The Girl and the Stars

by Mark Lawrence

  She turned to Zeen, walking just behind her, and took his hand. He returned her squeeze and both smiled, without effort this time.

  They reached the city cavern without challenge. Yaz led the way down the long slope, tired in every limb, still feeling grimy from her time in the black ice. The ache in her head had subsided but it still felt as though there were a knife lodged between the two halves of her brain and that every now and then an invisible someone would twist it.

  Behind her Thurin, Kao, Zeen, and Erris trudged along in a disordered group, only Erris with his shoulders squared and head unbowed. Kaylal hauled himself along at the rear, scraping the iron-clad stumps of his legs across the rock.

  Quell came striding across the city to meet them. At his hip swung some kind of makeshift axe that let her know he had been back to raid the hunter’s remains. He’d bound a large, sharp-toothed metal wheel to a short iron bar.

  “Yaz!” He took both her hands in his, studying her face. “Are you unwell?”

  She shook her head then regretted the movement. “I’m fi—”

  “We thought you were still in the city!” Quell raised his voice, edging it with a hint of outrage. “I would have gone with you to rescue . . .” He waved a hand at the others behind her. “These.”

  “I didn’t want to risk you or Maya being recaptured.” Yaz pulled her hands back. “It was my mistake to fix.”

  “You took your friend from the city though.” Quell’s pale eyes found Erris and narrowed in distrust. “He doesn’t look like the hunter you described.”

  “Quell, I presume.” Erris inclined his head.

  “You do presume. You took Yaz back to that nightmare of a place—”

  “She took me,” Erris pointed out. “I had no knowledge of its existence.”

  Quell’s face darkened. Yaz didn’t remember ever seeing him angry. “You took my—”

  “Quell!” She wanted to ask, “My what?” though she wasn’t sure how she might feel about the answer. “Calm yourself! We have to be ready to leave. The collection is due soon, yes?”

  Quell hardened his face, forcing all traces of emotion from it. He nodded, mouth in a tight line.

  “The next collection isn’t due for twenty-two days.” Thurin stared at Quell, challenge in his eyes. “If there is one before then it is because this stranger has arranged it with the regulator.”

  Quell’s brows rose and he shot Yaz a betrayed look. “You told him?”

  “I didn’t!” Yaz protested. Her words carried their own heat. Mention of Quell’s deal with the regulator still felt like betrayal. The way he had kept it secret from her had soured the trust between them that she had always taken as absolute and eternal. She turned to stare at Thurin. “How could you possibly know that?”

  Thurin’s mouth twisted. “Theus told me. He saw it on him. He said the Ictha had signs of the regulator’s influence all over him. He said Quell would betray you. He said the priests stand behind this one, and behind them their Hidden God.”

  Yaz wondered what stood behind the Hidden God, Seus maybe? She had dropped down the pit then found new depths to fall to, and wondered if the mystery of the Missing went deeper still, perhaps without end. Maybe all life was like that, people too. Tear off a layer, expose some new truth, but there will always be another layer. “Quell did what he thought was best. He was trying to help.”

  Thurin narrowed his dark eyes at Quell. “Theus said—”

  “A demon told you!” Quell stepped in close, full of menace now, his voice a furious hiss. “I won’t be accused of treachery by one who led us all into the black ice and tried to bury us there.”

  “Hey . . . Quell.” Zeen stepped into view from behind Kao, a stumble in his legs.

  “Zeen!” Quell was at his side, catching him as he collapsed.

  “Zeen!” Yaz pushed her way toward her brother, but Quell was already carrying him in both arms.

  “He weighs nothing. I expect he’s starved is all.” Quell started walking back down the slope, argument forgotten, genuinely pleased to see the boy again. “Come on. I’ll show you the mountain of food I’ve collected. Zeen needs to eat at least half of it.”

  Yaz followed. This was the Quell she remembered from the ice. Strong, caring, in control of himself and the situation.

  They crossed the city ruins, alert for hunters. Yaz offered a prayer to the Gods in the Sea that none would come. More than anything she wanted sleep. Deep and peaceful sleep. She felt like a raw wound.

