The Girl and the Stars

by Mark Lawrence

  Thurin’s magic fluttered around her and the ice swallowed the star as easily as if she were pressing it into fresh snow. “It’s still not working!” he hissed.

  Yaz stepped back. The star’s red glow gave the ice around it a bloody hue. “Sing,” she told it. And in an instant the light returned, bright as it had ever been.

  “Come on!” Thurin grabbed her shoulder, nails biting into bare skin. “We need to go back.” He pulled her with him. “Pray nobody saw that!”

  Both of them stumbled into the settlement, exhausted. Yaz found herself unable to stop yawning and Thurin seemed barely able to stand. “Working the ice . . . takes something out of me.” He straightened with effort.

  Yaz just nodded and followed as he led off again. Her sight had yet to recover entirely and the cavern’s twilight pulsed around her. Amid it all a mysterious clot of shadow moved across her vision like a person wrapped in night.

  “I’m not normally so weak,” Thurin muttered. “But when I was . . .”

  “With the Tainted,” Yaz supplied.

  He nodded. “My ice-work got used, but it wasn’t me using it. I was a passenger in my own body. I’m out of practice at being me . . . if that makes any sense.”

  Yaz said nothing. Part of her was thinking of Zeen, demon-haunted, wandering out there somewhere in the black ice. The other part ran Thurin’s words through her mind. Out of practice at being me. She felt adrift. She had, for her entire life, been a small but vital part in a single organism dedicated to survival against the odds. Just like every other member of the Ictha she’d carried out her duties in the certain knowledge that should she fail they would all suffer. On the edge of extinction every mistake carried a fatal edge, every waking moment had a purpose, every hour was occupied. It seemed strange that after what should have been a fall to her death she had for perhaps the first time in her life a chance to practice being her.

  On the outskirts of the settlement Thurin turned and looked out across the great cavern sleeping in its own starlit twilight. A dozen openings led from it into other caverns or tunnels. “It’s pretty, but seriously though, don’t wander off.”

  “I might get lost?” asked Yaz, trying not to bristle at the suggestion she couldn’t look after herself.

  “You might get taken.” Thurin made a flat line of his mouth. “Hetta will only eat you. Theus haunts the dark, and those they can’t fill with demons . . .”

  “What happens to them?”

  Thurin turned away. “Sometimes we hear them screaming, even here. It can last for days. They do it to tempt us out there.”

  Yaz hung her head. The shadows and starlight seemed suddenly less beautiful and she shivered despite the warmth.

  Thurin led off wearily without saying more.

  They reached the barracks and almost fell through the door. Yaz found the energy to close it behind them, noticing as she did so that the door to Arka’s hut stood ajar. She wondered for a moment if the woman had watched them return together. She decided that she was too tired to care, about anything, and crawled beneath her thin blanket with a sigh. She thought of this Theus, this nightmare creature waiting for them in the darkness, and was sure she would lie awake until the next day. But she was asleep before she drew her next breath.

  7

  HUA, LEAST OF all the Gods in the Sea, made Zin, the first man, from salt water, the bones of a tuark, and the skin of a whale. While Aiiki, least of all the Gods in the Sky, made Mokka, the first woman, from ice, clouds, the whispers of four lost winds, and a colour stolen from the dragons’ tails.

  Zin climbed from the waves and scaled the great cliffs to find that Mokka was there on the heights before him and had already set her tent. Zin asked if he might enter for the wind was a stranger to him and cruel. Mokka knew the wind as she knew herself and let the man come within, for he would die without.

  Zin brought fish from beneath the water and he ate to restore his strength. Mokka asked if she might eat for the sea was a stranger to her, showing its face but rarely. Zin knew the waters as he knew himself and let the woman eat, for she had known only hunger.

  Hua and Aiiki were the least of all the gods and neither spoke nor touched, but the children of their minds came to walk all corners of the world, and their work was in its way as mighty as that of any in the sky or in the sea.

