The Girl and the Stars

Quell led the way back up the long slope, past the gateposts, which remained silent, and into the chamber beyond. Yaz took out Pome’s star for additional light. She paused and raised it level with her head. The blue of it reminded her of the brittle blue of Pome’s eyes and it struck her that despite his slight build and relative youth he was perhaps the most dangerous of those beneath the ice with her. Even the largest of the gerants presented a knowable threat but Pome, with his faction and politics and ambition, could be capable of anything. She hardly knew him but it was clear he had generous measures of both pride and cruelty, a dangerous combination. He clearly had the skill to sway others with his words. A power that was both small and large at the same time. But what other magic he might hold from the corruption of blood that had seen him thrown down eight years before she didn’t know. Shadow-weaving? Ice-working? Or something more deadly and held secret?

“You made that star roll to your hand,” Quell said. “Back in the city, when I was failing to keep you quiet.”

“I was going to brain you with it.” Yaz exerted a little pressure and the star’s song changed ever so slightly. She held the star between thumb and finger. Stay. She lifted the finger, lowered the thumb, withdrew her hand. And the star remained, though it started to rotate slowly.

Quell’s eyebrows rose. “They do that?”

“Apparently.”

Yaz took a step back and the star followed, as if its instruction were relative to her rather than the world. She laughed. Slowly the star began to move around her on an orbit she could almost see, as if it were following a thread so fine that it dwelt just beyond the edge of vision. Yaz pursed her lips then shrugged. It would keep her hands free.

“The man I took this star from might want it back. He doesn’t like me very much. He could be trouble if we meet him out here.” Yaz remembered the look on Pome’s face when her light had found him, stalking Arka’s band in the shadows, others with him. Pome hated her, she was sure of that. How much danger that might put her in she was less sure of. “We’ll be fine once we’re with the others back at the settlement.”

They moved on together, the star winding its way about her and lighting their surroundings where the ice grew dark. Even there, though, she kept the star dim, not wanting to draw unfriendly eyes their way. They drank from standing pools, the water delicious after their long dry time in the city. Yaz tried raw fungi, choosing only those she remembered as safe. They tasted better cooked but her stomach was too hungry to care about her mouth’s opinions. She felt she was already losing weight, as if the bulk that sustained the Ictha on the ice were deserting her as other changes came fast and furious. Soon she would be a skinny wretch, too narrow to withstand the wind. She chomped at another tough fungus cap with focused dedication. Quell waited impatiently and hurried her on at the first opportunity.

Quell crossed each cavern as if he were still stalking the Broken, moving around the edge in a crouch, pausing frequently to listen, staying out of the light. Yaz followed in his footsteps, aiming for stealth. None among the ice tribes were hunters though. Nothing lived on the ice save the rare predators that, like the humans, moved from one temporary sea to the next. Should even one of the main seas stay closed for a season people would start to die. If it remained closed for two seasons whole clans might vanish.

Quell paused at a turning in a coal-worm tunnel, listening. “I miss my spear.”

“They’re good people, Quell. They’re just children from the tribes.”

“I saw one of your ‘children’ who must have been ten feet tall and looked like he could wrestle a hoola.” He moved on.

“Well, some of them are grown-up children. The Broken have been living down here for generations.”

“Some of them didn’t know when to stop growing up,” Quell murmured. He raised a hand to halt her and caution silence.

“What is it?” Yaz tried to whisper but the tunnel made hissing echoes of it.

Quell said nothing, only sniffed.

Yaz breathed in deeply through her nose. There it was, a familiar scent reminding her of her arrival on the Broken’s shores. Blood.

18

   THE BODY LAY sprawled in a grove of blue-grey fungi, broken stalks and crowns scattered all around it. Somehow it was this desecration, this waste of something edible in a land of hunger, that drew Yaz’s eye first. The anger and horror about that she could fit inside her mind. A dead person though, someone she had spoken to not long before, that was something more difficult to wrap her thoughts around. She had seen the dagger-fish take her youngest brother, Azad. She had fought to keep him in the boat, and had lost, but she had not seen him die—his body never came back from the sea. She had yet to come to terms with the image of Jaysin’s head swinging from Hetta’s belt. And now this.

“He’s huge . . .” Quell walked around the gerant, trampling more fungi.

The spear that had killed him remained, the haft jutting from his back. Yaz imagined that whoever had driven it through him had lacked the courage to recover it before the man was truly dead, and lacked the time to wait for it to happen. Jerrig was dead now though. The harvester lay in a pool of his own blood, half across the sack he had been filling. His massive ten-foot frame curled around his wound.

Quell set a hand to the iron spear.

“Quell!”

“What? You don’t think we’ll need it?”

“I think some of the Broken are warriors who’ve trained with weapons for years. They’re less likely to stick something sharp through us if we seem unthreatening.” Her voice carried less conviction than she had hoped it would. If Pome found them with the body he might well have them killed whether they were armed or not. “Besides. We should let him lie.”

Quell shook his head. “Dead is dead. The ice will take him to the sea, and the gods will take care of him.” He hauled on the spear, using it as a lever to turn the corpse. The point emerged a handspan beneath Jerrig’s ribs. “He’s smaller than a tonnerfin. Shouldn’t be . . .” A grunt of effort as he drove the spear through the gerant’s body.

“Quell!” Yaz winced and put a hand to her eyes. She had seen butchery before, enough blood to turn the sea red, but Jerrig . . . he wasn’t meat from the sea.

“Done.” Quell hauled the bloody length of iron from the corpse and held it in crimson hands. His lack of concern surprised her, but perhaps to him this was a nest of dangers and Jerrig’s remains were no more a cause for sentiment than those of the hunter were.

“When they see that in your hands there will be no end of questions . . .” Yaz frowned. “At least wash it.”

“I will.” Quell nodded. “But now I’ll have an answer if whoever did this comes after us.”