The Girl and the Stars

by Mark Lawrence

  “Still playing with that thing?”

  Yaz looked up and tried to refocus blurred eyes. She realised that it was Thurin speaking and that she had a splitting headache.

  “What . . .”

  “I said, still—”

  “You went in to see Eular.”

  “I know.” Thurin crouched beside her. “Maya’s in with him now. Are you alright?”

  “I . . . think so.” Yaz frowned and rubbed her brow. “Wasn’t Maya just here . . . ?” Time seemed to slip by in chunks when she looked at the star. The Ictha made all their hides with plenty of small pockets. She slipped the star into one and stood, finding her legs full of protests. “I’m fine. Just some cramp.”

  “Well, stamp it out!” Thurin stood with her. “Petrick thinks Arka might take us to the city today.”

  Yaz didn’t try to hide her surprise. “So soon? Isn’t the city supposed to be dangerous?”

  “I thought you would have realised by now.” Thurin shot her a dark-eyed look, half-sad, half-amused. “Everything is dangerous down here.”

  12

  SPEAKING WITH EULAR left each of the drop-group quiet, their thoughts turned inwards. Even Kao seemed subdued and Quina without her usual quickness that turned every motion into a twitch. She knelt beside Yaz and muttered, “He told me that we are all victims of our childhood, even good ones, for they made us what we are, and it’s a rare person who isn’t disappointed with that. What gave that old man the right to speak to me as if he knows me?” She seemed angry but distracted, as if the words did hold some special meaning for her.

  Yaz shrugged. “People get like that if they live long enough to turn grey. They think they’ve seen it all and have answers for everyone. But they’re so distant from living life that they forget that we all have different paths.” She met Quina’s eyes. “Maybe . . . or perhaps he does have a power after all, and we should listen.”

  Quina nodded, and half turned to move away, still troubled. “I thought I was dead when the regulator gave me the push. I knew it was coming. I was too fast. Different. Feeling the cold every night no matter how many furs I scrounged. I thought I was going to die. Even after the drop for a while I thought I must be dead and this is what the hells are.”

  “What changed your mind?” Yaz grinned. “Could you make a better hell?”

  Quina echoed the smile. “I guess the Tainted are like a hell on our doorstep. But this . . .” She waved at the starlit cavern. “It’s interesting down here. I had expectations about my life with the clan but one thing I never expected to see was anything different. I expected to spend my whole life looking at the ice. The same thing, every day. A long white view to a white-on-white horizon. And that’s gone. The wind is gone. Predictability gone.”

  “Safe gone,” Yaz said.

  “True. But I’ve been given something I never knew I wanted. Not these caves, but the possibility of change. The idea that I have no idea what my life will be tomorrow, or next year.”

  “You’d go back though?” Yaz asked, examining her own mind for any trace of doubt.

  “Hells yes. In a heartbeat.” Quina snorted. “But it would be a different me who went back. Already, even after just a day.” She walked away, aiming herself at Petrick. The two were of an age and Yaz had already noticed them spending time in each other’s company.

  Yaz returned to her own thoughts. The regulator wanted her back but his message didn’t tell her how to leave. Or perhaps it did and Hetta chose not to pass that part of the message on. Did she truly want to return? If she managed to recover Zeen, and if the regulator allowed him back too . . . wouldn’t the ice kill him? And life for her would be in service to the priesthood, part of their number, caged within the confines of the Black Rock, her clan forgotten. Was it better to be imprisoned in the priesthood, part of the system that discarded children into the Pit of the Missing? Or to have the freedom of the caves along with all the hardship and danger that came with them?

  * * *

  EVENTUALLY PETRICK LED them back to Forge Lake and, following his report of recent events, stayed at Arka’s request.

  Yaz joined the others in the smiths’ shed to observe the beautiful Kaylal and his friend Exxar tease iron into chain links with their hammers. Later the drop-group provided an audience while silent Ixen and the bony woman sorted newly scavenged metal by type. And finally they watched a gerant smith and several apprentices beating steel plates into pieces of armour.

