The Girl and the Stars

by Mark Lawrence

  She should have fallen. Somehow she didn’t. On her face frustration turned to surprise. Her hands reached up and took new hold.

  Back on the ground Thurin stood with his own hands raised and Yaz understood. He had used his ice-work to take hold of the water inside Maya and lift her and Zeen, who hung from her ankles.

  The cage jolted. Far above, whatever was hauling them up began the task in earnest and they began to rise faster still. Yaz locked eyes with Thurin for an aching moment before a groan from Kao demanded her attention.

  “Can’t hold . . . much longer.”

  Even after his beating Yaz had thought the gerant equal to the task of supporting a man and two children. Kao started to breathe in short desperate pants. In addition to his own muscular body Kao was carrying Erris, and Yaz had never considered what the body Erris had built for himself might weigh.

  “Hold on, Kao!” Yaz wanted to reach down between the board stacks and set her hands to Kao’s bloodless fingers but with her wrists bound outside the cage she could offer only words as comfort. The strength left to her was barely enough to get her to her knees, though once she might have been able to tear free of such bonds.

  Beneath Kao the human chain that ended with her brother swayed dangerously. Erris frowned in concentration and slowly, very slowly, brought his knees up, still with the end of the iron rod trapped beneath his heels. Impossibly he brought his knees to his chest with Yaz expecting Maya and Zeen to fall away at any moment.

  To the accompaniment of Kao’s puffed breath, and now an agonised keening, Erris released one hand from Kao’s foot and reached down to take a grip on the rod that Maya had killed Bexen with.

  Erris raised the rod and its burden of two children one-handed while straightening his legs again. Grim-faced and hurting almost as much as Kao was, Maya transferred her grip to Erris’s ankles.

  Erris discarded the rod. Yaz hoped it would miss any of those beneath them, craning their necks to watch. “Zeen. Climb up,” Erris ordered.

  Kao’s eyes bulged bloodshot from their sockets. “Gods in the Ice!” His gasp was hardly audible.

  Zeen began to climb Maya, the sheer terror of the fall beneath him overriding the Ictha shyness around close contact. He clutched her with an intimacy that would make married Ictha blush in private. Even so he looked precarious, poised to drop, risking his life time and again on the strength of patchwork skins and the stitches holding them together. Twice something tore and he slipped back with a despairing shriek only to catch himself again, both arms hugging Maya’s waist then neck.

  Above them the yawning throat of the ice shaft loomed, fringed by dripping icicles. Bands of glowing stardust marbled the first twenty yards of shaft and above that all was darkness. Zeen reached Erris, who grabbed his wrist and lifted him to where he could set both hands gripping Kao’s leg.

  Yaz met Kao’s despairing stare. “Hold on, just a little longer!”

  Before Zeen was halfway done climbing Kao, Erris lifted Maya to pursue him. They both reached the cage together and hung from the bars, reliving Kao of some of his burden. Next, Erris began to climb up Kao.

  By the time the cage entered the shaft Maya and Zeen had moved hand by hand to the edges of the cage bottom, still looking ready to fall at the slightest bump. It was Kao who fell though, dropping away with a despairing wail as Erris reached his neck. Quick as any hunska Erris shot a hand out to grab the cage bars even as the pair of them dropped. The whole cage jolted and Zeen cried out in fear. Yaz’s own scream died in her throat as she saw that Erris now had Kao’s thick wrist clasped in one hand while the other kept them both secured to the cage.

  Maya managed to get herself from the bottom of the cage onto the side, holding to the bars with hands and feet while the walls of the ice shaft came closer and closer as they rose. She cut the bonds on Yaz’s wrists as she passed.

  Gathering her strength Yaz moved the board stacks a little then helped Zeen with the transition to the side of the cage, making sure she had hold of him while he reached and strained.

