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WHEN THEUS FINALLY arrived the howls and hoots of the Tainted heralded him. Erris and Yaz were standing by the bridge as he emerged from the dark mouth of a black ice cavern further along the ravine. He made his way slowly, seeming to enjoy the adulation of his minions. Clearly pride was one component of himself that had already been rediscovered and added to the whole during the course of the Tainted’s searching. He wore Thurin’s body. Kao lumbered behind him, his face a vacancy waiting to be filled, and Zeen capered around them both, wild with laughter, too often dangerously close to the edge and a fatal plunge to the waters far below. Etrix followed, as frantic and unfocused as the rest of them once more.
The Tainted by the bridge parted before Theus’s advance, from biggest gerant to youngest child. Something about the fragmented soul carried inside Thurin’s slender body made those other demons fear. It made them forget the mindless pursuit of their own singular desires and listen to his will.
The black stain covered much of his face in a broad stripe from his hairline down across his forehead to his chin and trailing off along his neck.
“Yaz.” Theus showed her a wide grin. “You came back, following a star like some wandering king. And what a star! Has it led you to the birth of something great, I wonder?”
Before Yaz could answer this strange question Theus’s gaze fixed on Erris and blackness flowed into both his eyes as if this might offer more information about the newcomer. “Here’s a curio and no mistake. Alive but not alive. Human but not human. And familiar too. Very familiar.” The smile vanished. “You’re something made in the city. A marjal’s mind hiding inside the works of my people. It’s as if a dog had been given charge of a grand ship. He sits at the helm in the captain’s hat and brocade, tongue lolling out, and no clue as to what he has been given.”
Yaz willed her star forward, rising before her, red as the sun and burning brightly. The Tainted fell back, hissing, and even Theus took one step away, raising an arm to shield his eyes.
“We had a deal. Give me my friends.” She wanted to ask for them all. To free all those enslaved by the black ice. But Theus would never agree to it.
“Find the rest of me and you can have them.” Theus gestured toward the caves behind him. “Though I am rather fond of this one.” He ran his hands over Thurin’s chest and sides. “As are you, from what I’ve seen.”
Yaz hardened her features against any blush. She imagined that she felt Erris’s questioning gaze against the back of her head and wasn’t sure how she would feel about such jealousy. “I don’t have time to hunt the whole of the black ice for you. I said I could help you, not do it all for you. Consider what I’m offering as proof of concept. It will be up to you to refine it and make it work.”
“That was not our deal!” Theus snarled, the rage he was holding in check now beginning to slip free.
“Our deal was made with your knife at my throat,” Yaz growled back. “Accept this one or I’m going to see just how well you stand up against this star.” She increased the intensity of the light pouring out. Theus backed two more steps. The rest of the Tainted crowded in the gloom now, a good twenty yards further away on the chasm’s edge to either side of the bridge’s far end.
She softened her tone. “How long has it been since a piece of you was discovered down here?”
Furrows lined themselves across Theus’s brow. “Many drops. Long enough for a child to grow old.”
Yaz paused, astonished and horrified in equal measure. Astonished at his tenacity and horrified at how many lives had been lost in this creature’s cause. “If I find another you let them all go, not just my friends.”
“I would promise it if I thought you’d believe me.” Theus shook his head. “But even you are not that naive. Find a new fragment of me and I will let these three go with you.”
Yaz could feel Erris behind her, judging. “Agreed.”
Erris said nothing but as he came to stand beside her she thought that she felt the weight of his disapproval settle on her shoulders and she slumped, accepting her guilt. Erris, though, however long he had lived, was new to this world of ice and hardship. Compromise was how life had to be lived. Everyone had to lean against the wind. Yaz would free them all if she could, but she saw no way to reach that goal. Although she hated the idea she began to see the position her parents and the rest of the Ictha were in with the pit and the weakness in their broken children. She didn’t know if the priests’ poison was starting to infect her or if this was just what growing up was—a series of compromises that twisted a child’s idealism into something shameful.
