The Girl and the Stars

by Mark Lawrence

  “So how did Thurin get rescued if this is all so impossible?” Quina asked.

  “His mother, Arka, and some of the warriors spent a long time stalking Tainted through the margins, the edge of their territory where there are areas with just about enough light to see in. Eventually they got lucky and found him on his own. And they still didn’t manage to get clear without a fight.”

  “We don’t have time for that . . .” Yaz felt the beginnings of despair. She was risking all their lives and the chances of success seemed slim to none.

  “I know a way.” Thurin started off along the tunnel into the darkness. Yaz could hear strain in his voice as though he were fighting some internal battle. “I can get us to the melting pools. There are places to hide, and the Tainted come there on their own mostly, dragging ice.”

  “But the light,” Petrick said. “They’ll see us before—”

  “I don’t need to see to get us there.” Thurin stared down at his hands as if the admission shamed him. “I was one of them for more than a year. And most of the Tainted can hardly see in the dark. They feel their way. Only the ones with really strong demons are able to see far without light, and then only if the demon moves into their eyes.”

  Yaz set off after Thurin dogged by guilt at expecting the others to follow, and knowing that if she paused too long to think things through she would retreat into indecision. Quell followed, and one by one so did the rest, drawn into the darkness by the bonds between them, the desire not to be alone, and the lack of options.

  “Hide the star.” Thurin’s voice came to Yaz from the gloom ahead, harsh with strain.

  She quieted the star until it gave nothing but a glimmer of the sea at evening, then concealed it in her skins. “Everyone take hold of the person ahead of you,” she hissed, and reached out to find Thurin even as Quell took a firm grip on her belt.

  “Stay calm,” Petrick hissed as he followed the others. “The demons find their way in most easily when you’re angry. Any flaw can be exploited: cruelty, jealousy, hate. But anger’s the hardest to avoid.”

  Without talking now they walked blind into the Tainted’s caverns. Of all of them, Thurin at the front and Petrick at the rear must have known the most fear, Thurin in particular returning to a nightmare already experienced. And Petrick having lived for years with this threat and tales of the waiting horrors. But all of them were scared. No one walks blind into a night haunted by creatures like Hetta without fear.

  * * *

  IMAGINATION TURNED EVERY drip of meltwater and every groan of the ice into the approach of a monster. Yaz tried to dispel the feeling that Zeen was watching her, a twisted thing now, infested by demons that had wrung his flesh into new forms. The noise of the others behind her, their muffled footsteps, the breath drawn into their lungs, all of it combined to give the impression that the Tainted were gathering around them, corralling them, an awful hunger on their grinning faces.

  The Tainted’s territory seemed quite extensive. They stumbled on for what might have been a mile. Yaz tried not to brush against the ice. She could feel the hate emanating from it. Sometimes there were bands of anger, lust, or greed, but an ancient malice ran beneath all of these, the only constant. The menace of it wore at her and stray thoughts that were not her own crept across her mind. Given time she knew that this place would wear her down, get inside her.

  * * *

  “WE’RE HERE.” THURIN’S voice sounded different when he whispered. His breath tickled at Yaz’s ear, making her shiver. “Pass it on.”

  The space felt like many they had passed through, open and cold, with ice-scraped rock beneath her feet.

  She felt behind her and patted her way up Quell’s bare arm to find his head. “We’re here.” She felt him nod. Solid, dependable.

  The faint whisper travelled down the crouching line.

  Thurin’s hand discovered Yaz’s in the blind darkness, his fingertips stroking between her fingers from knuckle to knuckle where her fist was knotted in his skins. A complicated shiver ran along her arm and into the core of her. Bare hands had been a revelation for her. The intimacy of this touch was too much. Almost. And here, in this place, with evil on every side and Quell at her back. She didn’t understand.