  Finally, with the dark now broken only by the red glow of the star Yaz had taken from Pome, Erris showed more of his inhuman strength by climbing the outside of the cage using only his hands while carrying Kao locked between his legs. At one point the ice wall came in close enough to touch them and Yaz feared both would be scraped away. But Erris held on and soon added himself and Kao to the crush inside the cage.

  * * *

  ICE WALLS SLID past with surprising speed, glistening in the red light. Yaz had dimmed the star to a glimmer to lessen its impact on the others. For quite some time Kao lay groaning, incapable of motion. Quell beside him made no sound but lay beaded with sweat, watching Yaz through eyes slitted with pain. Maya crouched against the bars, as far from the others as she could get. The darkness seemed to flow around her as the cage rose, making her indistinct in that strange shadow-work way. Zeen sat beside Yaz, as close as his tolerance for the star’s radiance would let him. He said nothing, only hunched around his worries. Alone of them Erris stood, untroubled by his exertions and showing no sign of the recent battle save for the rips and bloodstains across his tunic and trousers. Yaz noted that neither of these garments . . . the word “cloth” floated across her mind . . . were suitable for the surface. Though none of them, even in Ictha skins, would survive long in the wind, damp as they were.

  “Well,” said Erris eventually. “We made it.”

  “Thurin didn’t.” Yaz could hardly believe they had left him behind. The idea didn’t want to fit into her mind.

  Erris inclined his head. “I’m sorry. Thurin proved himself brave and resourceful. Without him Zeen would not be with us.” He paused for a long moment then shook his head and managed a smile. “Still, even without one of our number you have accomplished great things here today, Yaz. Think of it. Your brother and two friends recovered from the heart of the black ice. Taken back from Theus himself. Six of us headed to the surface through a hole you helped put through two miles of ice. The Tainted freed from the horror that ruled them. Theus’s power broken!”

  “And Pome’s,” Maya said. “You made the Broken whole and brought them peace.”

  “Peace and food,” Kao said. “An entire whale! I never tried whale.”

  “But Quell . . .” Yaz turned to him, still horrified by the hilt jutting from his side.

  “They’re right, Yaz.” He managed a weak smile. “And you were right to ask me to drop that axe.” A glance toward the knife. “I’d rather this than living with the memory of children that I cut down to save myself.”

  Yaz found her eyes blurry with tears and her throat too tight for reply. She shook her head and reached out for his hand.

  They sat like that for a long time.

  * * *

  THE ICE WALLS seemed to slide by quickly in the crimson light but either that was an illusion due to proximity or the hole was deeper than even they had thought, because the first hour passed with no sign of daylight from above.

  Yaz’s pain and exhaustion ebbed slowly. Strength crept back into her limbs. She began to realise that despite it all, despite the losses and setbacks, she had won. They had won. The Broken had won. It might even be possible to convince Regulator Kazik to set right what had gone wrong. Quell could be healed. Erris had said so.

  And once on the ice they had both shelter and food to carry south with them. She touched the needle at her collar. If the journey proved too hard then, as a last resort, Elias Taproot was out there too and she could find him. Perhaps they would need his help, but she hoped not. She didn’t want to get drawn into his battle with Seus. The green world was a haven, a dream of peace. She wasn’t going there to make war.

  “How long?” Kao raised his head from the boards. “Before we get there?”

  Yaz looked up. She had seen only velvet blackness before but now it seemed that a single tiny star shone directly above
her, a lone point of light in all that dark. “Is that . . . the sky?”

  Even as she said it she thought of Thurin who had never in all his life seen the light of day.

  39

  WE NEED A plan,” Yaz said.

  The faint point of light had become a distant circle of sky. Yaz knew they didn’t have too long before they were hauled out into the daylight like fish drawn from the sea in the regulator’s iron net. They had perhaps another half or quarter mile to go.

  “Didn’t we have one already?” Kao asked.

  Yaz scowled. “I planned on not arriving with all my powers spent, or Quell with a knife in his side, or without Thurin and his ice-work. Now we need something new or the priests will catch me and throw the rest of you back down the Pit of the Missing.”

