The Girl and the Stars

Yaz rested on the stairs, half dozing, haunted by dreams of water. Eventually, feeling little better, she carried on, stumbling from time to time. Exhaustion had her mumbling to herself, promises and threats. The faces of her family came to her, distant, as if it had been years since she had seen them. She thought of Quell, then of Thurin, then of Erris. She wondered where Zeen was now, how the taints passed their time; she worried for him, for little Maya who she hardly knew, for Kao who she hardly liked, limping his way from the city.

And with a start she discovered that without realising it she had stopped climbing stairs and shuffled into a corridor pierced on one side by small windows through which a faint light was bleeding. Yaz stopped at the first, too narrow to climb through, and looked out onto a rocky cavern lit from above by faint shafts of starlight. The illumination reached down through two square holes in the ceiling. The “sky” of the great city chamber must be above those exits. The air was colder here, fresher. Hope rose in her, a fire licking up along her bones. The far wall of the cavern was a steep, rocky slope that led almost to the smaller of the two exits and in the uneven floor a shadow-filled pit reached back down toward the depths.

Relief floated away her exhaustion. After so long in the dead and dusty halls of the Missing, Yaz had begun to think she might never emerge, that the signs were a lie to deceive her, and that she would die, choking on her thirst, without ever seeing the ice again.

Yaz heard the noise as she turned her head from the window shaft. Something scraping stone. A foot? She turned swiftly, sending the light of her star lancing down the corridor behind her. Nothing but retreating shadows and dark doorways. The passage was surely too narrow for a hunter to move along at speed, but Arka had said they could reshape themselves to squeeze through unexpectedly small gaps . . .

Silence. An old silence. Yaz’s breath plumed before her. She dimmed her star to a glimmer, not wanting to advertise her movements, and advanced on soft feet. One pace, five, ten. There it came again, the slightest scrape. Somewhere ahead of her now . . . A prickling ran down her spine, sweat in her palms although she had thought herself too dried out for that. A hunter was stalking her. With freedom so close, with the voice of the ice whispering to her. To be caught here after so long climbing from the depths would be too cruel. Yaz wished she had kept the iron bar from Erris’s room of broken wonders.

She moved on, all her senses tingling, sure that unseen eyes watched her progress. She stopped, listened . . . nothing. A sigh emptied her lungs. She was being foolish. She began to walk again.

The attack came from behind. From a doorway she had already passed. The room beyond had been empty! Yaz found herself caught and hauled back with implacable power. She yelled despite herself and fought to escape. The thing that held her exceeded her Ictha strength. Even so she tore free, sacrificing furs and loosing a scream as another appendage reached for her mouth.

With an energy that she thought long exhausted, she opened her stride to run. For a moment she thought she’d won clear. Hunters have a long reach though. Yaz made it ten paces before something closed around both legs and brought her to the floor. She twisted and fought, pounding at the shape that reached over to pin her down. Somewhere in all that thrashing struggle two realisations managed to find space amid the panic crowding her mind. Firstly that not all the yelling was coming from her, and secondly that whatever she was fighting was not made of metal.

“Yaz?” A male voice.

“W-who . . .” Yaz stopped thumping the fur-laden shape. “Thurin?” It felt too solid for Thurin, not huge enough for Kao. She groped for her star only to see that it had rolled to the wall and lay there glimmering, its light breaking out softly here and there like foam on the ocean.

“It’s me, Yaz.” As if that would be enough.

Yaz stretched her arm toward the star and her mind reached further. It started to roll toward her open hand and as it rolled the light broke from it, bright enough now to show her attacker’s face. Black hair, straight and thick, reddish skin across broad cheekbones. Strong, even features, eyes as pale as her own, the irises like sea ice.

“Quell . . .” Pome’s star rolled into her open hand and she closed her fingers around it.

Quell grinned, a white smile, and wiped the blood from his nose where her fist must have caught him. “I came to save you.”

“How . . . Why . . . You attacked me!”

Quell got off her and offered his hand to help her up, glancing over his shoulder as he did so. “There’s something down here with us. I wanted to pull you aside and stop you shouting. Keep you quiet until you understood.” He kept hold of her hand as she found her feet. “But we seem to have ended up with the exact opposite.” He winced. “You pack quite a punch!”

“But how are you here?” Quell didn’t fit in the world of the Missing or the Broken any more than a shark belonged on the ice. Everything was wrong, and everything was right at the same time. He smelled of home. Of the Ictha. Of the life she had fallen from. Of seas and ice and sled oil and noisy tents. A world away from dry and ruined cities with broken minds.

“Come!” Quell pulled her back toward the doorway he’d lunged out of and she let him take her. Quell took his spear from its place leaning against the wall on the other side of the doorway. The length of hide-bound whalebone looked fragile compared to the iron spears of the Broken, but she knew Quell could skewer a submerged lungfish at fifty yards and haul it back to his boat on the attached line. Even so, against the beasts that haunted these passages neither kind of spear offered much protection. “We should get out of here.” He seemed nervous but not so nervous that he didn’t notice how weak she looked. He stopped suddenly and took her shoulders in his hands, studying her face. “Are you . . . You’re too dry.” He shrugged off his pack and dug into it, cursing. “Everything melts in this damned heat.” He pulled out an empty-looking water skin and a small lump of ice that Yaz guessed had been a lot bigger recently. “Here.” He handed her both.

“Thank you.” From its weight the skin might still have a mouthful left inside. Yaz held it in trembling hands, terrified she might spill some. She set the bone spout between parched lips and drank. The water tasted wondrous, like life pouring into her. She took it in three small swallows then bit off a piece of ice to suck. The Ictha knew about thirst. The wind killed those lost on the ice, but they died thirsty. Without whale oil and a tent there was no way to melt enough to drink. “Gods, I needed that.”

Quell grinned. “Good to go?”

Yaz nodded. She had questions. A thousand of them. But getting to the surface beat them all. Even so she couldn’t take her eyes from him. Although he was alone Quell brought the Ictha with him. The world that saw her and Zeen as broken, the world she had fallen from, now stood before her, hale, hearty. Had he come to lead her back to her life? A life that Quell had stood at the midst of like the centre pole of a tent from which all else depended. Before her drop he had said that he loved her, that he wanted to build a future with her. He brought that sense of calm with him, that sense of security that she had somehow thought was throttling her only to miss it from the moment they parted. How was he here? And why was her joy at his arrival tempered by shades of regret she could neither name nor explain. She answered his grin with a smile of her own. “Let’s go.”