The Girl and the Stars

by Mark Lawrence

  Yaz nodded and made a special effort to stay close after that. The feeling of being followed had returned despite Arka’s assurance that Pome and the warriors with him would not dare to come against them in the city. The silence that had seemed so mystical in the cavern above felt oppressive in the dry emptiness of the undercity, swallowing every noise they made and giving nothing back just as the darkness took their light.

  “It’s waiting,” Yaz murmered.

  “What?” Thurin looked back at her.

  “The whole city. It’s like it’s waiting for something. Holding its breath . . .”

  The next chamber was domed, a change from the depressing regularity of right angles and flat surfaces. On the far wall three symbols glowed, each a yard tall. They reminded Yaz of the sigils that turned a star’s light to heat.

  “We’ll see more of these as we go,” Arka said. “We don’t know their purpose.” She pointed to areas of textured colour spattering the stone around the symbols, patches of brownish yellow and pale blue-green. “That’s lichen. Another kind of plant, but not good to eat. It grows down here anywhere that there’s light.”

  The drop-group moved over to inspect, and as Yaz drew closer the same forbidding that had opposed her at the gateposts flared, though with less force. She ground her teeth and stopped her advance, hoping that nobody would notice. The symbols though had grown brighter and Maya turned to stare at Yaz. “Are they shining because of you?”

  Yaz forced a laugh and shook her head. She could see that where the wall was pitted the symbols persisted as if they were written through the thickness of the stone. “No.”

  “Come closer then,” Quina said, running her fingers across the lines of the central symbol.

  “I . . .” Yaz turned away and went to sit against the opposite wall. “I’ll just rest here.”

  “They faded as you walked away,” Arka said, lifting her star toward Yaz. It too burned brighter as it approached her, underlining Arka’s point. “Can you read them?”

  “Of course I can’t read them!” Yaz snapped. Then, forcing herself to calm: “I can’t read anything.” But she knew what the symbols said though. They told her to go. They told her she was not permitted here.

  Arka stared without comment then led them from the chamber. The symbols flared as Yaz passed them and she felt that stab of pain, the compulsion to go back, but pushed on through.

  They came to a great dusty space where the low ceiling rested on innumerable pillars. Here and there a shaft would vanish into the floor, large enough to swallow a boat and with no bottom to it. Other shafts led upwards, shrouded in darkness.

  “What is that noise?” Yaz pressed her fingers to her ears but it made no difference; the sound was in her head, a discordant rhythm, faint but wild. “It’s like . . .” It was like the heartbeat of a star, only wrong. It seemed familiar somehow.

  “Yaz?” Ahead of her Arka stopped and turned, the others bunching around her.

  “Run.” Yaz wanted to say more, needed to say more, but that was the only word to escape her lips.

  “Yaz?” Arka repeated, tilting her head.

  “Run!” A shout now. “Hunter!”

  The screech of metal on stone, growing louder, coming closer. Quina and Petrick were already running back. The hunter dropped from the nearest vertical shaft, scraping sparks from the walls then absorbing the impact of its landing on five articulated legs. A nightmare creature built from scraps such as the Broken hunted, iron plates, springs and coils, chains, wheels, and wires, its core a black fist from which a hot red light leaked, escaping through every chink in the monster’s armour.

  The thing lunged for Arka’s group with one of several arms, none of them the same. Although too short to reach across the intervening gap the arm proved versatile: the three-fingered grabber at the end detached and flew out to hit Thurin in the back, flooring him. Yaz started forward as the others ran toward her. The long metal fingers of the grabber were closing on Thurin even as the chain attaching it to the hunter’s arm began to haul it back. Before Yaz had crossed half the gap Thurin had twisted free and was up, sprinting for freedom, large pieces of his coat dangling from the iron fingers that had so nearly trapped him.

  “Run!” Arka shouted Yaz’s own instruction back at her.

  The hunter scrabbled across the stone floor, claws seeking purchase, accelerating slowly but with the promise of great speed.