  “What do you suggest?” Erris asked. “The last time I saw the sky the place we’re going to was above the clouds. So assume I have no idea what to expect.”

  Yaz pondered. “The element of surprise is supposed to be important when making war. Isn’t that what the Axit say, Maya?” She glanced around. “Maya?”

  Suddenly they were all looking for the girl. “Maya?”

  “I would say,” Erris commented dryly, “that Maya agrees with you.”

  “But where could she be?” Yaz continued searching, arms outstretched as if the girl might have made herself invisible. “It’s a cage!”

  Erris pointed up. “She’s climbing the cable. The priests know when the cage should get there. They’ll be ready for us then. Maya is going to arrive ahead of schedule.”

  “We should too!” Yaz exclaimed, though even as she said it she found herself daunted by the idea of hauling herself up hundreds of yards of icy cable.

  “I think you should.” Erris nodded. “It’s you they’re expecting. You and Quell. Then if they spot you they’ll be in the middle of dealing with you when we arrive and they won’t be expecting us.”

  “You’re coming up with me though, right?” Yaz suddenly had no idea what she might do when faced with the regulator once more. “What will I say?”

  Erris shook his head. “I need to take this knife out of Quell and stitch him up. We’ll probably have to move him quickly and if we do that with the blade still inside him it will do all sorts of extra damage.”

  Yaz blinked. “You couldn’t have done that during the first half of our journey up?”

  “There’s going to be a lot of blood, Yaz. Once it’s done we’re going to need to get him lying down and warm as soon as we can if he’s to live.”

  Yaz tried to imagine how that was even vaguely possible. She stamped down on the doubt and looked up at the cable instead, stretching away to the distant circle of light.

  “I should come too,” Zeen said. Over the course of their long ascent his mood had changed from wild optimism fuelled by the excitement of their escape to a pensive acceptance that although they were going back to the ice and the sky and the wind they were not going back to their lives. At first he had even thought that their parents would take them back, that their mother would open her tent to her two surviving children despite the regulator’s judgment and the rulings of Mother Mazai. Yaz had tried to be gentle. The judgment had changed how their world saw them. The fall had taken them from their past and simply climbing back out could not change that. More than this though were the changes that had undeniably been wrought in them during their time below. With every challenge Yaz’s quantal blood had worked its magic, saving her but making something new of her. She had grown both stronger and weaker each time, as though the threats and fear and hurt had torn first one skin from her then another, revealing a different creature beneath. Zeen too had changed beyond recognition, his speed a part of him now, evident in every move in a way it had not been before the fall. Before the regulator’s shove Zeen had been merely quick, now his hunska blood owned him and his swiftness was inhuman. These gifts had come at a price: the strength of the Ictha had bled from them, and the northern nights would eat them alive.

  “I should come too,” Zeen repeated.

  “You don’t know how to climb.” Yaz was grateful that a simple answer lay to hand.

  Without further discussion Yaz clambered up the side of the cage and then with more trepidation reached up to where the four supporting cables, which led to equally spaced points around the cage’s edge, met together and twisted into the one thick cable stretching directly upwards. She set the red star orbiting her in a slow spiral and glanced down one last time to see Zeen and Kao staring up at her. Erris was already kneeling beside Quell, bent across him, hiding both their faces.

  With a prayer to the Gods in the Sky Yaz took hold of the freezing cable. She grunted with effort as she hauled herself up then locked her legs about it and began to climb. Her time in the undercity with Arka and then her days alone had taught her all about climbing cables, except perhaps what to do when they are filmed in ice and so cold that they leach the feeling from your fingers within the first ten yards.

  She was thankful that enough strength to climb had returned to her during the long journey to the surface. Even so she made only slow progress. However slow her progress, though, each time she reached up the cable she put distance between her and the cage.

