The Girl and the Stars

by Mark Lawrence

  “They want to kill us, Yaz!” Quell readied himself for his strike. “There’s more coming.”

  “Please!” The feeling Yaz put into the word was aimed at the gods as much as at Quell. It wasn’t his fault they were in this impossible situation. It wasn’t his fault she had jumped.

  Despite his shorter legs it was the smallest of the two boys who reached them first. A child with a touch of hunska in him. Zeen had been just like him until she drove out the demons. Yaz stepped in front of Quell to intercept the boy, swinging a punch. The boy proved too fast, ducking under her swing and leaping onto Yaz, tearing at her face.

  The boards went skittering across the ice as Yaz grabbed and rolled, scattering and crushing carefully hoarded fungi. She got on top of her attacker and banged his head against the rock, once, twice, until the fight went out of him. A sharp pain in her shoulder told her another child had leapt on her. Yaz got to her feet, rearing up beneath the second attacker as a third hammered into her. Close by, Quell felled a man, clubbing him two-handed across the chest, his axe abandoned.

  The Tainted came too quickly and too many to be fought off. Food and shelter were kicked aside, trampled, her last hopeless plan in ruins. Yaz managed to shrug off the child on her back, crying out as the girl’s teeth lost hold of her shoulder. The child fell to the ground and as the girl rolled to grab Quell’s leg Yaz saw that it was Jerra, the girl with the short brown hair who had arrived with Arka an hour before, now host to one of the devils from the black ice.

  Immediately another of the Tainted tackled Yaz and for a time punctuated by blows and screams they wrestled each other, rolling back and forth, locked in a vicious struggle. Finally Yaz banged the man’s head against the rock, hard enough to take him out of the fight.

  A cry rang out as she raised herself. A cry that cut through the noise, not because it was louder than the din but because she had known that voice all her life and never heard terror in it. Her eyes found the knife in Quell’s side, buried to the hilt, which was still gripped by the grimy hand of the young girl grappling him. Jerra had stabbed him. Jerra who had lowered the rope to save her from Hetta. Even as Yaz looked, Quell was falling, hauled down from behind by a heavily muscled ice-miner, another of the Broken newly overwhelmed by devils freed from the Tainted he’d killed.

  “No!”

  The Tainted closed on all sides. If Thurin and Erris were still fighting they were lost in the press of bodies.

  “No.”

  A slow calm closed around Yaz, deadening the screams and shouts. Another Tainted hammered into her and although the impact shook her it didn’t reach her core. The world slowed again like it must for a hunska in the throes of their quickness, though it gave her no liberty to act.

  “No . . .” She kept eye contact with Quell as he dropped. His hand wrestled for control of the knife whose blade reached deep into his flesh, but his pale-on-white Ictha eyes held hers.

  “No.” The same denial that had wrapped her when the regulator pushed Zeen into the pit now owned her once more. She had fallen from her life and now the dream of freedom lay broken. It had always been a dream, like the green ghost in the south taunting her with ancient memories of softer times. But the ice held them. The ice was truth. And now at the end of things she found herself too cold for dreaming.

  Another half-felt impact and she too was falling. She saw only the river that flows through all things, impossibly distant, the thinnest of lines far below her, too far to reach. The river couldn’t be touched twice in a day, let alone twice in the space of minutes. When she had touched it twice in a day it had been the stars that allowed it. The stars brought it closer.

  As she fell Yaz became aware of the stars, constellations of them, watching her from the ice-locked heavens. Stars like dust. A line joining each of them to her and her to each of them. Stars above her in the ice. Stars below her in the undercity. Stars on every side. A million threads, with her held weightless at the centre.

  The river lay too far below her and too thin, but she was falling. Hadn’t Theus said that, ancient in his darkness? Hadn’t he told Thurin that we fall through our lives? Yaz fell toward the river and with each moment it grew closer. Somewhere far away there were screams and howls. In that place there was pain and the dying of friends. “No.” Yaz couldn’t reach to touch the river. But she could dive into it. And she did.