  At last, with their ears ringing and sweat running inside their furs, Yaz and the others followed Arka from the cavern. Yaz found herself eager to leave. To free Zeen from the taint she would need stars of a size the Broken were unlikely to risk using up for someone who had never been part of their community. The city held such stars. Eular had said as much.

  Arka lined them up and cast a critical eye over their short rank. “We will be going down to the city. I fear you may find it somewhat quiet after your recent . . . excitement. On my last dozen trips to the city I saw no taints and only once glimpsed a hunter. So you already have me beaten with just today! In any event, we shall not be going deep. Just far enough to give you an idea of the place.” She led off, waving for them to follow. “Keep your eyes open. They say bad luck comes in threes.”

  Yaz walked near the back with Thurin. Petrick brought up the rear.

  “How is it,” she asked, “that Hetta was hunting someone through the tunnels and ready to attack us all when only the day before I put my knife through her foot and hand? I know she’s tough and . . . well . . . insane, but I’ve seen Ictha take weeks to recover from smaller injuries.”

  “Maybe the Ictha heal slowly.” Thurin offered that half grin of his. “There has to be a price to pay for not feeling the cold, surely? And for being ridiculously strong.”

  Petrick spoke up from behind. “The tainted are full of demons. And some of those demons bring gifts as well as curses. Hetta’s been left for dead before and killed someone a week later. We have orders to remove her head next time. Just to be sure.”

  Yaz walked on, thinking about Hetta, the size of her, the ferocity, and how she ate Jaysin. Thurin said it was the devils under her skin that made her do it, but it was difficult to hate a black stain rather than the woman who has tried to kill you.

  Several times Yaz had the strong feeling she was being watched, followed through the caverns. But glancing back over Petrick’s head all she saw were gloom and shadows divided by the distant glow of stardust. She found it hard to imagine Hetta as a stealthy tracker even if she had managed to surprise them earlier.

  * * *

  ARKA LED THE group through chambers thick with fungi, great swathes of the stuff growing silently in the light and relative warmth of broad bands of stardust. It seemed to Yaz that the fungi mimicked in beiges, browns, purples, and pinks the striations of colour in the ice above them, their muted palette echoing the stars’ glow.

  In several places harvesters could be seen working alone or in close pairs among the groves of fungi. Yaz picked her way between the growths, some as round as wind-carved ice balls, some open with feathery fronds, and yet others taller, thinner, and blunt ended. Kao made some remark about these last ones and sniggered but Yaz missed what he said.

  As the air grew colder and the caves darker the fungus groves began to thin and vanish. Tending one of the last of them was a gerant so huge that all of the drop-group stopped to stare. Arka called the man over and he came shambling across with his sack on his shoulder, his patchworked furs hanging loose around him, big enough to serve as a tent for all the rest of them.

  “This is Jerrig,” Arka said, “a long-serving harvester. When you eat tonight it will likely be something Jerrig has tended and picked.”

  Jerrig smiled at them. Despite the brutality of his forehead and jawline something timid lay behind them, and the eyes that peered from beneath those brows looked half-shy. The man
stood perhaps ten feet tall and slabbed with muscle albeit softened by a layer of fat, and yet he seemed nervous of children half his height and fresh from their drop. Without speaking he opened his sack to show them his collection. Scores of the round fungi, none smaller than two fists, and all blushing either reddish brown or purple-grey.

  “Thank you, Jerrig.” Arka touched his arm and the man smiled again before returning to his duties.

  “Can’t he speak?” Kao snorted.

  “He can,” Arka said. “But he is a wise man and chooses often to be silent.”

  She led them on, leaving the growing chambers far behind.

