The Girl and the Stars

by Mark Lawrence

  “Oh, he’s wise.”

  Thurin said it with such conviction that it prompted Yaz to share what the old man had said to her when Pome first brought her before him. “He predicted all this, you know.”

  “All this?” Thurin raised a brow. “That must have taken some telling.”

  “Well, not all of it. He said I was an agent of change. That I had been dropped into the middle of something that was ready to become a new thing.” For an eyeless man it was impressive vision. Though his foresight had been blind to Theus lurking inside Thurin. “What did he tell you?”

  Thurin’s pale skin reddened and he turned his head away to watch the distant star-littered ceiling. “He talked about . . . you, I think . . . well, I’m not sure what he was saying. But I remember what he said, if that makes sense? He said when you put some people together for the first time there’s a kind of gravitation, a slow spiral dance as they’re drawn into each other’s orbit, each opening to the other by degrees, discovering how closely their wants and hopes and passions align.” Thurin kept his eyes on the distant stars, speaking the words from memory as if he had spent many hours turning them over in his own mind. “He said there’s a darkness in each of us, afraid to show itself, wrestling with such blunt tools as words and deeds to make itself known to the darkness in another person similarly hidden behind walls of camouflage, disguise, interpretation. Honesty is a knife that we can use to pare away those layers, but one slip, go too deep, and who knows what injuries might be inflicted.” He frowned and quoted, “The wounds an honest tongue can open sometimes take a lifetime to heal.”

  Yaz could imagine the old man saying all that. Part of her thought that he could have been talking about her and Thurin, seeing a time when they might spiral into each other, but, as she opened her mouth wondering if she dare say so, a cold thought ran through her. A darkness in each of us, afraid to show itself. It was almost as if Eular had been speaking directly to Theus rather than to Thurin, inviting him to reveal himself. And for a moment Yaz wasn’t sure quite how much Eular saw with his hollow sockets.

  After a long silence Yaz opened her mouth to reply but a curious spattering sound turned her head. Not far behind her two thin threads of silver joined the distant ceiling to the floor. Where they touched the rock a constant shower of sparkling droplets danced into the air. “What is it?”

  “Water!” Thurin grinned for the first time since the black ice. “The collection is coming!”

  34

  THE DRAIN SHAFT and the coal shaft have reached the ceiling. That’s the water melted by the heat pots, all draining out,” Thurin said.

  Yaz made no reply. She just watched the twin streams falling, glittering in the starlight. For the first time she thought they might actually make it back to the surface. All of them. As many as dared try.

  Erris and Kao hurried back to join them. Kao looking excited rather than scared for the first time since his rescue.

  “How long will it take before the worm reaches us?” Erris asked.

  “Soon? Will it be soon?” Kao sounded so eager to reach the surface. It hurt Yaz’s heart to know that he was too broken to live the life he wanted to have back. “How long?”

  “In a short while they’ll be pouring coal into the coal shaft. The priests will make a column of coal this much around.” Thurin made a circle that both his hands couldn’t quite reach around.

  “And the worm makes all its heat from eating this . . . coal? Enough to melt through miles of ice?” Yaz asked, still amazed by it.

  “It’s a rock that burns,” Thurin said. “If we had a pile of it here we could make a fire so hot we’d have to leave the crater.”

  “That stream’s quite small, there must be so much more coming than that . . .” Yaz pushed back from the crater wall, staring at the falling water. She left Kao and Erris behind her and joined Thurin by the narrow slot leading from the bottom of the crater down into the darkness of the city. “Lots more?”

  “Both shafts will drain soon. When the worm starts following the coal and leaving the full-sized passage behind there’ll be a river of meltwater through the drain shaft. It takes an hour or more to drain, and it melts the drain wider so at the end it’s quite a deluge,” Thurin said.

  “You couldn’t . . . you know . . . speed it up?” Yaz turned to face him. She didn’t know how long they had but maybe not long enough. “With your magic. So we could all get out of here quicker?”