  Quell’s collection of fungi proved to be more of a hill than a mountain but he had done a good job in the time available. Yaz didn’t point out the number of inedible or poisonous caps in the mix; they could be discarded later. How long the pile would last the nine of them up on the ice was a matter for speculation. Not long enough, she suspected, but then she had no true idea of how long would be enough.

  Kao began tucking into the fungi, chewing his way methodically through one thick grey-shield after another. Thurin picked up a handful of the less tough brown-scales and brought them to Zeen. “They’re better stewed in their own juice with some salt. But these are the most digestible raw.” He turned to Kao. “Eat too many uncooked grey-shields and you won’t need a cable to get to the surface. You’ll be able to blast there on your own wind.”

  Quell raised a brow at that, refusing to smile, and gestured to a hollow nearby where the corner of a board could be seen. “Maya has been busy too. That’s her stash. She even got us a hot pot . . . is that what you call it? One of those sigil things.”

  A thick blanket of exhaustion settled on Yaz and she staggered off to slump down before she fell. She sat with her back to a twisted metal beam and watched the others protectively from beneath heavy eyelids, Zeen most of all. He was the only reason she was here and she had succeeded in freeing him, if not from this place yet then at least from the nightmare he had been suffering. It seemed unreal to have her brother back, a dream she might wake from. Though now that he was back she almost feared for him more than when the Tainted had him. Now he was her direct responsibility, and no part of her plans felt safe. In fact, once her mind inserted Zeen into those plans they seemed suicidal. Crazed at best. All that drove her on was that the alternative seemed just as dangerous and yet lacked any hope of anything better at the end. She had seen the green world in Erris’s dreaming. She had felt the grass beneath her hands and the rich, soft soil in which it bedded. She had seen the trees towering, swaying in a warm breeze that gave rather than took. A butterfly had kissed her skin. These were true things. Quina’s wooden bead said that somewhere in this world of endless white, trees still grew, and just knowing that had sunk a hook in Yaz’s heart. For the longest time now she’d been afraid to dream, knowing that all her paths led to the pit and thinking that somehow she deserved it, for the weakness in her blood. She’d borne a heavy load, uncomplaining, stoic in the way that only the Ictha are, accepting her fate because she refused to become a burden on her people. But the green dream that Erris and Quina had given her would not hurt the Ictha. It was a dream worth hunting. A dream worth dying for.

  Yaz’s gaze drifted across Quell, Thurin, and Erris, momentarily close together and in discussion, though she couldn’t make out the words. Quell was binding together two of the boards from Maya’s stash, his powerful, blunt fingers twisting the wire with a delicacy that always surprised her even when gloved. Thurin had been trying to show him a better way. The Broken had been working with this material for generations after all. He seemed to sense her watching him and turned to look her way. For a moment his black eyes held her gaze with what seemed a dark and starless passion. Erris made some observation that brought Thurin’s attention back to the matter in Quell’s hand, an observation that had both of them looking to him with a grudging admiration of the kind usually reserved for a leader. She wondered what they would think if she told them Erris was over a thousand years ol
d and that his body wasn’t flesh and bone but something Missing-made, like the boards before them.

  She watched the three of them, her mind half dreaming. One from the world above, part of her life from her earliest memories. Solid, strong, dependable. One from this strange world below, owner of curious magics, dark, conflicted by tragedy, broken by experience. And one from the world before, a time when there had been no above or below, a mystery who had kept the company of the Missing’s works for so long that even he didn’t know how changed he might be.

  Once she had thought she would share her tent with Quell and her life would be a slight variation on the song that sang out her mother’s life and her mother’s mother’s and hundreds more joining her in a long chain to a time of gods when only Zin and Mokka walked the ice. Now she didn’t even know how the old stories fitted with the ones that Erris told her, or with the green world they had walked together in the dreams that the city made real for him.

  * * *

  “YAZ?”