  * * *

  THE CAVERNS GREW darker, the stars either mined out or absent due to the whims of the ice. Their footsteps rang in the frosty air and the darkness returned no echoes. Arka slowed her advance, leading by memory. Yaz strained to see in the deepening gloom. Someone was following them, following her, she felt sure of it, something creeping behind them. The sudden groaning of the ice made her flinch. The others started at the sound too, all of them on edge.

  “Something is wrong here . . .” Arka came to a halt.

  Something was wrong. The darkness sat around them, hungry and waiting. The ice, Yaz’s companion all the years of her life, felt wrong. It had always been uncaring, unforgiving, as brutal as the wind . . . but this was different. A cold malice.

  “I . . . I could make some light.” Yaz’s voice seemed thin and cracked, even to her, a feeble challenge to the silence that had grown among them.

  Nobody answered her. Beside Yaz Maya shuddered and hunched in on herself. Yaz reached for the pocket where she had placed Pome’s star. Everything resisted her, as if the sense of hopelessness that had enfolded them had thickened the air itself into ropes that bound her arms. Even so she forced her hand forward, ever more slowly, sinking into the depths of the pocket, fingers questing, certain now that they would find nothing. Nothing good at least.

  When Yaz’s hand closed about the star it was as if a clean wind blew through her, clearing her mind. She drew it out into the open, reminding it of how it once shone, and in an instant the marbled blue glow became a fierce, unforgiving light.

  On the surface with the Ictha the true stars that lit the long night offered no warmth but their red glow came softly through the darkness, whispering away details, hiding wrinkle and blemish. Yaz’s starlight carried a harsh edge, throwing each face into sharp relief, accentuating any defect, edging Arka’s scars in black, making something grotesque of Thurin’s mask of horror.

  “Brighter,” Yaz murmured, and the darkness slunk away, retreating down tunnels and into adjoining caverns.

  The others shook themselves, throwing off the malaise that had ensnared them.

  Where Kao, Maya, Quina, and the rest of them looked about themselves in confusion Thurin stared upwards, hunting.

  “There!” He pointed, hand trembling.

  “No?” Arka saw it too.

  It seemed like a shadow to Yaz. A shadow on the ice above them. Only there was nothing to cast such a shadow. “The ice is . . . grey?” It took her a moment to understand. “The ice is grey!”

  Following the stain back across the cavern roof she saw that it thickened and darkened until where it vanished into the gloom of the next chamber it might even be black.

  “Back!” Arka turned, arms spread, ushering them toward another cavern.

  “What is it?” Quina asked, staring but backing away.

  “The taint,” Thurin said.

  “You didn’t know it was here?” Kao asked Arka, pale in Yaz’s light. “You led us into it?”

  “Theus is behind this. I know it.” Thurin backed away slowly as if holding every part of himself tight. “The taint can spread. It can move. Not fast, but faster than the ice moves.”

  “It’s followed some fault in the ice or a shift in the heat flow,” Arka said. “I don’t think Theus—”

  “You don’t know what he’s capable of!” Thurin was nearly shouting.

  “You’re right. I don’t.” Arka held up her hands, peacemaking. “All I know is that it can spread.” She ushered them into a tunnel leading away. Standing to count them past her. “But it almost never does . . .”

  Thurin followed Yaz away from the cave with a last glance over his shoulder and a shudder. “A lot of things that never happen have happened today.”

  Even as she left, something tugged at Yaz, the feeling that she was being watched an unbearable itch on the back of her neck. She swung about, shaping the star’s light into a beam. It took an effort—a small shard of pain made itself known deep in her head—but the star shone as she asked it to, and she sent its radiance lancing into the chamber from which the taint had spread.

  “Arka!” There, exposed in the distance, darkness’s black sheet whipped from them, stood a handful of ragged figures, grime stained, frozen by the light’s sudden interrogation.

  “Tainted!” Thurin cried the warning. But the Tainted were already in full retreat, running for the security of the shadows.

