The Girl and the Stars
The iron hand closed like a trap around his head, engulfing it. Yaz staggered forward to grab one finger with both hands. She tried to pry it back but found no give in it.
“You don’t think breaking this body will break me?” Erris spoke beneath the assassin’s wrist. “You have held me too long. I have lived too long.” He was speaking to the city, to Vesta, not to the work of metal and magic that held him. Addressing the vast but broken mind that had kept him across all these centuries.
The symbols flowing across the assassin’s faceplate shone brighter now, painting themselves across Yaz. Every symbol on the walls glowed more strongly and the shadows, with no place left to hide, went scurrying down the nearest shafts.
“This isn’t what you were made to do,” Erris said.
The fingers moved fractionally, beginning to squeeze. Erris gasped as if in pain. “There. I’ve done it.”
In that instant every one of the thousand symbols on the walls, ceiling, and floor burned red. The assassin opened its hand and released Erris’s head. The script continued to flow over its face.
“I’ve bound myself in here,” Erris said. “This is all I am. I’ve finally escaped you. I can live or die but I can’t go back.”
A tone like metal being torn screeched out from the assassin’s chest and Yaz had to cover her ears. The voice was nothing human and yet the hurt in it, the depth of its sorrow, threatened to carry her away like a wave stripping fishers from their boat.
“I understand that I can’t return if I leave.” Erris hung his head. He turned and reached for Yaz’s hand. She let him take it and folded her fingers into his. His flesh felt warm. Almost human. But not quite. “Yaz will come with me.”
The symbols pulsed again.
“She will not return. Will you, Yaz?” He met her eyes.
“I . . .” She found that she didn’t want to say so. Even though it was a place of emptiness and death it also held mysteries and answers. The idea that she might never come again, that all these secrets would be locked away from her forever, somehow seemed too much to ask, even though she had been inches from death and didn’t stand much further from it now. “I will go as far away as I can get.”
Erris began to lead her toward the mouth of the nearest horizontal shaft. They walked quickly and quietly beneath the glow of the symbols’ scarlet fire.
“What did you do?” Yaz hissed, afraid that if she spoke too loud it might somehow make the city change its mind.
“I used the only currency I had,” Erris said. “Myself.” He glanced back at the assassin. “I have been a part of the void so long, even as the city’s mind fell apart, that I think it values my existence. A kind of love, if you like.”
Behind them a clang rang out and looking back Yaz saw that the assassin was literally falling to pieces, coming apart now that its purpose had been served. A maelstrom of emotions swept over them, sorrow, anger, loss. Yaz’s own feelings floated on that tide, leaving her hollow, walking like a dead man, tears running from her eyes, her breath hitching in her chest as she fought against sobbing.
The whirlwind of feelings began to subside as they entered the corridor. Their footsteps echoed before them and, as the entrance receded behind them into a square of red light, the star orbiting Yaz began to provide their illumination. As it circled it sent their shadows in a slow dance, drawing together, merging, parting, sliding across one wall then the next.
Yaz realised that they were still holding hands and self-consciously undid herself from Erris’s grasp. “I still don’t understand what you did back there.”
“I did what I used to do best,” Erris said. “I escaped.”
“What, just like that?” Yaz frowned. “Why didn’t you do it years ago?”
They walked in silence for several paces, circled by their shadows.
“Well, it wasn’t ‘just like that.’ First I had to build this.” Erris patted his body. “Which took finding, unlocking, and mastering some of the more complex machinery left by the Missing on the lower levels. That took some time.”
“How long?” Yaz knew it took a woman the best part of a year to make a baby.
“Lifetimes,” Erris said. “Dozens of them. And then I had to work out how to put myself wholly in it, with no part left to anchor me into the void. It’s fortunate that when the city took me it took all of me, including my marjal skills.”
“Even so, you didn’t really just figure it all out and get everything ready at the same time I happened to appear, surely?”
Erris stopped walking and turned to face her. “No.”
“Why then?” Why now, she meant. Why because of me, she wanted to ask. Didn’t he know she was broken? Didn’t he know she’d already failed those who put their faith in her, time and again?
“Why would I leave? I know what’s up there. Ice, ice, and more ice. A dead white world. A world that will sink its teeth into this body and bear down until the power cells are exhausted, and then at last there’ll be an end to me.” He paused. “I was scared to leave. Everyone I ever knew or cared about had gone.”
Yaz met his dark eyes, both reflecting a single red star. “Why . . .” She found her mouth too dry for her question. “What changed?”
He smiled a smile with too much uncertainty in it for someone thousands of years old.
“You made me care.”
27
DON’T LOOK SO astonished!” Erris laughed. “I haven’t seen another human in two hundred years, and that was the man who built the hunters. So it’s not as if you had a lot of competition. My mother always said I follow the first pretty face I see.”
Yaz found her fingers resting on her own unaccountably hot cheeks and lowered her hands quickly. “And do you?”
“Well, maybe. But I followed the last pretty face I saw for years and we were to be married. Only I had to go exploring some old ruins . . .” He grinned, showing white teeth. “Come on. Let’s go before we find some other trouble to get into down here.” He started walking again. “I’m sure there’s enough trouble waiting for us up above?”
Yaz didn’t know whether Erris was talking about the ice caverns or up on the ice itself. The answer was the same either way. “Yes. Lots.”
* * *
ERRIS LED THE way, paying no attention to any scavenger symbols. Where there were hanging cables he climbed them at a remarkable rate using just his arms. Twice Yaz had to call for a rest. She found herself very thirsty and had to be thankful for the turn of events that had reunited her with Erris so quickly, as she wouldn’t have lasted long. She made a mental note to check that Maya had stolen enough waterskins before realising that if she stole a heat pot then they would be able to melt ice as they went once they reached the surface.