The Girl and the Stars

by Mark Lawrence

  “We should go,” she said.

  25

  THEY COULDN’T FIND Quina. For Yaz that was the last load that made the ice break beneath her. Something snapped deep in her chest, the loss of Thurin and Kao and Petrick hit her like a hammer and sobs broke from her. She found herself calling for Quina, careless of who or what else might hear. Quell had to wrestle her to the floor and all the walls pulsed and blazed as the stars echoed with her grief.

  Maya spoke into the silence that followed. “We need to get to the city.”

  Yaz allowed herself to be led. Quell at her side, Maya ahead, scouting for danger. Maya seemed to be a new person, as though the timid child had been shrugged away like a cloak to reveal something hard and full of purpose.

  They saw no one, heard nothing save the groan and drip of the ice. Yaz’s resolve returned by degrees. The magnitude of her failure had frozen her thoughts but a slow thaw was setting in. She felt ashamed. She was Ictha and the Ictha endure no matter what is heaped upon them. The world above had been taken away from her, and now piece by piece the world below was being stolen too. Yaz knew she had been foolish to try to dream new dreams. She didn’t deserve happiness. But even so, she would fight to the end, just as all her clan did, even if their eyes were no longer turned her way, even if none of them ever knew what end she fell to. She would not surrender, not go gentle into her fate.

  In one of the brighter chambers Yaz turned and went to the wall while Quell watched, keeping any questions to himself. She reached into the ice with her mind, listening to the song of the stars, filtering through the beats of their many tiny hearts. Then with both palms to the cold surface she sent out a slow rhythm, the heartbeat of a star as large as the ones inside hunters. She sped the beat, sped it again, and once more, until finally she found an answering resonance. Deep within the ice one star now burned far brighter than all the rest, the largest within many yards of her. She spoke to it, trying to picture the complex sigil set into the iron of the forging pot. The star dimmed, and almost imperceptibly it began to sink as the extra heat it now radiated melted a path through the ice. Yaz drew it to her. It took time and the blades of a headache began to cut their way inwards from behind her eyes, but before too very long the star popped from the ice wall and dropped into her hand amid a rush of lukewarm water. A greenish star about half the size of Pome’s. It reminded her of Erris among the trees, and for a moment she stood staring at it in her palm, lost in its song.

  “Yaz.” Quell set a hand to her shoulder.

  “We can go now,” she said, and let the star slip from her fingers into a slow orbit around her head and shoulders.

  * * *

  “WHAT WAS THURIN saying, before they left us, about searching for himself?” Quell asked. “It made no sense. Is he just mad?” Maya had gone ahead again to scout the way and they crouched together in a dim cavern.

  “That wasn’t Thurin. The monster in him—”

  “A man is what he has inside him,” Quell said, brooking no argument.

  Yaz made no reply. She was thinking about Elias and the needle that he told her would show the way to another part of him. She wasn’t sure what Elias was but he seemed a very different creature from Theus. He’d seemed whole and balanced, just weak, where Theus was strong but clearly the collection of fractured pieces that he claimed to be. And Theus lived out here in the muck and blood of the real world whereas Elias dwelt in the strange dreamworld that Erris had shown her.

  Yaz shook her head and took hold of her new star again. She was just a girl from the ice. The wars of gods and demons lay beyond her understanding. “All I know is that we need a star. One much bigger than this one.”

  * * *

  IN ONE OF the harvest caves they found bloodstains and trampled fungi, and further on an encroaching tendril of black ice, killing all the fungi around it, leaving just grey husks. Once Quell knelt to examine strange scratches on the rock. “Pome’s hunter has been here.”

  “Or some other.” Yaz kept her eyes on the cavern’s exits.

  It wasn’t until they finally reached the long slope and reunited with Maya that Yaz dug her heels in and stopped allowing herself to be led.

  “What are we going to do?” she asked.

  “We’re going to escape,” Quell said.

  “How do you propose that we do that?”

  “You were the one convincing us all that we could survive on the ice, head south, find the green land,” Maya said. “You must have an idea.” The look on Maya’s face suggested she already suspected that Yaz didn’t.

  “Well . . .” Yaz felt fresh guilt at the reminder of her role in taking their friends to the taint. Now that she had to say it out loud her plan sounded too thin to have ever rested their hopes on. “All this iron the scavengers collect and the forgers work. It has to go to the priests. So someone must know when—”

  “The next collection is soon, a day or two at most. Maybe less than that,” Quell said with confidence.

  “No,” Maya said. “The next collection is in twenty-three days.”

  Quell snorted. “You’re wrong.” He set a hand to Yaz’s shoulder. “Wait here with me. The collection will be soon. We can escape with—”

  “Twenty-three days.” Maya narrowed her eyes at Quell. “I know this one is your clan, Yaz, but he has been here less time than us and alone for most of it. How would he know?”

  “How would you know, child?” Quell retorted, an unusual anger flaring in him.

  Confused as to how everyone seemed to know more than her, Yaz turned to face Maya. “Back there in the black ice. You said something about a mission.”

  “She said she needed you to complete her mission.” Quell frowned and looked uncomfortable. Most un-Quell-like.

