The Girl and the Stars
“I know a way.” Thurin started off along the tunnel into the darkness. Yaz could hear strain in his voice as though he were fighting some internal battle. “I can get us to the melting pools. There are places to hide, and the Tainted come there on their own mostly, dragging ice.”
“But the light,” Petrick said. “They’ll see us before—”
“I don’t need to see to get us there.” Thurin stared down at his hands as if the admission shamed him. “I was one of them for more than a year. And most of the Tainted can hardly see in the dark. They feel their way. Only the ones with really strong demons are able to see far without light, and then only if the demon moves into their eyes.”
Yaz set off after Thurin dogged by guilt at expecting the others to follow, and knowing that if she paused too long to think things through she would retreat into indecision. Quell followed, and one by one so did the rest, drawn into the darkness by the bonds between them, the desire not to be alone, and the lack of options.
“Hide the star.” Thurin’s voice came to Yaz from the gloom ahead, harsh with strain.
She quieted the star until it gave nothing but a glimmer of the sea at evening, then concealed it in her skins. “Everyone take hold of the person ahead of you,” she hissed, and reached out to find Thurin even as Quell took a firm grip on her belt.
“Stay calm,” Petrick hissed as he followed the others. “The demons find their way in most easily when you’re angry. Any flaw can be exploited: cruelty, jealousy, hate. But anger’s the hardest to avoid.”
Without talking now they walked blind into the Tainted’s caverns. Of all of them, Thurin at the front and Petrick at the rear must have known the most fear, Thurin in particular returning to a nightmare already experienced. And Petrick having lived for years with this threat and tales of the waiting horrors. But all of them were scared. No one walks blind into a night haunted by creatures like Hetta without fear.
* * *
IMAGINATION TURNED EVERY drip of meltwater and every groan of the ice into the approach of a monster. Yaz tried to dispel the feeling that Zeen was watching her, a twisted thing now, infested by demons that had wrung his flesh into new forms. The noise of the others behind her, their muffled footsteps, the breath drawn into their lungs, all of it combined to give the impression that the Tainted were gathering around them, corralling them, an awful hunger on their grinning faces.
The Tainted’s territory seemed quite extensive. They stumbled on for what might have been a mile. Yaz tried not to brush against the ice. She could feel the hate emanating from it. Sometimes there were bands of anger, lust, or greed, but an ancient malice ran beneath all of these, the only constant. The menace of it wore at her and stray thoughts that were not her own crept across her mind. Given time she knew that this place would wear her down, get inside her.
* * *
“WE’RE HERE.” THURIN’S voice sounded different when he whispered. His breath tickled at Yaz’s ear, making her shiver. “Pass it on.”
The space felt like many they had passed through, open and cold, with ice-scraped rock beneath her feet.
She felt behind her and patted her way up Quell’s bare arm to find his head. “We’re here.” She felt him nod. Solid, dependable.
The faint whisper travelled down the crouching line.
Thurin’s hand discovered Yaz’s in the blind darkness, his fingertips stroking between her fingers from knuckle to knuckle where her fist was knotted in his skins. A complicated shiver ran along her arm and into the core of her. Bare hands had been a revelation for her. The intimacy of this touch was too much. Almost. And here, in this place, with evil on every side and Quell at her back. She didn’t understand.
Thurin did it again, more slowly this time, more intimate. Her grip loosened. Part of her wanted to hit him, strike him to the floor for being so forward, for presuming. The rest of her didn’t know what she wanted. His palm brushed her wrist, pushing back her sleeve. She bit her lip against any sound she might make and pulled away.
In that instant he was gone. The faint sound of skins brushing skins and he left, moving away as he rose to his feet.
“. . .” Yaz opened her mouth but made no sound. She daren’t hiss after him.
Without warning, cries rang out. Quell twisted and lost his grip on her. Iron clattered across rock. More shouts and cursing, real terror in the mix.
A voice rang from the blackness of the cave, not close at hand but not too distant. “You can bring that star out again, Yaz of the Ictha.”
Yaz had already been fumbling for it among her furs, hunting for the right pocket. Whoever had spoken, it was not one of those who had entered with her. Her hand trembled around the star’s blue glow. She opened her fingers and bid the light pour out.
Through slitted eyes she saw that Quell and the other four members of their group were crouched on the open floor, Quell with a bloody nose and without his iron spear. At the outer limits of the star’s illumination well over a dozen figures stood in a loose circle around them, at least three of them gerant, many almost naked. Fear flooded through Yaz so swiftly it threatened to drown her. The Tainted watched with broad grins full of malice, just as her imagination had painted it.
“Zeen!” She saw her brother beside a barrel-chested gerant. Zeen wore only leggings, reduced to tatters below the knees, and across his neck and ribs black stains spread. She wanted to believe them bruises, but no bruises ever looked like these and his grin was as hate-filled as the rest. He stared at her with no sign of recognition.
Thurin stood just a few yards from her. A black stain covered much of his face and filled his eyes. The stain returned no light, so that against the background of darkness and black ice it looked almost as if that part of him had been bloodlessly taken, sliced away by some great knife.
Of all of them Thurin was the only one not to smile. He opened his mouth, white teeth framing a black tongue, and spoke again with a stranger’s voice. “You may call me Theus. I command here and have done so since long before your kind began to arrive beneath the ice.”
23
YAZ STARED IN horror, unable to find words. Thurin had betrayed her. Her hand tingled where the monster had so recently stroked her flesh.
“Were you always in him?” It was Petrick who spoke, bleak-eyed, rising to his feet. One of the gerants had wrenched his sword from him in the dark, but he had his knife in hand now and pointed at Theus with it. “Or did you catch him while he led us?”
Now Theus did smile. “Oh, I never left the boy. I wrapped myself around his bones and came to have a look-see around your settlement.”
“Did he . . . did he know?” Yaz asked. A calm had descended on her. She would die before she let any demon enter her. This was the end she had fallen to. She was prepared to accept her death. She only hoped that she could take Zeen with her. “Did he know he was carrying you?”