The Girl and the Stars

by Mark Lawrence

  “I don’t care about that. Give me what you promised!” Yaz shouted. She narrowed the star’s light into a single brilliant beam that struck Theus in the chest, driving him back, pinning him to the cavern wall. “Now!”

  Theus twisted, trying to struggle free, his breath escaping him in gasps and snarls. They fought, Yaz forcing herself to keep the star working at an intensity that didn’t allow the creature inside Thurin to turn his ice-work against her. At last, sucking his breath over red teeth, Theus raised his face and fixed Yaz with a black stare. “The time will come when you realise what you need is here. You’ll want me back, Yaz of the Ictha, and you’ll find this boy to have been a poor exchange.” He snarled, trying to break free. “You don’t even know what you’re looking for. Some remnant of the green world? Nonsense. All of us are looking for ourselves. That’s how we spend our lives. At least I’m honest about it.”

  Yaz’s pain had escaped the confines of her skull. She hurt in places she didn’t own. She was certain that blood must be running from her eyes, her nose, her mouth. It wasn’t possible to contain so much hurt. Even so, she forced herself to brighten the star and to speak, grating the words out past her teeth. “What. You. Promised.”

  With a howl part rage and part exasperation Theus called out to the Tainted thronging in the next cavern. Yaz didn’t understand the language he used. Mother Mazai said that in distant parts of the ice other tongues were used, but Yaz had only half believed her and had never expected to hear with her own ears words that weren’t words.

  Three figures came reluctantly into the chamber, hunched against the light, feet shuffling on the wet rock. Kao, Zeen, and one other, even larger than Kao, an older gerant with a dirty shock of red hair, blank eyed and scarred around the neck and face.

  The gerant crossed the chamber, reaching out toward Theus though reluctantly, as if he were on fire and the gerant lacked the courage to dare the heat. Theus lunged, stretching to clasp his hand around the gerant’s. In that moment of connection something dark flowed from the sleeve of Theus’s skins, a mottled stain moving swiftly across his wrist, a trailing darkness in the veins. It seemed to pass between them, blooming across the back of the gerant’s hand and rippling up through the meat of his forearm.

  “A poor exchange. One you will regret.” The gerant rumbled the words, Theus’s words falling from a new mouth as Thurin collapsed to the floor, a puppet whose strings had failed him. The gerant’s eyes darkened, the whites shading through greys into black. In three strides he had both Kao and Zeen gripped from behind by the neck. “These two you will have to empty by yourself. I have nowhere for their fragments to go.” Without warning he smacked their heads together, lifting Zeen from the ground in order to do so, then, dropping Zeen, he clubbed Kao to his knees with one massive fist.

  The gerant snarled, turned, and strode away, ducking to leave the chamber. “Go die on the ice.”

  31

  ERRIS DRAGGED ZEEN and Kao from the black ice caverns. They screamed and roared and issued threats that Yaz knew could never have sprung from the minds of either one. She closed her ears to their sickness and kept her star burning, a defence against any change of mind on Theus’s part or disobedience among the Tainted’s ranks. The light would be no defence against a spear thrown from the dark though, and Yaz kept their pace as fast as Thurin, still stumbling and disoriented, could manage. He had yet to speak though he had retched several times, spitting filth onto the floor. A cold suspicion still ran through Yaz that Theus had broken Thurin’s mind on his way out of him, leaving her just a shambling ruin to care for.

  At last they heard the muffled roar from the ravine and then finally emerged onto its flanks. All of them exhausted, and speckled with the black meltwater that dripped constantly in the warmer caverns. And still they weren’t safe. The ice bridge lay to their left just thirty yards away. To reach it they had to negotiate the narrow span of rock between the black ice on one side and the chasm yawning on the other.

  “Be careful.” Yaz steered Thurin ahead of her. “We’re getting out of here—just focus on what you’re doing.” A vision of Petrick falling from the bridge flashed across her mind. If the Tainted meant to stop them it would be here that the spears flew.