  “My ice-work’s good.” Thurin pursed his lips. “But not that good.”

  * * *

  IT WASN’T A noise that lifted Yaz’s head, turning her gaze from the work Erris had set her to, wiring boards together. It was the stopping of a noise. Just as on the one occasion in her life when the wind fell silent it was that pause in the world’s song that hauled her from the tent, now it was the cessation of the water’s patter. “It’s stopped!”

  Thurin nodded beside her, his eyes still on his work. “They’ll finish filling the coal shaft soon. Then summon the worm to follow it.”

  Yaz made a grim smile. “With any luck we can be out of here before—”

  “Someone’s coming!” A shout rang out and Yaz stood sharply.

  “Gods in the Sky!” She raised her hands in the “why me?” gesture the Ictha used.

  A lithe figure was racing across the city ruins at speed, leaping pits and swerving around the few girders in his way.

  “It’s Zeen!” Yaz clambered up onto more exposed rock. “Let him through!” She could see now that Quell and two of the Broken were also running back, though they had yet to reach the halfway point on the long slope.

  Zeen came in faster than Yaz had ever seen anyone run, his feet flickering against the stone. He tamed his speed but still crashed into her and hung in her arms for a moment, panting. “Pome’s coming.” He hauled in a breath. “With everyone.” Another breath. “And his hunter.”

  Yaz stepped away from her brother to watch the other three approaching, Quell in the lead. She shook her head. Half a day would probably have seen them all gone. A few more hours maybe. But no, it all had to come crashing in right now. Maybe it was better this way. The shame of leaving the others to face Pome alone would have been hard to carry across the ice.

  “Take your positions,” Arka shouted. “Stay hidden until my mark.” She lowered herself to her chest behind an outcrop of the more stubborn rock that the Missing had poured their foundations from. In her left hand an iron spear, no different from the one that had seen Petrick fall from the bridge or the one that had slain Jerrig, the huge and gentle harvester.

  Kaylal hunkered down beside Arka, clutching a short sword from his own forge. Without legs, though, he was unlikely to last long in the coming fight. His fierce determination lent a new aspect to the beauty the gods had given him. He met Yaz’s eyes for a moment. Memories of Exxar haunted his stare, though whether it was revenge driving him or the desire to join his lover Yaz couldn’t say.

  Quell found cover thirty yards ahead of them. The two with him vanished into the city through a jagged crack. The first of Pome’s force were just coming into view at the top of the long slope. Four slim, dark-haired hunskas, fast enough to stand a chance against ambush and perhaps to dodge spears thrown from cover. They advanced in scurries, one moment a blur of motion, the next motionless save for their heads scanning for threats.

  Gerants came behind them, bundled in skins and armour plates. Too many of them but not nearly as many as she had feared. She remembered lots more. Surely Arka’s followers hadn’t killed them?

  Bexen led from the centre of the front line. The distance was too great for Yaz to see his milky eye but his size marked him. He bore a round shield on his arm and in the other hand a sword as long as Yaz was tall. It might still have Exxar’s blood on it. They came on swiftly, not running but with a rapid stride, as if eager to get on with what would surely be the last battle of this
insurrection.

  The hunter loomed behind the first rank, dwarfing even Bexen. Yaz wondered that it didn’t lead the way in. Perhaps Pome valued it above his human servants. The thing looked ill-fashioned, a brutal and graceless collection of iron. On one side three arms ended in serrated blades, on the other side two slightly heavier and longer arms, one sporting a six-foot spike and the other ending in a blunt-fingered hand of banded metal that looked capable of crushing rocks.

  Pome sheltered behind the hunter, betrayed by glimpses of the glowing star in his hand. Others of his band followed on, many of them the younger and the older members of the Broken who had been swept into Pome’s orbit and had found themselves unable to leave it without help.