  Yaz and Thurin were last through the doorway Arka selected, and before they were ten yards along the corridor the hunter slammed into the entrance behind them, a host of black metal limbs reaching for them while mechanical legs thrashed to try to cram the monster’s bulk in after its prey. Yaz heard the hunter’s talons snapping closed on the air just behind her. She ran on, taking a corner at speed and crashing into the wall. Behind her the hunter released a long scream of rage, a noise like a metal file being scraped across a rough edge, only magnified a million-fold, vibrating through Yaz’s bones and setting her teeth on edge.

  “Wait!” Arka caught them as they came around the turn. “It can’t follow. It will look for other routes to overtake us.” She drew a deep breath, pale faced in the light of the star she held above them.

  The scream came again, discordant and making Yaz’s stomach want to empty itself.

  “Sounds like we made it angry.” Thurin tried to smile. His furs hung around him in tatters, his exposed body lean and muscular.

  Arka did not return the smile. “It’s calling for other hunters.” She turned away, shaking her head. “We need to go slow. Be vigilant. Take the narrow ways. Too many scavengers are lost when they run from one hunter into the jaws of another.”

  Arka led them at a cautious pace, muttering to herself from time to time.

  “I thought she said you hardly ever see a hunter,” Maya whispered.

  “Normally you wouldn’t,” Thurin said. One of the metal fingers had scored a red line across his exposed back, beaded with blood.

  “Only since the drop . . . there’s been no normal.” Petrick glanced toward Yaz.

  “I . . .” Yaz hung her head. She couldn’t argue. The jump that had upended her life seemed to be turning the Broken’s expectations upside down too. As if the waves from her impact hadn’t died to ripples and vanished against that stony shore but instead had passed on through the ice, growing and growing all the time.

  Less than half an hour later they saw the hunter again, charging at impossible speed the length of a shadow-haunted hall, betrayed by its clatter as Arka ushered them into a narrow passage. And a short while after that a long, thin arm lunged out from some narrow pipe at foot level, scything talons that narrowly missed Quina, who leapt above them with inhuman swiftness. The rest of them edged around the blindly reaching hand, just beyond the reach of its iron claws.

  After that Arka seemed to have lost the creature, though she showed no signs of relaxing.

  * * *

  THE DEEPER ARKA led them the warmer it got. They encountered more symbols, glowing quietly through the stone in rooms bearded with so much lichen that the walls looked diseased. Most stood a couple of feet tall, some a little larger, some could be covered with a hand. All were varied, flowing, and complex. Even the smaller ones hinted at largeness, as though they might be the shadows cast by something infinitely more profound and dwelling in more dimensions than a human mind could fathom.

  Most of the symbols offered Yaz no resistance, others she had to battle past, but all of them shone brighter as she drew near.

  Some of the descents required the navigation of rocky slopes; elsewhere there were stairs. In two places they went down vertical shafts using ropes of an unknown material that had been left hanging there by scavengers. Cables, Arka called them. Kao slipped on the second climb, fell the last two yards, and hurt his ankle.

  “When you can’t run it’s time to head back.” Arka looked up
the long shaft above them, a hundred feet and more, vanishing into the gloom. “I’ll take us by a different route with more stairs and less climbing.”

  Kao muttered that it was time to head back when the hunter first saw them. Arka stiffened but didn’t turn to rebuke him. Yaz felt a certain sympathy for Kao on this one. Whatever his size he remained a child in a maze full of horrors, and now he lacked even the option to run from them. On the other hand it seemed that nothing beneath the ice was safe, and perhaps harsh lessons were all that could be offered. They would learn to survive, or die trying. And much as Yaz wanted to leave this place, she had come here for stars large enough to give Zeen a chance of surviving the cleansing he needed. She hadn’t seen so much as stardust yet . . .

  Arka led them through a series of long galleries, echoingly empty, burdened with a sadness that the rooms before held only whispers of. Yaz saw that this time the others felt it too. Maya had tears cutting tracks through the dirt on her cheeks.

  “We call them the Crying Halls,” Arka said, her face held tight. “Parts of the city will play tricks on you like t—” She stopped dead, spreading her arms to keep the others from passing her.