  Thurin grunted and shambled ahead, still hunched as he had been in the low tunnels leading to the ravine. Behind her Erris manhandled Kao and Zeen along the ledge, the gerant before him, arm twisted behind his back, Zeen behind him, more or less dragged along, both of them struggling and howling.

  Kao and Zeen’s protests were echoed by screams and roars from further back in the black ice. The wild cacophony seemed to be getting louder and closer very swiftly, as if the din were racing ahead of a Tainted mob. The black throats of the nearest cave mouths redoubled the sounds before throwing them out into the ravine, drowning out the complaints of the hidden waters. Yaz worried that it wouldn’t be long before they vomited forth the demon-possessed horde responsible for the noise.

  Thurin stumbled and slipped. Yaz caught his arm, holding him from the fall. He flinched her off and staggered forward, reaching the ice bridge in ten more steps, each of them looking to be the last before he pitched into the chasm. He stood now at the start of the bridge fighting halfheartedly for balance like a lone tent pole victimised by the wind.

  Another scream tore the air behind Yaz. Something in the swiftly diminishing wail dragged her attention away from Thurin. She turned to see with horror that where Erris had been holding Kao and her brother he now held only the gerant and a handful of torn skins. As the shock held Yaz paralysed, the first of the pursuing Tainted began to leap, whooping, from the nearest cave mouths.

  “No!” Yaz stood locked in place. It was as though the regulator had pushed Zeen into the pit all over again. “No!”

  “Yaz! Move!” Erris shoved Kao ahead of him. The gerant came forward, grinning hugely as if her anguish were the sweetest feast, laid out for him to savour. “Hurry!”

  Behind Erris the first of the Tainted were running along the ledge, careless of their safety.

  “Yaz!” Erris shouted again, more desperately. He got close enough for Kao to lunge at her and try to knock her into the ravine.

  With a scream wholly unequal to the task of expressing what she felt Yaz turned and hurried to the bridge. Thurin was still standing on the ice just at the start of the arc that spanned the ravine. He stood with his feet inches from the edge, still hunched and leaning forward, staring into the nothingness beneath him. Yaz reached him and tried to bundle him forward without knocking him over or unbalancing him into the fall. She found his body as stiff as if it had been frozen, every muscle rigid.

  Zeen was gone. Zeen! Vanished like Petrick into the dark fall. She tried to force it from her mind but the image of Erris’s hand clutching only torn skins refused to go.

  Over the whooping of the Tainted rapidly closing on the bridge Yaz imagined she could hear Theus’s mocking laughter. She’d lost her brother despite all her efforts. Thurin was a broken-minded ruin that probably couldn’t feed or clean himself, and all she had was Kao, who she felt bound to only by a grudging sense of duty.

  “Yaz!” Erris had caught her up again, forcing Kao ahead of him onto a bridge that they had once worried might not hold them singularly and now held four of them.

  A spear sliced the air between them, shockingly fast, swallowed by the chasm. Yaz hadn’t seen it coming, hadn’t even seen it carried among the Tainted. She shouted again, a mix of rage, fear, and frustration, then grabbed Thurin to bodily manhandle him along the bridge. At the same time she willed her orbiting star to blaze, hoping to drive back any Tainted who might join them on the bridge. Behind her, panicked or hurt by the starlight, Kao redoubled his efforts to break free, even if it meant leaping from the bridge.

  Thurin remained as if frozen, just a deep moan escaping him as she tried to carry him forward. He seemed unreasonably heavy and her efforts to move h
im slackened the light that she could drive from the star. With a grunt she managed to shift him a few inches across the slick ice. She saw something at the corner of her eye, a pale something where nothing should be. Expecting a spear to impale her at any moment she allowed herself a glance.

  “Zeen!”

  There, yards below them in the darkness, Zeen was rising. He fought it, twisting and spitting with fury, but foot by inexorable foot he was rising from the chasm. Suddenly Yaz understood. Thurin had hold of him. Thurin had reached out with his ice-work as Zeen fell and had taken hold of the water that makes up most of any person. What it had cost him Yaz couldn’t know but she did know better than to break his concentration. Instead she turned her focus to the star and flared its light back at those Tainted just gaining the bridge. Erris, lacking any space to get past her and Thurin, waited with Kao, all of them exposed to the next spear to come hissing from the dark.

