The Girl and the Stars

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.