The Girl and the Stars

by Mark Lawrence

  It’s very deep.

  “I . . .” And there it was, the restless song of a star. Star-stones Arka had called them. Eular had also called them core-stones and heart-stones. Whatever they were they sang and this one sang so deep that the notes reverberated through the longest bones in her body then sank deeper still, beyond sensing. Rising here and there like a whale breaking the surface before plunging into the endless fathoms of the sea.

  *boom*

  A shudder ran through the stone beneath Yaz’s feet, so deep that she would not have noticed it except for Erris. It was as if something the size of a mountain had fallen far away.

  “What was that?” Yaz almost knew but the answer felt wrong.

  Its heartbeat.

  “Oh.” Her answer had been right. Every star had its own heartbeat, the small ones racing so fast that they became a buzzing rising beyond hearing as their star’s size descended toward dust. The large star that she and Thurin had taken from the ice by the settlement had a heartbeat swift as a running child. But the star that Erris had made her listen to had given just one beat and even as the breath she held became painful in her lungs there was no second beat.

  “How big is—”

  *boom*

  That is the star that feeds the void.

  Yaz could feel it now and was amazed that she had not before. She felt it tugging at the boundaries of who she was, washing against her mind in waves, setting voices whispering inside her head. “How big is it?”

  Large.

  The metal body in front of Yaz shifted as Erris returned to it. The arms flexed. “This is why your people scavenge from the city. Surely you know this? Even a small star brings the Path closer to the world. When close to a star of good size even a half-blood quantal can reach the Path and work wonders with the power they can take from it.”

  “They’re not my people. And there are no quantals among the Broken.” Yaz frowned.

  “But they hunt the stars for quantals to use. They trade them, do they not?”

  “That’s why they throw children down here,” Yaz breathed. “The priests of the Black Rock. They might want the stars even more than they want the iron.”

  Erris shrugged, an odd thing to see. Metal grated on metal. “There may be other reasons. It doesn’t seem an . . . efficient . . . solution. But yes, those are reasons too. Any star should be worth a billion times its weight in metal, but I concede that the realities of life in a frozen wasteland might change that balance, especially if the ability to exploit them is rare.”

  Yaz looked around. Her stomach growled, she licked dry lips with a dry tongue, her head ached, and her body felt sore. “How does this help me leave?”

  “You should be dead, Yaz. Being this close to the void star would drive almost anyone else mad, their brain would bleed, they would die. Even most full-blood quantals couldn’t get within a hundred yards without their personality being torn apart. The human mind wasn’t built to withstand this power. It’s like fire. From a distance it lights the way. Closer up it warms us. Too close and we burn. With the stars it’s similar. At a distance there is light. Closer to us they open the Path to those who can find its power. Too close and they split our minds apart. The piece of you that longs to murder becomes its own creature. The part that is jealous, the part that lusts, your anger . . . all of them break away and find their own voice.”

  Yaz nodded. “I can feel that. Voices in my head. A splitting pain.”

  “It’s good you can feel something! I was starting to think you weren’t human at all.” Erris raised a metal hand. “Don’t be offended. It’s just that the city brought you here to die. It’s as if you had been thrown into a furnace and were standing there in the white heat and only now just beginning to sweat. It shouldn’t be. And yet it is.” He set his steel fingers to her shoulder and Yaz kept herself from flinching. “And I am glad of it. Truly.” He looked around and pointed at a section of the wall no different from any other. “That’s where we need to go. Look for the Path. This river of yours.”

  Rather than argue that it was too soon Yaz let her eyes defocus, ignored the pain lancing through her skull, and looked beyond the world.

  If the river were visible at all so close to her last touch then it should have been a gossamer thread far beyond reach. Instead the river roared all around her, a torrent rushing through the world’s impossible angles with a speed that might strip flesh from bone. The shock of it threw Yaz back against the wall and left her trembling.

  “I saw it!”

  “I noticed.” Erris bent his dark head.

  “What do I do?”

  Erris turned away and began clearing a path to the opposite wall, pushing aside heavy blocks from which black ropes emerged, metal casings, parts of . . . things. “You’re the expert, not me. But it shouldn’t be hard. Remember that the Missing have made this route for you. All you need to do is follow it. And take me with you.”

  Yaz advanced along the cleared path toward the wall, kicking away small objects Erris had missed. One whirred alarmingly and scuttled away on pin-like legs to hide among the heaped debris to one side. She came to the wall as Erris hauled aside the last obstacle, metal squealing on stone.

  “So, I just . . .” Yaz set her palms to the stone, finding it warm to the touch, warmer than ice anyhow. She gathered herself for the effort.

  “You don’t need to pound your way through—use the Path to take us, let it show you the way.” He reached out to tap the stone with a steel finger. “We should probably hurry.” Another tap.

  “Hurry?” Yaz looked back over her shoulder and favoured the impenetrable darkness where Erris’s face should be with her hardest stare. “Through a wall?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yesterday I was on the ice, where I had always lived. And now I’m miles below the rocks that are miles below the ice in a city built by the Missing, and I am being instructed on walking through walls by a man who might have died thousands of years ago and is talking to me from inside a body made of metal and . . . and I don’t know what else. All of which is to say: give me a gods-damned moment here.”

