The Girl and the Stars

“Zeen! Maya? Kao?” Yaz called the last name without hope. The boy had been among the first to go down, throwing himself at the Tainted to save her. “Kaylal? Arka?”

They reached the cage, looming above them, a thing as alien as the hunters, having no place on the ice. It still leaned at a steep angle, supported by the forking cable at one end and by the edge touching the rock at the other. The cable end was high enough that Yaz couldn’t reach any of it with outstretched arms.

“If we climb on it they’ll have to come up at us,” Yaz said.

“Or bring us down with spears,” Thurin said.

“I have this.” Quell had picked up one of the big gerant shields on the way. A grey board as dust covered as he was. “We can hold out until they haul the cage back up. Maybe.”

“We’ve no food or shelter,” Erris noted.

“No.” Yaz hung her head. It had taken the only member of their group not to need either of these vital things to point out their absence. The boards and fungi had doubtless been washed away and swirled down into the undercity through a dozen different holes, along with the last of any remaining hope.

“They’re where we left them,” Thurin said. “I convinced the water to leave them behind.”

“Thank the gods.” Yaz blinked at Thurin, amazed and elated in equal measure. His ice-work had advanced seemingly in leaps and bounds. When they first met he showed off by lifting a puddle. Now he steered the currents of a wild flood and threw grown men through the air. “We need to load it. Quickly. And search for the others.”

Quell opened his mouth to speak but at that moment the cage began to straighten up. “They’re hauling it back!”

“No,” Thurin said. “They’ll lift it a little off the ground. So they know it’s vertical and easy to load.”

“How do they know?” Yaz asked, ready to grab the bars should it start to rise beyond reach.

The cage straightened but instead of rocking on its base it scraped across the ground then began to swing free beneath the still-rising cable. A moment later it stopped rising and just hung there swinging slowly.

“They must be able to tell by the weight on the lifting mechanism,” Erris said. “Let’s hurry.”

With the dust settling all around them and visibility heading back to normal the four of them hurried to get the stashed food and shelter. They worked in pairs heaping fungi onto stacked boards then carrying the loads to the cage. The Tainted and Broken resumed their fights, knots of Arka’s and Pome’s factions struggling against the possessed intruders from the black ice. Even with Theus and his gerants removed from the battleground along with a score or more of others the Tainted still had more than twice the combined numbers of the Broken factions. The pause had, however, allowed the Broken a moment to organise their defence.

Guilt dogged Yaz’s steps as she worked. They were preparing their escape while others fought and kept the enemy from them. Worse still, Zeen was still out there. But without the cage and supplies she had no salvation to offer her brother even if she could find him. She knew though that she would not be leaving without him.

Yaz and Quell were returning to the cage with their third load before the first band of Tainted came running at them. Quell set down his end of the boards, spilling fungi, and raised the bloody axe hanging at his hip.

Yaz looked at the five Tainted sprinting toward them across the wet rock. Two ragged children, two painfully thin women, their dirty hair flying out behind them, and a man of more solid build, his chest bare and bleeding from several long cuts. She could already imagine the ruin that the swing of Quell’s axe would wreck. “Couldn’t we . . .” She raised her fists and mimed a punch.

“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.