  Yaz’s heart was beating as fast as if she’d been sprinting alongside Zeen. They could fight them here or run into the city and be hunted there, but either way it would be bloody. She found herself as scared as at any point since her fall. There had been no time to think when she faced Hetta or the hunters, but now, watching the approach of people who were ready to kill her, a terror rose through her in place of the anger that had helped her before. A terror that not only would she die, slashed open by the swing of a well-forged sword, but that Zeen, barely twelve and huddled behind her, would die, run through with an iron spear. And Kao, white-faced, his bravado gone, would spill his blood on the rocks, and that Thurin, Quell, even Erris would fall beneath a flurry of blades. The horror of it paralysed her and set both hands trembling against the stone slope before her.

  “This is not going to end well.” Thurin joined Yaz, leaning up against the side of the crater.

  “I thought this Pome wanted Yaz returned to the surface?” Erris slid up on her other side.

  “Well, he does . . .” Yaz admitted. The presence of Erris on one side and Thurin on the other released Yaz from her paralysis. She drove back her fear, trying to keep it from her voice. “But he wanted to send me up as a tribute to the regulator.”

  “Pome wanted you delivered to the man who Quell has contacted to arrange this collection so that you might be brought to him?” Erris asked.

  “Well . . . yes.” Yaz wanted to protest that it wasn’t the same. Pome was doing it because he wanted something from the regulator. But she knew that Quell was also doing it because he wanted something from the priest. Only in Quell’s case that something was her rather than a kingdom under the ice.

  “So the only people here who might object to your going are those who have given their loyalty to Arka?” Erris pressed on with his relentless logic.

  “Pome is a . . .” She stretched for an insult. The Ictha used them rarely and had few to choose from. “He is cruel and unworthy. I wouldn’t want him guiding the Broken even before he tainted himself.”

  “But won’t Theus and the other Tainted overrun them all soon in any case?” Erris sounded sincere, as if he genuinely didn’t know that he was bringing out into the light all the issues she had been hating herself for.

  “It’s not that easy—”

  Thurin exclaimed, “He’s got more gerants at the back than at the front!”

  Yaz looked away from Erris, grateful for the interruption. Pome’s whole force was on the slope now. At the back were ten gerants bearing the large square shields she remembered from the meeting in the Icicle Cavern. Rather than focusing their attention ahead of them, though, these ones kept glancing over their shoulders.

  “I don’t think they’re chasing Arka at all,” Yaz said. “I think they’re being chased.”

  35

  POME’S FORCE TIGHTENED ranks as they approached the city. Yaz watched their advance, her eyes level with the edge of the crater. Though they were just children of the tribes, the Broken seemed very different from those who had cast them down from the ice, and not just the hulking gerants. The wind hadn’t sculpted their features, and they wore a pitiful mix of patchwork rat skins, the aging remains of whatever they had worn on their drop day, here and there a cloak of woven hair or a pelt sent down by the priesthood along with their payments in salt and fish. And yet despite their beggar’s garb they carried in iron the wealth of many clans, all of it shaped for war.

  They halted some fifty yards shy of Yaz’s position, though Quell was hiding much closer, about halfway between them. Pome came out from behind his hunter and three of the hunskas moved to protect him, as if they might be fast enough to pluck any spear out of the air before it could hit home. He stood wrapped in the thickest hides the Broken had with an iron breastplate over the top. In his right hand he held a short iron rod with his star glowing crimson at the other end. Taller than most Ictha and of slighter build with his thin brown hair and narrow face he looked a man of little consequence but somehow, like parasitic worms, his words burrowed into the minds of those around him, swaying them to his cause.

  “I am not here to make war!” he shouted. “I have come to see that the girl, Yaz, is returned to the surface in accordance with the regulator’s orders. Once she has been dispatched to the ice we can resolve our differences.”

  “He’s scared of me,” Yaz hissed to Erris and Thurin. “He’s worried I’ll mess with his hunter again. He just wants me out of the way before he kills Arka.”

  “Come out here, Yaz of the Ictha! I’m sending you home!” Pome tried to make it sound inviting but his voice was no more capable of holding warmth than the ice was. “I’ll give you a moment to say your goodbyes. Don’t make Bexen come in and get you.”