“Stay out of my way.” Yaz advanced across the bridge. “All of you.” She swept her star’s light across the ranks of Tainted. “But be close enough for my call.”
She stepped onto the far side of the ravine and recalled her star into her hand, striding toward the closest of the yawning cavern mouths, the one that Thurin had first led them into with promises to guide them safely in the dark. She glanced back toward Theus, staring at her hawk-like, and wondered what kind of darkness Thurin was lost in now, helpless in his own flesh while a demon used him to its evil ends. He’d been returned to the nightmare he had so recently escaped, and why? To save her brother, someone he had never met, one of the Tainted that he cared about least. He was here because of her. Another of her victims.
Yaz stepped into the black ice, Erris at her heels, and let the red star float free a yard before her. She strained that unknown muscle somewhere deep at the base of her mind and made the star blaze until its heart began to beat faster and its song became a war chant. Rather than focusing the light into a beam she let it shine before her in a wide arc, and even then the small fraction of it that reached her burned on her cheeks and forehead, dazzling her eyes behind a shielding hand. She moved slowly, letting the star’s light reach into the blackness of the ice and purge the foulness there. Malice and hatred turned to terror as the knife that had once cut these demons free of the beings that owned them now returned to cut them once again.
“Enough!” Yaz quieted the hunter’s heart and stood there panting, her skin feeling raw, head aching. All around her the sweating ice walls had become clear, the blackness pushed back almost too far to see. Here and there a stubborn black spot hung amid the fractured whiteness, like the opposite of the stars seen in the caverns where the Broken lived.
It stood to reason that if the Tainted had spent generations mining the ice and found only a few pieces of Theus then it wasn’t reasonable to expect to find several more within yards of the first tunnel that Yaz examined. She focused the starlight into a tight beam and shone it into the ice, directing it at the nearest of the more tenacious demons. Within seconds the patch had gone. Yaz wasn’t sure if she was destroying the demons. It didn’t seem that they could be moving through the ice, certainly not as fast as they were vanishing from it. But Yaz didn’t much care if they were escaping to some unknown place or evaporating in the starlight; either way they were gone, and that was a good thing.
Yaz focused her light on each remaining spot in turn, a little at a time until just one was left.
“It will be hard to reach,” Erris said.
Yaz shrugged. The blackness, an area perhaps smaller than a fist, lay some yards deep in the ice. She couldn’t tell if it was an arm’s length or two spears’ in. But she had seen the coal-worm at work. With one finger she traced onto the surface of her star the best approximation she could of the sigil from the heat pot. It was more than memory that guided her. When she thought of heat it seemed that it had a shape, something complex and many angled, like some small piece of the river that flows through all things. She tried to project that shape down onto the confining dimensions of a surface.
“Ow!” She pulled her hand back quickly as heat flared from the star. She let it float free and directed it against the ice in a slow spiralling motion so that the hole it made would be slightl
y larger than the star itself and allow the meltwater a way to escape.
It took some time to reach the trapped demon, and all the while that the star poured out its heat Yaz felt a coldness growing in her bones. But at last a pulse of blackness came out with the water running steadily from the hole.
“Theus!” Yaz recalled her star and slumped back against the clear ice of the nearest wall. “Theus!”
He came, prowling in as though she and Erris were his prey. He tried and failed to hide his surprise on seeing the cleared ice on all sides. Yaz hoped that seeing how easily it had been returned to its natural state would make Theus more worried about what she might be able to do to him if he reneged on their agreement.
“What have you got for me?” Immediately he finished the question Theus stepped into a hollow where the meltwater had collected. He lifted his foot with a snarl, the skins wrapped about it now dripping.
“Over here.” Yaz pointed to the stain trying to leech itself back into the ice at the base of the wall beneath the hole she had made.
