The Girl and the Stars

They lapsed into silence. Yaz found herself shivering, the cold having as much to do with it as her fears did. Working with the stars really had removed the last traces of Ictha resilience from her. She shuddered to think what havoc the winds above the ice would wreck upon her weakened body.

She thought about how shockingly thin Zeen had looked. Yaz had never seen starvation before she threw herself into the Pit of the Missing. The wind up above wouldn’t allow anyone to grow thin. The cold would kill a person long before their ribs began to show.

Time passed in its slow way. None of them had much to say and the ice spoke into the silence between them, its groans seeming a lament.

Yaz wriggled her way to Quina and found her shivering. They huddled together for warmth, saying nothing. Quina’s silence heightened Yaz’s sense of guilt. She liked Quina. She liked her quick mind and her humour though it often came with a sharp edge. Given more time they could have been close friends. Quina who had saved her from falling to her death in the city. Quina who despite her toughness had stolen that wooden bead and kept it close to her heart, hoping those who valued the trinket more than they did her might recover them both. Quina who always had something to say . . .

Quell worked at his bonds but without light, a weapon, and direction there seemed little to be gained in freeing hands and feet save some modicum of pride and a little comfort.

Whispers spoke in Yaz’s head, hate-filled, mocking, urging violence, telling her that she had killed her friends. Sometimes it was hard to tell which voices were her own. She had led her friends to their death. The black ice pressed on her though no part of her body touched it. Soon it would find a way inside them. Petrick was already muttering as though he were responding to voices inside his head.

“Stay quiet!” A new voice hissed at Yaz’s ear, and for a long moment she was unsure if it were inside her or just very close by. A blade began to saw at the hide strips around her wrists. “And be quick when I tell you to move.”

“Maya?” It seemed beyond reason that little Maya should be here.

“Sssh!” The girl moved on to the bonds around Yaz’s ankles. “We don’t have much time. I had to kill one of them.”

Kill? For a moment Yaz wondered if Maya had been taken by a demon. She sounded very different from the timid child who hardly seemed to have stopped trembling from her drop.

Yaz rubbed her wrists and waited for Maya to free the others. “How can we get out?” she whispered as the girl returned to her.

“I can see in the dark,” Maya murmured. “And you have this.”

Something soft swung against Yaz’s hands. A wrap of rat skin on the end of a long cord. She fumbled with it, already sensing the quiescent star inside. Pome’s star, recovered from the chamber where they had been captured. Maya had dragged it behind her to avoid its effects.

“Keep it hidden until we need it,” Maya said. “Take hold of me. I’ll lead you out.”

Quell’s hand patted for Yaz’s belt, the others shifting positions to form a line.

“Wait!” Yaz hissed. “What about Zeen, and Kao . . . and Thurin?”

“They’re lost. Finished.” Iron ran through Maya’s voice. “In war you have to learn to let go.”

Yaz suddenly understood that this was Maya’s clan speaking through her. The Axit remembered their days of war and taught the arts of it with a fervour, as though it were as important as knowing how to fish or how to pitch a tent against the wind. “I can’t let go of them.” Yaz reached for the girl, finding her small frame in the dark and taking hold. “You didn’t let go of us.”

“I need you to complete my mission. Come on. Quickly. No talking.” She moved off, tugging Yaz along.

Mission? Yaz bit back on her questions and moved as quietly as she could. The others weren’t lost. She couldn’t allow that. But she did need to escape if she were ever to be able to help them.

Maya led them, making no sound herself. Yaz tried to emulate the girl’s stealth. Quell, Quina, and Petrick managed to avoid stumbling or scuffing their feet behind her. They hadn’t gone far before Yaz smelled the blood and stink of whoever Maya had murdered on her way in. She prayed that it wasn’t Zeen, but didn’t ask.

Yaz wondered why the demons from the corpse hadn’t invaded Maya, but maybe they required the killing to be done in a rage or motivated by malice in order to make the cracks they needed to find their way into someone. Yaz wasn’t sure that dispassionate murder was better though. If you were going to take someone’s life, shouldn’t it matter? Yaz didn’t know how to feel about this new Maya any more than she knew how to feel about the new Thurin. Both of them had revealed some hidden aspect that even though it left what she had known of them before unchanged, still changed who they were.

Fifty yards further on Maya stopped and reached round to unhook Yaz’s fingers from her furs. “Wait.”

She moved off ahead. Moments later a sharp sigh broke the darkness and something heavy slumped to the ground. Maya returned, smelling of blood. “Hurry.”

It seemed to Yaz that rather than the gerants with their seven-foot iron greatswords, it might be a small girl with murder in her heart and impressive marjal shadow-work that was the deadliest thing under the ice. At least the deadliest thing with a pulse.

Maya called another halt. “Pome’s hunter is still rampaging,” she hissed. “It was on the edge of the taints’ territory not long ago. That might be why you were tied and left. So they could try to deal with it.”

Far off Yaz began to hear the clash of metal on metal, perhaps a hunter running. It grew a little louder then slowly faded.

Maya led off again. They moved faster now. At one point Yaz banged her head on the low ice ceiling and filled the darkness with her own personal stars. She carried on, cursing silently.

The malice-soaked darkness clawed at them as they moved from chamber to chamber. Sometimes Maya doubled back, sometimes she had them squeezing through tunnels almost too tight for Yaz and Quell. On two more occasions Maya left them to scout ahead. Whether any more killing occurred on these trips Yaz didn’t know. Twice, when Maya was with them, unearthly screams rang out close at hand, shattering the silence. And always the black ice was heaping doubt upon their shoulders, filling them with the certainty that escape was as far away as it had ever been. Yaz even found herself half convinced that Maya was deliberately leading them in circles.

In some of the warmer chambers the ice was melting. The first splat of black water hit the back of Yaz’s neck and ran beneath her hides, freezing and yet burning at the same time. Whispers filled her mind, the words almost loud enough to hear. She ignored them, worried that to pay them attention might be to invite the demons under her skin.

With Maya looking out for them Yaz worried less about Tainted rushing unseen upon them and more that it might be Quina or Petrick who turned on them, driven mad by demons just as Zeen had been. Quell she didn’t worry about. He hadn’t succumbed even when fighting for his freedom in the heart of the black ice and her worry that he might have done now shamed her. The idea that Quell could be turned seemed as crazed as the thoughts that the demons tried to ignite within her skull. Her life stood on several pillars, and Quell’s steadfast loyalty had proven more sturdy than the devotion of her parents or the solidity of the ice.