  Thurin did it again, more slowly this time, more intimate. Her grip loosened. Part of her wanted to hit him, strike him to the floor for being so forward, for presuming. The rest of her didn’t know what she wanted. His palm brushed her wrist, pushing back her sleeve. She bit her lip against any sound she might make and pulled away.

  In that instant he was gone. The faint sound of skins brushing skins and he left, moving away as he rose to his feet.

  “. . .” Yaz opened her mouth but made no sound. She daren’t hiss after him.

  Without warning, cries rang out. Quell twisted and lost his grip on her. Iron clattered across rock. More shouts and cursing, real terror in the mix.

  A voice rang from the blackness of the cave, not close at hand but not too distant. “You can bring that star out again, Yaz of the Ictha.”

  Yaz had already been fumbling for it among her furs, hunting for the right pocket. Whoever had spoken, it was not one of those who had entered with her. Her hand trembled around the star’s blue glow. She opened her fingers and bid the light pour out.

  Through slitted eyes she saw that Quell and the other four members of their group were crouched on the open floor, Quell with a bloody nose and without his iron spear. At the outer limits of the star’s illumination well over a dozen figures stood in a loose circle around them, at least three of them gerant, many almost naked. Fear flooded through Yaz so swiftly it threatened to drown her. The Tainted watched with broad grins full of malice, just as her imagination had painted it.

  “Zeen!” She saw her brother beside a barrel-chested gerant. Zeen wore only leggings, reduced to tatters below the knees, and across his neck and ribs black stains spread. She wanted to believe them bruises, but no bruises ever looked like these and his grin was as hate-filled as the rest. He stared at her with no sign of recognition.

  Thurin stood just a few yards from her. A black stain covered much of his face and filled his eyes. The stain returned no light, so that against the background of darkness and black ice it looked almost as if that part of him had been bloodlessly taken, sliced away by some great knife.

  Of all of them Thurin was the only one not to smile. He opened his mouth, white teeth framing a black tongue, and spoke again with a stranger’s voice. “You may call me Theus. I command here and have done so since long before your kind began to arrive beneath the ice.”

  23

  YAZ STARED IN horror, unable to find words. Thurin had betrayed her. Her hand tingled where the monster had so recently stroked her flesh.

  “Were you always in him?” It was Petrick who spoke, bleak-eyed, rising to his feet. One of the gerants had wrenched his sword from him in the dark, but he had his knife in hand now and pointed at Theus with it. “Or did you catch him while he led us?”

  Now Theus did smile. “Oh, I never left the boy. I wrapped myself around his bones and came to have a look-see around your settlement.”

  “Did he . . . did he know?” Yaz asked. A calm had descended on her. She would die before she let any demon enter her. This was the end she had fallen to. She was prepared to accept her death. She only hoped that she could take Zeen with her. “Did he know he was carrying you?”

  “Young Thurin?” Theus licked his lips with a black tongue, Thurin’s lips. “No. He thought the stars burned us out. And they did burn the others. They couldn’t sink as deep as I did. But of course, I could be lying. I do like to lie. Honesty is one of the pieces of myself that I am still missing. One that I won’t find here of course.” He waved a hand at the surrounding cavern. And in that moment Petrick lunged, faster than blinking, throwing himself across the gap between them, knife in hand. He almost made it, but some i
nvisible force yanked him from the ground and held him just beyond reach of Theus.

  “That was rather predictable.” Theus frowned, possibly with effort, and Petrick’s feet lifted still further above the rock. He hung there, snarling, unable to drive himself forward. “The human body is almost all water. You do understand this? And your friend Thurin has considerable influence over the stuff. Especially when it’s me doing it and not caring if I break anything in here while I do.” Theus tapped Thurin’s head with a finger.

  Petrick drew back his hand to throw his knife but the same force wrapped him and his thin arm remained raised, trembling with effort.

  Theus shook his head. “If I let you throw that blade would you do it? Kill your friend? It would be no great inconvenience to me. I have many bodies. I’ll have yours too if I like, and attacking me just makes it easier for me to find a way under your skin.”