  Yaz blinked and realised that she had been asleep. Maya stood before her, a shy half smile on her lips, every inch the young girl rather than the shadow-weaving Axit assassin.

  “Good to see you, little sister. You’ve done well here.” Yaz forced away a yawn. She stood stretching. “How long have I been dreaming?”

  “A long time.” Maya turned away, pointing. “Others are coming.”

  That woke Yaz up quickly, a cold wind blowing away her mind-fog. “Who is it?” Following Maya’s line she could see figures in skins coming down the long slope with spears on their shoulders. “Didn’t we have anyone on guard?” Had it been her responsibility, she wondered, to organise things like a perimeter?

  “Thurin went up there to watch not long after you fell asleep,” Maya said.

  Yaz tried to spot him in the group coming down. There were more than ten of them in view now, and none of the figures looked like Thurin.

  “Arka!” Kaylal hauled himself from the depression where he’d been working on Maya’s haul of stolen boards and other material. “Arka!”

  Yaz relaxed. With Thurin absent none of their company was better placed to recognise Arka and her company than Kaylal.

  Arka raised a hand in greeting and came to the fore of her group, leading them cautiously across the scraped ruin of the city. The dozen or so Broken with her all kept low, moving between the holes that would offer them an escape into the chambers below if a hunter were to surface.

  Yaz searched desperately for Quina among the shuffling, exhausted group but saw no sign of the girl.

  “Yaz!” Arka looked tired. A bloody wound on her forehead would add to the collection of scars that Hetta had given her, if it ever had the time to heal. Grey streaks stood out in her dark hair where none had been before. “Kaylal.” She reached down for his hand. “Exxar?” She looked around at the others approaching from the stashes as her own followers came up behind her.

  “Gone.” Kaylal’s voice fractured around the word and he let her hand go.

  “I’m so sorry, Kaylal.” Arka lowered her head. After a long silence she turned to check her people. One was the girl, Jerra, who had been with her when they rescued Yaz from Hetta. Yaz had still been wet from her drop. It seemed a lifetime ago but couldn’t have been much more than a week. Jerra had graduated from her rock-and-bone hammer to an iron spear, lighter and shorter than Arka’s though.

  “Have you seen Quina?” Yaz asked.

  Arka nodded though she looked grim.

  “Tell me!” Doubt clutched at Yaz’s heart. “She’s not with Pome, is she?”

  Arka set her hand to Yaz’s arm the way the Ictha do when telling bad news. “A hunter took her. A hunter from the city.”

  “She’s dead?” Yaz’s voice broke.

  Arka made a pained shrug. “Taken. The hunters take us. We’ve never found the bones of any they catch. Maybe they eat those too . . .” She drew a breath. “They’ve been busy while we fought. It might be we’ve lost more to their claws than to Pome’s forces.”

  Yaz shook her head, not trusting herself to speak yet. Quina was too quick for a hunter to catch. She didn’t believe it.

  “I’m sorry.” Arka took back her hand. She looked around at Yaz’s friends. “Petrick is not with you?”

  “He . . . fell.” Yaz found it hard to speak about. “Into the chasm.”

  Arka closed her eyes. Something like a mother’s pain twisted her lips. “So many gone.”

  Another silence stretched between them. Yaz broke it.

  “Why are you here?” She tried not to sound unwelcoming. Her plan interfered with the fundamentals of life in the caverns and might disrupt the long-held arrangement that kept the Broken alive. She didn’t want Arka trying to stop her.

  Arka seemed on the point of answering with some rousing speech for the benefit of her followers but instead she released the deep breath she’d drawn and her shoulders fell. “Because Pome is winning.”

  It wasn’t the news Yaz wanted to hear. She pursed her lips. “Won’t the city be harder to defend than anywhere else?”

  “It will.” Arka nodded. “But the hunters here will attack them as much as us. Which will help even the odds. If we’re lucky a hunter will take Pome. They might even destroy his hunter.”