  “Iron is power.” Maya met Yaz’s eyes with a bold stare. The soft lines of her face had hardened into something fierce over the days since her drop. “The priesthood use that power to dominate the tribes. The Axit do not live that way. We fight for our freedom!”

  “But you need iron like the rest of us,” Yaz said. “So you accept their laws.”

  “No. We fight.” Anger flashed in brown eyes. “But the first part of any fight is to understand the enemy. The priests say they mine and smelt iron from the heart of the Black Rock. They say there is coal and ore to be had. But the Axit have long watched them and the smokes that escape that mountain are not sufficient. For days to either side of the gathering the Black Rock pours smoke but in the months when the priests believe the clans are chasing seas the chimneys barely trickle.”

  Quell smiled. “And yet there is a great pit melted through the thickness of the ice just a few miles from their mountain.”

  Maya nodded. “And so every Axit child is told that if they are ever thrown into the pit it is their duty to discover the secrets of the iron and escape with that knowledge.”

  “And what then?” Yaz asked. “They say thank you very much and throw you back in?”

  Maya scowled but Yaz could tell that her question had hit the mark.

  “Do you know how they get the iron out?” Yaz asked.

  Maya nodded. “They put stars in two sigil pots and lower them on wires to rapidly melt two narrow holes all the way through the ice. The water pours out through the roof of the city cavern. They pour coal down one of the holes and clog it up. Then they call a coal-worm somehow and it follows the line of coal, melting a big wide hole, with all the water draining through the other narrow hole they made.

  “The worm veers off before it falls through the ceiling but they can melt through the last bit themselves. And then they lower a cage for the iron loads and haul them up. When it’s all finished ice-workers at this end seal the hole so a new pit doesn’t start, and the flow of the ice squeezes the rest shut after a while. When the Pit of the Missing moves too far away from the city they start a new one here. They do that about every thirt
y years or so.”

  Yaz and Quell looked at Maya in astonishment.

  “You did not hear all that just eavesdropping for a few days!” Yaz said.

  “And no elder would have laid all their secrets bare to someone so new, surely?” Quell frowned.

  “I asked Petrick,” Maya said. “Made him feel awkward for not knowing. Then I spied on him during the sleep periods until he went and demanded that Arka give him the answers.” She shrugged. “You just have to know how people work. Petrick didn’t care about not knowing until it put him in the same basket as a girl still wet from her drop. Then he had to know. The next collection is in twenty-three days.”

  Yaz’s mind plagued her with images of Petrick’s slow, inevitable fall from the bridge. He’d been the one to save her from Hetta when she was still dripping from the pools. She shook the thoughts away. “You’re thinking we should ride up in the cage?”

  “I am.” Maya nodded.

  “In twenty-three days? Theus will have taken all the caverns by then, unless Pome regains control of his hunter. And if that happens Pome will have all of the caverns and we won’t be much better off than we would with Theus. That new star of Pome’s has tainted him . . . as if he weren’t bad enough before.”

  “We could hide in the city.” Even Maya sounded doubtful, and she could hide herself in shadow.

  “There are things down there that would kill us quicker than Pome or Theus would,” Quell said.

  “You have a better idea?” Maya asked, her expression growing fierce again.

  Quell turned away, his hands in fists at his sides. He started to walk down the long slope toward the city cavern, kicking at the ground as he went. Yaz had never seen him like this, angry, unsure of himself.

  She was on the point of starting to follow when he spun round and marched back, his face dark. “Yaz . . .” He faltered before her stare.

  “What is it?”

  He reached into his furs and brought out a small yellow star, no bigger than the nail on his little finger. Holding it seemed to pain him and he held it out to her, gesturing for her to take it.

  Yaz lifted it from between Quell’s finger and thumb without touching it and let it hang in the air between them alongside the as yet unasked questions about its existence. The star shone a sour yellow light and its song seemed out of key. Something about it made her think of black strips of skin fluttering in a breeze.

  “He said I could save you,” Quell said helplessly. “But I had to lie to you. If you knew he was behind it then—”

  “But you were behind it . . . you came to save me.” Yaz had never understood when the stories spoke of heartbreak but something was breaking in her chest now. “Quell?” She drew in a shuddering breath to steady her voice. “You stole the harness ropes to—”

  “They gave the ropes to me because the regulator told them to.” Quell hung his head. “I didn’t even need the ropes. The priest told me I would be safe if I leapt in. But I was too scared to jump . . .”

  Yaz snatched the yellow star from the air. Instantly she had flashes of scars seared across face and scalp, the sigil shapes familiar from the walls of the Missing’s city. The gaunt and sour lines of the priest’s face. The Icthan whiteness of his irises. She released it as if bitten. “You used this to schedule an early collection of iron?”

  Quell nodded. “I can’t talk to him but he said if I held it and thought hard about you he would know I was ready and would arrange the collection.”

  “So he knows we’re coming. They’ll all be waiting for us out on the ice when they haul us up? Ready to capture us.” Yaz shook her head. “Quell, how could you?”

  “How could I what?” He sounded angry now. “How could I want to bring you home? You just threw yourself into the hole. You didn’t have to. You left us. You left me! And now you’re cross with me because I needed help to save you?”

