Panic seized her. Images of the Tainted howling past bloody teeth. “Where—”
“I’m sorry. I can’t save you. There are too many of them.” Erris offered a sad smile.
“You’ve killed us!” Yaz gasped in horror.
Erris shook his head. “Time is passing much more slowly here. We are close enough to the city to reach the void. But only because it remembers us. In many senses part of us never left.” He raised a hand against her next question. “We have time to talk and to still go back to the fight before we hit the ground. Or we could accept the inevitable, ask the city to take us back, and if it does, stay here, abandoning our bodies. But we do need to decide. If we are destroyed up there without making the proper transfer then we will face the final death. And there is barely enough time to make that crossing from the flesh to the void star.”
“I thought the city wouldn’t have you back.”
“Never heard of the prodigal son?”
Yaz met Erris’s gaze. “I can’t leave them.”
“Would any one of them wish you to die alongside them if they knew you could escape?”
“You could bring them—”
“I can only bring you because of the days the void star had to store your data.”
“I don’t know what that means.” But she knew it meant no.
Yaz sat, her heart still pounding, limbs trembling, but calming beneath the sun’s warmth and the soft touches of the breeze. Soon she would be dead, or worse. If Erris told her that this was free time, passing in a moment as she fell, then why not enjoy it? She slipped the skins from her feet and curled her toes in the grass. She had imagined doing so since her first visit, but the reality, if she could call it that, was beyond her imagining.
“Stay here. With me.” Erris’s smile was already sad, as if he knew her answer.
Yaz looked at the grass beneath her hand, a daisy nodding its head between her outstretched fingers, a tiny black . . . something . . . an ant, the word came to her, crawling between stalks that were as big to it as trees were to her.
“The Missing lost something of themselves when they cut away their evils. Something they didn’t think they needed and that Theus thinks they did.” She drew a deep breath, marvelling at the quality of the air. “If I leave my friends to die, even if I can’t help them, even if they would tell me to go . . . I would leave something of myself with them that I know I need. And even this place wouldn’t be able to make me feel right. Not even you. And in time I would be a poison to you, to this place, to all of it.”
“But—”
“And even this place has its darkness, hiding behind what we can see.” Yaz knew that it was Vesta who had made this green memory for Erris. But she also knew that Seus haunted the city’s veins. “You said yourself that Taproot is seeking to draw me into his plans. That makes me Seus’s prey, part of whatever game they’re playing between them.” She patted her hides, finding them dry, just as the city remembered her, as if the recent flood had never happened. Her fingers sought something above her collarbone, then pulled Elias Taproot’s needle free from her jacket. She held it out. “This followed me here where the water couldn’t follow.” The needle might be small but its significance was not. Its sharp truths could pop the sweet dream that Erris wanted to keep them in, just as easily as it could pop any other bubble. “There’s nowhere for me to hide, Erris. Trouble’s coming for me one way or another, so I had best face it head-on.”
“Stay.” Erris pressed his lips into a tight line. “Whatever happens here it would still be better than having your brains dashed on the rocks. Or being eaten alive by those creatures. Or used to house old evils in service to Theus’s search. You saw what he did, what your life would be. Mining the ice in the dark until your body grows old and fails.”
“There’s still a chance though. It doesn’t matter how slight. I can’t leave them while there’s still a chance.” Yaz knew she couldn’t leave them even when the last chance had long gone, but it seemed easier to speak as if she would.
“What chance?” Erris asked.
“I’m a . . . what did you call it? A quantal? Like the priests. I can reach for my power.”
“That would be like setting off a bomb.”
Yaz frowned in confusion.
“You might destroy half of the Tainted but you’d shred your friends too, and maybe yourself.”
Yaz looked out across the meadow. Butterflies were dancing among the flowers, all wings and flutter. Hidden birds sung out their tiny hearts, filling the air with a chaotic beauty. A lone tree stood amid the waving grass, its branches fingering into space, leaf-clad, swaying in a slow dance that struck an echo in her chest, something old and deep, a kind of peace she had never known.