  The smallest of them lingered, just a moment, casting a malevolent glance over his shoulder, black eyes gleaming, mouth twisted in a rictus of hate. And in that heartbeat before he looked away and sprinted after the rest of the Tainted, Yaz recognised her brother.

  “Zeen!” She gave chase with no thoughts for her safety, knowing she could never catch her brother in a footrace.

  Thurin brought her crashing to the ground and they struggled briefly before she flung him away, slamming against the nearest ice wall. Yaz found her feet but Zeen was gone. Even the sound of his footsteps had faded into the distance, and into the momentary silence came Thurin’s groaning.

  “You stopped me!” She helped him up, her anger warring with concern that she might have done him some serious injury.

  “It’s how they trap you!” Thurin rose, clutching his side.

  “That was my brother!” Yaz shouted.

  “That was a demon wearing your brother like you wear a hide.” Thurin winced and straightened. “They would have trapped you in the black ice and tainted you.”

  Arka joined them, the others following. “It’s true. At least you know he’s alive.” She gave an apologetic shrug. “Though it might be better for him if he weren’t.”

  Yaz shook off the hand Quina reached tentatively toward her. Her anger still smouldered even though she knew they were right. Zeen was alive and she wasn’t able to drive the taint from him. Not yet. “Come on.” She headed back the way Arka had been leading them, eager now to reach this city.

  Even in the tunnel Yaz felt followed, as though the taint might be snaking after them through the ice, and the Tainted following in its wake. Zeen’s hate-twisted face returned to her mind whenever she rested her eyes on any patch of shadow. Thurin, limping beside her without complaint, was her only proof that her brother remained behind those demon-tainted eyes, whole and restorable.

  The sensation of being watched returned so strongly when they came into a wider chamber and crossed it that Yaz turned back, asking her star to shine once more, shaping its light into a beam that reached out to where they had entered. Three figures became visible and immediately drew back. Two with spears and behind them someone huge. They lacked the ragged twitchiness of the Tainted.

  Arka turned just in time to catch a glimpse. Her face tightened in shock. She spoke quickly and quietly as the others stared at the dark mouth of the tunnel into which the trio had retreated. “That was Pome, I’m sure of it. Was there a gerant? Yes? That would be Bexen, his enforcer. The other one was probably Jalla, a hunska warrior in his faction.”

  “What are they doing?” Yaz asked. “Why would they follow us?”

  “Quickly!” Arka was already moving. “If they’re following us, way out here near the city, then whatever they want is nothing good. They’re not here to protect us from the
Tainted. That’s for damn sure!” Arka had them jogging now. “Pome has always had a brittle pride. You were wrong to push him, Yaz. He knows how to talk, that one. He has many who listen, and he wants Tarko’s position. If you make him look weak then he has to do something to take that strength back again.” She hurried them through a narrow, twisted tunnel, the close confines carrying her voice back to Yaz. “The day he makes his move there will be blood. Pome’s the sort who would rather break something and own the pieces than see another hold it whole. And I don’t mean to let him start with us!”

  Yaz hurried on with only Petrick between her and any pursuit. At every moment she expected a spear to come winging out of the darkness. She had seen something in Pome’s eyes, an emptiness that reminded her of the wind and that made her think him capable of anything if he thought he held the upper hand. She hoped that Zeen would keep clear of him. Something told her Pome might not be much of a warrior but she was certain he enjoyed killing when the odds were heavily enough in his favour.

  Arka led them at a stiff pace, all of them watchful, no longer trusting the ice, until at last they came to the long slope.

  “Here,” Arka said. “The taint can never come here. That at least is for certain. And this is scavenger ground. No warrior would choose to face us here. Warriors they might be but they still fear the hunters.” Even so, she glanced back to where Pome and the others might appear.

  “What is it?” Maya seemed more awed by the slope than scared of pursuit.

  Arka smiled and gestured ahead of them. “You’re looking at something the Missing walked on.”