  Erris had the wisdom to say nothing.

  Yaz returned her attention to the wall. She could feel the pressure of the void star, feel it eroding who she was, prying apart the constituents of her mind. She leaned in and set her forehead to the stone. “How dangerous is this?”

  “Less dangerous than staying here.”

  “Will I get stuck? Lost in the rock?” When someone became separated from their clan the wind would lay them down in time. The snow would cover them. The ice would take them into itself, locked forever in its depth. “Will I die?”

  Erris’s voice came soft now, almost free of distortion, almost how he had sounded under the warmth of the sun, standing with the grass waving around his feet. “I don’t know.”

  “Thank you for showing me the trees,” Yaz said, a bittersweet pain around her heart as she remembered how they had looked. “At the end of the long night the Ictha take any oil that remains and melt ice. We build a windbreak and our elders dribble the water out . . . It freezes at once, but the skill is to build sculptures as it flows and freezes. They call it the garden.” The shapes had always reminded Yaz of veins, spreading and branching. They were tall and fragile and beautiful, built only for the wind to tear down. A rare Icthan extravagance. But for a while they lasted, and overhead the dragons’ tails lashed in the last of the night sky, the aurora, shifting, ghostly veils of colour. And when the light grew green and echoed within the branches of the ice garden the elders would sing a song without words, holding only loss. The burning of the oil was the only time, save for leaving the dead to the wind, that any Ictha ever wasted anything. Yaz had never understood it, nor known what lay behind the sorrow in the garden-song. “If I die here . . . well . . . I still will have seen trees. You taught me something. And for that I
am grateful.” Perhaps it was the void star’s song eroding her barriers, or the accumulation of two long days since dropping into the pit, or just the fear that she would die, but Yaz found herself trembling, her eyes prickling, the breath threatening to catch in her throat. “Thank you for the flutterby too. And the grass.”

  “Butterfly.” Erris bowed his head. “I’m sorry this has happened to you. You were thrown from the only life you knew. Maybe the only life you could imagine.” His metal hand rested beside hers against the wall. “I fell and lost my future too. The things I had wanted and hoped for. Small things maybe, foolish things, but they were mine and it still burns me even though all those times are gone and forgotten. It still hurts. Both of us . . . we’ve fallen into lives we don’t understand and didn’t ask for.”

  Erris’s ancient pain echoed in Yaz, bringing with it an image of aurora light shivering through ice trees before the dawn. Her face twitched, eyes stung. Her fingers moved to touch Erris’s without instruction and in that moment, without any sense of movement, she stood once more before the timeless peace of the forest, caressed by a warm breeze, her hand in his, flesh and blood once more, black fingers laced with copper fingers.

  “There was a girl I loved. But I fell into the void and never went back to her. I never knew how long she waited for me, what became of her life, or how she died. But I loved her and I was loved, and I keep that with me. It makes me think that I must still be alive . . . some kind of alive . . . because how could even the Missing capture a thing like that in their machines, something so sweet and fragile and strong as love?”

  Yaz lifted her face and found Erris watching her, a tear on his cheek. She could have held on to her own misery forever maybe. The Ictha have strong walls. But that tear cracked her and a sob shuddered through her. Then another. And for a long time they stood, caught in each other’s arms and in their own sorrow, with the trees swaying and butterflies rising from the grass all around them, until their tears were spent.

  The warmth of that day, lost in the centuries, covered by the tide of the ice, but somehow preserved for her here and now, melted something in Yaz. A coldness, the frozen core that she had been wrapped about all her life, surrendered to an ancient summer. The resolution that she would do her duty, play her role as the Ictha needed and demanded, set aside her own hopes and imagination in the grim service of mere survival, all these ran from her. Under the light of a brighter sun long-forgotten dreams began to unfurl with the caution of budding flowers.

  Yaz’s presence of mind returned all at once rather than by degrees, in much the same way the enormity of recent events had suddenly overwhelmed her. She found herself in Erris’s arms, her face buried between his neck and shoulder. Shocked, she broke free, and in the next moment she was standing in the dusty junk-filled room once more, the metal construct looming above her.

  “I . . . I thought we had to hurry.” She found her voice shaky, her body remembering the shape of his. The scent of him still seemed to linger on her.

  “We do. Time passes differently in the void though.” He sounded uncertain too, hesitant, and that pleased her for some reason that she couldn’t squeeze into sentences. “Are you ready?”

  Yaz looked beyond the wall to the endless river of power that flowed about her, there for the taking but so fierce that the slightest error would overfill her and the stolen energies would shred both flesh and bone. She didn’t have to break through the wall—Erris had told her that. She just had to travel. Yaz didn’t reach to touch the river as she always had before. Instead she strained some unsuspected muscle in her mind, trying to let the river touch her. Almost instantly she felt the currents of it flowing through her as they flow through all things, but now they seemed to notice her, to pluck at her flesh, to sweep her along. The effect was immediately alarming and swiftly became painful. The river flows in every direction the human mind can imagine and in far more that cannot be imagined. Before the competing forces could tear her apart Yaz pushed against the wall. She felt the weight of Erris’s steel hand descending upon her shoulder. At the wall the currents began to converge until, when pressed against it, Yaz could feel the dominant tug of one current in one direction. With a sigh of relief she let go her hold on the world and allowed the flow to carry her away.

