The Girl and the Stars
Instead of Erris she found herself looking at the point of an iron spear.
“Arka?” The face of the woman behind the spear had been smeared with mud, leaving her almost unrecognisable, but her rangy build and something around her eyes made Yaz think of Arka.
“Yaz!” And as the hunter’s star slowly rotated into view from behind her: “Gods in the Ice! That’s the biggest fucking star I’ve ever seen!” Arka fell back, wincing as the star’s aura brushed over her.
Yaz looked past Arka to where the grey-haired gerant who had been among the council at headquarters in the drying cave now had both arms wrapped around Erris from behind. A second of the Broken watched him, clutching a spear. Erris was smiling, seeming both amused and very interested by the development. Yaz found herself wondering about the world he had come from before falling into the city. Did they not have violence or was he simply less protective of his body because it wasn’t the one he was born into? He should be. From his own account he had spent far longer making it than his mother and he had spent on the original.
Arka continued to edge back from the hunter’s star, still holding her spear toward Yaz. “Who’s this?” She nodded toward Erris.
“That’s Erris.” Yaz pushed the star behind her. “He’s new to all . . . this.” She waved at their spears. “So please don’t hurt him if he does the wrong thing. He’s from the city.”
Arka frowned. “You’ve come from the city?”
“We have. But Erris is from the city.”
“Nobody is from the city,” the gerant growled.
“I am.” Erris raised both arms in a slow yawning stretch and in the process broke the old gerant’s bear hug with no apparent effort despite the man’s scarred arms being thick with slabbed muscle.
The other Broken, a bony older woman, one of the ironworkers, Yaz thought, retreated two steps, the point of her spear trembling.
“This is . . .” Arka gaped, her gaze darting back and forth between Yaz and Erris. “Astonishing.”
“I’ve been astonished every day since I came down the pit.” Yaz shrugged.
Arka fixed her stare on Erris. “Are you one of the—”
“He’s not one of the Missing, no,” Yaz said. “But Theus is part of one. Several parts of one. And that’s where we’re going.”
Arka shook her head. “No. We’re going to secure the city. We’re making it our new base. If we deny Pome access to the iron then his power won’t last long.”
“You’re not worried about the hunters?” Erris asked.
“Always. But I’ve been worried about them for twenty years. And besides, we have Yaz now and something about that star behind her tells me she knows how to handle hunters.”
Yaz shook her head. “I’m going to get Thurin and Kao and my brother back from the Tainted.”
Arka blinked. “That’s insanity. Two of you? You need to come to the city with us.”
“I can’t.”
“I’m still your drop-leader, Yaz.” Arka’s face hardened. “We need to secure the city before the next collection. Once we have the trade goods from the next shipment we’ll start to regain control. Pome’s faction won’t do so well without fish and salt.”
“The next collection isn’t for twenty-three days,” Yaz said. “Erris and I will be coming to the city once we have the others. There’s time.”
Surprise overwrote the resolve on Arka’s muddy face at the mention of twenty-three days. “You don’t know as much as you think you do, girl. There’s going to be an unscheduled collection very soon. The coal-worms are on the move. That’s a sign.”
Yaz was about to ask how Arka knew what the coal-worms were doing when she became aware that Arka was no longer looking at her or even at the hunter’s star but at some spot to the left on the wall behind her. The ice seemed to be glowing from within but Yaz sensed no star.
“What is—”
A sudden cracking sound heralded a white explosion and the chamber vanished in a tumult of roaring, curiously warm water. Yaz had no time to grab hold of anything, just a brief impression of bodies tumbling amid crimson waters and then an impact with something hard that took the world away.
* * *
YAZ CAME TO her senses spluttering and coughing water from raw lungs. She found herself facedown in several inches of the stuff and felt as though she had choked the whole lot out from inside her chest. She quickly became aware of a savage heat and a fierce red light that was not her star. She turned her head to stare across the steaming waters still draining from the cavern. On the far side a creature writhed on the wet stone. A creature not unlike the seaworms that sometimes cling to whales, only this one was too wide for her to wrap her arms around, many yards long, its soft, segmented body a putrid grey streaked with black, and where a seaworm had a complex head of ugly mouthparts ringed with bone hooks, this creature had only a glowing mass the colour of a forge pot melt and twice as hot.
“Hsssst!”
The thing looked as groggy as she was, swaying its head back and forth across the water, sending up great clouds of steam each time it dipped too close to the surface. The ice above it was in full thaw, meltwaters raining down to vaporise on the worm’s glowing face.
Beyond the creature gaped the tunnel from which it had been ejected at speed by the pressure of meltwater behind it. Water was still pouring out, colder now and less ferocious.
“Hsssst!”
Yaz had thought the worm was making the noise but now she saw Erris lying against the ice wall opposite. He had tucked himself back in the channel made where the flow of warm water had cut into the base. He was waving for her to do the same. Yaz found she’d become snagged on some irregularity in the stone floor but managed to free herself and roll to the side just as the scorching head swung her way.
She huddled back into the ice channel and looked for the others, finding no sign. She guessed Arka and her friends had been swept away in the flood, and if they had any sense they’d keep on running. Judging by the height of the tunnel and what she had been told Yaz guessed that the specimen before her was a baby. It fuelled her resolve never to meet a full-grown coal-worm.
The creature seemed disoriented, perhaps surprised at having been flushed into a void within the ice, not so adept at sensing gaps as an adult. In any event, its head appeared to be cooling as its fright wore off, now glowing only a dull red, shading into black. In a series of disturbing undulations the worm flowed across the chamber and set its head to the ice wall opposite, slowly melting its way in while pushing the meltwater out with ripples that ran the length of it.