  Fortunately weapons of any kind were rare among the Tainted and if there were spears being held back in the gloom then the owners proved loath to throw them out over the chasm. In battle with the Broken it seemed that the Tainted must rely on the reluctance of former friends and family to skewer loved ones. That and the fact that they knew no one would follow them into the black ice.

  To a rising chorus of howls Zeen came level with the bridge. Yaz knelt and hauled him up, getting a tight grip on his shoulder despite his clawing hands. A moment later he had his teeth in the meat of her forearm. She yelled in surprise. The pain was astonishing, and the fear that he would actually tear free and devour a chunk of her flesh overwhelmed her. She struck out in panic, pounding his head. Teeth slipped from blood-slick flesh and Zeen went limp, sliding soundlessly from the icy bridge.

  “No!” But somehow Thurin had the boy’s wrist and was dragging him onwards.

  Quickly they followed Thurin across and within twenty paces were back in the cavern where they had questioned Etrix seemingly an age ago but in reality less than a day earlier.

  “Is he alright?” Yaz hurried to Thurin’s side to inspect Zeen. He hung bonelessly in Thurin’s grasp with blood running from his nose. A deep pang of guilt skewered her but as she reached toward him his eyes flickered open, showing not the near-white irises of the Ictha but crimson discs, and he lunged for her, jaw snapping shut just shy of her fingertips.

  Yaz pulled her arm back, seeing for the first time the dark blood welling from the set of tooth-shaped holes Zeen had put there.

  “If you can drive the demons out then do it quickly.” Thurin spoke with a rusty voice as if words had become strangers to him in just the short while since his capture. “They’re both dangerous until you do it.”

  Yaz nodded. This was the part she had been dreading. If she failed here what would she do with them? Could she leave, and abandon her brother to the hell he had been enduring since his drop? Would death be cleaner? Or would she die trying and still leave him demon-ridden?

  Thurin pinned Zeen to the rock while Yaz approached with her star in hand. The orb had grown noticeably smaller, her fist almost encompassing it. “How did they cure you?” Yaz asked Thurin, hesitating over “cure,” since they had left Theus wrapped around his bones.

  “They staked me out on a bed of stardust and showered more on me. I felt the demons burn and die inside me. But it took days. We need something quicker if Pome and his hunter are still after us. Is Arka still fighting them?”

  “I don’t know.” Yaz shook her head, shamed that she had given Arka no thought in an age. “How can I do it faster?”

  “My mother said the demons could be driven into an extremity and cut out . . . or off.”

  “Cut off?” Yaz’s blood ran cold.

  “A finger . . . or a hand.” Thurin didn’t meet her gaze. Held in his grip Zeen stirred and started to howl while Kao began to roar and to struggle against Erris once more.

  “Here.” Erris tossed something down beside her. “Tie them.”

  Yaz picked up the rope. A cable of some kind, smooth and shiny like old leather, something from the city. She bound Kao’s hands and patted her hip for a knife.

  “Let me.” Erris released Kao briefly and broke the rope between his hands. “There.”

  Yaz took it, blinking. She saw that the rope had a metal core, an orangey red; her mind supplied the word “copper,” one of Erris’s. She tied Kao’s ankles as Erris held him on his knees, then she bound her brother similarly. He fell silent once she’d secured his hands, watching her instead with baleful eyes. She stood back to consider him.

  “I didn’t rescue my brother to maim him!” The idea of cutting Zeen’s hand off turned Yaz’s stomach. “There has to be a better way.”

  “Sometimes a clean cut is the kindest way.” Thurin let go of Zeen’s head and got to his feet. “Some cankers have to be carved out before they spread.” He led Yaz closer to the ravine where her starlight would keep the Tainted at bay.

