The Girl and the Stars

“Yes. Then Seus came and . . .”

“Ah. I must be all that survived. The basic framework, so’s to speak. Recent memory gone.” He frowned. “I can’t remember anything before . . . Well . . .” He held up the star again and studied it. “Put it this way.” The thin line broadened slowly into a wide green belt so that nearly a third of the world lay free of ice. “Since the world looked like this.”

“Is Seus the winter?” Yaz whispered.

Elias shook his head. “This world was always going to freeze in the end. He’s dead set against anyone slowing it down though.”

“What does he want? To destroy the world?”

“Never that.” Elias flashed a nervous smile. “Just all of your kind.”

Yaz suddenly found her island of the present crowded with returning past and future. She had been falling. She had been hunted and been hunting. “I need a star to save Zeen and the others!”

“Big picture!” Elias snapped his fingers irritatingly in her face. “I just told you Seus wants to close the Corridor, ice over the green zone, and kill well over ninety-nine percent of all humanity on the surface of this planet.” His eyes flitted to her collar. He reached out to tap a finger to the needle there. “You need to use this to find me. A better me who can use—who can help you to stop Seus!”

Yaz stepped back and fixed Elias with a hard stare. “Big picture” wasn’t a phrase she had ever heard spoken but somehow she understood the sentiment. It was the same mind-set that saw children sacrificed to the greater good, that saw awful deeds against the few to preserve the many. Maybe it was right or maybe it was wrong. Yaz left that for the gods to decide. But whatever they decided, her course was fixed, right or wrong. “I’ll care about your fight when I’ve finished mine. Now send me back!”

“Send you? Dear girl, you brought yourself.”

“Then how do I—” But the words were slurring from a mouth whose cheek was pressed to cold stone and a tongue that tasted blood. Her vision blurred and the great red star about which the others had orbited swung back into view out of the darkness.

Time passed and the circle of illumination from her star, now lying just beyond the tips of her outstretched fingers, began to surrender to the growing glow of at first half a dozen large symbols, themselves manifesting like stars from the general darkness of a night sky. Soon there were scores of them, lighting a chamber in which all the peoples of the gathering could have assembled without rubbing elbows.

Yaz got to her feet, groaning and wiping fresh blood from her mouth. She was back in the chamber into which she had fallen while escaping the hunter. The rest of it could just have been the result of banging her skull too hard against the floor. Her head and chest competed to see which could ache the worst.

“Hello?”

The vastness of the chamber swallowed the word. By way of an answer the dark mouth of one of the many side shafts lit from within with crimson light. A hunter emerged moments later, hooking black claws around the exit and hauling itself into the room in a single smooth motion that brought it crashing to the stone floor five yards below. The same hunter that had pursued her down so many falls.

A sigh escaped Yaz’s lips. She called her star to her hands and began to advance on her foe. She had few illusions about her chances of beating the creature, but the time for running had passed.

This hunter resembled a giant black crab with a complexity of many-jointed legs bearing up a body three times as wide as Yaz was tall. One arm massively outweighed two smaller ones on the other side. Where those two had fingers like tentacles the other sported a claw large enough to snatch up a gerant and snip him effortlessly in two.

Whether surprised by her advance or recovering from its drop the hunter remained where it was, close to the base of the wall, its iron carapace backed almost against another of the several dozen identical entrances.

Yaz advanced in a straight line, save where she tracked around one of the shafts that opened in the floor. She held the star out in front of her, smaller cousin to the one she could sense powering the monster ahead. In its light she saw the river that runs through all things, wider and clearer than she had ever seen it before, its power hidden but terrifying even in the hints and rumours it offered to her eyes. The star she had recovered in the city chamber had once more opened the river to her. She feared it more than she feared the hunter though. If she touched it the river could flood through her in half a heartbeat, filling her with energies beyond her capacity to own. She would sooner stick her hand in a forge pot than dare the river like this.

The hunter rose on its legs as Yaz closed the remaining distance between them. It lifted half a yard and raised its huge claw still higher, regarding her with mismatched glass eyes, gleaming darkly at the ends of two small articulated arms.

“You’re going to be mine.” Yaz spoke the words through gritted teeth as she exerted her will through the star in her hands, seeking to influence the one pulsing amid the ironwork body looming over her.

The crab advanced in quick, stuttering steps, the weight of it scoring the stone in every place that one of its sharp legs set down. The claw, big enough to squash Yaz flat, now hung poised above her head. She felt the creature’s heart with her mind, a fiercely defiant fire refusing her command. Yaz ground her teeth and raised a hand toward the claw as it descended.

“No!”

The crab hesitated, the iron bulk of it groaning as its forward momentum arrested. In the next instant its heart-star flared, deep-red light shone from every joint, and a bright pain blossomed in Yaz’s head. Something brittle fractured in her mind and she fell, blood running from her eyes. The massive claw following her to the ground.

Before the claw’s jagged teeth could close around her the whole of the monster jolted. Yaz heard an awful squealing and a swift series of snapping sounds. Then, with sudden violence, the entire crab burst into pieces. An eye hit the ground close to Yaz’s head and shattered, scattering broken shards over her. A section of its carapace bounced just past her, its edges gleaming where the thick iron had been torn. Yaz saw the claw skitter across the ground before toppling down one of the shaft openings, swiftly followed by several lengths of cable and a glowing star almost the size of a newborn’s head.

With a groan Yaz rolled over into a sitting position and began to scramble back. It looked as if some dark core remained amid the wreckage of the hunter. Even as she watched, it seemed to unfold, shedding iron cables, metal plates, toothed wheels, and a great blue-black spring coil. The thing revealed amid the hunter’s ruin was something almost human and perhaps only a little taller and wider than Hetta or Jerrig, though cast in black metal. It followed a careful design rather than the seemingly improvised hunters that the regulator had created. And although Yaz had never had a clear sight of it before she knew exactly what it was: the assassin that the city had sent to stop her escape. On that occasion only Erris’s sacrifice of his own iron body had slowed it sufficiently for her to escape.