The Girl and the Stars
“Quickly would be better . . .”
Yaz bit back a retort and once more she opened herself to the currents of the hidden river. A moment later they swept her away.
There were no more interceptions. No gaps at all between pressing against one wall and stumbling away from another.
Erris led them through a series of junction chambers. He said he was threading their way through holes in a network that was supposed to keep them in. The fourth, fifth, and sixth transitions became progressively more difficult, Yaz having to let the current tear at her before the stone would surrender, and having to battle to win free of the wall at the end of their journeys. Each time they emerged the song of the void star sounded more distant, a host of competing voices beginning to rise above the depth of its refrain.
“From here we walk.” Erris pointed across the large hall, now lit by the light that Yaz had woken from Pome’s star. “The main thing we have to worry about is—”
Yaz found herself shoved from behind as if by a strong gust of wind.
“Ah hell.” The wind that was not a wind even set Erris staggering forward.
“The main thing we have to worry about is . . . ?” Yaz prompted.
“Right behind us.” Erris turned to face the wall they had just emerged from. “I can slow it down. But not for long. You have to run.”
“I’m not running.” Yaz stepped beside him, staring at the blackness where his face should be. She wanted to see those dark eyes of his, both young and old, with a thousand years and more behind them. “I can help!”
“No, you can’t.” Erris swept her back with one arm, his strength alarming. “Run!” He shouted the word loud enough to leave her ears ringing. The wall was fuzzy now, like the last ice before the sea shows itself.
“But . . .”
“This pile of junk isn’t me, Yaz.” Erris slapped a hand to his silver chest. “When it’s destroyed I’ll go back to the void. Just run. Please. And don’t come back.”
Something within the stone roared. A black shape began to press into being in the space between Erris and the wall. With a sudden rat-a-tat-tat black spikes hammered out of nowhere, piercing Erris’s steel skin. The shape, becoming more definite, reached out for him. Yaz began to run, the squeal of tearing metal chasing her across the hall.
She reached the far doorway and turned into it just as half a dozen black spikes hammered into the wall behind her.
Yaz ran on, pursued by what sounded like an avalanche of metal. A hideous scraping noise underwrote the thunder behind her, as if somehow whatever was left of Erris continued to cling to the monster, trying to anchor it.
For a long time Yaz focused only on speed, always taking the smallest exit, always heading upwards when presented with a choice. Soon the sounds of her own panic—the rasp of her breath and the pounding of her heart—drowned out any other noise. Finally she tripped and fell, too exhausted to rise from the floor. She lay, hunting for breath, and when she found it there was nothing to be heard but her breathing. She was alone in the vast labyrinth of the city, with neither Erris nor Arka to help her.
* * *
YAZ SAT, RUBBING her ankle. By starlight she saw that at some point the rock had moved and created an unexpected step across a room. This had been what tripped her. The pain in her ankle made her remember Kao hobbling along after his fall. She hoped Arka had led him and the others to safety.
After a time Yaz got to her feet and limped on. She wondered how far the others might have got. It didn’t seem that she had been delayed very long. If she knew the way to go she might even beat them out. First out or last, though, she knew it would be a different Yaz that hauled herself back beneath the ice sky of the great cavern. She had seen a thing that she had never thought to see, and something amid the gentle swaying of those trees had found its way into her heart. Her imagination burned and every wild thought seemed edged with possibility.
For now, though, the floor held most of Yaz’s attention as she walked, and her ears strained for any hint of hunters or the black monster that had chased her. In these endless halls the only thing that would save her from death by thirst or a violent end in a hunter’s claws would be the marks left by scavengers to show the way.
When she came to the first decision point and saw the scratches at the base of the wall Yaz gave a broken gasp. She shocked herself by nearly breaking into tears for the second time in a day. Until she saw the small arrow she hadn’t allowed herself to acknowledge how much the thought of being lost here had terrified her. The scratches looked quite fresh, not scuffed and almost worn away like those Arka had shown them. It meant she was still deep in the city, almost at the limits of the scavengers’ explorations.
Following the markings led Yaz by efficient routes to a series of stairs, natural fissures, and vertical shafts hung with ropes. With cables, to be more accurate. Steel cables, some with plastic coatings. Yaz wondered how these words came to be in her head. They belonged to Erris. She frowned and moved on.
This deep there were no concessions to trainee scavengers and the climbs demanded both a level of skill and a tolerance for heights that Yaz didn’t possess.
“I’m not scared of heights. I’m scared of drops.” Yaz pushed the words out past gritted teeth as she hauled herself over the lip of a shaft taller than ten trees stacked one atop the next. Sore-handed, arms aching, she lay with a dry mouth and wondered for the hundredth time just how deep she was. Only her Ictha strength was keeping her alive, her grip compensating to some degree for her lack of talent when it came to scaling natural rock or tackling a hundred yards of dangling cable. It definitely helped that she could draw up the whole of her body weight with one arm.
Yaz pulled herself away from the mouth of the shaft then got to her hands and knees, groaning. She had come to the city in the hopes of securing a star large enough to safely drive the taint from her brother. She was leaving empty-handed and half-alive, knowing that the city while still a city was also a being that would use all its resources to prevent her returning. More than that, her efforts to escape had somehow bound her into a conflict between unknown gods that lived beyond reality. And now, in that strange somewhere, a being called Seus, that was both the mind of a distant city and, from what Yaz could see, also a dark god, had marked her for destruction.
“These things too the wind shall take.” Yaz found comfort in the old saying. Cursing at herself to muster the required strength she stood and moved on.
A dozen more rooms, sections of corridor, and she started up another square spiral of steps, seemingly endless. Her legs ached now, the repetition of unfamiliar action melting the endurance from her thighs. She hoped she was returning to sanity, to clarity, and something more familiar. It seemed that the deeper into the world you fell the more unreal things became.
The only thing to take comfort in was a lack of the glowing symbols that had opposed her on the way in and finally driven her to fall. She hadn’t seen a single one in all her wandering.