  None walk ice but for the sharing of Zin and Mokka. None survive there alone for the wind is cruel and the sea is a stranger. All their children are taught this lesson in their cradle hides. To forget this is to forget ourselves. To forget this is to go into the ice before your time.

  * * *

  A CLANGING SOUND drew Yaz from the depths of her dreaming. An alien noise. The Ictha owned little metal and what they did own came from the priests of the Black Rock: iron pins that could be driven into the ice where bone would prove unequal to the task; knife blades for those who could afford the trade goods demanded for such things. Yaz’s uncle owned an iron knife but it had been her grandfather who purchased it with the horn of a narwhal and a stack of bundled tuark skins as tall as himself. Even so, Yaz had heard the sound of metal on metal before: it clanged.

  *CLANG*

  Yaz sat abruptly then clutched her blanket to her. On all sides her fellow newcomers were sitting up, remembering where they were, and realising that they had no idea what to do until someone arrived to tell them. Yaz drew up her legs and hugged herself, not against the cold but against the memories of the previous day.

  The clanging stopped but Arka failed to appear.

  “What was that?” Maya asked.

  “It’s to wake up the day shift.” Thurin yawned and stretched. “Not that we have nights and days down here. But Tarko likes to keep things ordered.”

  “So, we’re awake.” Kao hulked in front of the star-lamp, throwing everyone into shadow. “Where do we go for breakfast?”

  The others grinned but Kao’s answering scowl showed that he wasn’t joking, and now that Yaz thought about it she discovered herself to be ravenous. She went to dip a hide cup into the water bucket at the end of the barracks and drank. The bucket was made of no substance she knew. The water tasted clean but everything here was strange, nothing felt right.

  “Where did all the young ones go?” Quina asked suddenly.

  “They fell to the taints,” Thurin answered in a quiet voice.

  “She told us that yesterday. The scar-faced woman . . . Arka.” Kao sneered, though whether at Quina’s stupidity or some distaste for Arka, or both, Yaz couldn’t tell.

  “But why?” Quina persisted. “Why are all of us here nearly grown and all the young ones . . . none of the older ones . . . with the taints?”

  “It’s a good question.” Thurin closed off Kao’s retort with a raised hand. “It depends on how the pit is. The vents form, stretch, and twist as the ice flows, and then are abandoned as the heat finds a new more direct route to the surface. There can be many ways down and sometimes who falls where just depends on how heavy they are. The shafts sort them like . . .” He wriggled his fingers as if trying to pluck a good analogy from the air.

  “Fish in a sorting basket,” Maya offered.

  Yaz and Quina grunted. It was well said. In a sorting basket the fisher shook their catch in the right way and the largest rose to the top, the small fry packing the tail.

  The door banged open. Arka leaned in. “Come on then, eat!” She frowned at Thurin. “You know this stuff. Show some initiative.”

  The five of them followed her out into the same gloom that had seen them to bed. Kao, Quina, and Maya clutched their capes about them, and Yaz brought her blanket. Arka cast a disapproving eye over them. “Alright, alright, you can go fetch your clothes from the drying cave. I want you back here before I get bored of waiting. Thurin, make sure they don’t get lost.” She clapped her hands. “Run!”

  Thurin led off at a steady pace, weaving around
the larger puddles. Quina kept easily at his shoulder, Yaz next holding to a straighter path, Kao and Maya labouring at the rear, one too heavy for speed, the other too short-legged for it.

  Yaz slowed considerably when they reached the ravine. The narrow path down into it gave onto a decidedly fatal-looking drop on one side. Quina was nearly dressed by the time Yaz joined her and Thurin. The heat immediately made Yaz sweat, droplets beading the redness of her skin and making her wonder why she’d bothered drying the clothes. In the north an Ictha could not afford to sweat. Even that small amount of moisture could see them freeze entirely. Here in the heat and dampness she seemed to do little else.

  “Be quick about it,” Thurin advised. “We don’t want to make Arka look bad. Pome is just itching to find fault and get himself put in charge of us. If he put half as much effort into defending us against the Tainted as he does into fighting Tarko and agitating then we’d still have them confined to the black ice.”