  In a blindingly fast advance Zeen shot from the shadowy margins to tackle Petrick, bringing him to the ground. Another of the Tainted came forward and set a foot to pin Petrick’s wrist to the rock, immobilising the knife.

  “Now,” said Theus in a louder voice, a current of anger rippling beneath it. “It happens to be very hard for me to be so reasonable for so long. Please don’t try my patience. It’s something else that I misplaced long ago.

  “You are going to be inducted into our ranks and then, since obviously I know all about your domestic troubles with young Pome, we are going to conquer what remains of your territory. Adding you to my collection will make an already fairly uneven contest still more one-sided. Murder, bloodshed, oh my!

  “Now, the truth is that my friends here are an unruly lot and need to be allowed to indulge their baser instincts once in a while. In fact base instinct is all most of them are.” Gasps, wicked chuckles, and unhinged laughter rang around the circle at that. “So I propose to let you go one at a time and hunt you. Some of you might even escape. Who knows?”

  Yaz looked along the line of her companions: Quell, tensed and ready with murder in his eyes. Quina coiled and poised to strike, her hand on an iron knife at her hip. Kao scared but dangerous even so.

  “We came here together and we’ll fight you together,” she said, wondering if Thurin was still looking out at her from those wholly black eyes. “We’re ready to make you bleed.”

  “Me?” asked Theus. “Poor Thurin will do the bleeding. I will be fine. It’s not my blood.” He pointed at one of the exits. “Run, Yaz!” All around them the Tainted started to hiss and call, the largest gerant began to roar, a thunderous noise, and a crimson-eyed child, frothing at the mouth, screamed as if she had been set on fire.

  Yaz forced more light from the star, setting its heartbeat racing. The thing vibrated in her hand and the Tainted fell back to the walls of the cavern, their shouting dying away. Zeen and the other Tainted abandoned Petrick but not before kicking the knife away. Only Theus stood his ground, though he squinted against the light and set his mouth in a grimace of pain.

  “What a talented child you are,” he snarled through Thurin’s teeth. “But that fragment will burn out before it starts to do more than irritate me.” He looked at Kao and took a sudden step toward the boy, making him flinch. “You should run. A big one like you might win free!”

  “None of us are running,” Yaz said, afraid that if the Tainted started screaming and roaring again her nerve would break. She steadied her voice, coaxing still more light from the star. “Why don’t you tell us what you really want? It can’t be just to capture the last handful of the Broken.” That didn’t seem a particularly grand ambition for Theus to have nurtured for so long. “What are you hunting for out here?”

  Theus raised a hand and peered at her from behind the shadow it cast across his face. He rested his black gaze on Yaz and where the others among the Tainted radiated only hate and rage, she sensed something more complex in his stare. He shook his head slowly, seemingly in admiration, and clapped his hands together. “Quina, you’re the clever one. Why don’t you tell Yaz what I’m doing in these miserable caves?”

  Quina gave him a suspicious look. “How would I know? Drinking demon-juice?”

  “Hunting for something you’ve lost,” Kao said.

  Theus smiled a black smile. “Young Kao has it. Just drinking demon-juice, Quina? You’ve got to credit your enemy with some intelligence if you want to beat him. The Golin clan know that, so Kao knows it too. I’ve ridden many Golin over the years. Good workers. Don’t ever think your enemy is just wasting their time.” He waved a hand at the black ice above them. “The stars, as you call them, are said to purify. Their effect on my people, the ones who made them, is similar to their effect on your kind. They give voice to different parts of who we are and split them away. The Missing . . . let’s call my people the Missing . . . the Missing purged themselves of anger, greed, malice, and all the other traits they considered to be impurities. What you call demons, the creatures like me that saturate the black ice, these are all unwanted elements of the Missing. They wanted to be gods, sublime, spiritual beings who could ascend to a new level of existence. They felt the more basic of their instincts pinned them to the dirt, imprisoned them in their flesh. And so they shed these things, carving them away with stars of which you have seen only fragments. They trapped these unwanted pieces of themselves in impregnable vaults, and they moved on.” Theus seemed to relish an audience and looking at the Tainted Yaz could understand why. All of them, even Zeen, seemed barely restrained, not really listening to what was being said, just a heartbeat from violence, as if each of them were the fragments Theus described, too shallow to hold on to much interest in the world beyond the exercise of their singular passions. In many ways the title that the Broken had taken for themselves would sit better with Theus and his fellow demons, so broken that they could act only when infecting someone else like a disease beneath the skin.

