“Young Thurin?” Theus licked his lips with a black tongue, Thurin’s lips. “No. He thought the stars burned us out. And they did burn the others. They couldn’t sink as deep as I did. But of course, I could be lying. I do like to lie. Honesty is one of the pieces of myself that I am still missing. One that I won’t find here of course.” He waved a hand at the surrounding cavern. And in that moment Petrick lunged, faster than blinking, throwing himself across the gap between them, knife in hand. He almost made it, but some invisible force yanked him from the ground and held him just beyond reach of Theus.

“That was rather predictable.” Theus frowned, possibly with effort, and Petrick’s feet lifted still further above the rock. He hung there, snarling, unable to drive himself forward. “The human body is almost all water. You do understand this? And your friend Thurin has considerable influence over the stuff. Especially when it’s me doing it and not caring if I break anything in here while I do.” Theus tapped Thurin’s head with a finger.

Petrick drew back his hand to throw his knife but the same force wrapped him and his thin arm remained raised, trembling with effort.

Theus shook his head. “If I let you throw that blade would you do it? Kill your friend? It would be no great inconvenience to me. I have many bodies. I’ll have yours too if I like, and attacking me just makes it easier for me to find a way under your skin.”

In a blindingly fast advance Zeen shot from the shadowy margins to tackle Petrick, bringing him to the ground. Another of the Tainted came forward and set a foot to pin Petrick’s wrist to the rock, immobilising the knife.

“Now,” said Theus in a louder voice, a current of anger rippling beneath it. “It happens to be very hard for me to be so reasonable for so long. Please don’t try my patience. It’s something else that I misplaced long ago.

“You are going to be inducted into our ranks and then, since obviously I know all about your domestic troubles with young Pome, we are going to conquer what remains of your territory. Adding you to my collection will make an already fairly uneven contest still more one-sided. Murder, bloodshed, oh my!

“Now, the truth is that my friends here are an unruly lot and need to be allowed to indulge their baser instincts once in a while. In fact base instinct is all most of them are.” Gasps, wicked chuckles, and unhinged laughter rang around the circle at that. “So I propose to let you go one at a time and hunt you. Some of you might even escape. Who knows?”

Yaz looked along the line of her companions: Quell, tensed and ready with murder in his eyes. Quina coiled and poised to strike, her hand on an iron knife at her hip. Kao scared but dangerous even so.

“We came here together and we’ll fight you together,” she said, wondering if Thurin was still looking out at her from those wholly black eyes. “We’re ready to make you bleed.”

“Me?” asked Theus. “Poor Thurin will do the bleeding. I will be fine. It’s not my blood.” He pointed at one of the exits. “Run, Yaz!” All around them the Tainted started to hiss and call, the largest gerant began to roar, a thunderous noise, and a crimson-eyed child, frothing at the mouth, screamed as if she had been set on fire.

Yaz forced more light from the star, setting its heartbeat racing. The thing vibrated in her hand and the Tainted fell back to the walls of the cavern, their shouting dying away. Zeen and the other Tainted abandoned Petrick but not before kicking the knife away. Only Theus stood his ground, though he squinted against the light and set his mouth in a grimace of pain.

“What a talented child you are,” he snarled through Thurin’s teeth. “But that fragment will burn out before it starts to do more than irritate me.” He looked at Kao and took a sudden step toward the boy, making him flinch. “You should run. A big one like you might win free!”

“None of us are running,” Yaz said, afraid that if the Tainted started screaming and roaring again her nerve would break. She steadied her voice, coaxing still more light from the star. “Why don’t you tell us what you really want? It can’t be just to capture the last handful of the Broken.” That didn’t seem a particularly grand ambition for Theus to have nurtured for so long. “What are you hunting for out here?”

Theus raised a hand and peered at her from behind the shadow it cast across his face. He rested his black gaze on Yaz and where the others among the Tainted radiated only hate and rage, she sensed something more complex in his stare. He shook his head slowly, seemingly in admiration, and clapped his hands together. “Quina, you’re the clever one. Why don’t you tell Yaz what I’m doing in these miserable caves?”

Quina gave him a suspicious look. “How would I know? Drinking demon-juice?”

“Hunting for something you’ve lost,” Kao said.

Theus smiled a black smile. “Young Kao has it. Just drinking demon-juice, Quina? You’ve got to credit your enemy with some intelligence if you want to beat him. The Golin clan know that, so Kao knows it too. I’ve ridden many Golin over the years. Good workers. Don’t ever think your enemy is just wasting their time.” He waved a hand at the black ice above them. “The stars, as you call them, are said to purify. Their effect on my people, the ones who made them, is similar to their effect on your kind. They give voice to different parts of who we are and split them away. The Missing . . . let’s call my people the Missing . . . the Missing purged themselves of anger, greed, malice, and all the other traits they considered to be impurities. What you call demons, the creatures like me that saturate the black ice, these are all unwanted elements of the Missing. They wanted to be gods, sublime, spiritual beings who could ascend to a new level of existence. They felt the more basic of their instincts pinned them to the dirt, imprisoned them in their flesh. And so they shed these things, carving them away with stars of which you have seen only fragments. They trapped these unwanted pieces of themselves in impregnable vaults, and they moved on.” Theus seemed to relish an audience and looking at the Tainted Yaz could understand why. All of them, even Zeen, seemed barely restrained, not really listening to what was being said, just a heartbeat from violence, as if each of them were the fragments Theus described, too shallow to hold on to much interest in the world beyond the exercise of their singular passions. In many ways the title that the Broken had taken for themselves would sit better with Theus and his fellow demons, so broken that they could act only when infecting someone else like a disease beneath the skin.

“The vaults weren’t so impregnable as they thought though?” Yaz gazed at the snarling faces of the Tainted. She avoided looking at Zeen. It hurt too much to see the madness in him. “You got out.”

Theus made a mock bow. “Time is a digger, time scratches and claws its way into any prison sooner or later. Time is not a healer, it’s a destroyer. Time is ruin. Time opens old wounds. The ice scraped away the cities that the Missing had abandoned, and one by one the ancient vaults failed. We spilled out into that ice. Creatures like me. Broken pieces, overpowered by our nature.