Theus squinted, frowned, and took one step toward it. A moment of recognition pushed his eyebrows back, then he shook his head. “Quite powerful. An impressive find, but no part of me. Burn it.”
“Destroy it?” Yaz asked.
“Why would I want any competition?” Theus pulled Thurin’s lips back to reveal his teeth. “Burn it.”
Yaz shrugged and called the star’s light out in a beam, keeping it focused on the demon until the last part of it relinquished its hold on the world. “Is it dead now?”
Theus shook his head. “It’s gone to haunt the barrier between life and death. There are ways back from that place. Not many, but some.”
* * *
YAZ RETURNED TO her work. Theus had retreated from the star’s radiance and left them to it, but he could be called back easily enough. The iron collection was due soon whether she was back at the city or not. There would be more, of course, but surviving until the next one could prove to be a problem. The scale of her task daunted her. She might be working a thousand times faster than the Tainted but the odds were still against her finding a part of Theus in the time allowed to her.
Erris followed her dutifully as she drove her star to new efforts, saturating the black ice with its fierce illumination, to leave small constellations of dark stars in the ice, then focusing ever more intense beams on these stubborn spots and melting paths to the toughest of them so that Theus could inspect the runoff.
Hours later Erris took her arm. “This is hurting you. I can see that. You need to rest. You need to eat.”
Yaz shook him off. “There’s no time.”
“And how will you hold Theus to his bargain if you exhaust yourself fulfilling your part of it?”
Yaz pressed her fingers to her aching forehead and bit back on an angry reply. Erris was right. She’d never been so tired, but there was so much to do. She managed a smile. “I was rather hoping that if he changes his mind about letting the others go then you could change it back for me.”
Erris frowned. “It’s not just you that this is taking a toll on. The star-stone is diminishing too.”
Yaz widened her eyes in alarm and looked down at the star making its slow revolutions around her. It looked the same but now she wasn’t sure. Slow changes, like ice melting, could happen before your eyes without the mind registering them. Much like the way parents don’t see their children growing, she supposed. “Really?”
Erris nodded. “It’s a fragment, already broken. The tasks you demand of it gradually burn it up.”
“But I need it to get the demons out of Zeen and Kao . . .” The idea of losing the star bit at her in other ways too. Ways that should have been as nothing against the desire to free Zeen. But the fact was there: she found it hard to think about the star being gone, leaving her in darkness, leaving her in silence without its song echoing through her bones.
“Let’s hope we’re lucky then.” Erris smiled but it didn’t take the worry from his face.
* * *
MORE HOURS PASSED without result. Yaz had cleared the ice many yards deep along the length of one tunnel and around the edges of two small chambers. The star felt noticeably smaller when she took it in her hands now and its heartbeat had sped up, even when at rest. Despite the speed she worked at it would still take weeks if not months to make a sizable impact. The black ice covered dozens of chambers much larger than the ones she had cleared, and there was no telling how far it extended beyond the regions where the heat had melted gaps between ice and rock.
“That one has been watching us a lot,” Erris said.
“Huh?” Yaz started, jerking her head up. She was shocked to discover that she had been dozing, chin on chest. She’d only sat down at Erris’s insistence, to rest her eyes for a moment. She wiped at her mouth, hoping she hadn’t drooled. Erris watched her, a question remaining in the dark calm of his eyes. He turned toward the far end of the cavern, and there, lurking in the gloom, a gerant stood, watching her with wholly black eyes. “That’s Kao, one of my friends.”
The Tainted had long since retreated beyond sight, unable or unwilling to endure the star’s light. Yaz supposed Theus might have set Kao to watching them but it seemed a strange choice given that the boy was one of the hostages against her success. She wondered what else might be drawing him closer than the rest. “If you can hold him for me we could speak to him like we did with Etrix.”