“Do you think the world still has these things in it?”
Erris shrugged. “It’s possible. Near the equator. But if the ice hasn’t advanced from both poles to join hands then it’s only a matter of time. Our star . . . our sun . . . was dying when the tribes first arrived here. They thought we might have a hundred thousand years or longer. But the death throes of a star are hard to predict and it faded faster than they thought. Fewer than a hundred centuries to go from this”—he gestured about them—“to endless ice.”
She took in a deep, slow breath. “Can you show me the battle?”
“I was going to show you the coral reefs off the Kondite Coast. A sea warm enough to swim in, a riot of colour and wonder beneath the waves, and beaches of golden sand. We could take a boat and sail—”
“I need to see the area around where we were standing . . . are still standing.”
Erris furrowed his brow. “You’re just torturing yourself, Yaz.”
“Please.”
He sighed and waved away the world about them, painting in the battle as they had left it but frozen in time. His recollection was remarkable, though in the areas shielded from his vision things grew grey and misty, the figures indistinct with just an impression of numbers.
Erris helped Yaz to stand. “We can walk around. They’re not solid.” He swung a foot through a muscular Tainted wrestling with Kaylal on the ground.
“This isn’t how I look!” Yaz found herself in the act of punching the Tainted who had leapt at her, her fist frozen in the moment it met his cheekbone. She glanced around at Quell with his axe flung back, a spray of blood droplets hanging in the air behind the blade. At Thurin grappled around the knees and falling, his mouth caught in the moment of surprise. They both looked like themselves. But her face . . . was not her own, surely? Not the face she felt beneath her fingers. The fat that the Ictha needed to survive the northern cold had melted from her bones, she looked frail but fierce, the new angularity of her features carried a hardness with them, a threat, and the determination in her white-on-white eyes shocked her. A new person revealed beneath the old as time cut closer to the bone, like the world of the Broken that would be revealed if the ice were pared away. Yaz studied herself a moment longer. If she were one of the Tainted she would think twice about throwing herself at someone with that look.
“Zeen?” Yaz spun around, finding no sign of him in the confusion of bodies.
Erris shook his head. “I didn’t see him. But he’s fast enough to stay out of trouble.”
“He’s a boy with his head full of being a man. He’s stupid enough to get into trouble.” The thought of Zeen lying out there, wrapped around a wound, was a cold wind through her heart. She spun again, noting the occasional outcrops of harder rock, the bent girders, and here and there a gap in the battling crowd where a hole or fissure must lead down into the chambers beneath their feet.
Yaz set off toward the wedge of tainted gerants advancing behind Theus as he led them through the rest of his forces. She felt strange, passing through people, as if she were the ghost not them, as if she were like the first daughter of Zin and Mokka who still haunted
the ice, less substantial than the wind.
She reached the red-haired gerant, his face less blood-crazed than the others, a cruel and eager pride on blunt features, green eyes staring out from beneath a heavy brow. She turned to Erris as he caught her up. “Can you show me the undercity? I mean how it lies beneath the stone?”
Erris frowned in concentration then nodded. The Tainted and the Broken faded into smoky memories; even the stone beneath their feet became translucent, and shining through it she could see a confusion of chambers and tunnels stretching down into untold depths. In some places you would have to mine through fifty or a hundred yards of rock to find a void. In others the nearest chambers almost touched the surface. In others they did touch the surface, and those were the holes down which the recent flood had drained in a remarkably short time given the volume of water.
Yaz made a slow turn. Thurin had wanted them to escape to the undercity but even if the nearest entrance were just yards away, and it wasn’t, it would still be too far with all of them already grappling with the foe. Yaz tried to see if there were some way she might direct any power she took from the river into the rock to forge a new escape route. But the nearest chamber that lay close to the surface was nearer to Theus and the advancing gerants. They would reach it first.