  In the black skies of the long night when the dragons no longer lash their aurora tails across the heavens and only the uncountable crimson eyes of the dying stars bear witness, there comes from time to time a white and shooting fire. It is as if one of those low-banked hearths has gathered all its fuel in a last blaze of defiance and hurled itself from the impossible heights to burn a brilliant path toward the ground.

  Mother Mazai had a tale wherein once during her youth a white light reached in through the hides of her family’s tent and rolled their shadows across the far walls. And scrambling from their beds into the killing cold Mother Mazai’s family had watched, ankle-deep in the dry ice of the polar night, as a ball of blinding whiteness carved through the sky, shaking the ice with thunder until it fell from view with one last crash that set the powder-ice dancing into the air.

  Mother Mazai said her own grandmother had gone to find where the star had fallen. She went alone, wrapped in so many hides a hoola would have run from her if any such roamed so far north. There was no sense in it, Mazai said. It was not the Ictha way to spend precious energy in the long night, but her grandmother said she had seen the end of her days approach and that the Gods in the Sky would want one of the true people to stand witness to the fall of this star. And so she went.

  She returned long after they had given her up for dead, and she died soon after for the cold had its teeth too deep in her for the warmth of the tent to draw them out. But before she fell asleep that last time she said she had found the crater where the star fell and that it was as large as the wandering seas, and in all that great wreckage of ice there was only darkness. The light that had lit up the world was gone. Wholly spent in one last defiance.

  * * *

  YAZ KNEW SHE was that star.

  * * *

  SHE STOOD AND her flesh was burning. The Tainted fell away screaming. She held a thousand times more power than she might possibly contain and direct. It would burst from her in every direction, taking her bones with it. But like the shooting star she would have defied the darkness if only for a short time, and when her moment of glory was done there would be nothing of her for the darkness to claim.

  Even in her instant of release Yaz thought of the ones she loved. The lines that joined her heart to theirs radiated from her. Quell, her foundation, Thurin, as broken as she had become, Erris, both ancient and young, Zeen, her last tie to family, and all the other friends around her. But growing stronger and more clear than even these connections were the million threads that joined her to the stars. The power in her made each star in the ice above and city below known to her with a clarity she had never experienced before. She knew their position, their song, their nature. Even the void star, further below her than the surface of the ice lay above her, even the void star echoed her song. Even its heartbeat quickened in response. Those million threads thrummed and sang with power, a celestial harmony leeching energy from her through uncountable pinpricks.

  “No!” Yaz raised both arms, fingers splayed. Above her the ice lit, alive with the colours of every star, from those that would cover a thumbnail to those that could be lost among grains of dust. Beneath her the dark, dead chambers of the undercity knew light once more as the script walls burst into brilliance and the stars as yet unscavenged began to burn with a new fire. Light woke in rooms that had stood for millennia in silent, unbroken blackness. The shadows ran from galleries where the last flame had been borne in the hands of the Missing.

  Yaz found herself at the midst of a constellation, of a galaxy, and as she shouted her deni
al every star orbited around her centre. Each one carved its own curved path through the ice, burning with heat stolen from the river in which she swam.

  “Come!” Yaz roared, and the closest stars answered, tearing from the ice to swarm through the air in shimmering tendrils.

  The stars broke upon the battlefield like a deluge, a rattling flood of light, surging in response to Yaz’s desire. She wrapped the Tainted in cocoons of glowing stars, flexible dusty skins studded with larger stars.

  “Go!” Yaz commanded, feeling through the stars as if they were somehow extensions of her own hands, feeling the number and disposition of the devils in each of their victims. “Leave!” She struck as she had struck with her hunter’s star against first Kao’s chest and then Zeen’s, but now with many thousands of lesser stars and with far greater clarity. The pulse of light as the stars gave out the last of their stolen energy was enough to burn out many of the smallest, leaving nothing of themselves behind.

