The Girl and the Stars

SCCCCCREEEEEEEE!

A hunter’s scream, worryingly close, ricocheting from the archway to the left.

“Quick!” Arka skirted around the walls, avoiding the symbols burning on the floor. Kao hobbled after her, then Quina and Petrick, then Maya. Thurin beckoned Yaz on and she tried to follow, straining against the forbidding that lay written out before her. The symbols blazed as she defied them. The light became so fierce that it seemed a brilliant world waited beneath the stone and that the curves of the symbols were just gaps through which it shone. Wisps of pale fire started to dance above the lines. Each of the symbols shouted at Yaz, roaring, adding its voice to a wordless four-part harmony.

SCCCCCREEEEEEEEEEE!

Even louder this time, setting Yaz’s teeth buzzing in their sockets. In the distance the clatter of metal claws on stone.

Yaz came to a halt with her back pressed to the wall, seeking to distance herself from the source of her pain.

“What are you doing?” Thurin reached out toward her. She read the words from his lips, his face pale, dark eyes wide. “We need to run!”

“I . . .” She coughed and spat blood on the floor, her head about to split open. The symbols’ song filled her, ringing in her bones.

“Come on!”

Gathering the same determination with which she faced the wind as the long night closed in, Yaz forced herself on. Something had to break. For a moment it seemed it must be her. And then, with a last flash and flare, the symbols released their hold.

“This is all wrong,” Arka muttered to herself, starting on the steps. She glanced back into the room as if expecting the hunter to burst in any moment. “All wrong.”

They climbed at speed, held back only by Kao and his ankle. More symbols appeared along the walls of the stairway while Arka led the group up the square spiral of steps. Strings of text ignited as the drop-group passed them. More and more. Lines of symbols so small each could be covered with a finger, and so bright that they wrote themselves across Yaz’s furs as she passed, whispering to her all the while, their voices filled with reproach. She felt them burn on her skin, a searing that she thought must leave a mark. The others though showed no discomfort as symbols slid across them.

The stairs gave onto a large rectangular chamber with many exits. Rubble scattered the floor from old roof falls. Huge single symbols decorated the walls opposite and to either side, lighting the chamber. The lack of any lichen told Yaz immediately that these too were new.

Even as Arka led them in, more symbols appeared, not revealing themselves by growing brighter but scrolling down from above the ceiling or as strings of text running in through the doorways. Thurin and the rest looked wildly around, the script writing itself across their faces in light, flowing over their bodies. For a moment they reminded Yaz of the regulator and the complex burn scars all across his skin. When they reached her she gasped in pain at their fierce heat.

Behind them on the stairs a sudden crashing and thrashing, metal on stone, approaching fast, loud enough and close enough for Yaz to hear it over the cacophony of symbol song that none of the others seemed to notice.

“Run!” Arka shouted. In moments all of them were chasing her through a brightness that was almost blinding. Where the others ran straight paths, symbols of forbidding forced Yaz to twist and turn. More came, moving, shifting, almost as though they were herding her.

Without warning all the symbols vanished, leaving total darkness. Behind her Yaz heard the hunter take the last turn of the stairs, whirring and clanking, the angry pulse of its core-stone echoing in her head. She took two more steps blind then tumbled as the ground beneath her feet gave way. And for the second time in two days Yaz was dropped into empty space, screaming into the depths of a fall that no person should expect to survive.

14

   GREEN. A CARPET of green. Innumerable green blades, like the swords of an army pointing at the sky. Yaz could find no sense of scale. She lifted her head and found that the blades were no longer than her fingers and marched in from the distance, running beneath her splayed hands and on behind her. The stuff bent beneath her palms, it stirred in a breath of wind. It seemed to grow from the ground itself, and that ground, hidden beneath a thickness of the greenery, was soft, like nothing she had ever felt before. Not yielding to her weight but lacking the rigidity of ice or rock. And the heat. Heat suffused her. Not with the fierceness of a flame, but soaking into flesh, warming bones.

The city! She had been falling! In sudden panic Yaz got to her feet, spinning around, overwhelmed by a view so open and yet so complex, nothing in it familiar, nothing that made sense save the sky and the red eye of the sun. Even the clouds were strange. Great puffy white clouds, moving lazily, seeming so close she might touch them. She tensed to run, but where to? There was no ice. None. The ground swelled and dipped and rose toward distant hills. Green everywhere. Beneath her feet. Rising in lumps. Crowning tall structures, a million waving, fluttering pieces. Yaz found herself able to do nothing but stare, overwhelmed.

“Hello.”

Yaz turned to find a young man walking toward her. It didn’t seem possible that she could have missed him. His smile broadened.

“I’m Erris.” He was taller than her, broad shouldered, his skin as dark as Tarko’s, the leader of the Broken. Yaz had never seen its like on the ice. The clothes he wore were like nothing she had seen before. Impossibly colourful, and from no beast she had ever seen or heard of. They didn’t hang like hides or furs. “Lestal Erris Crow, actually. But call me Erris.”

“Where are we?” Yaz glanced around, her gaze returning to the man.

“Not far from where you fell.” Erris pointed behind her. “Above those trees you can see the ruins of the city.”

“Trees?” Yaz turned. The things her eyes had refused to understand. They were trees. So tall, like vast tent poles, splitting, branching into an infinitely complex storm of green. And where Erris had pointed so many of them stood that there seemed no space between them, just a vastness of them. Objects reached above the treetops, hazy in the distance, buildings. Ruins Erris had called them, but Yaz had no idea what they would look like if not ruined. They gave an impression of height, making the trees, which must surely tower above her, seem tiny in comparison. “I don’t understand.”

“It was like this when I first came here.”

“You . . . Are you one of the Missing?” Yaz stared, trying to see past his disguise.

“Ha! No. The Missing were gone long before I came to their city. Before our people even came to Abeth.”

“But . . . there’s no ice.” Yaz shivered despite the pervading heat. “And no wind.”

Erris pursed his lips, seeming gently amused. He watched her with dark eyes. His black hair held close to his head in tight, tiny curls. Yaz had never seen anyone like him.