The Girl and the Stars

by Mark Lawrence

  Erris stopped walking and turned to face her. “No.”

  “Why then?” Why now, she meant. Why because of me, she wanted to ask. Didn’t he know she was broken? Didn’t he know she’d already failed those who put their faith in her, time and again?

  “Why would I leave? I know what’s up there. Ice, ice, and more ice. A dead white world. A world that will sink its teeth into this body and bear down until the power cells are exhausted, and then at last there’ll be an end to me.” He paused. “I was scared to leave. Everyone I ever knew or cared about had gone.”

  Yaz met his dark eyes, both reflecting a single red star. “Why . . .” She found her mouth too dry for her question. “What changed?”

  He smiled a smile with too much uncertainty in it for someone thousands of years old.

  “You made me care.”

  27

  DON’T LOOK SO astonished!” Erris laughed. “I haven’t seen another human in two hundred years, and that was the man who built the hunters. So it’s not as if you had a lot of competition. My mother always said I follow the first pretty face I see.”

  Yaz found her fingers resting on her own unaccountably hot cheeks and lowered her hands quickly. “And do you?”

  “Well, maybe. But I followed the last pretty face I saw for years and we were to be married. Only I had to go exploring some old ruins . . .” He grinned, showing white teeth. “Come on. Let’s go before we find some other trouble to get into down here.” He started walking again. “I’m sure there’s enough trouble waiting for us up above?”

  Yaz didn’t know whether Erris was talking about the ice caverns or up on the ice itself. The answer was the same either way. “Yes. Lots.”

  * * *

  ERRIS LED THE way, paying no attention to any scavenger symbols. Where there were hanging cables he climbed them at a remarkable rate using just his arms. Twice Yaz had to call for a rest. She found herself very thirsty and had to be thankful for the turn of events that had reunited her with Erris so quickly, as she wouldn’t have lasted long. She made a mental note to check that Maya had stolen enough waterskins before realising that if she stole a heat pot then they would be able to melt ice as they went once they reached the surface.

  “The way the assassin hit you. It would have killed me.” Yaz tried to see any sign of bruising or swelling on Erris’s face.

  “I’m tough stuff.” Erris thumped his chest jokingly. “Built of alloys and polymers.”

  “Just how strong are you?” Yaz knew that even Quell wouldn’t be able to haul himself up two hundred yards of cable without breaking a sweat.

  “I’m not sure.” Erris shrugged. “It depends in part on how much power I draw from my reserves and how much risk I want to run of damaging myself.”

  “You said you would live until your . . . cells? . . . run out? How long is that?”

  Erris smiled and widened his eyes at her. “Nobody wants to know exactly how long they have left in the world. The truth is I don’t know. Years rather than months. My cells store a lot of energy, but they last longer in the warm. I would live longer in these chambers than in the ice caves above, and much longer in those caves than up on the surface, out in the wind.”

  Yaz’s face fell as a sudden guilt overtook her.

  Erris shook his head. “Take it from me though, centuries are overrated. It’s what you do with time that makes it matter. I’d rather spend a year making new memories than a thousand wandering around in the same old ones.”

  Yaz got to her feet again, still tired but driven more by her thirst than the desire to rest. “Ready to go?”

  “You still haven’t told me why you came back.” Erris rose smoothly from his haunches.

  “I came to find you. I need your help to get my brother—”

  “Zeen.”

  “Yes, Zeen. To get him back from the Tainted. And to rescue my friends too.”

  “Friends now? You do like to raise the stakes. And what do they need rescuing from?” He resumed climbing the long stairway they had been resting on.

  “From the Tainted. There’s this . . . man . . . Theus—”

  Erris looked back sharply at that. “Theus? Not Prometheus?”

  “I . . . I don’t know. I don’t think so. I’ve only ever heard him called Theus.” Yaz let her red star rise above them. “Who’s Prometheus?”