  “He . . . he’s not dangerous though?” Little Maya looked worried. She looked worried most of the time.

  Thurin made a half shrug. “Arka thinks he is, but Tarko doesn’t see it. Arka isn’t convinced that everyone who’s disappeared lately has been taken by the Tainted or while scavenging. But that’s hard to prove. Just because some of those who vanished were standing in Pome’s way doesn’t mean he had a hand in it. Life down here is dangerous . . . So don’t go making enemies of Pome or anyone else. Especially Pome.” He glanced at Yaz, a warning look, as if standing up for him last night had been a foolish thing.

  Yaz dressed in a hurry, haste making her clumsy, and then had to wait for Maya and Kao to finish before Thurin would lead them back.

  “Why dry clothes all the way out here anyway?” she asked.

  “The stone keeps the heat in better than any shelter. And we don’t like to make too much heat under an ice roof. Sometimes they don’t just drip. A chunk can fall. And that tends to hurt.”

  Yaz winced.

  Quina stood, fully dressed in her clan furs. Their clothes identified their clans both by design and composition. Nothing but men survived on the ice in the far north so the Ictha had no furs save the few they traded. They wore hides and skins. Among the Broken, though, the differences were lost amid years of repairs. The coat and leggings that wrapped Thurin’s narrow musculature were a patchwork of furs and leathers in which Yaz saw no clues at all to his clan. Quina offered her a narrow smile, quick then gone. “More speed less haste. We’ll get your brother back from the Tainted. They got Thurin back after months. So you can take the time to match your ties up.”

  Yaz looked down to realise she had mismatched one side of her outer coat to the other. “Dung on it!”

  Quina’s grin returned. “Is that how they curse in the north?”

  Yaz felt her cheeks colouring but she nodded. She found herself liking this narrow girl with her guarded ways and swift smiles.

  “I thought the Ictha would be good at swearing, what with all those long nights to practice!” Quina went to the doorway. “I’ll teach you some better ones later.”

  Maya’s struggling head emerged wide-eyed from the top of her parka. “You’re going to rescue your brother?”

  “Yes.” Yaz frowned. The Ictha would call it throwing good spears after bad. The Ictha couldn’t afford grand gestures. Weakness had to be abandoned on the ice. Grow too old, get sick, become injured, become a burden and the harsh equations of wind and cold dictated that you be left. No one would come after her. She had committed the crime of weakness and the Pit of the Missing was her sentence, though somehow the regulator had commuted it. She set her jaw, defiantly. This was a new world. New rules applied. “Yes, I am. And soon. Coming with me?”

  Maya paled at that and edged toward Thurin, waiting in the doorway. Thurin shot Yaz another glance, this one unreadable. Quina had already left the hut.

  “Come on!” Thurin waved to go, even though Kao was still struggling to get his other overboot on and lace it.

  “I feel better like this.” Yaz stamped her boots, the rock no longer grating against the soles of her feet. Back in the clothes she’d been wearing when she dropped, Yaz felt like an Ictha again. She looked like one too. The mix and colour of her skins declared it. She wondered how long it would take for her differences to fade into the patched oneness of the Broken. She wondered if the guilt would ever fade. If she would ever lose the feeling that it had been her fault that dragged her here. Her failure that deprived the Ictha of a pair of able hands and took her parents’ first and last child from their tent.

  The others started up the path at a half run, laughing as Kao bellowed curses after them. Yaz followed, deep in her thoughts, Kao labouring behind her, still snatching at his boot. He began to catch them up in the second great chamber, puffing and blowing.

  “Call that running? Arka told us to hurry!” Quina sped off, showing a remarkable turn of speed. “Come on!”

  Thurin made to chase after her but paused when he saw that Yaz had come to a halt. “The Ictha girl needs to rest?”