“Send me back to the fight,” Yaz said. “I mean, wake me up, or whatever it is you do.”
“I’m not sending you. If we go we’ll go together.”
“I thought . . .” Yaz frowned. “I thought you had coral reefs to see.”
Erris smiled a slow, regretful smile. “I had coral reefs to show you. I have spent too long alone in such places. The only joy left is in sharing them. I would rather share your last minutes than spend another eternity in sunshine and green fields by myself, Yaz.”
Yaz didn’t know how to answer that. “Keep them off me for a few moments more. I’m going to try something.”
Erris nodded. He reached for her face, one warm hand shaping itself to the curve of her cheek, some urgent and unexpected need swelled within her and she opened her mouth to speak, but suddenly everything was screaming and falling again.
Yaz’s fall ended with a sharp pain and a sudden loss of breath. The Tainted that had brought her down clung to her legs while a howling child no older than Zeen hurled herself at Yaz’s face, biting and clawing.
A heartbeat later the girl sailed away, plucked from Yaz by Erris and thrown into the advancing masses. He hauled Yaz to her feet while kicking her other assailant clear.
“Make it fast!” Erris pivoted to kick a large man high in the chest, sending him tumbling back before he could swing the ice hatchet in his hand.
As Erris threw himself into the oncoming lines, kicking, twisting, and punching, Yaz tried to see past them as she had in the vision she had so recently shared. The river that runs through all things was there before her, thin, ethereal, but within reach if she could just stretch . . . She extended her arms, her eyes defocused, fingers straining. The river eluded her, like a sneeze that was there but wouldn’t quite make itself known. The screaming and roaring and falling bodies made it hard to find. She needed her stars but they were gone. She needed time but the booming voices of the gerants flanking Theus told her that she had none.
“I can’t . . .” It was too soon, and her work in the black ice with the hunter’s star must have used the same muscle as reaching for the river because it seemed to retreat before her. Her friends were dying. Innocents were falling on all sides. “I can’t.” And suddenly she could. Suddenly the river was beneath her fingers, swirling around her hands, flowing through her, filling and flooding her, trying to tear her from the moorings of her flesh.
With a cry Yaz pulled free. Even in the depths of their madness the Tainted knew to draw back as Yaz shuddered with the raw energies that pulsed through her. To her own eyes her flesh shone with a golden light. Time fractured around her, different possible Yazes trying to fall in every direction at once. The pain was as nothing she had experienced before and with a shriek she released the borrowed power before it destroyed her. She flung it forward in a thick beam of brightness that cut through several Tainted before it reached the rock just before Theus’s feet. The stone absorbed the bolt, glowing with the same spreading gold that Yaz’s hands had shown, and shattered rather than exploded. A great sheet of rock fell in broken pieces, taking Theus, his gerants, and a score of other Tainted down with it, falling into the chamber that had been hidden beneath their feet. The sound shook the ground as if the ice sky itself had fallen, raw, violent, bigger than mountains. The hole was a rough rectangle with jagged edges, many yards on each side, and dust rose from it in a big curling cloud, whooshing up toward the icy heavens.
37
THE DUST CLOUD rolled over Yaz, taking the ice sky away and most of the light with it. The boom, louder even than that of the collection cage hitting the floor, had for a moment stolen everyone’s voice. An eerie silence, as tenuous and fleeting as the dust cloud itself, hung in the air.
At first it was groans and calls to friends that nibbled away at the thickness of the silence. Yaz called for Erris and found her voice distant as if the crash of falling stone had deadened her hearing. The snarling of the Tainted came next, orienting themselves in this unexpected grey world. Yaz found a pair of bodies resuming their struggle and hauled the thinner one away to reveal someone familiar. “Quell?” She coughed on the dust, trying not to choke. The man looked almost like Quell beneath the grey.
“Yaz!” It was Quell. He gripped her arm and used her as support while he clambered to his feet.
“Get to the cage,” Yaz said.
