The Girl and the Stars

“Over years, however. Decades, centuries. I did what my fellow escapees seem unable to do and set my will to regathering myself. I did not agree to being torn apart and discarded. When I have reunited all that was shriven from the original me I plan to seek out the rest among the golden halls of the Missing and make myself whole once more. A person rather than a thing.

“So the truth is simple. Those that you call the Tainted are hunting something, and what they’re hunting is me. Pieces of who I was, scattered amid a multitude, lost among screaming millions. And very shortly you will be joining them in that search. So, I—”

“It’s not going very well, is it?” Yaz didn’t know where her courage was coming from. Perhaps it was just the certainty that her chances had fled and that the death she had expected at the end of her fall had arrived. “It sounds as if you’ve been looking for years. Generations? What do you have them do? Chip at the ice, melt it, drink it, hoping to randomly find the other little demons that together make whatever monstrosity you are?”

Theus stalked toward her. She felt Thurin’s ice-work like a giant hand squeezing around her, trying to compel the blood inside her to move at his command, attempting to lift her from her feet. She ground her teeth together and struggled to find some muscle in her mind that could resist him. Quell stepped between them with the same hard and determined look she had first seen when he faced the hunter in the city. A moment later the invisible force of Thurin’s magic tossed him aside, seeming to find it easier to get a grip on Quell than on Yaz.

“I won’t ever let one of your kind control me.” Yaz clenched the star burning in her hand. The room dimmed, and as she focused on her glowing fist her full weight rested once more on the rock. She had said they wouldn’t run, so she stood her ground. She opened her hand to let the light out once more. “You can’t own me.”

“You know,” said Theus, drawing ever closer. “I believe you.” He held her gaze with his unreadable black eyes, the stain moving slowly across his face, pouring into his mouth, coiling about his neck, Thurin’s neck, like a serpent.

Suddenly there were hands on her arms, the star shaken from her fingers to roll across the rock. A gerant had her from behind. Quina leapt to attack, Kao bellowed and charged. All at once it was chaos and Theus had the cold blade of a knife against her neck. Quell found his feet, his roar almost as loud as the screams and howls of the Tainted. He took the eight-foot gerant trying to wrestle him and slung the man across the room with undiminished Ictha strength.

Yaz ignored the knife and fought to free herself but the gerant’s strength overmatched her. She had expected to die. She hadn’t thought it would be Thurin’s knife that killed her though or that they would be face-to-face at the moment her life ended. His eyes cleared, a desperate horror filling them as the darkness drained away. Still, the hand holding the blade to her neck did not retreat. All around them the sounds of struggle, cries of pain and rage, but even now she couldn’t look away from Thurin.

“I believe you,” Theus repeated with his impossibly black tongue. “And if you can’t be tamed . . . what use are you?”

“The stars!” Yaz blurted. “The stars can help you!”

“The stars did this. The stars broke us apart. Even now, like this, they hurt us.”

The sounds of struggle diminished around Yaz as the Tainted brought her friends down. Only Quell remained on his feet, his bruised face running crimson from a scalp wound. He wrestled with a gerant while a woman, her face almost as red but from demon-stain rather than blood, beat at his shoulders and head with a large thighbone. The unaccustomed fury on Quell’s face made Yaz fear that the demons were already in him. Surely they would be soon.

“I know the stars hurt you! I’ve seen it!” Yaz fought to keep her voice steady and loud. The knife pressed at her throat, a cold, hard line. “The stars drive demons back through the ice, but the strongest are last to retreat. Couldn’t that help your search? If a star drives back the tide, pushes away the multitude, wouldn’t the last to go be most likely to be fragments of you?”

Theus stood back to regard her. Close by, another Tainted threw himself at the back of Quell’s knees and he finally went down beneath the gerant still grappling him.

“That’s . . . not entirely stupid.” Theus seemed taken aback. He took the knife from her neck and toyed with the blade. “It would take a big star though, to have much of an effect.”

“I have one. From a hunter.” Yaz shook her arms free of the gerant’s grip.

“A star that large would break you,” Theus said. “Not that I care but it would let the many in the black ice flood into you and you’d be useless to me.”

“No, I can resist it.” Yaz reached toward her fallen star and it shot back into her hand. “You’ve already seen what I can do.”

Theus’s face twitched, a snarl on his lips, wild anger, raw hatred, and something else holding them back but just barely. He answered through his teeth. “I will think on it.” He took a coil of hide rope from Thurin’s pack, forcing his face to calmness. “For now give me your wrists.”

Yaz shrank back. “No.”

Theus looked meaningfully across to where Quina stood, stretched between two Tainted, each holding a wrist in two hands. Both of the men were bleeding from gashes that she had apparently cut into them. A third Tainted, this one a young girl, had recovered Quina’s knife and came to stand in front of the trapped hunska.

“Present your wrists or the little one there will show us all what you people keep inside your bellies. It’s actually quite surprising, though rather disgusting. You wouldn’t believe the length of intestine that can be pulled—”

“Here.” Yaz raised her crossed wrists. “Just do it.”

24

   WHERE’S KAO?” YAZ could see nothing. The cave to which they had been dragged was cold, dry, and utterly dark.

“They must have taken him a different way.” Yaz hardly recognised Quina’s voice and realised the girl must be trying not to cry.

“This is bad.” Petrick sounded utterly dispirited.

“How are we going to escape?” Quell asked at her side. From the strain running through his words Yaz guessed he was trying to break his bonds again.

No one answered and even though she couldn’t see them Yaz felt that each of the others was looking her way. She’d never asked to be the leader but it seemed that that was what came when you convinced people to follow your ideas. She had brought them here, hunting her brother, and somehow had acquired responsibility for all their lives.

“I don’t know.” They’d made her leave her star, reduced to a faint glow. None of her friends had weapons. They were all tied, and blind once more in the dark. Lost. She wanted to ask their forgiveness but knew that she didn’t deserve it and that asking would remove the last strand of their hope. “I think my offer was a good one. I hope Theus agrees to it.” But whether the creature inside Thurin was sufficiently rational to see where its best interests lay Yaz was far from sure.