  “Someone the city dreams of.” Erris frowned. “Someone it’s scared of.” He shook his head and carried on up the stairs. “Greatness and torment and fire.”

  “What?”

  “I’m not sure . . . Just words that float through me when the city dreams of Prometheus.” Erris shrugged. “Tell me about this Theus of yours.”

  So Yaz did. She told Erris about the Tainted and about her ill-fated raid to rescue Zeen, and about what Theus had said he was doing there in the black ice.

  “So what do you think?” It had taken an hour or more to tell it all, and although there were no obvious signs to indicate it Yaz felt that they were close to the surface now. “Is he lying? Or is this Theus really some cast-off piece of one of the Missing? Is that truly what the black ice is? Purged sins?”

  “I really don’t know.”

  “But you’re my expert here!” Yaz exclaimed.

  “I don’t get out much, you may have noticed.” He reached up and pulled himself into a narrow vent that Yaz hadn’t seen. His voice came back muffled as his feet disappeared into the dark hole. “Whatever else this black ice is, on the scale of the city’s lifetime it’s a new development.”

  Yaz sighed and jumped to catch the edge of the vent. Cursing and panting with effort she managed to drag herself up and in. She advanced on her chest, letting the star roam ahead of her. An irregular dark stain running down the middle of the narrow shaft hinted that water had trickled down here in the not so distant past. Touching her fingertips to the stain Yaz could even imagine that it was damp. She unglued her tongue from the roof of her mouth and hauled herself forward on sore elbows.

  * * *

  ERRIS FOUND WATER seeping from a narrow crack in a chamber not long after they escaped the crawl-way and Yaz slaked her thirst impatiently, a quarter mouthful at a time, marvelling at how good gritty, mineral-heavy water can taste when you’ve been dried out for too long.

  “You said the city dreams of Prometheus. Does it dream of Seus too?” Yaz asked. “Or of Elias Taproot?”

  Erris’s brows lifted in surprise. “Is this some quantal power of yours? Are no secrets safe from you?”

  “You know them then? It was when we were going through the walls. You said I got intercepted and—”

  “And I was too busy escaping to ask you more. And then too busy being torn into small pieces.”

  “So you know them then? The city dreams of them?”

  “It’s always a nightmare when Seus is in the dream. Vesta is terrified of him. Sometimes I think it was him that drove her mad.”

  Yaz didn’t ask how one city could be a he and the other a she. Instead she asked about the one who had seemed human. “And Elias Taproot. Is he like you?”

  Erris shrugged. “Well, he is much, much older. I think he was old beyond imagining before he came to Abeth.”

  “Then how is he like he is? Like you—”

  “Whatever happened to him happened somewhere else, long ago. He might have been a man back at the start but now he’s a memory, an echo of that man, and he lives in minds like those of the cities. But not just one like me. He’s shared between them. Back when all the cities were still connected, when they all spoke together, he would move where he liked. But when those connections broke he was left scattered. Not in pieces, but in copies, some stronger than others though, more detailed, truer to the original, with more of their memories and the power that goes with memory.”

  “He told you all this?”

  Erris laughed. �
��No. I can uncover secrets too. Elias Taproot always had bigger fish to fry. I was beneath his notice. So count yourself honoured!”

  Yaz didn’t feel honoured, she felt targeted, drawn into a larger war that she had no concept of. Taproot’s interest had focused the eyes of a dark god upon her just when she was already in the worst peril she could imagine.

  * * *

  IT TOOK MAYBE another hour before they emerged into the glow of the city cavern from a different hole than the one that Yaz had left it by. Erris reached down to haul her up then stood marvelling at the ice sky high above him.

  “It’s beautiful.”

  “It is.” Yaz came to stand beside him, looking up too but listening with something other than her ears for signs of the hunters. Overhead the bands of stardust held in the ice marbled the ceiling with muted rainbow shades. In time much of the dust would fall with the meltwater and be washed down the gentle gradient to join the oncoming ice that might carry it once again into the heights.