He nodded, uncertain of the direction, then set off, pulling her with him.
“Wait. Thurin is close.”
The howls were rising again from many directions. The sounds of renewed fighting echoed out, new screams of pain and anger and fright.
“Yaz?” Against the odds Thurin stumbled from the sifting clouds.
“The cage,” she said, and let Quell pull her on. “Erris! The cage!”
Thurin limped after them. Glancing back she saw the left side of his face ran with blood, so dark as to look black in the half-light.
By the time Erris jogged into view to join them the dust had settled enough for a good ten yards of visibility. They passed ghost-grey people identifiable as the Broken only by the fact that they didn’t run madly to attack them. Quell led on, taking Yaz further from the front line where the flood had swept her, back past the positions Arka’s followers had established.
“Zeen! Maya? Kao?” Yaz called the last name without hope. The boy had been among the first to go down, throwing himself at the Tainted to save her. “Kaylal? Arka?”
They reached the cage, looming above them, a thing as alien as the hunters, having no place on the ice. It still leaned at a steep angle, supported by the forking cable at one end and by the edge touching the rock at the other. The cable end was high enough that Yaz couldn’t reach any of it with outstretched arms.
“If we climb on it they’ll have to come up at us,” Yaz said.
“Or bring us down with spears,” Thurin said.
“I have this.” Quell had picked up one of the big gerant shields on the way. A grey board as dust covered as he was. “We can hold out until they haul the cage back up. Maybe.”
“We’ve no food or shelter,” Erris noted.
“No.” Yaz hung her head. It had taken the only member of their group not to need either of these vital things to point out their absence. The boards and fungi had doubtless been washed away and swirled down into the undercity through a dozen different holes, along with the last of any remaining hope.
“They’re where we left them,” Thurin said. “I convinced the water to leave them behind.”
“Thank the gods.” Yaz blinked at Thurin, amazed and elated in equal measure. His ice-work had advanced seeming
ly in leaps and bounds. When they first met he showed off by lifting a puddle. Now he steered the currents of a wild flood and threw grown men through the air. “We need to load it. Quickly. And search for the others.”
Quell opened his mouth to speak but at that moment the cage began to straighten up. “They’re hauling it back!”
“No,” Thurin said. “They’ll lift it a little off the ground. So they know it’s vertical and easy to load.”
“How do they know?” Yaz asked, ready to grab the bars should it start to rise beyond reach.
The cage straightened but instead of rocking on its base it scraped across the ground then began to swing free beneath the still-rising cable. A moment later it stopped rising and just hung there swinging slowly.
“They must be able to tell by the weight on the lifting mechanism,” Erris said. “Let’s hurry.”
With the dust settling all around them and visibility heading back to normal the four of them hurried to get the stashed food and shelter. They worked in pairs heaping fungi onto stacked boards then carrying the loads to the cage. The Tainted and Broken resumed their fights, knots of Arka’s and Pome’s factions struggling against the possessed intruders from the black ice. Even with Theus and his gerants removed from the battleground along with a score or more of others the Tainted still had more than twice the combined numbers of the Broken factions. The pause had, however, allowed the Broken a moment to organise their defence.
Guilt dogged Yaz’s steps as she worked. They were preparing their escape while others fought and kept the enemy from them. Worse still, Zeen was still out there. But without the cage and supplies she had no salvation to offer her brother even if she could find him. She knew though that she would not be leaving without him.
Yaz and Quell were returning to the cage with their third load before the first band of Tainted came running at them. Quell set down his end of the boards, spilling fungi, and raised the bloody axe hanging at his hip.
Yaz looked at the five Tainted sprinting toward them across the wet rock. Two ragged children, two painfully thin women, their dirty hair flying out behind them, and a man of more solid build, his chest bare and bleeding from several long cuts. She could already imagine the ruin that the swing of Quell’s axe would wreck. “Couldn’t we . . .” She raised her fists and mimed a punch.
The Girl and the Stars Page 39