their shadows in a slow dance, drawing together, merging, parting, sliding across one wall then the next.
Yaz realised that they were still holding hands and self-consciously undid herself from Erris’s grasp. “I still don’t understand what you did back there.”
“I did what I used to do best,” Erris said. “I escaped.”
“What, just like that?” Yaz frowned. “Why didn’t you do it years ago?”
They walked in silence for several paces, circled by their shadows.
“Well, it wasn’t ‘just like that.’ First I had to build this.” Erris patted his body. “Which took finding, unlocking, and mastering some of the more complex machinery left by the Missing on the lower levels. That took some time.”
“How long?” Yaz knew it took a woman the best part of a year to make a baby.
“Lifetimes,” Erris said. “Dozens of them. And then I had to work out how to put myself wholly in it, with no part left to anchor me into the void. It’s fortunate that when the city took me it took all of me, including my marjal skills.”
“Even so, you didn’t really just figure it all out and get everything ready at the same time I happened to appear, surely?”
The Girl and the Stars Page 29