Yaz dimmed her star to a molten glow and began to circle toward Kao while Erris slid the other way around the cavern wall. Kao watched her, baring his teeth in threat, thick arms raised but whether to attack or defend she couldn’t tell. Erris moved through the darkness, swift and surefooted. The quiescent star held Kao’s attention, allowing Erris to come up behind him unseen. He nodded and Yaz increased the star’s glow. With a snarl Kao backed and started to turn. He stumbled over a crouching Erris and fell.
“Quick!” Erris grabbed the fallen boy, dwarfed by his broad frame.
Yaz let the star blaze and ran forward to hold it close to Kao’s head as he howled and struggled against Erris’s implacable strength. Further back in the adjoining cavern the darkness seethed with motion, but none of the Tainted lurking there dared the star’s light to aid their fallen brother.
Just as the ice had cleared before the red glare, Kao’s face returned to that of a scared boy. The only difference was the star’s much greater potential to damage Kao during the process. Yaz had to force the demons from his head while leaving his mind in one piece. The boy screwed his eyes closed against the brightness, screaming for Yaz to take it away.
She drew the star back as far as she dared to without letting the demons that had claimed Kao surge back into his mind. “Listen to me. We’ve come to get you out of here. But first I have to do something for Theus.”
“You’re searching for him.” Kao stopped struggling against Erris’s hold on him. The city man had him gripped at both wrists with his legs scissored around his waist. “You’re searching for Theus just like we all do.”
“Yes, but when I find a piece of him he is going to let you and Thurin and Zeen go free. I just need to get on with it. You need to be patient, Kao. I’m sorry.”
Kao started to pant and choke, as if he were gulping air in the gaps between the waves of a rising tide. “I . . . I know what . . . what you’re doing.”
“Let him go, Erris.” Yaz stood and backed away. She couldn’t know what Kao was suffering but she hoped her words offered him some hope, a little comfort.
“Wait! . . . wait . . .” Kao twisted on the wet rock as Erris released him and rolled away. “The furthest cavern . . . search there . . . they . . . they’re all scared of it . . . they don’t tell him . . . Theus.”
“Scared of what?” Yaz asked, starting to find her hope.
“The great . . . great darkness . . . my demon saw—” His lips d
arkened, shading into black and twisting into a savage grin. “You’ll never have this one back, girl.” He rolled onto all fours, panting, reminding Yaz of the Quinx’s dogs. One eye turned crimson. He snarled and scampered off, reaching his feet only as the darkness took him.
Erris stood, wiping at the grime on his pale clothes in mild disgust. “Can we believe him?”
Yaz frowned. “Kao must have been pushing at his demons to get them to come close enough for us to notice him. He might not have much control but he used what little he could.”
“Why would the ‘demons’ be hiding things from Theus?”
“You’ve seen what they’re like. Why wouldn’t they be cruel, treacherous, and untruthful to their own kind as well? Besides, Theus rules over them, forces them to work. I can understand them not being keen to make him stronger. I’m not eager to do that myself.” Yaz repressed a shudder.
“The furthest cavern?” Erris made a slow rotation with his arms spread. “Furthest from where?”
“I think furthest from the centre,” Yaz said.
“And how would we find that?” Erris widened his eyes at her. Of all of him it was his eyes that were most alien to her, so different from the pale glances she had known all her life with the Ictha.
“Furthest from the heat. So the coldest caverns in the black ice. Out on the edge of the Tainted’s territory.” She turned and pointed in the opposite direction from the slow flow of the ice. “That way.”
Together they abandoned the work so far and walked off toward the black heart of the Tainted’s territory.
By the red light of her star Yaz saw the horrors that she had missed during the merciful blindness of her first visit. The bones of scores, possibly hundreds, had been pressed into the ice as macabre decoration, many of them clearly children. Yaz had never seen human bones before, only those of fish. On the ice something had to eat the flesh for the bones to be revealed. Clearly while the Tainted could not sustain themselves by cannibalism they all shared Hetta’s instinct for it and would not waste the dead.
The Girl and the Stars Page 32