The Girl and the Stars
At last, with their ears ringing and sweat running inside their furs, Yaz and the others followed Arka from the cavern. Yaz found herself eager to leave. To free Zeen from the taint she would need stars of a size the Broken were unlikely to risk using up for someone who had never been part of their community. The city held such stars. Eular had said as much.
Arka lined them up and cast a critical eye over their short rank. “We will be going down to the city. I fear you may find it somewhat quiet after your recent . . . excitement. On my last dozen trips to the city I saw no taints and only once glimpsed a hunter. So you already have me beaten with just today! In any event, we shall not be going deep. Just far enough to give you an idea of the place.” She led off, waving for them to follow. “Keep your eyes open. They say bad luck comes in threes.”
Yaz walked near the back with Thurin. Petrick brought up the rear.
“How is it,” she asked, “that Hetta was hunting someone through the tunnels and ready to attack us all when only the day before I put my knife through her foot and hand? I know she’s tough and . . . well . . . insane, but I’ve seen Ictha take weeks to recover from smaller injuries.”
“Maybe the Ictha heal slowly.” Thurin offered that half grin of his. “There has to be a price to pay for not feeling the cold, surely? And for being ridiculously strong.”
Petrick spoke up from behind. “The tainted are full of demons. And some of those demons bring gifts as well as curses. Hetta’s been left for dead before and killed someone a week later. We have orders to remove her head next time. Just to be sure.”
Yaz walked on, thinking about Hetta, the size of her, the ferocity, and how she ate Jaysin. Thurin said it was the devils under her skin that made her do it, but it was difficult to hate a black stain rather than the woman who has tried to kill you.
Several times Yaz had the strong feeling she was being watched, followed through the caverns. But glancing back over Petrick’s head all she saw were gloom and shadows divided by the distant glow of stardust. She found it hard to imagine Hetta as a stealthy tracker even if she had managed to surprise them earlier.
* * *
ARKA LED THE group through chambers thick with fungi, great swathes of the stuff growing silently in the light and relative warmth of broad bands of stardust. It seemed to Yaz that the fungi mimicked in beiges, browns, purples, and pinks the striations of colour in the ice above them, their muted palette echoing the stars’ glow.
In several places harvesters could be seen working alone or in close pairs among the groves of fungi. Yaz picked her way between the growths, some as round as wind-carved ice balls, some open with feathery fronds, and yet others taller, thinner, and blunt ended. Kao made some remark about these last ones and sniggered but Yaz missed what he said.
As the air grew colder and the caves darker the fungus groves began to thin and vanish. Tending one of the last of them was a gerant so huge that all of the drop-group stopped to stare. Arka called the man over and he came shambling across with his sack on his shoulder, his patchworked furs hanging loose around him, big enough to serve as a tent for all the rest of them.
“This is Jerrig,” Arka said, “a long-serving harvester. When you eat tonight it will likely be something Jerrig has tended and picked.”
Jerrig smiled at them. Despite the brutality of his forehead and jawline something timid lay behind them, and the eyes that peered from beneath those brows looked half-shy. The man stood perhaps ten feet tall and slabbed with muscle albeit softened by a layer of fat, and yet he seemed nervous of children half his height and fresh from their drop. Without speaking he opened his sack to show them his collection. Scores of the round fungi, none smaller than two fists, and all blushing either reddish brown or purple-grey.
“Thank you, Jerrig.” Arka touched his arm and the man smiled again before returning to his duties.
“Can’t he speak?” Kao snorted.
“He can,” Arka said. “But he is a wise man and chooses often to be silent.”
She led them on, leaving the growing chambers far behind.
* * *
THE CAVERNS GREW darker, the stars either mined out or absent due to the whims of the ice. Their footsteps rang in the frosty air and the darkness returned no echoes. Arka slowed her advance, leading by memory. Yaz strained to see in the deepening gloom. Someone was following them, following her, she felt sure of it, something creeping behind them. The sudden groaning of the ice made her flinch. The others started at the sound too, all of them on edge.
“Something is wrong here . . .” Arka came to a halt.
Something was wrong. The darkness sat around them, hungry and waiting. The ice, Yaz’s companion all the years of her life, felt wrong. It had always been uncaring, unforgiving, as brutal as the wind . . . but this was different. A cold malice.
“I . . . I could make some light.” Yaz’s voice seemed thin and cracked, even to her, a feeble challenge to the silence that had grown among them.
Nobody answered her. Beside Yaz Maya shuddered and hunched in on herself. Yaz reached for the pocket where she had placed Pome’s star. Everything resisted her, as if the sense of hopelessness that had enfolded them had thickened the air itself into ropes that bound her arms. Even so she forced her hand forward, ever more slowly, sinking into the depths of the pocket, fingers questing, certain now that they would find nothing. Nothing good at least.
When Yaz’s hand closed about the star it was as if a clean wind blew through her, clearing her mind. She drew it out into the open, reminding it of how it once shone, and in an instant the marbled blue glow became a fierce, unforgiving light.
On the surface with the Ictha the true stars that lit the long night offered no warmth but their red glow came softly through the darkness, whispering away details, hiding wrinkle and blemish. Yaz’s starlight carried a harsh edge, throwing each face into sharp relief, accentuating any defect, edging Arka’s scars in black, making something grotesque of Thurin’s mask of horror.
“Brighter,” Yaz murmured, and the darkness slunk away, retreating down tunnels and into adjoining caverns.
The others shook themselves, throwing off the malaise that had ensnared them.
Where Kao, Maya, Quina, and the rest of them looked about themselves in confusion Thurin stared upwards, hunting.
“There!” He pointed, hand trembling.
“No?” Arka saw it too.
It seemed like a shadow to Yaz. A shadow on the ice above them. Only there was nothing to cast such a shadow. “The ice is . . . grey?” It took her a moment to understand. “The ice is grey!”
Following the stain back across the cavern roof she saw that it thickened and darkened until where it vanished into the gloom of the next chamber it might even be black.