  Yaz fell to her knees amid the shimmering drifts. With the last of her strength she flung her arms out to her sides and drove the stars back. The drifts drew away toward the outskirts of the city, leaving a battlefield littered with bodies.

  * * *

  A SILENCE REIGNED and Yaz lay spent, unmoving, her gaze fixed. It seemed an age before anyone spoke and before they did, not a single thought passed across the clean white field of Yaz’s mind. At last the bodies began to move. Beside Yaz the girl Jerra, freed from possession, now rolled to her back, groaning. “What? What happened?”

  38

  YAZ HAD SAVED them. A smile found its way to her lips, even as she lay hollowed on the rock. If Yaz had achieved nothing else, if the last of her life’s energy trickled from her limbs as she lay on the cold stone, she had done this one good thing. She had driven the devils from those claimed by the taint. She had ended the battle that saw son turned against father, mother against daughter. She had reunited two great halves of the Broken, mended families torn apart by ancient evils.

  In a fog of wonderment the newly cleansed Tainted began to gain their feet. Friends and family long-parted found themselves in each other’s arms once more.

  “It’s started rising again!” Kao’s shout startled Yaz out of her daze. She turned as quickly as her fragile body would allow. She felt as though she were a collection of broken parts, her bones turned to brittle ash. The power that had flowed through her left a burned-out feeling. If all that energy hadn’t found an immediate exit she would have been blown apart by it. The stars had saved her.

  “The cage . . .”

  The cage hadn’t stopped. They were still hauling it back. Slowly but without pause.

  “They’re not supposed to do that!” Thurin hobbled toward her, holding his arm.

  “We should hurry then.” Erris had already collected several boards, still wired together at the edges. His white tunic, now smeared with dirt and blood, had been half torn from him, revealing the musculature of his chest and belly. He strode urgently toward the rising cage, now hip height above the ground.

  Yaz’s sense of success turned to panic. Zeen was still out there! “You three do it. I’m going to look for—” Yaz broke off, remembering Quell. Somehow the vast energies she had employed had temporarily wiped from her memory the horror that had driven her through whatever barriers she had overcome in order to call on them. She spotted Quell as one of the Tainted who had been attacking him, the same child who drove the knife home, now moved aside from trying to tend his injuries.

  “I’m so sorry.” Jerra wiped at her grimy tears.

  Yaz shouldered her aside. It was as if the idea that Quell might die had been too big to fit in her head, blasted from it by the very plunge into the river that it had precipitated. The knife was still buried to the hilt in his side, no part of the blade showing. She took Quell’s hands, their eyes meeting again. There were no words to say. The Ictha had no healing save for minor cuts. To become injured on the ice was to die. Living without injury was struggle enough. It was the same hard fact and same cruel logic that saw children thrown into the Pit of the Missing.

  Yaz reached to pull the knife out.

  “Don’t.” Jerra caught her arm. Her hair was still dark with the flood and guilt haunted her eyes. “He’ll bleed to death.”

  “Take it out.” Quell gasped through gritted teeth. “Going . . . to . . . die anyway.”

  Another of the Tainted, blinking, still disoriented, reached to stay Yaz’s hand. “It’s a bad wound, but if we stitch it and bind it”—she tilted her head as if trying to judge what the knife might have reached—“and keep it clean . . . he stands a chance. A good chance maybe.”

  A dark shape loomed over them. “She’s correct.” Erris knelt beside Yaz. “We don’t want to remove the blade until we are ready to deal with the wound. I suggest your new friend helps you move Quell to the cage.” He softened his voice and added, “Quickly.”

  Erris hurried back to the business of loading food and equipment. He and Thurin pushed through the wandering crowd, made rough by fear of the cage leaving them behind, seemingly the only ones there with any purpose. The rest of the Broken were too overwhelmed to notice what Yaz’s friends were about. They were busy tending to their wounded, weeping over their dead, and discovering those who they thought lost forever months or years before.

