The Girl and the Stars

by Mark Lawrence

“Fresh . . .” She stared at her fingertip, feeling a new kind of coldness deep inside her. “Zeen.” She started forward but stopped, her foot knocking something soft aside. Yaz crouched and patted the rock. She lifted the warm object for inspection. A thumb. Smaller than her own. The flesh chewed, splinters of bone jutting from it. She dropped it with a shudder, curled her lip, and followed the tunnel.

  * * *

  THE SOUND OF dripping from the pool chamber faded behind her and Yaz found herself folded in an eerie silence. The rock-floored tunnel was around fifteen feet wide and ten feet tall, the ceiling fringed with icicles. The longer ones had been broken off with none reaching quite low enough for her to touch. Whatever hunted down here had to be big, but it made no sense that it could be something like a hoola or a bear—they could hardly survive on a dozen children every four years.

  For hundreds of yards the tunnel ran on, barely turning from the straightness of its path. Occasionally the groaning of the ice disturbed the quiet. Yaz had heard the noise all her life, deep-throated and rising into her family tent through the sleeping skins. The ice was never still and at every moment some part of it creaked in complaint. Down here, though, actually in the ice, the sounds were louder, stranger, as if a great beast were waking from its dreams.

  The wet rock beneath her feet wasn’t the pristine, ice-scoured rock that might be expected but slick with a thin film of grime, and though she had left the blood behind her the air held a faint but undeniable animal stink, not much different from that of the dogs she had met earlier.

  Further on, the tunnel was intersected by another, then another, then a third. The first narrowed rapidly, old and squeezed by the flow of the ice, the second plunged into water lit from below by a ghostly radiance. The third was perfectly round and led upwards through the ice sheet at an angle steep enough to make for difficult progress on the slick surface. Yaz paused at the entrance, listening hard, hunting for smears of blood.

  On her journey she had noticed that the tiny stars bedded in the ice ran in seams. In some places more thickly clustered and therefore brighter; in others fading away. The rising tunnel looked to grow utterly dark after just a few dozen yards.

  Yaz turned from her inspection of the blackness. She stared intently along the tunnel she’d been following, sure that she’d heard a noise, something other than the grumbling ice. In the gloom ahead something moved. Then again. A shape, huge and black, lumbering toward her.

  The tunnels held nowhere to hide. She could run back to the pool or try to follow the dark side passage, all the time struggling not to slide back into the clutches of any pursuit. But neither of those would help Zeen if the beast had him, and even if she gained a lead any predator would just follow her scent.

  The Ictha waste nothing, energy least of all. If there is a point to running then they will run with all their heart, but an Ictha will not run from fear. Even so, Yaz wanted to run. Instead, she drew her knife. If the beast was to kill her it would have to do it here while she could still make a fight of it.

  Fear clutched at her stomach but it was a different kind from the hopelessness she had felt in the first chamber. The anger that had begun to rise in her at first sight of the blood now started to burn, and the warmth felt good. Yaz had never been in a fight before. Life on the ice was all the fight her people needed. But it had been the worst day of her life, and likely it would be the last, and she was prepared to learn quickly.

  * * *

  YAZ HADN’T EVER been far enough south to see one of the bears that roamed between the Shifting Seas, but from the saga plays acted out by the elders she knew this must be one. Black against the glow the thing shuffled closer, head bowed, brushing the broken stumps of icicles. The creature stood twice as wide as her and more again, huge within the shagginess of its coat. A rank odour reached ahead of it. Yaz’s knife suddenly looked very small. Tonkin had told her that a bear’s claws were longer than a man’s fingers. The dagger-fish tooth wasn’t more than four or five inches itself.

  The beast stopped a few yards from her and raised its head. The great mane of its hair moved across what seemed now to be a mass of skins and furs sewn together in confusion to create one huge shaggy coat. The face lifted to regard her was human, the mouth red with blood. A black stain, darker than any bruise, covered one cheek. It seemed almost the shape of a hand, its fingers reaching across nose and brow in sharp contrast to the pale skin beneath. The woman roared, a great openmouthed roar, exposing teeth that had been filed to points. She took a pace forward. Something reddish swung from the hide straps around her waist. Yaz stood transfixed, forgetting the danger. A head hung by its hair from the huge woman’s belt, not a neatly severed head but one torn from the body, trailing strands of meat. And the face that swung toward her was one she knew.

