The Girl and the Stars

The clanking filled her ears. The wheel brought her racing toward it a good twenty feet above the ice, tall enough for all of the cage to be lifted clear. Straining every muscle Yaz thrust as hard as she could with her legs while clinging desperately to the cable. Tension built rapidly. The wheel was on her, her frozen fingers racing toward the narrowing gap between the iron rim and the cable. Yaz tried to let go and found she couldn’t. She saw her hand pulled past the bottom of the wheel, inches from mutilation. She screamed with effort, legs straining, and found sudden release. The force flung her outwards, the blackness of the shaft yawned beneath her. She hit the slick, sloping ice at the edge of the shaft where the coal burn had melted it away. She would have slipped back into the hole but her momentum carried her on, rolling and sliding to a halt on the raw ice. Without the wind that now pressed on her back she would never have made it. The Gods in the Sky loved her. Though lying there with her body feeling like one huge bruise and unsure how many of her bones remained unbroken Yaz couldn’t find it in her to thank them. She hauled her right arm toward her face, terrified that the thing that broke her grip on the cable had been the removal of her fingers. But no, they were still there, abused but whole.

Yaz levered herself up, gritting her teeth against sharp pains all along her side. The fall left her vision blurred but she could see enough to spot that her star had rolled from her sleeve and lay some yards ahead of her, glowing dully on the ice. She wasn’t sure which would hurt more, compelling the star to her or crawling to get it. The shockingly cold wind clawed at her, icy fingers finding a way through her damp hides to filch every last scrap of warmth from her body.

She spat blood onto the ice and crawled. The clanking of the wheel accompanied her progress. By the time she closed her numb hand around the red sphere Yaz’s vision had cleared enough to see her surroundings. Empty ice stretched away before her, mile upon mile until it met the sky in a white infinity. Encompassing the star in both hands and grateful for its warmth she got painfully to her feet like an old woman of fifty.

Yaz had expected to see the Black Rock. She shook her head to rid it of the fog that had filled it when she hit the ice. Some bone in her neck screamed in protest, almost making its echo burst from her mouth. Carefully, leaning into the wind, she turned her body, keeping her head still to avoid further agony. The mountain came into view, the Black Rock, rising from the ice like the tip of some vast spear driven up from below. She turned a little more and the lifting frame then the winding gear both came into view. The winding gear was another iron framework, taller than a man and filled with large many-toothed wheels. Five figures in the black hides of the priesthood stood to either side turning great handles though many more could fit beside them to help if the load were a heavier one.

It seemed impossible that they didn’t see her but apparently their labour wholly occupied them, and whatever method they used to gauge their progress told them the cage would not arrive for a little while yet.

The wind had her shivering already. The changes wrought on her down in the caverns of the Broken had left her shockingly vulnerable. She hunched about herself, willing more warmth from her star, and laboured around to complete her circle.

The long-expected sight of the regulator still startled her and halted her turn. He stood five yards off, hunched against the wind, the trailing strips of his cloak fluttering about him. The symbols burned across his face and scalp were familiar now, the script wall of the Missing had driven him from the undercity and left its mark upon him.

“Yaz. Welcome back. And you’ve brought my star, I see.”

The slight smile on the regulator’s lips was enough to ignite her anger. “You throw children into that hole to be your slaves!” A long-banked outrage burst from her mouth. “You use up their lives in the dark, and just for the iron that gives you power over my people!” Yaz found herself pointing in accusation.

Rather than show any shame the regulator threw back his head and laughed. “That’s rather melodramatic, young Ictha.” He fixed her with white-on-white eyes. “I hear it’s warm down there, and quite well lit. And most of them don’t get worked to death. The hunters take them!”

Yaz’s anger flared into rage, burning bright, fuelled by that same deep sense of injustice that had dogged her throughout her time in the pit and had underwritten so many of her actions over the past few days. Her hand reached for the dagger-fish knife at her hip and finding it gone she began to advance on the man with her bare hands, ready to brain him with the star. Kazik had tossed Jaysin into the pit just to carry a message, delivering a scared little boy into the clutches of a monster like Hetta. He’d thrown generations of Jaysins into that hole, tearing their young lives apart to add comfort to his own. A red haze filled Yaz’s vision as if she had brought a devil of her very own up from the black ice.

“Mine, I think.” The regulator pointed to the star in Yaz’s raised hand and without warning it jolted toward him.

“No!” Yaz managed to hold on though the initial yank nearly took her shoulder from its socket. Mustering what little remained of her strength she leaned back, hauling on the star with both hands as it strained toward the priest. A new noise was coming from the shaft now, a deep thrumming sound from the cable but rising swiftly in pitch, a sign that the cage had nearly arrived.

The regulator snarled and his face twisted with effort.

Yaz found her feet slipping. She added the muscle in her mind to the contest. A bright pain blossomed behind her forehead and she tasted blood behind gritted teeth but slowly she bent the star to her will. A slow horror crept over Kazik’s face. Disbelief at being bested by a mere girl barely woken to her talent. He redoubled his efforts, and Yaz fought him.

All thought of escape left her. She advanced again, the star raised and burning brighter and more crimson than the sun. “You’re a monster, old man, and I am going to end what you do here.”

A gentle voice spoke to her left, a man’s voice creaking with age. “Well, we can’t have that, can we, Regulator Kazik?”

The star blazing in Yaz’s hand went out. It didn’t merely dim. It turned a cold, smoky grey. Its song ceased. Its heartbeat stopped. And in an instant it became so heavy that she dropped it, crushing the ice where it landed.

Yaz turned uncertainly, trying to twist her neck to see but unable to do so without fainting from the pain. She couldn’t tell if the priest who came into view as she turned had been there all along, watching her struggles, or if he had somehow materialised out of the air. He stood thin and bent with age, robed in black hides and hooded against the wind, less tall than Kazik, frail with age.

“Hello, Yaz.” He pushed back his hood. “I told you you’d be an agent of change.”

Eular, his thin white hair streaming in the wind, regarded her with eyeless sockets and a sad smile. “You misunderstand the purpose of the pit though.” His smile was the same gentle one he had used back in the caverns, almost kindly. “It’s not iron we’re most interested in mining, or even the star-stones. It’s the Broken.”