  Members of Arka’s and Pome’s factions were scattered and intermingled but their fight seemed forgotten, washed away by a flood of water and the falling of stars. The Tainted, returned to their senses when Yaz’s last effort burned the devils out of them, were now the glue that joined the two pieces of the Broken together, the joy of their reunion stronger than recent disputes of which they knew nothing. Yaz had no idea how long it would last. Long enough, she hoped.

  Yaz, with help from Jerra and the woman, bent to carry Quell by his arms and legs but as she began to pull Yaz saw the pain it would cause. She set the woman to watch while she and Jerra got boards onto which they could roll Quell and then drag him to the cage. She wanted to stay with him, to talk, to tell him he was going to survive, but there wasn’t any time, the cage was leaving. Before long it would be shoulder high from the ground and for all Yaz knew the priests might soon start to haul it up at speed.

  “Let’s do this.” Yaz had found the boards. With the woman’s help she’d slid them under Quell.

  The strain required to move the solid Ictha proved too much for Yaz, burned out by her miracle with the stars, and for the woman, starved and weakened during her time in service to Theus. Jerra was stronger than both but too small to make the difference. Yaz’s fingers slipped from the board beneath Quell’s shoulders and she fell back cursing, weeping with effort.

  As she sat up Yaz found a hulking shape coming toward her, unrecognisable in the dimmed glow from the ice ceiling high above them.

  “I’ll do it.” Kao bent to take hold. His thick arms bore a dozen bleeding bite marks and cruel nail furrows. His hair stood at odd angles, some having been torn out in clumps, and his hides were ripped in several places. But he still had his strength and soon had Quell scraping across the rocks, gasping at the jolts.

  At the cage Thurin was already inside, receiving fungi, boards, and other equipment as Erris brought it. A dozen or so former Tainted stood watching in confusion, their minds perhaps unsure of reality after the sudden departure of the devils that had ruled them for so long. An emaciated fair-haired young woman approached the cage as Kao reached it dragging Quell.

  “Thurin?”

  Thurin positioned the hot pot Erris had given him, setting it on a stack of boards. He turned to the woman. “Klendra?” A smile of astonishment cracked his bloody face. Seeing Yaz he pointed to the blond girl. “She’s cave-born. We grew up together.” He rubbed his eyes as if to clear his vision and looked at Klendra again. “Is it really you? They took you so long ago! You were six? Everyone thought you must be dead ages ago.�
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  Yaz wanted to shout that there wasn’t time for reunions. Part of her wanted to shove the girl aside. And other voices within her skull cried out to shame that first voice. Exhaustion was showing her what the stars did. She understood that she wasn’t the selfish voice, or the kind one—she was the sum of a multitude, normally joined so close that the seams didn’t show, but liable to fall apart under stress. Everyone was. A mix, a recipe, the sum of their parts and more.

  Erris had swarmed up the outside of the cage and now motioned that he was going to drop the load of boards he’d brought across. “Sorry to be insensitive but we’re on a clock here.”

  Thurin looked up. “A what?”

  “In a hurry.” He dropped the boards for Thurin to catch.

  Yaz called out to him. “Erris! Help me with Quell. I can’t lift him like this.”

  Erris landed beside them, making the fifteen-foot drop from the side of the cage seem nothing. The bottom of the cage was already approaching shoulder height above the ground.

  “Do you know what to do for Quell?” Yaz asked, thinking that in the warm years into which Erris had been born there might have been time to heal the sick rather than discard them.

  “I’ll have a look at it on the way up,” he said. “How long was the blade?”

  Quell shook his head. “Feels like it’s long enough to poke out the other side.”

  Erris pulled himself back onto the gently swinging cage and Kao, with Yaz’s help, lifted Quell toward him. Erris took hold of Quell from behind, reaching one arm under his armpit and across his chest, then began to climb, as if Quell were a small child and his considerable weight was nothing. Quell panted through his teeth, clearly in great pain, but made no cry, just a groan as Erris lifted him over the top of the cage, avoiding the lifting cables.