The Girl and the Stars

He lifted his star, the scarlet glow leaking between his fingers. The light of it cast his face in shadows and blood.

“Yours is not the only rising star.” He lifted his voice, speaking for the crowd, his magic letting his poisoned words find a home in some of the hearts that would otherwise reject them. “The girl, Yaz, must return to the surface as the regulator has stipulated and answer for her crimes there. I don’t need to remind you that without the goodwill of the priests we would have no fish, no salt, and no skins. You are all too young to know but Eular remembers a time without salt. It’s a slow, ugly death. It takes about ten days before it starts to hurt, and quite a few more days to die, but after the first twelve days you’ll wish you were dead.” He nodded to one of his gerants. “Go bind her hands.”

Some of the Broken had looked angry at the threat to a child’s life, but now that anger wavered, torn by self-interest, swayed by Pome’s influence. They couldn’t live on fungi alone, and rats were too scarce. The priests might be miles above but they could reach down and wrap their hands about the throats of the Broken just as Bexen was doing to Zeen.

Each moment the cage edged its way higher. The bottom of the cage had cleared the Broken now, above the reach of those of regular height. The gerant coming to tie Yaz’s hands outside the cage was nearly close enough to do it. Yaz would have to drop down on the inside and push her wrists through the bars to comply.

“I should leave.” Thurin began to climb out, his face grim but forcing a smile. “Pome should let you take Quell back. The priest sent your friend to get you after all.”

Erris, already near the top of the cage, swung himself back out and began to climb down. “I’ll find you again, Yaz.”

Thurin snorted and pointed at the hole above them. “Good climber, are you?”

Erris smiled. “I have a knack for getting out of places I don’t want to be in.”

Kao hung where he was, halfway up the inside. He watched her, blue-eyed beneath his mass of dirty blond hair. He exhaled a long sigh. “The Golin wouldn’t have me back anyway,” he said, his voice thick with a boy’s heartache, and with one more sigh he began to haul his man’s body back out of the cage, every limb sporting cuts and bites he had taken saving her from the Tainted.

Yaz couldn’t let them go but she saw it was no good to argue with any of them. Instead she addressed the Broken, hoping to turn them against Pome.

“The priests need you as much as you need them,” Yaz called as she clambered into the cage. To her own ears she sounded like a nervous girl trying to argue with an elder, but she pressed on as she began to climb down to where Quell lay curled around his knife wound. “They need the iron you scavenge. It’s how they influence the tribes and gain their favour. They need the trade. It’s not done out of kindness. They trapped you here for their use.”

Pome laughed. “Do you think they will run out of iron before we run out of salt? Which need is more urgent?” The humour dropped from his face, leaving something ugly behind it.

For a moment despair swamped Yaz, darkening her mind. But the darkness took on a shape as it swam across her thoughts. “Wait!” she shouted. “There’s a whale! We found a whale locked in the ice. One of the great whales, enough to feed all of you for years. It’s in the furthest cavern of the black ice, but I cleared the demons from it. You don’t need the priests.”

She felt the change in the crowd. Rumbles of “she cleansed the Tainted,” “they should be allowed to go,” “we don’t owe the priests anything.” Rebellious faces turned Pome’s way. Some of Arka’s faction started toward him and for the moment nobody seemed inclined to stop them.

Thurin paused at the top of the cage, clinging to the outside, ready to go down.

“Uh, Yaz?” Kao, white-faced, now dangled beneath the cage, his toes almost scraping stone. “What should I do?” The distance he had to fall wasn’t growing very fast but for someone of such heavy build a drop of even a few feet could hurt.

Before Yaz could answer, Pome snarled and raised his crimson star above his head again. “This is not open for debate,” he roared.

The star flared and with a clanking and a grating of metal on stone, hunters began to emerge from cracks and pits all across the ruins. Three, four . . . half a dozen iron behemoths. Some within the great halo formed by the drift of stars and stardust, some outside it.

Pome shouted, all traces of persuasion gone from his voice. “You will obey the priesthood. All of you. As far as you lot are concerned I am a priest. I rule here now and my word is law.” The wrist that had emerged from his skins as he had raised his arm lay mottled with the stains of demons, not from the black ice, not pieces that the Missing had cut away, but devils of his own making, split from him by the too fierce light of the star that he lacked the skill to properly handle. These were parts of Pome’s madness now given their own voice, their influence all the stronger for it.

The hunters had all emerged now, standing motionless, the red glare of their eyeholes sweeping the crowd for dissent.

Pome focused back on Yaz. “I’ll count to ten. If the others aren’t out of the cage by then and your hands are not presented for Rakka to tie then Bexen will kill the boy.”

He drew a breath. “One. Two.”

Erris reached the bottom of the cage on the outside. Yaz dropped painfully beside Quell on the inside. The gerant, Rakka, more than a foot taller than the dangling Kao, stood below, raising the looped hide strips he would use to bind her hands.

“Three. Four.”

Yaz thrust her hands out through the square gaps in the cage. Rakka had to reach up at arms’ length. He set the loop about her wrists and drew the knot tight, trapping her hands outside.

Erris hung from the bottom of the cage and dropped lightly to the ground.

“Five. Six.”

Thurin hung below the cage. He looked up, despair in his dark eyes even though he had never known the surface. “Yaz . . .” He dropped away, landing less well than Erris and falling to hands and knees at the older man’s feet. The cage jerked, starting to rise faster.

“Seven. Eight.”

Kao hung beneath the cage. His toes nearly a yard above the ground.

“Let go.” Rakka punched him in the stomach.

“Nine.”

“Yaz?” Kao wheezed.

Bexen tightened his grip on Zeen’s neck, a grin cracking his brutal face. Yaz opened her mouth to tell Kao to drop, but a spray of crimson across Bexen’s shoulder stopped her. Something long and thin emerged from just above his collarbone, clearing the top of his breastplate and grazing his chin, coming level with his left eye. That eye and the other one widened. The cruel mouth beneath them went slack. And with a clatter of metal he collapsed, dragging Zeen down with him.