The Girl and the Stars
The thing lunged for Arka’s group with one of several arms, none of them the same. Although too short to reach across the intervening gap the arm proved versatile: the three-fingered grabber at the end detached and flew out to hit Thurin in the back, flooring him. Yaz started forward as the others ran toward her. The long metal fingers of the grabber were closing on Thurin even as the chain attaching it to the hunter’s arm began to haul it back. Before Yaz had crossed half the gap Thurin had twisted free and was up, sprinting for freedom, large pieces of his coat dangling from the iron fingers that had so nearly trapped him.
“Run!” Arka shouted Yaz’s own instruction back at her.
The hunter scrabbled across the stone floor, claws seeking purchase, accelerating slowly but with the promise of great speed.
Yaz and Thurin were last through the doorway Arka selected, and before they were ten yards along the corridor the hunter slammed into the entrance behind them, a host of black metal limbs reaching for them while mechanical legs thrashed to try to cram the monster’s bulk in after its prey. Yaz heard the hunter’s talons snapping closed on the air just behind her. She ran on, taking a corner at speed and crashing into the wall. Behind her the hunter released a long scream of rage, a noise like a metal file being scraped across a rough edge, only magnified a million-fold, vibrating through Yaz’s bones and setting her teeth on edge.
“Wait!” Arka caught them as they came around the turn. “It can’t follow. It will look for other routes to overtake us.” She drew a deep breath, pale faced in the light of the star she held above them.
The scream came again, discordant and making Yaz’s stomach want to empty itself.
“Sounds like we made it angry.” Thurin tried to smile. His furs hung around him in tatters, his exposed body lean and muscular.
Arka did not return the smile. “It’s calling for other hunters.” She turned away, shaking her head. “We need to go slow. Be vigilant. Take the narrow ways. Too many scavengers are lost when they run from one hunter into the jaws of another.”
Arka led them at a cautious pace, muttering to herself from time to time.
“I thought she said you hardly ever see a hunter,” Maya whispered.
“Normally you wouldn’t,” Thurin said. One of the metal fingers had scored a red line across his exposed back, beaded with blood.
“Only since the drop . . . there’s been no normal.” Petrick glanced toward Yaz.
“I . . .” Yaz hung her head. She couldn’t argue. The jump that had upended her life seemed to be turning the Broken’s expectations upside down too. As if the waves from her impact hadn’t died to ripples and vanished against that stony shore but instead had passed on through the ice, growing and growing all the time.
Less than half an hour later they saw the hunter again, charging at impossible speed the length of a shadow-haunted hall, betrayed by its clatter as Arka ushered them into a narrow passage. And a short while after that a long, thin arm lunged out from some narrow pipe at foot level, scything talons that narrowly missed Quina, who leapt above them with inhuman swiftness. The rest of them edged around the blindly reaching hand, just beyond the reach of its iron claws.
After that Arka seemed to have lost the creature, though she showed no signs of relaxing.
* * *
THE DEEPER ARKA led them the warmer it got. They encountered more symbols, glowing quietly through the stone in rooms bearded with so much lichen that the walls looked diseased. Most stood a couple of feet tall, some a little larger, some could be covered with a hand. All were varied, flowing, and complex. Even the smaller ones hinted at largeness, as though they might be the shadows cast by something infinitely more profound and dwelling in more dimensions than a human mind could fathom.
Most of the symbols offered Yaz no resistance, others she had to battle past, but all of them shone brighter as she drew near.
Some of the descents required the navigation of rocky slopes; elsewhere there were stairs. In two places they went down vertical shafts using ropes of an unknown material that had been left hanging there by scavengers. Cables, Arka called them. Kao slipped on the second climb, fell the last two yards, and hurt his ankle.
“When you can’t run it’s time to head back.” Arka looked up the long shaft above them, a hundred feet and more, vanishing into the gloom. “I’ll take us by a different route with more stairs and less climbing.”
Kao muttered that it was time to head back when the hunter first saw them. Arka stiffened but didn’t turn to rebuke him. Yaz felt a certain sympathy for Kao on this one. Whatever his size he remained a child in a maze full of horrors, and now he lacked even the option to run from them. On the other hand it seemed that nothing beneath the ice was safe, and perhaps harsh lessons were all that could be offered. They would learn to survive, or die trying. And much as Yaz wanted to leave this place, she had come here for stars large enough to give Zeen a chance of surviving the cleansing he needed. She hadn’t seen so much as stardust yet . . .
Arka led them through a series of long galleries, echoingly empty, burdened with a sadness that the rooms before held only whispers of. Yaz saw that this time the others felt it too. Maya had tears cutting tracks through the dirt on her cheeks.
“We call them the Crying Halls,” Arka said, her face held tight. “Parts of the city will play tricks on you like t—” She stopped dead, spreading her arms to keep the others from passing her.
“What is it?” Yaz tensed, ready to run from a hunter.
“Those were not there before.” Arka pointed at a string of symbols on the wall just ahead of them, smaller than those before and so faint they could be easily missed, almost hidden by the light of the star she held above her.
“Maybe Yaz is just making them brighter so you can see them, but they were always there,” Quina offered.
“Maybe.” Arka frowned but carried on. Behind her Yaz imagined the Missing who had walked the hallway before them in the long ago and wondered what sorrow might have happened here to linger so many centuries.
More strings of symbols came into view, some small enough to circle with a finger and thumb. Some more visible than the ones Arka had thought new but all seeming to alarm her. As Yaz passed by the lines a brighter pulse followed along them and a whispering filled her ears as if the text were being read aloud, the words just beyond hearing but laden with meaning.
Arka quickened her pace, bringing them into a vaulted chamber from which a broad flight of stairs led upwards. Four large symbols blazed on the floor and Arka came to another halt. “These are definitely new!”
“Does it matter?” Thurin asked, worry and confusion edging his voice.
“I’ve come back and forth through these halls for twenty years. I’ve never seen a new symbol appear or an old one change.” The fear in Arka’s voice infected the rest of them, the sorrow at their backs turning to foreboding. Even from the rear of the group Yaz could feel the pressure the symbols exerted, like a strong wind opposing her together with the promise of good things if she just turned aside.