  16

  ARE YOU THERE?” Yaz could see nothing, feel nothing save that there was ground beneath her feet.

  Only silence. Silence and a cold light, very faint, starting to grow to one side of her. This at least reintroduced direction into her world. A confusion of stark black lines began to make themselves known against the diffuse light, a thousand of them, rising, dividing, reaching, growing thinner. A wind blew. Not the sharp, fierce wind of the ice, but chill and insistent. The black lines swayed and Yaz knew them for the innumerable branches of trees, stripped of their fluttering green, left bare and black to greet the dawn.

  “Erris?”

  But it seemed that she had failed to bring Erris through to wherever this was. A dead forest deep below the ice? But there was a lightening sky and a wind.

  “This isn’t real.” Yaz turned slowly, twigs snapping beneath her feet.

  Another light burned not far off, just visible between the black multitude of trunks, this one a flame, a warm, flickering glow. A lamp. She began to move toward it, weaving her way between trees, warding off their scratching fingers, stumbling as the ground itself tried to snare her with gnarled roots that looped and twisted before plunging into black soil.

  The wind at Yaz’s back slackened and turned colder, the air becoming brittle with frost as the temperature fell. Swaying branches stilled. Traceries of ice began to wrap the trunks and still the lamp’s light seemed to get no closer.

  It grew colder still, not a breath of wind now. The ground’s softness turned to iron. Branches shattered as Yaz knocked them aside, running now and not knowing why. Slanting shadows painted the forest. Behind her a sun rose, its light whiter than the sun she knew, and where it should give heat it took it instead. The white light saturated the forest, wrapping dead trees in ice. This was a cold even an Ictha could respect. Far behind her came a loud retort, then closer at hand, much louder, a thick tree cracked open with shocking violence, spitting fragments of frozen bark, surrendering to the pressures of the ice expanding within it.

  Suddenly the hut was there before her, the single lamp hanging before a wooden door that opened as she drew near.

  “Hurry.” A thin, dark-haired man waved her in. He glanced about at the trees, a nervous quickness to him.

  The interior of the hut seemed smaller than the building in all dimensions, as if the plank walls of the rough shack were a yard thick. The man heaved the door closed as though it weighed many times what he did, and joined her at a tiny table before a small but fierce fire.

  “You made it then.” He seemed surprised, watching her from dark, intelligent eyes set in a face pinched up into a prominent nose. His age was hard to determine. Not young. Maybe not old. Well-preserved. His eyes were old though.

  “Who are you?” Yaz dispensed with manners. She was having too strange a day for politeness.

  “A drink?” He glanced around, disappointed. “Well, maybe. I’m sure I had some absinthe here a moment ago . . .”

  “Who are you?”

  The man leaned in over the table, both elbows on the boards. “My name is Elias. At least, that’s part of my name, but then I am only part of myself, which seems to be a common problem these days.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” Yaz looked toward the door. “Where’s Erris? He said I had to hurry and now instead of running away I’m . . . here.”

  “Ah yes, young Erris. A good-hearted boy, to be sure. I apologise for hijacking your escape, but there’ll still be time enough for all that running and screaming. It’s just that we don’t get many visitors down here and . . .”

  A screech reached in throu
gh the shuttered windows, at once huge and yet far away. A scream like nothing Yaz had heard before or even imagined. Nothing human. A roar so laden with threats of violence and pain that Yaz immediately wanted nothing more than to cower beneath the table and hope for it to end. Instead she fought to keep the quiver from her voice as she asked, “What was that?”

  “That?” Elias flashed her a dark look. “That’s what the end of the world sounds like.”

  “It’s after me?” Panic clawed at Yaz’s heart. She shoved it down, ashamed at her weakness. The scream seemed to echo in her skull.

  “It’s after us all, dear. By definition.” Elias allowed himself a small smile. “But yes, today it’s after you. But only because I showed an interest.” He went to the window. “Care to take a look?”

  “Is this a test?” Yaz stood, warily. Her head brushing the ceiling.

  “Everything is a test.” Elias set a thin, long-fingered hand to the shutter. “Quickly though. Look at him too long and he’ll look at you.”

  Yaz crouched to peer out as Elias eased the shutter back, opening it a crack.

  The cold cut at her with the fierceness of the polar night. The forest lay thick with snow beneath a blazing white sky, all the trees had burst asunder, an army of bare, broken trunks, their branches fallen. And above it all with the frozen light bleeding all around it, some great dark . . . thing, a creature as large as the sky, like a hand but not, a creature of spindly legs reaching out to encompass the world, supporting a knotted body the colour of venom and despair. The thing hypnotised the eye, drawing on the mind behind. Yaz felt her thoughts leaking from her.

  “That’s Seus.” Elias pulled her back.

  “What is it?”

  “In this place it’s what you see it as. A monster that wishes to destroy you. Out in the world it’s a city. The heart and mind of a great city.”