  Erris made a slow turn, gazing at the pockmarked rock and occasional twisted beams. “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”

  Yaz cocked her head questioningly.

  “A line of ancient poetry that dates back to even before the beaching. Did you know that the ships that brought the four original tribes to Abeth were powered by star-stones almost identical to the ones in the city?”

  Yaz shook her head. The Ictha had little mythology about the black oceans between the stars. Mokka, the first woman, had sailed her boat there once when she argued with the Gods in the Sea. “Tell me about the poem.”

  Erris smiled. “It’s just a line that stuck in my head long ago. I guess it’s saying that however you try to set your mark on the world, time will come and wash it all away.” He reached out a hand toward her. “Let me show you how it was when I came here.”

  Yaz found his smile echoing itself on her lips. She reached out and let him close his hand around hers. “I don’t—”

  But then she did. The ruins grew around her, far taller than she had imagined when glimpsing them in the distance of an early visit to Erris’s memory. The towers reached up through the ice ceiling of the cavern to daunting neck-craning heights, and yet they were still merely stumps of what had once stood there, the metal skeletons reaching up above the poured stone to challenge the clouds. In the memory Yaz stood on rubble that covered the ground to an unknown depth, great chunks of poured stone, some bigger than whales and like the carcass of some vast beast their iron bones broke from stone flesh. Bees droned lazily by and a riot of ivy, heavy with white flowers, pursued the ruins up into the air.

  Yaz gazed up at the defeated structures, marvelling, awestruck. Even their wounds seemed beautiful, exposing a complexity of floors and chambers inside, high above the ground. The buildings had their own grace, no two the same, and few of the straight lines she had grown so weary of in the chambers below. These were variously fluting, bulbous, slender, as if like the fungi in the caves they had grown rather than been built.

  “What—” Yaz felt Erris’s hand leave hers, fingers trailing across fingers, and the illusion vanished, replaced with the ice cave that now seemed small and dull by comparison to the past glories taken from her. “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.” She repeated the line. No more need be said. She understood some of the city’s sorrow now. It too had been broken and cast aside. Abandoned by those who made it.

  * * *

  “WHAT’S NEXT?” ERRIS rubbed his hands together and looked about expectantly.

  Yaz contemplated the long slope. Taking Quell and Maya back into the black ice would put them both in danger. Maya could prove very useful, but she also had a proclivity for murdering the Tainted, and given that Yaz was going in specifically to reclaim two of the Tainted it felt profoundly wrong to be killing any of the unfortunates that got in the way.

  “We’re going to go and find Theus, just the two of us, and I’m going to hold him to our agreement.”

  Yaz shivered. Just before Petrick had fallen to his death Theus had boomed at her, “Yaz of the Ictha, we have a deal.”

  He might have just been saying it because he saw she and the others were going to escape him and it was something that might bring her back. But whether he meant it or not it was something that she was going to hold him to.

  Erris extended his arm toward the slope, tilting his head. “Lead on, dear lady.”

  Yaz frowned. “Sorry?”

  “It’s what people say. Said. Don’t mind me. I’m just . . . well . . . I think I’m nervous. It’s been a long time since I felt anything like this. Excited. With the city’s avatar I was scared I guess, but I knew what I was dealing with, what the options were. This, however, this is all new. It’s been a very long time since I’ve done anything this foolish.” He grinned. “I’m rather enjoying it.”

  “Well, don’t enjoy it too much. The Tainted are dangerous. And so are the Broken. And the hunters. In fact everything down here is dangerous and I’ve no idea how easy it is to stick a spear through your chest or what it would do to you.”

  “A spear?” Erris wrinkled his nose as if he hadn’t considered something as basic as a pointed piece of bone or metal. “I think it would be very bad news to get one of those stuck through me. So let’s avoid that.”