  “You should have told me you were working with the regulator.”

  “I was scared you wouldn’t come back with me. I didn’t understand what had happened to you. To your mind.” He took a breath and spread his hands in incomprehension. “You threw yourself down the pit, Yaz!”

  “Zeen—”

  “Yes, Zeen! I know. It was bad. But a score of children go down the pit every gathering. Nobody throws themselves after them. Nobody. Not even the mothers. Certainly not a sister!”

  “Well, maybe they should!” Yaz practically screamed the words and the sound echoed back from the roof above the long slope, fading into silence as the two of them stood facing each other, fists balled, breathing hard as if they’d been wrestling.

  That she had jumped. That was what stood at the heart of it. What had pushed her and what had pulled her. Theus had said that everyone was searching for themselves, and evil as he was Yaz saw a certain truth in his words. She had always been a mystery to herself, a battle between the pieces that Theus said the Missing cut away and discarded. Had she been escaping her life? Saving Zeen? Railing against the injustice that she had been saved from only by a hair’s breadth? Quell stared at her, his eyes demanding an answer. Yaz could only shake her head.

  Maya was the first to speak again. “Then we wait here a day or two and ride the collection cage up.” She began to walk down the long slope, and after a short pause, Quell turned to follow her.

  Yaz watched them go, past the warding pillars and into the glow of the city cavern. She held the regulator’s star between finger and thumb, willing its light down to a whisper and then down again until she held nothing but a translucent yellow globe. She found a pocket for it and released a long, slow sigh. Then, still deep in her thoughts, she followed the other two into the ruined city.

  * * *

  QUELL MADE SLOW progress, pausing to watch for any signs of hunters before darting on to the next cover. Yaz caught up with him amid a small forest of metal girders, bent by some ancient flow of ice that had defied the upwelling heat, yet unrusted by the years, subject only to a slow powdery corrosion.

  The collective song of the stars overhead, tiny and numberless, pervaded the whole cavern. Yaz hadn’t noticed it on her previous visit but her sense for such things had sharpened. The ancient refrain filled the silences between the groaning of the ice. Amid the girders it seemed closer to a dirge than Yaz had ever heard it. The unvoiced chorus somehow sketched the city that had once towered here, suggesting form and shapes, eulogising lost beauty.

  “What I don’t understand”—Quell cut across her contemplations—“is if the regulator made the hunters—and the fact that he gave one to Pome seems to back up what you learned in the city—then why on Abeth would he set them to guarding the city and killing the Broken? They’re attacking the very people trying to gather the iron the priests need for trade.”

  Quell made a good point. So good in fact that it overcame Yaz’s resolve not to talk to him. “They take them.”

  “What?”

  “The hunters take the Broken that they get hold of. Nobody knows what they do to them. The bodies aren’t found.”

  Quell pressed his lips into a flat line—it was the way he looked in the tent. Lamplit, considering a difficult move in the game of eight. “Well, it still doesn’t make sense.”

  * * *

  MAYA WAITED FOR them at the crack through which Arka had first led them down into the city chambers. She stood staring down into the darkness below. “We don’t have any food.”

  “Or water,” Quell replied.

  “It doesn’t matter.” Yaz took the regulator’s star from her pocket, held it out over the edge of the chasm, and let it fall. She looked slowly from Quell to Maya. “You both turned out to be different from the person I thought you were.”

  Quell winced. “Yaz—”

  “I haven’t changed though. Somewhere in all that escaping and running away I forgot who I was.” She looked out over the ice-scoured rock,
scarred by the city’s foundations. “I threw myself down here after Zeen and I’m not going anywhere without him. Or,” she said, “any of the others. I’m taking them all back.”

  “That’s madness, Yaz.” Quell reached for her, but thought better of it and let his arm fall.

  “It would take a miracle to get them out of Theus’s clutches,” Maya said.

  “Yes, it will.” Yaz gazed back at the long slope. “But while I was down in the city I met someone who knows all about miracles.”

  26

  I’M GOING DOWN into the city to find my friend.” Yaz looked at the others, daring them to object. “Maya, you’re going to the settlement to scavenge water flasks, heat pots, salt, and anything else that could come in handy on the ice. Quell, you’re going harvesting. Bring as many fungi as you can find and pile them up somewhere discreet. When you’ve got a really big heap team up with Maya and start bringing material for shelters and sleds. Lightweight boards and the means to join them together. The settlement must have plenty to spare.”

  “If you’re going into the city, I’m coming with you,” Quell said.

  “No. You’re going to do what I said.” Yaz turned and looked behind her, stretching out a hand. “This is coming with me.” The hunter’s star rolled from the distant hollow she had placed it in after freeing it from the ice. It looked as if it were a ball of iron still cooling from the forge, glowing a dull red in places, a darker red elsewhere, almost black. Maya and Quell backed away along the chasm edge as it approached, a little smaller than Yaz’s fist, its heartbeat the pitter-patter of a child’s.

  “I still don’t see how this Edris—”

  “Erris,” Yaz said.

  Quell scowled. “Erris. I don’t see how one man is going to—”