  “What is it?” Yaz tensed, ready to run from a hunter.

  “Those were not there before.” Arka pointed at a string of symbols on the wall just ahead of them, smaller than those before and so faint they could be easily missed, almost hidden by the light of the star she held above her.

  “Maybe Yaz is just making them brighter so you can see them, but they were always there,” Quina offered.

  “Maybe.” Arka frowned but carried on. Behind her Yaz imagined the Missing who had walked the hallway before them in the long ago and wondered what sorrow might have happened here to linger so many centuries.

  More strings of symbols came into view, some small enough to circle with a finger and thumb. Some more visible than the ones Arka had thought new but all seeming to alarm her. As Yaz passed by the lines a brighter pulse followed along them and a whispering filled her ears as if the text were being read aloud, the words just beyond hearing but laden with meaning.

  Arka quickened her pace, bringing them into a vaulted chamber from which a broad flight of stairs led upwards. Four large symbols blazed on the floor and Arka came to another halt. “These are definitely new!”

  “Does it matter?” Thurin asked, worry and confusion edging his voice.

  “I’ve come back and forth through these halls for twenty years. I’ve never seen a new symbol appear or an old one change.” The fear in Arka’s voice infected the rest of them, the sorrow at their backs turning to foreboding. Even from the rear of the group Yaz could feel the pressure the symbols exerted, like a strong wind opposing her together with the promise of good things if she just turned aside.

  SCCCCCREEEEEEEE!

  A hunter’s scream, worryingly close, ricocheting from the archway to the left.

  “Quick!” Arka skirted around the walls, avoiding the symbols burning on the floor. Kao hobbled after her, then Quina and Petrick, then Maya. Thurin beckoned Yaz on and she tried to follow, straining against the forbidding that lay written out before her. The symbols blazed as she defied them. The light became so fierce that it seemed a brilliant world waited beneath the stone and that the curves of the symbols were just gaps through which it shone. Wisps of pale fire started to dance above the lines. Each of the symbols shouted at Yaz, roaring, adding its voice to a wordless four-part harmony.

  SCCCCCREEEEEEEEEEE!

  Even louder this time, setting Yaz’s teeth buzzing in their sockets. In the distance the clatter of metal claws on stone.

  Yaz came to a halt with her back pressed to the wall, seeking to distance herself from the source of her pain.

  “What are you doing?” Thurin reached out toward her. She read the words from his lips, his face pale, dark eyes wide. “We need to run!”

  “I . . .” She coughed and spat blood on the floor, her head about to split open. The symbols’ song filled her, ringing in her bones.

  “Come on!”

  Gathering the same determination with which she faced the wind as the long night closed in, Yaz forced herself on. Something had to break. For a moment it seemed it must be her. And then, with a last flash and flare, the symbols released their hold.

  “This is all wrong,” Arka muttered to herself, starting on the steps. She glanced back into the room as if expecting the hunter to burst in any moment. “All wrong.”

  They climbed at speed, held back only by Kao and his ankle. More symbols appeared along the walls of the stairway while Arka led the group up the square spiral of steps. Strings of text ignited as the drop-group passed them. More and more. Lines of symbols so small each could be covered with a finger, and so bright that they wrote themselves across Yaz’s furs as she passed, whispering to her all the while, their voices filled with reproach. She felt them burn on her skin, a searing that she thought must leave a mark. The others though showed no discomfort as symbols slid across them.

  The stairs gave onto a large rectangular chamber with many exits. Rubble scattered the floor from old roof falls. Huge single symbols decorated the walls opposite and to either side, lighting the chamber. The lack of any lichen told Yaz immediately that these too were new.

  Even as Arka led them in, more symbols appeared, not revealing themselves by growing brighter but scrolling down from above the ceiling or as strings of text running in through the doorways. Thurin and the rest looked wildly around, the script writing itself across their faces in light, flowing over their bodies. For a moment they reminded Yaz of the regulator and the complex burn scars all across his skin. When they reached her she gasped in pain at their fierce heat.