  “The vaults weren’t so impregnable as they thought though?” Yaz gazed at the snarling faces of the Tainted. She avoided looking at Zeen. It hurt too much to see the madness in him. “You got out.”

  Theus made a mock bow. “Time is a digger, time scratches and claws its way into any prison sooner or later. Time is not a healer, it’s a destroyer. Time is ruin. Time opens old wounds. The ice scraped away the cities that the Missing had abandoned, and one by one the ancient vaults failed. We spilled out into that ice. Creatures like me. Broken pieces, overpowered by our nature.

  “Over years, however. Decades, centuries. I did what my fellow escapees seem unable to do and set my will to regathering myself. I did not agree to being torn apart and discarded. When I have reunited all that was shriven from the original me I plan to seek out the rest among the golden halls of the Missing and make myself whole once more. A person rather than a thing.

  “So the truth is simple. Those that you call the Tainted are hunting something, and what they’re hunting is me. Pieces of who I was, scattered amid a multitude, lost among screaming millions. And very shortly you will be joining them in that search. So, I—”

  “It’s not going very well, is it?” Yaz didn’t know where her courage was coming from. Perhaps it was just the certainty that her chances had fled and that the death she had expected at the end of her fall had arrived. “It sounds as if you’ve been looking for years. Generations? What do you have them do? Chip at the ice, melt it, drink it, hoping to randomly find the other little demons that together make whatever monstrosity you are?”

  Theus stalked toward her. She felt Thurin’s ice-work like a giant hand squeezing around her, trying to compel the blood inside her to move at his command, attempting to lift her from her feet. She ground her teeth together and struggled to find some muscle in her mind that could resist him. Quell stepped between them with the same hard and determined look she had first seen when he faced the hunter in the city. A moment later the invisible force of Thurin’s magic tossed him aside, seeming to find it eas
ier to get a grip on Quell than on Yaz.

  “I won’t ever let one of your kind control me.” Yaz clenched the star burning in her hand. The room dimmed, and as she focused on her glowing fist her full weight rested once more on the rock. She had said they wouldn’t run, so she stood her ground. She opened her hand to let the light out once more. “You can’t own me.”

  “You know,” said Theus, drawing ever closer. “I believe you.” He held her gaze with his unreadable black eyes, the stain moving slowly across his face, pouring into his mouth, coiling about his neck, Thurin’s neck, like a serpent.

  Suddenly there were hands on her arms, the star shaken from her fingers to roll across the rock. A gerant had her from behind. Quina leapt to attack, Kao bellowed and charged. All at once it was chaos and Theus had the cold blade of a knife against her neck. Quell found his feet, his roar almost as loud as the screams and howls of the Tainted. He took the eight-foot gerant trying to wrestle him and slung the man across the room with undiminished Ictha strength.

  Yaz ignored the knife and fought to free herself but the gerant’s strength overmatched her. She had expected to die. She hadn’t thought it would be Thurin’s knife that killed her though or that they would be face-to-face at the moment her life ended. His eyes cleared, a desperate horror filling them as the darkness drained away. Still, the hand holding the blade to her neck did not retreat. All around them the sounds of struggle, cries of pain and rage, but even now she couldn’t look away from Thurin.

  “I believe you,” Theus repeated with his impossibly black tongue. “And if you can’t be tamed . . . what use are you?”