The Girl and the Stars
Erris made a slow turn, gazing at the pockmarked rock and occasional twisted beams. “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”
Yaz cocked her head questioningly.
“A line of ancient poetry that dates back to even before the beaching. Did you know that the ships that brought the four original tribes to Abeth were powered by star-stones almost identical to the ones in the city?”
Yaz shook her head. The Ictha had little mythology about the black oceans between the stars. Mokka, the first woman, had sailed her boat there once when she argued with the Gods in the Sea. “Tell me about the poem.”
Erris smiled. “It’s just a line that stuck in my head long ago. I guess it’s saying that however you try to set your mark on the world, time will come and wash it all away.” He reached out a hand toward her. “Let me show you how it was when I came here.”
Yaz found his smile echoing itself on her lips. She reached out and let him close his hand around hers. “I don’t—”
But then she did. The ruins grew around her, far taller than she had imagined when glimpsing them in the distance of an early visit to Erris’s memory. The towers reached up through the ice ceiling of the cavern to daunting neck-craning heights, and yet they were still merely stumps of what had once stood there, the metal skeletons reaching up above the poured stone to challenge the clouds. In the memory Yaz stood on rubble that covered the ground to an unknown depth, great chunks of poured stone, some bigger than whales and like the carcass of some vast beast their iron bones broke from stone flesh. Bees droned lazily by and a riot of ivy, heavy with white flowers, pursued the ruins up into the air.
Yaz gazed up at the defeated structures, marvelling, awestruck. Even their wounds seemed beautiful, exposing a complexity of floors and chambers inside, high above the ground. The buildings had their own grace, no two the same, and few of the straight lines she had grown so weary of in the chambers below. These were variously fluting, bulbous, slender, as if like the fungi in the caves they had grown rather than been built.
“What—” Yaz felt Erris’s hand leave hers, fingers trailing across fingers, and the illusion vanished, replaced with the ice cave that now seemed small and dull by comparison to the past glories taken from her. “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.” She repeated the line. No more need be said. She understood some of the city’s sorrow now. It too had been broken and cast aside. Abandoned by those who made it.
* * *
“WHAT’S NEXT?” ERRIS rubbed his hands together and looked about expectantly.
Yaz contemplated the long slope. Taking Quell and Maya back into the black ice would put them both in danger. Maya could prove very useful, but she also had a proclivity for murdering the Tainted, and given that Yaz was going in specifically to reclaim two of the Tainted it felt profoundly wrong to be killing any of the unfortunates that got in the way.
“We’re going to go and find Theus, just the two of us, and I’m going to hold him to our agreement.”
Yaz shivered. Just before Petrick had fallen to his death Theus had boomed at her, “Yaz of the Ictha, we have a deal.”
He might have just been saying it because he saw she and the others were going to escape him and it was something that might bring her back. But whether he meant it or not it was something that she was going to hold him to.
Erris extended his arm toward the slope, tilting his head. “Lead on, dear lady.”
Yaz frowned. “Sorry?”
“It’s what people say. Said. Don’t mind me. I’m just . . . well . . . I think I’m nervous. It’s been a long time since I felt anything like this. Excited. With the city’s avatar I was scared I guess, but I knew what I was dealing with, what the options were. This, however, this is all new. It’s been a very long time since I’ve done anything this foolish.” He grinned. “I’m rather enjoying it.”
“Well, don’t enjoy it too much. The Tainted are dangerous. And so are the Broken. And the hunters. In fact everything down here is dangerous and I’ve no idea how easy it is to stick a spear through your chest or what it would do to you.”
“A spear?” Erris wrinkled his nose as if he hadn’t considered something as basic as a pointed piece of bone or metal. “I think it would be very bad news to get one of those stuck through me. So let’s avoid that.”
“Stop enjoying yourself then, and stay alert.” Yaz shook her head and led on toward the slope. Her mission had felt daunting before when she thought Theus was “just” some dark spirit capable of possessing the unwary. Then he was one of the Missing, or at least broken pieces of one of them, an enigmatic and incomprehensibly ancient being, albeit robbed of most of his memory. And now it seemed he might be Prometheus, significant even among the Missing. A figure that troubled the city’s dreams and whose relationship with such entities as Taproot and Seus remained unclear.
* * *
DESPITE HER INSTRUCTION Erris followed Yaz through the ice caverns as if the whole place had been constructed just to astonish him. At the first stream they came to he crouched and for an age would do nothing but let water run over his fingers then cup it in both hands and watch it fall as he lifted it. He marvelled at icicles and frost, at heaps of fallen ice and the banks of stones deposited by the glacial flow. He carried a rough, irregular stone in each hand for some distance, turning them over in his fingers.
“Nobody made this. No human hand has ever touched either of these stones before . . .”
“I’m very pleased for you,” Yaz growled.
“It’s just that for more than a thousand years I’ve seen nothing that wasn’t made by someone, or something. A simulation just can’t—”
“Sssh.” Yaz held up a hand to silence him. Another distant cry rang out. Fainter than the first. Fear, pain, anger, or just someone shouting for someone else? She couldn’t tell. She dimmed the light of the hunter’s star still further. “Come on.” She beckoned.
“Did you know that the star-stone fragments glow more brightly when you’re near them?”
Yaz turned to glare at him. “Quietly!” She led on. “And yes. And call them stars.”
Two caverns on and they came into a starlit grove of fungi, some of them types that Yaz hadn’t yet seen, tall, slim, and elegantly spotted with vibrant red and lustrous blue spots. Some of these reached to her elbows and where they grew together thickly they reminded her of Erris’s forest. She turned to find him on hands and knees, examining examples of the capped fungi that tasted so good in stew.
“These are marvellous. I’m amazed to find them growing here, but I guess life finds a way . . .”
“We should go,” Yaz muttered. “It’s not safe here.” As she said the words a rattle of falling or thrown ice snapped her attention to the darker of the two exits. “Erris!” she hissed, turning back to beckon him to her.