  “There may be another way.” Thurin spoke in a hushed tone so the others wouldn’t hear. “Eular told my mother that if you could get the demons to stay still and then hit them with a massive star they would be destroyed.” His voice lacked certainty. “She never really knew what he meant at the time. She didn’t have a star anything like the one you’ve got and she couldn’t have held it if she had. But you could do it.” He frowned. “It would be difficult though. If you’re using the star to drive them and trap them in an extremity they’d slide away while you were readying yourself for the final strike . . .”

  Yaz bit her lip, pondering. “Where do the demons like to stay?”

  “In the head.” Thurin furrowed his brow, remembering the invasion.

  Yaz knew what damage even a small star could do to someone’s soul. Pome had some resistance to them and yet a star considerably smaller than the one in her hand had broken his mind, splitting away some of his darker side into a demon not so different from the ones haunting the black ice. “And if not in the head?”

  “The heart,” Thurin said without hesitation. “Sometimes they go there to let you understand your plight. They return your senses to you and let you think clearly, while they sit in your heart to savour your despair. If you try to run or to destroy yourself they do . . . something . . . to your heart, and all you can do is lie there in agony gasping for breath. And sometimes even that’s better than standing thinking about what they’ve made you do.”

  “The heart. That could work . . .” Yaz tried not to think about Thurin’s suffering. She hoped Zeen’s demons had been less interested in torturing him. Either way she would take pleasure in their annihilation.

  “I don’t know anything else,” Thurin cautioned. “It’s probably a lot harder than it sounds. And if you damage the heart . . .”

  “I’ll try it on Kao first.”

  Thurin glanced at her, a hint of reproach in those dark, haunted eyes of his.

  “What?” Yaz felt instantly guilty. “He obviously has the strongest heart. If it doesn’t work on Zeen I won’t know if it will work on Kao. But if I start with Kao and he doesn’t survive I’ll know there is no point trying that approach with Zeen.”

  Thurin raised his brows a fraction but said nothing. Instead he gestured back at the cavern where Kao lay bound. He nodded toward Erris. “You’ll have to tell me later who that man is and how he seems so much stronger than an Ictha.”

  * * *

  AT YAZ’S REQUEST Erris laid Kao on the rock beside Zeen and held him steady. Thurin knelt beside Erris, holding Zeen’s head to keep him from dashing it on the ground.

  Yaz approached Kao, who twisted and turned in Erris’s grip, roaring threats. Thurin shrank back as the blazing star came nearer to him, as if the thing were as hot as it looked, but he kept hold of Zeen.

  Yaz focused as much of the light as she dared onto Kao’s face. He screwed his eyes tight shut and turned his head as far away as he could. Within a few
heartbeats he began to quiet, and shortly after, the stains left him, moving down his neck. She waited a moment, ignoring the boy’s plaintive questions. Where was he? Was that Yaz? Had they escaped? She had no answers for him and only one hope. When she was sure that the demons had had sufficient time to reach his heart and coil there, hiding from the star’s glare, she raised it overhead and focused all of its light, and song, and anger into a tight core at its centre.

  With a scream that contained all her fears she brought the star slamming down onto Kao’s muscular chest right over his heart and released all that she had stored within the star in a single hammer blow.

  There was a crack as though she had split the world and the star vibrated in her hand like a ringing bell, hurting her fingers. Kao convulsed with such force that Erris was thrown back. Silence followed that one moment of violence. Kao lay limp, a small blackened circle burned into his furs, smoking gently where the star had struck.

  “Kao?” Yaz asked, her voice shaking. “Kao?”

  Nothing.

  She dropped to her knees and grabbed his shoulders.

  “Careful!” Erris warned. “He could be shamming.”

  Yaz ignored Erris and shook Kao. “Wake up! Wake up, you big idiot!” He felt lifeless in her grip, a deadweight.

  “Is he dead?” Thurin asked.

  Erris looked grim. An acid guilt ran through Yaz. She had experimented with a child’s life at stake, and her skills had failed her. A tear rolled across her cheek.

  “I . . .” Kao opened one eye.