  “No . . .” Yaz wasn’t sure what it was but it was . . . something. The river that runs through all things remained hidden from her, she had used its power on the previous day to match the endurance of her tribe and it would be some time yet before she could find it again. But even when the river lay beyond her reach there were echoes of it everywhere, lines, infinitely many and infinitely fine, running from and to every part of every thing. She only had to defocus her vision to see those threads, and sometimes, like now, they encroached without her asking. They had pulsed in the air around Regulator Kazik while he inspected her at the mouth of the pit and they vibrated now, throughout the cavern, as if they were a net across which something heavy were advancing. “Over there.” She pointed without seeing.

  “No . . .” Thurin spoke the word in disbelief.

  “What is it?” Maya moved to stand behind Kao as he joined them, puffing, and with angry words waiting only on the breath with which to express them.

  Yaz could now see two points of light in the direction she’d aimed her finger. Far across the dark cavern. Hard white light of a kind she had never seen. Not the soft red of sunlight or the warm orange of flame.

  “With me!” Thurin shouted. “Run!”

  Yaz took off after Thurin, the others following, all but Quina, who had gone off ahead and become lost from sight in the gloom. “What is it?”

  Thurin saved his breath for running. Yaz pounded after him, praying no unseen fold of the rock would trip her, and from behind came a growing clatter of hard feet hitting stone, a clattering and a clashing and a thrashing. Whatever the thing was it was gaining on them at a frightening rate. In seconds it would be on them, and with the cavern wall looming ahead they had nowhere to run in any case.

  “In! Crawl!” Thurin reached the cavern wall at a point where the base failed to quite meet the floor, leaving a narrow gap between ice and rock. Yaz threw herself after him, cutting her hands on the grit to save tearing the knees from her leggings. Skin grows back, hides don’t, was an old Ictha saying.

  “Deeper!” Ahead of her Thurin was on his chest, scraping further in.

  Kao and Maya launched themselves after Yaz and a heartbeat later their pursuer hit the wall with a thump that shivered through the ice. A shower of pulverised fragments fell in a white veil across the entrance to the gap.

  “Quick! Get in deeper!” Thurin sounded desperate.

  “I can’t!” Kao’s thick body jammed two yards short of Yaz’s position.

  “Grab hold!” Yaz had already half turned to wedge herself deeper and now turned further to reach back for Kao’s outstretched hand. Behind the boy she could see what seemed a forest of black legs through the clearing debris.

  “Pull!” Kao screamed.

  Yaz hauled, trying to anchor herself, but Kao proved more tightly held and instead they only
succeeded in dragging her forward a few inches.

  Behind Kao’s scrabbling feet something large and black clanged against the rock and a blinding white eye filled the crevice with light.

  “Try again!” Thurin shouted and above Kao a layer of ice several inches thick shattered and fell away as Thurin exercised his power.

  Yaz hauled and Kao lurched forward.

  Through slitted eyes Yaz could see a variety of limbs invading the gap, some sinuous like black metal tentacles, others rigid and articulated, iron arms with too many elbows and skinning knives for claws.

  Kao jerked his foot back as one of the clawed arms reached for it.

  Thurin shouted behind them. “Back further! It opens up!”

  In a nightmare of squeezing and pushing, Yaz and Kao burrowed deeper until at last, as Thurin said, the ice roof lifted slowly, then swiftly, and they found themselves in a bubble the size of an Ictha tent, the almost-dark broken by the faintest glow from the walls.

  “What in the long night is that thing?” Yaz almost had to shout to hear herself above the grinding and fracturing noises coming from the cavern wall though it was now separated from them by ten yards of ice.

  “A hunter from the city,” Thurin said. “It shouldn’t be here. They hardly ever leave the ruins.”

  “But what is it?” Yaz demanded.

  Thurin only shook his head. Behind him the glare from the hunter’s eyes was a diffuse white glow reaching through the yards of ice.

  Yaz crouched down to peer back the way they’d come. The hunter had lifted its head to get in close and was reaching for them blind. The longest of its arms raked the rock two yards shy of their chamber but could reach no further. The only light now was a deep red one, so deep it was almost black at times, radiating out from between the plates of armour covering the creature’s body. Yaz couldn’t make sense of the thing, it looked like a random collection of pieces, segmented together. “How long will it stay?”