  Yaz frowned, puzzled, then realised that much of what she’d learned during her time in the city was unknown to Arka. “The regulator made all of the hunters, not just Pome’s one. I don’t know how much he sees down here but you could find yourself facing Pome’s forces along with the very hunters you hoped might attack him.”

  Arka shook her head. “That makes no sense. Why would the regulator have made the hunters? They’re responsible for the loss of so many of the best of us. Without them we could get more iron. Lots more! And that’s why we’re down here.” She shook her head again, more emphatically. “Someone has been lying to you.” She glanced at Erris, brows rising as she clearly remembered Yaz’s claims about his origins. “And this stranger . . . what does he want from us? Or did he follow you up from the city like Quell followed you down from the ice?”

  “It was me he came here for, yes.” She hid a smile, surpressing a kind of pleased embarrassment. “But listen to me. The hunters serve the regulator. Erris saw him make them.”

  Arka still frowned in disbelief but her shoulders slumped a second time. “If that’s true then we’re finished.”

  Yaz glanced toward the fungus heap and felt immediately guilty for wondering if Arka and her followers would need feeding. “I guess you should ready your positions. Thurin is still on watch but you could send—”

  Arka nodded. “I left two warriors with him.”

  “Well . . . if we see Pome he’ll have all of us to deal with.” Yaz didn’t mention that in a day at most she expected to be gone. She wasn’t sure that Arka wouldn’t try to stop her rather than coming with her. Arka still dreamed of restoring the Broken to what they had been when Yaz arrived. She saw herself as Tarko’s heir and she wouldn’t want to antagonise the regulator. If she started to believe that the priests owned the hunters, that might just make her more willing to placate them. She might still let Yaz ride the cable to the surface, but alone, and bound as a tribute.

  Yaz drew a deep breath. “We’ll stand with you. If we see him.”

  Arka clapped a hand to Yaz’s shoulder. She offered no thanks. Her authority stood on the assumption that Yaz owed her obedience, but there was gratitude in that contact. She moved away as Erris came in close. “Positions!” Arka gestured to Jerra and the others with her. “As we discussed.” Together they moved away toward nearby openings leading down into the city.

  Yaz watched them go, feeling unsettled. Pome was hunting Arka and her people. When he found them gone from the main caverns he would follow them to the city. She felt that she was abandoning Arka’s faction to their fate, and it made her feel dirty. J
erra wasn’t the only child among them, but it seemed that the caverns of the Broken weren’t large enough for childhoods. Quell had said she couldn’t save them all, and it was true. Lately life seemed full of ugly truths and attractive lies.

  * * *

  “HOW LONG DOES the cage normally stay down?” Yaz had gone to eat in one of the craters. This one had a rectangular shaft at the bottom of it, sheer sided and too narrow for any hunter she’d yet seen.

  “Two days,” Thurin said. “It takes a while to load all the iron securely.” Quell had taken over his guard duty above the slope and Zeen had gone with him, though Yaz had wanted to protest it. “Sometimes three.”

  “We won’t have two days. Not with Arka here and Pome hunting her.” Maya bit into a large mushroom without enthusiasm.

  “But the regulator is sending this cage down for you, right?” Kao asked. “So he might just leave it there long enough for someone to get on, then haul it back up.”

  “True.” Yaz nodded.

  “This means the regulator is going to be right there waiting for you up top,” Thurin said. “With gods know how many priests. He’ll want the rest of us back down here to work for him.”

  “But he won’t be expecting the rest of you.” Yaz offered a smile. “And you can pick a man up without touching him, Thurin. If the regulator tries to stop us going south then you can throw him down the hole to scavenge his own iron.”

  Maya and Kao nodded. Thurin looked worried. They ate without speaking, and after a short while Maya and Kao left the pair of them alone, going to join Erris, who was still working on fashioning their collapsible shelter from the materials that Maya had recovered from the settlement.

  “Eular wasn’t with Arka,” Thurin said.

  “No.” Yaz had noticed the blind old man’s absence and had worried for him. “Pome must have caught him after the Icicle Cavern. If he’s wise he’ll do whatever Pome asks and hope Arka can rescue him.”