The Girl and the Stars
“Imagine all your hate broken away from you and given its own voice,” Thurin said. “Living under your skin as a separate thing. Or all your greed, or lust. I’ve seen it happen, once. A demon made just of you. Crawling over your body like a stain. That’s what it looks like, just a stain, no bigger than your hand. A taint. So be careful around the stars. Even the smaller ones. They weren’t made for us. They aren’t good or evil. Just dangerous. Like fire.”
* * *
THE COAL-WORM’S TUNNEL eventually descended to the bedrock again and connected with a melt chamber. The air was warmer than back at the settlement, the dripping faster; small streams wound their way across the rock, vanishing beneath the ice at the chamber walls. Yaz led them past more warriors into a cavern lit by half a dozen bright stars whose light revealed a collection of sheds beside a lake, and above them a ceiling that funnelled up into a steep but slanting shaft vanishing into darkness.
“This is where I fell,” Quina said, her narrow face growing tight at the memory.
“Me too. But I made a bigger splash!” Kao slapped his belly and chest.
“What’s that smell?” Maya sniffed. Ever since coal-worms had been mentioned she’d been jumpy. It was hard to remember that the timid child came from the Axit. If she had not been dropped she would soon have worn their bone piercings through her eyebrows and, allegedly, beneath her furs, blood tattoos recording the clan’s victories over past enemies. Walking close behind Maya it seemed to Yaz that something odd happened each time the girl flinched at a new sound. A subtle change, so slight it might just be imagination. The twilight seemed to flinch with her, as if just for a moment the shadows themselves drew in their breath. Maya sniffed again. “What is it?”
Yaz inhaled slowly through her nose. The air smelled of blood and fire and harsh, alien scents with sharp angles to them. “I don’t know.”
“Metal, being melted down,” Arka said.
“Metal melts?” Yaz blinked.
“If you get it hot enough. A lot of things do. Even rock!” Arka took them toward the huts.
As they drew closer a man in a thick hide apron emerged. The skin on his bare arms glistened with sweat and black smudges decorated bulging muscle. He grunted at Arka and took two handfuls of random metal pieces from the bin beside the hut. The mixture included toothed wheels of unblemished silvery metal, thin black wire in coils, and rusting iron rods with traces of some coating that had been stripped away.
“That’s Ixen. He doesn’t say much.” Arka caught the door before it closed and took them inside.
The heat hit Yaz like a blow and she staggered beneath it. The shed was a longish hall whose central feature was a large bowl of what looked like stone, supported on thick chains that ran to the ceiling. Ixen dumped his collection of metal pieces into the bowl, discarding one and adding some more iron rods from a nearby stack.
“It’s like cooking,” Arka said. “You have to get the mixture right.”
While Ixen added his finishing touches a bony woman, also in a scorched hide apron and little else, came from the rear of the shed to lower a heavy sigil-covered pot on another chain so that it nestled among the scrap.
“That pot looks like it’s iron but it’s not. It can get hot enough to melt all the other metals in there without melting itself.”
“So . . . how did you make it?” Quina asked.
Arka frowned. “That happened before my time. But I guess we’d be in trouble if we lost it.” She frowned again. “Though we do occasionally find metal it can’t melt.”
The woman with the skull-like face took a pole with a scoop on it and began to move stars from a box to one side, dropping them one by one into the grey pot. As she added them each ceased its shining and instead the sigils on the pot began to emit a redder glow along with a fierce heat. Yaz backed off, not wanting to cause the stars to burn too bright and drive the sigils to incinerate them all.
“It’s the heat,” she said as Arka looked her way. “I can’t take it.”
Yaz retreated outside the shed and Arka followed to stand in the doorway.
“I’ve seen it all before, many times, but I never get tired of watching the molten metal being tipped out. It’s like liquid fire. Ixen makes ingots and also pours various shapes for the other smiths. Almost all of it goes to the priests.”
Yaz wiped the chilling sweat from her brow. “If you can make that much heat why do you need miners? Surely you can just melt the stars from the ice and make any tunnels you need just like the coal-worms do?”
“I thought Quina would be the first one to ask that question.” Arka rubbed at the scars running down her cheek. “It’s a question of profit and loss. When the stars are used to drive sigils they’re eaten away by it; the star you take out is smaller than the one you put in. It’s rapid for small stars. A pot will consume handfuls of dust just to make a little heat. And slow for bigger ones. But even with our largest stars we would find less of value in what ice we melted than the pot had consumed in order to melt it. It’s like life up top. Every decision is about what you gain and what it costs you.” She glanced back. “He’ll be pouring soon. Come and watch if you’re not going to faint.”
Yaz stayed outside after Arka returned to the furnace heat of the interior. She walked slowly to the shore of the lake, wondering. She knew what her decision to throw herself down the pit had cost her. She had less idea about any gains, but if she didn’t find Zeen then it was all loss. The Ictha had cast him aside but to her he was still clan, still valued, and she would find him irrespective of loss and gain. It seemed to Yaz that if she had allowed them to throw her brother away without protest, as if he were worthless, or indeed if she had stood by and watched any child be thrown into that hole and said nothing, then something of herself would have been thrown away too, something more valuable than what she had lost by acting.
Thurin had said that the stars could split away the worst parts of a person and give them new voice. Yaz knew that watching the regulator toss children into the pit split away something good within those who watched and confined it to a place every bit as dark and silent as the hole into which those children vanished. She couldn’t say how she knew this or how she held to it in the face of the harsh arithmetic that governed life upon the ice. But she did know it, blood to bone, however much she might long for the blissful ignorance that seemed to enfold the rest who watched that day.
With a start Yaz realised that she had reached the shore of the lake and wet her toes in the shallows. It grew rapidly more deep, lit from beneath by stardust drifting against ridges in the rock, but the constant rain of meltwater from above rippled the surface too much for a clear view of the depths. Even so, it held a beauty and a peace: black rock, ice in every shade of pearl between white and clarity, the marbled seams of stardust glowing in all the colours that can be broken from the light. Beneath the many-tongued voice of falling water lay a distant glacial groaning, as timeless in its way as that of the wind. Yaz let the wonder of the place enfold her. The serenity—