  The cannibal charged and Yaz, frozen with horror, was too slow to evade her. Even among the variety of the southern tribes Yaz had never seen anyone tall enough that the top of their head would come close to this giant’s shoulder. She stood as wide as two men and when she brought both arms up before her in a double-handed blow it lifted Yaz off her feet and flung her back along the tunnel.

  Yaz slid a fair way but before she could rise, or even haul a breath into an empty chest that felt as though every rib had shattered, the woman was on her. She reached down for Yaz with a hand that could close around her whole head.

  The Ictha cannot afford to lose anything. Yaz had looped her knife thong about her wrist and the hilt lay within inches of her fingertips. As the massive hand descended for her Yaz snatched up the dagger-fish tooth and plunged it through the palm.

  The woman snatched her hand back with a roar, nearly taking the knife with it. A heartbeat later a great hidebound foot came thundering down to crush Yaz’s skull. The cannibal’s heel slammed onto stone, pinning Yaz’s hair as she rolled aside. She yanked free and drove her knife through the woman’s other foot, losing her grip on it when the point struck the rock beneath. The monster roared in pain and Yaz saw her chance. She scrambled between the woman’s legs and took off, running down the tunnel behind her.

  4

  YAZ RAN THE way the huge woman had come, sprinting at first, then with more caution. Behind her the roaring had faded into nothing, the cannibal slowed by her injured foot.

  The glow from the ice gradually lessened and the circle of Yaz’s vision drew in about her, a tightening noose. Imagination began to paint her fears into the thickening gloom. She saw the head dangling from the cannibal’s belt, its frozen stare horrific and familiar. Whatever taint had caused little Jaysin to be thrown into the pit would never show now. Yaz hoped it had been the fall that had taken his life rather than the creature that had been eating him.

  In her escape the thong securing Yaz’s knife had snapped, leaving her only weapon transfixing the woman’s foot. She frowned at the murky tunnel ahead, glanced back the way she had come, then carried on, empty-handed against whatever the darkness hid.

  She jogged on, careful of her footing on the grimy floor. The animal stink seemed to be increasing rather than decreasing as she opened a lead on the giant. Several times she passed other tunnels but she kept to the largest, wanting room for manoeuvre if she found herself trapped in a dead end.

  The big chamber took Yaz by surprise. The tunnel didn’t widen, it just opened into a much larger space without warning. Yaz had no idea that caverns so vast could exist beneath the ice. She got a sense of scale through the change in the quality of the sound and through the slight motion of the air. Also there was the marbling effect of half a dozen seams of the tiny stars that offered the walls and roof in glowing bands, too faint to illuminate the contents of the chamber but bright enough to be seen across its width.

  Yaz stood, wondering, wanting to shout out Zeen’s name but lacking the courage. Who knew what other terrors the darkness held?

  Quite what made her turn her head Yaz couldn’t say. It wasn’t som
ething she was conscious of hearing. By the time she looked back over her shoulder and focused on the great dark mass rushing at her out of the tunnel’s gloom she could finally hear the rush of its footsteps. The cannibal gave a bloodcurdling roar. This time, rather than freezing Yaz to the spot the roar galvanised her and she ran, sprinting along the edge of the cavern where the faint illumination might at least warn her of rocks large enough to trip her or to turn an ankle on.

  Wounded foot or not the huge woman came after Yaz with terrifying speed, fuelled by rage and pain, devouring the yards in great strides. The monstrosity pounded ever closer, narrowing the gap between them, roaring giving over to a determined silence punctuated by laboured breaths. Soon Yaz could hear nothing but her own gasping for breath and the thunder of her heart.

  The ground before her began to rise in a slope of ice-worn shingle, channelled and heaped by some ancient flow. Yaz started to scramble up. The shifting stones sucked away the last of her strength and she slowed to a crawl. Behind her the giant followed, sounding like an avalanche.

