The Girl and the Stars

Yaz set off toward the wedge of tainted gerants advancing behind Theus as he led them through the rest of his forces. She felt strange, passing through people, as if she were the ghost not them, as if she were like the first daughter of Zin and Mokka who still haunted the ice, less substantial than the wind.

She reached the red-haired gerant, his face less blood-crazed than the others, a cruel and eager pride on blunt features, green eyes staring out from beneath a heavy brow. She turned to Erris as he caught her up. “Can you show me the undercity? I mean how it lies beneath the stone?”

Erris frowned in concentration then nodded. The Tainted and the Broken faded into smoky memories; even the stone beneath their feet became translucent, and shining through it she could see a confusion of chambers and tunnels stretching down into untold depths. In some places you would have to mine through fifty or a hundred yards of rock to find a void. In others the nearest chambers almost touched the surface. In others they did touch the surface, and those were the holes down which the recent flood had drained in a remarkably short time given the volume of water.

Yaz made a slow turn. Thurin had wanted them to escape to the undercity but even if the nearest entrance were just yards away, and it wasn’t, it would still be too far with all of them already grappling with the foe. Yaz tried to see if there were some way she might direct any power she took from the river into the rock to forge a new escape route. But the nearest chamber that lay close to the surface was nearer to Theus and the advancing gerants. They would reach it first.

“Send me back to the fight,” Yaz said. “I mean, wake me up, or whatever it is you do.”

“I’m not sending you. If we go we’ll go together.”

“I thought . . .” Yaz frowned. “I thought you had coral reefs to see.”

Erris smiled a slow, regretful smile. “I had coral reefs to show you. I have spent too long alone in such places. The only joy left is in sharing them. I would rather share your last minutes than spend another eternity in sunshine and green fields by myself, Yaz.”

Yaz didn’t know how to answer that. “Keep them off me for a few moments more. I’m going to try something.”

Erris nodded. He reached for her face, one warm hand shaping itself to the curve of her cheek, some urgent and unexpected need swelled within her and she opened her mouth to speak, but suddenly everything was screaming and falling again.

Yaz’s fall ended with a sharp pain and a sudden loss of breath. The Tainted that had brought her down clung to her legs while a howling child no older than Zeen hurled herself at Yaz’s face, biting and clawing.

A heartbeat later the girl sailed away, plucked from Yaz by Erris and thrown into the advancing masses. He hauled Yaz to her feet while kicking her other assailant clear.

“Make it fast!” Erris pivoted to kick a large man high in the chest, sending him tumbling back before he could swing the ice hatchet in his hand.

As Erris threw himself into the oncoming lines, kicking, twisting, and punching, Yaz tried to see past them as she had in the vision she had so recently shared. The river that runs through all things was there before her, thin, ethereal, but within reach if she could just stretch . . . She extended her arms, her eyes defocused, fingers straining. The river eluded her, like a sneeze that was there but wouldn’t quite make itself known. The screaming and roaring and falling bodies made it hard to find. She needed her stars but they were gone. She needed time but the booming voices of the gerants flanking Theus told her that she had none.

“I can’t . . .” It was too soon, and her work in the black ice with the hunter’s star must have used the same muscle as reaching for the river because it seemed to retreat before her. Her friends were dying. Innocents were falling on all sides. “I can’t.” And suddenly she could. Suddenly the river was beneath her fingers, swirling around her hands, flowing through her, filling and flooding her, trying to tear her from the moorings of her flesh.

With a cry Yaz pulled free. Even in the depths of their madness the Tainted knew to draw back as Yaz shuddered with the raw energies that pulsed through her. To her own eyes her flesh shone with a golden light. Time fractured around her, different possible Yazes trying to fall in every direction at once. The pain was as nothing she had experienced before and with a shriek she released the borrowed power before it destroyed her. She flung it forward in a thick beam of brightness that cut through several Tainted before it reached the rock just before Theus’s feet. The stone absorbed the bolt, glowing with the same spreading gold that Yaz’s hands had shown, and shattered rather than exploded. A great sheet of rock fell in broken pieces, taking Theus, his gerants, and a score of other Tainted down with it, falling into the chamber that had been hidden beneath their feet. The sound shook the ground as if the ice sky itself had fallen, raw, violent, bigger than mountains. The hole was a rough rectangle with jagged edges, many yards on each side, and dust rose from it in a big curling cloud, whooshing up toward the icy heavens.

37

   THE DUST CLOUD rolled over Yaz, taking the ice sky away and most of the light with it. The boom, louder even than that of the collection cage hitting the floor, had for a moment stolen everyone’s voice. An eerie silence, as tenuous and fleeting as the dust cloud itself, hung in the air.

At first it was groans and calls to friends that nibbled away at the thickness of the silence. Yaz called for Erris and found her voice distant as if the crash of falling stone had deadened her hearing. The snarling of the Tainted came next, orienting themselves in this unexpected grey world. Yaz found a pair of bodies resuming their struggle and hauled the thinner one away to reveal someone familiar. “Quell?” She coughed on the dust, trying not to choke. The man looked almost like Quell beneath the grey.

“Yaz!” It was Quell. He gripped her arm and used her as support while he clambered to his feet.

“Get to the cage,” Yaz said.

He nodded, uncertain of the direction, then set off, pulling her with him.

“Wait. Thurin is close.”

The howls were rising again from many directions. The sounds of renewed fighting echoed out, new screams of pain and anger and fright.

“Yaz?” Against the odds Thurin stumbled from the sifting clouds.

“The cage,” she said, and let Quell pull her on. “Erris! The cage!”

Thurin limped after them. Glancing back she saw the left side of his face ran with blood, so dark as to look black in the half-light.

By the time Erris jogged into view to join them the dust had settled enough for a good ten yards of visibility. They passed ghost-grey people identifiable as the Broken only by the fact that they didn’t run madly to attack them. Quell led on, taking Yaz further from the front line where the flood had swept her, back past the positions Arka’s followers had established.