The Girl and the Stars

The assassin had torn into the hunter’s back and emerged from its wreckage. The hunters were the regulator’s doing and now the city had risen against them. Though it seemed that the avatar the city had sent was focused on Yaz. The hunter had merely been an impediment, stealing its prey.

The assassin raised its hand toward her, fingers extended and tight together. Yaz realised that even if she thought she could master the city’s creation where she had failed to master the regulator’s, the only star that she could hear was the one in her hand. Whatever powered this killer it was something new, something over which she had no influence.

With a soft click four black points appeared at the ends of the extended fingers. The next two things happened simultaneously. Four black darts shot toward her with the same velocity that had seen them hammer into stone on their last encounter. And Yaz plunged both arms into the river that flows through all things. For a moment she became one with the universal current, the awful power flowing through her with a force that should strip the flesh from her bones. In the next moment the river rejected her and she lay gasping in the same place she had been before though it seemed to her that she had been carried a great distance. The energies still inside Yaz made her feel like a plucked harp string resonating to the note of creation. Her body wanted to break apart, to stride off in a dozen different directions, each part carrying away a different piece of her mind. She stood, shuddering like a flag in the wind, scarcely noticing the four flattened pieces of black metal that slid from her lap. The spent projectiles tumbled down across the shield of golden light that encased her and struck the ground with ringing tones. Yaz and the assassin faced each other, one golden, one dark.

Yaz thought of her friends, of her purpose, of Thurin and Zeen trapped amid the black ice. With a great cry, half rage, half ecstasy, she managed to grab the tatters of her being and drag them back into a unity. She became united, drawn more definitely into the world than she had ever been before, understanding at the same time how very close she had come to dispersing across the surface of her stolen power like oil spilled across the face of the sea.

Yaz spread her hands, cupped, half-surprised not to find them full of fire. Something invincible ran through her veins, her lungs didn’t need to draw breath, her muscles screamed with a strength that could easily tear her asunder. When she took a swift step forward, the black assassin took a swift step back.

Yaz struck. Not with her hands, but with everything that was in her, a blast of something white and black and chaotic and loud. The force of it flung the assassin away like a child’s toy, hurling it yards back on a rising line to hit so high up the wall that Yaz couldn’t have reached it with her fingertips.

Her opponent fell back to the ground, face forward, hitting with a clang like an iron bell. A rain of fractured stone pieces rattled down around it from the impact crater high above them. Yaz stood, trembling, watching the inert, gently smoking form at the base of the wall. She was glad it was dead. She had, in that one act of violence, discharged herself, shedding everything the river had given her. It would be at least a day before she saw the river again. A week before she could touch it with anything even approaching safety.

Yaz slumped, the fear leaving her body and uncovering all her aches and pains as it retreated. Exhausted, Yaz turned to examine the closest of the downward shafts.

The scrape of iron on stone turned her sharply back around and reversed the tidal flow of her terror. A great metal hand twitched. Joints groaned in protest and the assassin slowly levered itself up, turning its blank face toward her once more. Even in her fear she wondered for a moment if she were looking into the face of the Missing. Had the city crafted its assassin in their image?

The assassin stood and stepped toward her, limping on one leg, grinding metal on metal. It smouldered here and there, the energies she had unleashed on it still sparking across the formerly glossy exterior, now deeply scored and etched in almost geometric scar patterns. It held its hand out and the fingers shuddered, but the black spikes that would have torn through her didn’t come. The mechanism that threw them seemed broken.

Part of her wanted to turn and run. To throw herself down yet another shaft. But she didn’t want to die with her back to the thing. Exhaustion wanted to put her on her knees, but that wasn’t an option. Not for an Ictha. She would meet death standing.

She raised her star, thinking perhaps to throw it. She had felt ready to die before, back there beneath the black ice, but maybe that had been the weight of the demons’ malice crushing her spirit. Now she was anything but ready. She had unfinished business. People that only she could save.

Yaz wasn’t ready but she understood she had nothing left. Just holding her arms out before her with the star was taking all her strength.

Without warning something struck the ground between her and the assassin. A something that must have fallen from one of the shaft openings on the ceiling. It hit fast as a thunderbolt but without any sound other than a slap like a palm against stone. Yaz blinked. A figure, a human figure, coiled against the impact, crouched between the towering assassin and Yaz, who realised only now that she was on her knees.

The star fell from Yaz’s hands as Erris unfolded from his crouch. Facing her, rather than the metal giant. Not Erris in his body of mismatched parts but Erris as she had seen him in the green memories of his life, tall, calm, his skin the same rich brown she remembered, hair close to his skull in tight black coils. He wore a white linen tunic and leggings. Yaz discovered that she knew the word “linen” and what cloth was. Something else that had slipped into her mind while wandering Erris’s memories with him.

“Yaz. I told you not to come back.” A sad smile played at the corner of his mouth.

Behind Erris the assassin took a step closer, now directly behind him. Erris’s head reached only just above its hips.

Erris turned and looked up at the assassin’s blank face. “I can’t let you have her.”

“How . . . how are you here?” Yaz struggled to her feet, heavy with exhaustion. “You said you didn’t have a body.”

“Actually, I said I had two. One better built than the other.” Erris kept his back to her.

“But . . . the other one was metal, like a hunter’s.”

“And this one has metal in it too.” Erris’s gaze remained on the blank plate of the assassin’s face, where symbols suddenly began to glow, many of them, flowing down over the iron like a slow waterfall.

“No!” Erris said.

The assassin backhanded him. A seemingly lazy blow but one that sent him flying across the expanse of floor. Yaz cried out as he fell into a shaft, but somehow his fingers caught the edge and heartbeats later he had hauled himself out.

The assassin reached for Yaz and she backed away. With impressive footspeed Erris returned to interpose himself. His face just inches before the iron fingers reaching for Yaz.

“You know how long it took me to build this body,” he said to the assassin. “How much of myself I put into it. How hard I worked to hide it from you.”