  Yaz would not have made it far but for the fact that Maya had preceded her, and like many marjals she had some minor talent for ice-work, at least enough to break away the cable’s ice cladding at the places she wanted to hold on. Yaz took advantage of these clear spots and continued to climb until her arms began to tremble with the strain and her hands felt as if they belonged to a stranger. Looking down she was surprised to see the cage had entirely vanished into darkness.

  Above her the circle of sky loomed larger and closer than ever, a bleak blood-tinged white offering no hope of warmth. She had half expected to see Seus’s dark form reaching across the heavens like a skeletal hand, as it had above the freezing forest where she had found Elias Taproot. But even the bare sky felt like a threat.

  During her time in the close confines of the caverns and the undercity Yaz had mourned the loss of her open spaces, the aching distances of the ice plains, even the unending song of the wind. But now, hauled inexorably from her hole out into the daylight, Yaz found herself daunted by that same wide emptiness she had wanted back.

  Only a short time remained. She could now see the frame that must support the cable. Maya must already have reached the surface ahead of her. Yaz brought the star into her sleeve and began to worry about the mechanics of her arrival. It hadn’t occurred to her until now but it seemed that the cable must be wrapped across some kind of wheel on the frame above. If Yaz failed to release her hold her hands would be destroyed. If she did release it she would fall back down the shaft, dropping a distance that would kill both her and whoever she landed on.

  Yaz experimented with climbing back down, trying to mark her position against the shaft wall. At the fastest rate she felt safe with, her descent was still exceeded by the rise of the cable. Increasingly desperate she tried to judge the width of the shaft. Would it be possible to jump to the side? She would have to land almost entirely on the ice or she would slide back down the hole. Given her current weakness it seemed unlikely that she could make it. Would she have to scream humiliatingly for the priests’ attention and hope that they would be able to stop the cable in time?

  Gods in the Sea! She was such an idiot! Yaz’s terror grew moment by moment. The circle of sky was rushing at her now, growing larger with each heartbeat. Soon it would be the whole world and the time for thinking would be replaced by a need for action.

  “Maya made it,” Yaz whispered. The girl’s body hadn’t dropped past her, not even a scatter of severed fingers, so somehow little Maya had figured out a solution.

  Yaz could hear the creaking of the wheel now and see it on its great iron frame, devouring the cable yard by yard, directing it through a sharp turn to
angle down at the ice where some great mechanism must be winding it onto a spool. Yaz wondered if she could reach out to the cable after it left the wheel, but the distance looked too great and her arms too leaden to lift her.

  And suddenly she was level with the ice, slitting her eyes against the light, with no time left to think. The wheel was huge, the cable hauling her swiftly toward it. With a strength born of terror Yaz released one numb hand from the cable above her and took a hold much lower. Crying out with effort she lifted and twisted her tired body and set both feet to the cable between her two hands. If her grip failed a fatal fall waited. She thought perhaps that her top hand might be frozen to the metal and that that might be all that was keeping her from the drop.

  The clanking filled her ears. The wheel brought her racing toward it a good twenty feet above the ice, tall enough for all of the cage to be lifted clear. Straining every muscle Yaz thrust as hard as she could with her legs while clinging desperately to the cable. Tension built rapidly. The wheel was on her, her frozen fingers racing toward the narrowing gap between the iron rim and the cable. Yaz tried to let go and found she couldn’t. She saw her hand pulled past the bottom of the wheel, inches from mutilation. She screamed with effort, legs straining, and found sudden release. The force flung her outwards, the blackness of the shaft yawned beneath her. She hit the slick, sloping ice at the edge of the shaft where the coal burn had melted it away. She would have slipped back into the hole but her momentum carried her on, rolling and sliding to a halt on the raw ice. Without the wind that now pressed on her back she would never have made it. The Gods in the Sky loved her. Though lying there with her body feeling like one huge bruise and unsure how many of her bones remained unbroken Yaz couldn’t find it in her to thank them. She hauled her right arm toward her face, terrified that the thing that broke her grip on the cable had been the removal of her fingers. But no, they were still there, abused but whole.