  “We can’t beat them, can we?” Yaz asked.

  “Even if we could, think how many would die.” Thurin frowned. “And the Tainted must be hard on their heels, judging by how they came in here.”

  “I—” Motion between her crater and Pome caught Yaz’s eye. Quell had broken cover and was hurrying over to her, trusting in Pome’s period of grace that he wouldn’t end up with a spear between his shoulder blades.

  Quell slid over the edge of the crater, his booted feet thudding down on the rock beside her. Thurin stumbled back, narrowly avoiding being flattened.

  Quell reached for her shoulder. “Pome must have spoken with Regulator Kazik somehow, so he’ll know to let me and Zeen come up with you too. It’s got to be just the three of us though. I think it’s that or a bloodbath. You can do more for your friends up with the priests than in a war down here.”

  “But—”

  Quell raised a hand to her objections. “Think about it. This Pome is a madman pretending to be sane. And look how many he has with him.”

  A clattering from behind saved her from answering. She turned in confusion to see black stones bouncing in the puddled meltwater from the two narrow shafts.

  “It’s coal escaping,” Thurin said. “Tarko normally seals the end of the coal shaft with his ice-work.”

  “Tarko’s dead. You’ll have to do it.” Yaz glanced up at the hole, wondering if Thurin could work his will over such a distance.

  “I should save my energies if we’re going to fight.” Thurin looked doubtful.

  “Try.” Yaz reached out to grasp his arm below the elbow. “We won’t get out of here at all if all the coal falls through.”

  Thurin furrowed his brow and reached out toward the ceiling. He gritted his teeth and drew his lips back in a mask of effort. The fall of stones thinned out with just a handful more hammering into the small mound that had already formed. He grunted and they stopped entirely. “Ouch.”

  Pome’s call reached them across the rock. “Your ride is nearly here, Yaz. Come out. You’ve no choices left.”

  The sound came of iron feet ringing on stone as the hunter advanced a few yards to underscore its master’s point.

  Quell held his hand out. “We should go, Yaz.”

  Yaz pulled back, her mind working furiously. There was a hard logic at work here. The same cold weighing of benefit and loss that surrounded the pit. She couldn’t find the words to argue with it but th
at didn’t stop her wanting to fight against it.

  Far above them the cable and the lifting cage would be resting on the ice, waiting for the summoned coal-worm to arrive and follow the lead shaft, widening it sufficiently for the cage to follow down. The coal had fallen a great distance and the shaft behind it must be full of falling coal now backing up behind the blockage. The worm might even have started its work, pursuing its meal. But she hadn’t time to wait for the cage, and even if it was here now Pome wouldn’t allow the others to join her in it, or for them to take the food and the shelter they’d made. She hissed in frustration. They had come so close.

  “Maybe this is the only way,” Erris said solemnly.

  An idea hit Yaz, almost a physical blow. She rocked onto her heels. “Thurin! All that coal in the shaft . . . Could you make it burn? You once told me that you thought your flame-work was stronger than your ice-work.”

  A rough laugh broke from him. “I have no idea! I know I can’t set things on fire. Once it was burning I might be able to do . . . something. I don’t know for sure—I’ve never properly used my flame-work. But we don’t have any fire and—”

  Erris raised his hand between them and clicked his fingers. A small flame danced on the end of his thumb as if it were an oil lamp.

  Thurin’s eyes widened in amazement. “How . . . ?”

  Yaz waved the question away. “It doesn’t matter. Can you burn the coal?”

  “What? No! It’s all the way up there and the flame . . . is . . . here . . .” Thurin seemed hypnotised by the flame. It started to flare, growing several feet tall in the instant before Erris shut it off. He looked surprised, alarmed even, and his thumb was left gently smoking.

  Yaz remembered what Thurin had said about the need to use his ice-work at least every few days or the energies built inside him and burst out more strongly and with less control when he tried to use them. His flame-work had been building up for a lifetime. When he let the talent loose the results might be spectacular.