  Behind them on the stairs a sudden crashing and thrashing, metal on stone, approaching fast, loud enough and close enough for Yaz to hear it over the cacophony of symbol song that none of the others seemed to notice.

  “Run!” Arka shouted. In moments all of them were chasing her through a brightness that was almost blinding. Where the others ran straight paths, symbols of forbidding forced Yaz to twist and turn. More came, moving, shifting, almost as though they were herding her.

  Without warning all the symbols vanished, leaving total darkness. Behind her Yaz heard the hunter take the last turn of the stairs, whirring and clanking, the angry pulse of its core-stone echoing in her head. She took two more steps blind then tumbled as the ground beneath her feet gave way. And for the second time in two days Yaz was dropped into empty space, screaming into the depths of a fall that no person should expect to survive.

  14

  GREEN. A CARPET of green. Innumerable green blades, like the swords of an army pointing at the sky. Yaz could find no sense of scale. She lifted her head and found that the blades were no longer than her fingers and marched in from the distance, running beneath her splayed hands and on behind her. The stuff bent beneath her palms, it stirred in a breath of wind. It seemed to grow from the ground itself, and that ground, hidden beneath a thickness of the greenery, was soft, like nothing she had ever felt before. Not yielding to her weight but lacking the rigidity of ice or rock. And the heat. Heat suffused her. Not with the fierceness of a flame, but soaking into flesh, warming bones.

  The city! She had been falling! In sudden panic Yaz got to her feet, spinning around, overwhelmed by a view so open and yet so complex, nothing in it familiar, nothing that made sense save the sky and the red eye of the sun. Even the clouds were strange. Great puffy white clouds, moving lazily, seeming so close she might touch them. She tensed to run, but where to? There was no ice. None. The ground swelled and dipped and rose toward distant hills. Green everywhere. Beneath her feet. Rising in lumps. Crowning tall structures, a million waving, fluttering pieces. Yaz found herself able to do nothing but stare, overwhelmed.

  “Hello.”

  Yaz turned to find a young man walking toward her. It didn’t s
eem possible that she could have missed him. His smile broadened.

  “I’m Erris.” He was taller than her, broad shouldered, his skin as dark as Tarko’s, the leader of the Broken. Yaz had never seen its like on the ice. The clothes he wore were like nothing she had seen before. Impossibly colourful, and from no beast she had ever seen or heard of. They didn’t hang like hides or furs. “Lestal Erris Crow, actually. But call me Erris.”

  “Where are we?” Yaz glanced around, her gaze returning to the man.

  “Not far from where you fell.” Erris pointed behind her. “Above those trees you can see the ruins of the city.”

  “Trees?” Yaz turned. The things her eyes had refused to understand. They were trees. So tall, like vast tent poles, splitting, branching into an infinitely complex storm of green. And where Erris had pointed so many of them stood that there seemed no space between them, just a vastness of them. Objects reached above the treetops, hazy in the distance, buildings. Ruins Erris had called them, but Yaz had no idea what they would look like if not ruined. They gave an impression of height, making the trees, which must surely tower above her, seem tiny in comparison. “I don’t understand.”

  “It was like this when I first came here.”

  “You . . . Are you one of the Missing?” Yaz stared, trying to see past his disguise.

  “Ha! No. The Missing were gone long before I came to their city. Before our people even came to Abeth.”

  “But . . . there’s no ice.” Yaz shivered despite the pervading heat. “And no wind.”

  Erris pursed his lips, seeming gently amused. He watched her with dark eyes. His black hair held close to his head in tight, tiny curls. Yaz had never seen anyone like him.

  “I came to the city a very long time ago. The ice followed me a while later.” Another smile. Yaz guessed him to be around Thurin’s age. Handsome. Strong features. “I wasn’t supposed to, of course. All our laws forbade it. For our own safety, they said. But how many our age are going to ignore a city of wonders on our doorstep ‘for our own safety,’ I ask you? It wasn’t just that law keeping fools and dreamers away though. The city had its own defences. Much stronger back then. The script would turn anyone away in those days, though it was most effective against quantals like you.”