The Girl and the Stars

Maya stood revealed behind him, shedding shadows. She climbed over Bexen’s transfixed body before Pome could react and tugged the gerant’s fingers clear of Zeen’s neck.

“Catch him!” Pome roared, but Zeen was away and weaving through the Broken with a hunska’s swiftness.

The six hunters lurched into action as one, their metal feet gouging the stone to accelerate them forward.

Yaz gritted her teeth against the pain that made her head feel like brittle ice waiting to shatter, and with the last effort remaining to her she reached out. The star in Pome’s hand jerked forward. He got both hands on it, braced against the pull . . . and held. Yaz cried out in despair, having no more to give, but a moment later a dark shape rolled from among the nearest onlookers to knock Pome’s feet out from beneath him. Kaylal! The legless smith tried to grapple Pome but Pome managed to keep one hand on the star and it dragged him clear. Devil-darkened fingers refused to release the star even as it hauled him across the roughness of the rock, trying to fly to Yaz’s outstretched hands.

Yaz bowed her head in defeat but even as she did so Maya leapt forward, evading the gerants behind her. With one slash of a heavy knife she cut Pome’s hand from him. The star flew free, the severed hand tumbling in its wake. In a crimson streak it sped through the air on a rising curve to hammer into Yaz’s outstretched palms.

Yaz’s vision dimmed as she strained to send a word of negation to the hunters through Pome’s star and the great mechanisms ground to a halt. She collapsed beside Quell. A trickle of his blood ran across the boards beneath her neck and she watched the drops fall from the cage. They had a frightening distance to fall. Past Kao, still hanging white knuckled beneath the cage and carrying on for another four yards beneath his kicking feet before splashing on the bedrock.

Erris, Zeen, and Thurin stood beneath staring helplessly, watching Yaz being hauled away. Unchallenged by Pome’s remaining gerants Maya had hauled the iron rod from Bexen’s toppled corpse and trailing the bloody, nearly five-foot length of it she was racing to join the others.

A warm tear rolled from Yaz’s cheek and fell like the blood. She had failed. If instead of following Zeen into the pit she had stayed and watched the regulator throw more children down how would things be worse? She would have been alone in his bony clutches and Quell would have stayed with the Ictha. And now? She was being delivered weak and alone into the priest’s hands, a package they had bartered for with salt and stars. And Quell would be given back to the Ictha, wounded, not fit for life on the ice.

Beneath her Zeen was retreating at an increasing pace, Maya, a friend who had saved them so many times, also now abandoned in this hole. And Thurin, and Erris. Both of them had infinitely complicated her life but she found that losing them was tearing her apart as if each owned a separate piece of her heart.

Erris was doing something. One moment he had been talking urgently to Thurin and in the next he became a blur of motion. Somehow he climbed Thurin, and in a leap that sent the other man sprawling to the ground he launched himself skyward. The jump should have been impossible but Erris wasn’t made of flesh or bone. Somehow he got his fingertips to the toe of Kao’s boot and found enough purchase to hang there. Kao yelled in pain but didn’t surrender his grip on the bars.

As Thurin got to his hands and knees little Maya used him as a step to execute her own leap. Even with Erris hanging below Kao the vertical distance was too great for her to jump but she thrust her bar out above her and with inhuman skill Erris caught the very end of it between his heels. Held by such a tenuous bond Maya swung at the far end of more than a yard of bloody iron and rose with the accelerating cage.

Thurin got unsteadily to his feet, still bent over, and formed a cup with both hands. Zeen stepped into it. With a howl of effort and unsuspected strength Thurin threw the boy into the air.

“No!” Yaz shouted. It was like the game where you stack ice blocks impossibly high, each person adding one in turn until the teetering structure eventually falls. The chain beneath her was already longer and more fragile than anything that could be expected to endure. To expect Zeen to join it . . .

The boy caught his arms around Maya’s ankles. The impact made her grunt and sent her swinging more wildly. The slippery iron between Erris’s heels worked back and forth. For a heartbeat it looked like everything might impossibly hold together. And then with a shriek of anger Maya lost her grasp on the rod.

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.