  “Hey!” A voice from somewhere in the gloom. “Hey! Up here!”

  Yaz glanced around wildly but saw nothing.

  “Here! Catch the line!”

  Yaz swung her head and saw something dangling to her left. A rope! And high up on it a clot of darkness hung. A person! She veered toward them but in that moment the cannibal made a last desperate lunge and fastened a hand about Yaz’s leg, encompassing it from the ankle almost to the knee.

  For a second both of them lay there, sprawled on the slope of shifting stones, too winded to do anything but pant. Yaz found the energy to struggle only once she felt herself being hauled back toward her enemy. She rolled onto her side and looked down. Close up the giant was still more fearsome; the charnel stink of her filled Yaz’s lungs. The ink-black stain across her face seemed to have moved, forming a band across her eyes now, stark against pale but grimy skin. The woman’s gaping mouth began to descend toward Yaz’s thigh, the points of her teeth gleaming wetly. Feeding on Yaz rather than finishing her off seemed to be the priority. Whether it was hunger or cruelty that drove the cannibal Yaz didn’t know but she clearly intended to eat her alive.

  Yaz grabbed a rock and hammered it down, not on the fingers but on the nerve cluster in the wrist. Quell had shown her the trick years before. Yaz struck home with all her strength and with a wordless prayer to the Gods in the Sea. She yanked her leg free just as those jaws snapped shut inches from it, and rolled away.

  The rope hung less than ten yards off, vanishing up into the gloom. The figure on it had gone. Yaz ran, knowing even as she did that she wouldn’t have time to climb high enough before the giant hauled her down.

  She grabbed the rope, a crude thing of twisted hide strips studded with knots, and turned to check her opponent. To Yaz’s surprise the giant hadn’t advanced. A much smaller figure danced around her, throwing fist-sized stones. The missiles seemed only to annoy the giant but when she lurched toward her assailant the boy just danced away. His speed and timing were breathtaking.

  “Climb!” A girl’s voice, high above. “Bring the rope with you!”

  Yaz reached up, taking hold just above a large knot, and began to climb. It was not something she had done before. The ice tends to be flat. But fortunately the Ictha are strong and what she lacked in technique she replaced with muscle power. A short way off the ground Yaz reached down, groaning as her bruised body complained, and grabbed a lower section of the rope to tuck into her belt. Then, bringing it with her, she continued upwards. She had to assume the boy had another means of escape. If he could run as swiftly as his dodging implied then the giant would have no chance of keeping pace.

  * * *

  YAZ REACHED THE top of the rope in darkness. For some yards she had been climbing alongside an ice wall, presumably a vertical shaft in the roof of the cavern. Hands reached out to help her over the lip. More hands than she had expected. A number of strangers crowded around her, drawing her back from the hole.

  “Zeen?” Yaz asked. Nobody answered; they only hustled her along, blind in the dark. Yaz frowned, then stopped moving. She braced herself against the slickness of the ice. “How did you do all this? Make a rope? Get up here? We weren’t that late to the gathering. You couldn’t have been more than an hour ahead, maybe two.”

  Suddenly there was light. All around her, figures shielded their eyes, some gasping as if it had been unexpected for them too. Shadows swung as the light moved, a bright point held between two shards at the end of an iron rod clutched in a young man’s fist. Yaz squinted and could see that the source of the glare was one of the stars she had seen locked in the ice, though this was a larger one, considerably larger than her thumbnail. Despite its dazzle Yaz found herself staring at it, ignoring what its light revealed. It looked like a hole in the world, opening onto some bright place. For a moment the air seemed full of whispers just beyond hearing, the space between them strange and echo-haunted, as if a heavy stone had dropped, rippling the fabric of everything.

  A cough broke the spell.

  Six strangers surrounded Yaz. She spun around. Zeen was not among them. Two were younger than her, two around her own age, one a man in his twenties, carrying the light, and beside him a scar-faced woman in her thirties perhaps.

  Yaz’s frown deepened. What was a grown woman doing here?

