The Girl and the Stars
“Would be like being thrown down the pit,” Yaz said. “You’ll survive it and find a new world. Just like we all did. But we need you, Thurin. I need you. Without your understanding of the Tainted and this Theus who leads them I don’t know if we can find Zeen, let alone save him.”
Thurin’s dark eyes found hers. He took her hands as if there were no one watching. “The surface sounds terrifying but I would rather go there naked than return to the black ice. We will all die there. Those they can’t inhabit become their sport. They torture them to death. Think on it again, Yaz. Think again.”
“Did your mother think again when she came after you?” Yaz squeezed his hands and felt the fear there, trembling in his bones.
Thurin hung his head and for a time he said nothing. The sounds reaching them down the tunnel sounded like the hunter’s iron footsteps. Still, no one spoke.
“You’ll go whether I come or not,” Thurin muttered. He met her gaze briefly. “I can’t let you do that.”
“You’ve said yourself that the Tainted will come for the survivors when this war is over,” Yaz said. “In days they’ll wash over the Broken and the nightmare won’t just be lurking in the black ice, it will be everywhere. Face it now and we can still escape.”
The battle raging inside Thurin dragged on. Finally, with the hunter’s glow colouring the tunnel ice and warning of its imminent arrival Thurin looked up again, his eyes bright, his determination rekindled. “Alright then. Let’s go.”
22
THURIN LED THE way to the Tainted’s caves. He took them through coal-worm tunnels too narrow for Pome’s rogue hunter to pursue them along. Yaz followed Thurin, Quell close behind her. Quina and Kao coming next, with Petrick bringing up the rear. The hunska boy had followed when Quina beckoned him to join them. He carried a slender sword over his shoulder, the hilt and the pale hand holding it nearly lost in the dark mats of his hair. Normally only the warriors were allowed swords and spears but normal had made itself scarce of late.
This time the taint didn’t appear as a questing tendril of blackness spreading through the ice but as a slow greying. The air had been growing colder, the stars thinning, winking out until there was no light but the blue glow from the star slowly orbiting Yaz. She drew her skins closer about her, shivering, though more from the pervading air of malice and threat than from the dropping temperature. Ahead madmen haunted the darkness in thrall to demons, all bound to the will of this Theus. And Zeen, if he still lived, was one of them.
The darkness seemed to press in on all sides, squeezing the light of Yaz’s star, speeding up its heartbeat. Whispers haunted the shadows and they all felt watched. Thurin continued to find his way with the same surety he showed in the Broken’s territory.
“Demons live within this ice.” Thurin spoke loudly enough to be heard at the back. “They want nothing more than to find their way under your skin. Let one in and it will fill your mind with its ugly thoughts and you’ll lose yourself to its will. The longer we stay in the black ice the more certain that is to happen.”
In the next chamber the ice shaded darker still, save for the opposite wall where Yaz’s light showed what seemed to be a bruise, the centre black but ringed with halos of colour: a deep maroon, a sickly yellow, a green that came from a different palette than the one used to paint Erris’s world of grass and trees.
“Where demons of one particular sort gather, the ice can take on their colour,” Thurin said. “Red for rage, green for envy, the yellow ones particularly enjoy inflicting pain. You’ll find many shades here. Where they come together they are black.”
Yaz moved slowly toward the blackest area, where the ice devoured her light and returned not even a glint. The nothingness of it shared the same draw as the void in which Erris lived, the same fascination that dwelt in the jaws of the Pit of the Missing itself. This darkness held more than that though. The malice there, the ancient evil, the sense that it was waiting with endless patience for her touch, all of these turned that initial pull into a push. Even so, she pressed on, closing the gap still further.
“Yaz!” Thurin turned back. “Don’t!”
Yaz held her star before her and moved forward, pouring its light into the ice, sure that she must see something of the surface if she only got close enough. “We’re going into this stuff. It’s going to be on all sides, under us, dripping on us. Better to find out about it here than a mile inside the Tainted’s territory.”
“What’s to find out?” Kao wrapped his thick arms around himself. “It’s evil and it hates us. I can tell that from here.”
Yaz pushed forward, the radiating malice almost a physical thing. The star in her hand blazed with blue-white light, and slowly, as the distance narrowed from feet to inches, the ice began to grey, revealing itself in glistening ridges. The effect was far from uniform; the blackness pushed back in a ragged circle but some patches of darkness proved more resistant than others, as dirt will cling here and there beneath a flow of water that has carried the bulk of it away.
One persistent black spot remained amid almost clear ice and Yaz nearly had to touch the star to it before with great reluctance it began to retreat into the thickness of the wall.
“The demons don’t like stars. We know that,” said Petrick, unimpressed. “It’s all that’s kept the black ice from spreading into our caverns.”
Yaz shrugged and retreated toward the group, not trusting the blackness not to leap out at her if she showed it her back. “The Ictha find very little that is new to them, and when we do we like to look into it.”
“We have a much bigger star,” Quell said. “Maybe we should—”
“No.” Thurin said it so fast that Yaz almost thought he might have voiced his objection just to disagree with Quell. “Carrying something like that in there will alert all of them.”
Without waiting to argue he led them on into the next chamber. Yaz glanced at Quell, shrugged, and followed Thurin out.
He caught up with her swiftly, putting a hand to her arm and hissing just for her ears, “I don’t trust this one.”
Yaz shook his hand off and walked on, saying nothing. Quell gave everyone his trust until they betrayed him. This wasn’t the Quell she knew above the ice nor the Thurin she knew beneath it. She wondered for a moment if they were really at odds over her, engaged in some sort of unvoiced competition for her good regard. She pushed the foolish notion away. They couldn’t be jealous of each other, surely? And besides, if they were competing for her respect then all they were achieving was to let it slip through their fingers.
A short way along the next tunnel Yaz reached an area of red ice that looked as if someone had dealt the wall a huge wound, leaving old blood frozen in with the water. Passing it, she felt an echo of the anger stored there. Not anger at her in particular, just a bubbling rage of the sort that can lash out in any direction. It proved infectious, blowing at the embers of her own discontent, the fire of resentment she had started to bank even before the Ictha first had sight of the Black Rock. A fury at a world so set against giving her a place in it. She gritted her teeth, hastened her stride, and tried not to let the demons’ anger become one with her own.