  “Stop enjoying yourself then, and stay alert.” Yaz shook her head and led on toward the slope. Her mission had felt daunting before when she thought Theus was “just” some dark spirit capable of possessing the unwary. Then he was one of the Missing, or at least broken pieces of one of them, an enigmatic and incomprehensibly ancient being, albeit robbed of most of his memory. And now it seemed he might be Prometheus, significant even among the Missing. A figure that troubled the city’s dreams and whose relationship with such entities as Taproot and Seus remained unclear.

  * * *

  DESPITE HER INSTRUCTION Erris followed Yaz through the ice caverns as if the whole place had been constructed just to astonish him. At the first stream they came to he crouched and for an age would do nothing but let water run over his fingers then cup it in both hands and watch it fall as he lifted it. He marvelled at icicles and frost, at heaps of fallen ice and the banks of stones deposited by the glacial flow. He carried a rough, irregular stone in each hand for some distance, turning them over in his fingers.

  “Nobody made this. No human hand has ever touched either of these stones before . . .”

  “I’m very pleased for you,” Yaz growled.

  “It’s just that for more than a thousand years I’ve seen nothing that wasn’t made by someone, or something. A simulation just can’t—”

  “Sssh.” Yaz held up a hand to silence him. Another distant cry rang out. Fainter than the first. Fear, pain, anger, or just someone shouting for someone else? She couldn’t tell. She dimmed the light of the hunter’s star still further. “Come on.” She beckoned.

  “Did you know that the star-stone fragments glow more brightly when you’re near them?”

  Yaz turned to glare at him. “Quietly!” She led on. “And yes. And call them stars.”

  Two caverns on and they came into a starlit grove of fungi, some of them types that Yaz hadn’t yet seen, tall, slim, and elegantly spotted with vibrant red and lustrous blue spots. Some of these reached to her elbows and where they grew together thickly they reminded her of Erris’s forest. She turned to find him on hands and knees, examining examples of the capped fungi that tasted so good in stew.

  “These are marvellous. I’m amazed to find them growing here, but I guess life finds a way . . .”

  “We should go,” Yaz muttered. “It’s not safe here.” As she said the words a rattle of falling or thrown ice snapped her attention to the darker of the two exits. “Erris!” she hissed, turning back to beckon him to her.

  Instead of Erris she found herself looking at the point of an iron spear.

 
“Arka?” The face of the woman behind the spear had been smeared with mud, leaving her almost unrecognisable, but her rangy build and something around her eyes made Yaz think of Arka.

  “Yaz!” And as the hunter’s star slowly rotated into view from behind her: “Gods in the Ice! That’s the biggest fucking star I’ve ever seen!” Arka fell back, wincing as the star’s aura brushed over her.

  Yaz looked past Arka to where the grey-haired gerant who had been among the council at headquarters in the drying cave now had both arms wrapped around Erris from behind. A second of the Broken watched him, clutching a spear. Erris was smiling, seeming both amused and very interested by the development. Yaz found herself wondering about the world he had come from before falling into the city. Did they not have violence or was he simply less protective of his body because it wasn’t the one he was born into? He should be. From his own account he had spent far longer making it than his mother and he had spent on the original.

  Arka continued to edge back from the hunter’s star, still holding her spear toward Yaz. “Who’s this?” She nodded toward Erris.

  “That’s Erris.” Yaz pushed the star behind her. “He’s new to all . . . this.” She waved at their spears. “So please don’t hurt him if he does the wrong thing. He’s from the city.”

  Arka frowned. “You’ve come from the city?”

  “We have. But Erris is from the city.”

  “Nobody is from the city,” the gerant growled.

  “I am.” Erris raised both arms in a slow yawning stretch and in the process broke the old gerant’s bear hug with no apparent effort despite the man’s scarred arms being thick with slabbed muscle.

  The other Broken, a bony older woman, one of the ironworkers, Yaz thought, retreated two steps, the point of her spear trembling.

  “This is . . .” Arka gaped, her gaze darting back and forth between Yaz and Erris. “Astonishing.”