  “We had more than an hour’s head start on you, girl,” the woman said. “The younglings came down last gathering.”

  Yaz blinked. “Four years?” Four years in the blackness. Four years under the ice.

  The woman coughed a bitter laugh. “I’ve seen five drops since that old bastard gave me the shove. It’s still Kazik, is it?”

  Yaz nodded. Kazik had been regulator even before her grandmother’s testing.

  “Shame. He’s lived too long.”

  Yaz looked about her at the others. All of them were lean, cheeks hollow, eyes bright, all grimy, all wrapped in gut-sewn skins. The two boys of her own age held makeshift clubs, smoothed stones the size of a fist lashed with hide to the end of bones that looked suspiciously like the thighbones of a large man.

  “My brother?” She held a hand to indicate his height. “Where is he?”

  The others looked down, their mouths in grim lines. Yaz grew suddenly cold, stomach knotting, a twitch coming to her cheek. The scar-faced woman shook her head. “Hetta got him.” She pursed her lips in the direction of sympathy. “Nearly got me once.” She indicated the parallel lines scored across her face as if torn by claws. “Nearly got you too.”

  “No.” Yaz drew a breath, understanding. “That was Jaysin. Zeen is bigger.” As she said it the anger rose in her again. Little Jaysin, timid, eager to please, now torn apart and half-eaten. “The giant didn’t have Zeen. It was Jaysin’s head on her belt.”

  “Gerant,” the young man with the light said.

  “What?”

  “Gerant, not giant. The ones that grow too big. They’re gerant.” The harsh shadows made something sinister of his face.

  Yaz shook her head. She didn’t care about that. “My brother?”

  “He must have come down somewhere else,” the woman said. “The shafts change between gatherings. We can’t cover them all. We didn’t expect anyone out here, but Hetta must have known somehow. She’s cunning, that one.”

  “The taint told her.”

  Yaz glanced back. It was one of the younglings that had spoken, a fair-haired boy now holding his hand to his face in mimicry of Hetta’s black stain. Yaz had never seen hair so pale before, but then she had seen a dozen new things in less than an hour. She turned back to the woman. “My brother. Zeen. He’s all I care about.”

  The woman nodded, biting her well-bitten lower lip. “The other search parties might have got him.”

  “Or the Tainted did,” whispered the young girl standing beside the fair boy.


  The woman shrugged. “We’ll join up with the rest of the Broken and find out.” She held up a hand as Yaz started forward. “Once we’re sure the regulator has finished.”

  “He has,” Yaz said. “The Ictha were the last clan. And I was near the end.”

  “Three Ictha.” The man with the light looked at the woman. “I can’t remember the last time there was even one.”

  The woman shrugged again. “Two now. Or maybe just one. We’ll go find out once Petrick is back.”

  “The boy who attacked the giant?” Yaz asked. “Gerant.” She corrected herself at the young man’s frown.

  Back down the tunnel something rattled. “Speak of the devil.” The woman nodded to the girl who had whispered about “the Tainted.” “Jerra, go let the rope down.” The girl ran off into the darkness. “Check first!” the woman called after her. “And don’t fall down the hole.”

  The woman turned back to Yaz. “I’m Arka. That’s Pome.” She motioned toward the hard-eyed young man with the star. There were other names but somehow they didn’t stick. Zeen was the only name she wanted to hear.

  The girl, Jerra, and the boy Petrick, who close up didn’t look much older, came hurrying back, the girl clutching the rope. Yaz wondered how it had been secured. Her mind always threw in tangential questions at unhelpful moments.

  “Hetta?” Arka asked. Yaz saw the cannibal’s mouth descending toward her leg again, drool hanging from pointed teeth.

  “Still raging.” Petrick grinned. “I lost her in the threads. The new girl stuck her good. Hand and foot!”

  Yaz frowned, her hand returning to her side where her knife should be. Even now the loss weighed on her.

  “And the pools? Any more arrivals?”

  Petrick shook his head. “Think that’s our lot.”

  “Let’s go then.” Arka led the way, Pome at her side, holding his light-stick aloft as though he were some grand official at a clan ceremony.