The Girl and the Stars

The Tainted by the bridge parted before Theus’s advance, from biggest gerant to youngest child. Something about the fragmented soul carried inside Thurin’s slender body made those other demons fear. It made them forget the mindless pursuit of their own singular desires and listen to his will.

The black stain covered much of his face in a broad stripe from his hairline down across his forehead to his chin and trailing off along his neck.

“Yaz.” Theus showed her a wide grin. “You came back, following a star like some wandering king. And what a star! Has it led you to the birth of something great, I wonder?”

Before Yaz could answer this strange question Theus’s gaze fixed on Erris and blackness flowed into both his eyes as if this might offer more information about the newcomer. “Here’s a curio and no mistake. Alive but not alive. Human but not human. And familiar too. Very familiar.” The smile vanished. “You’re something made in the city. A marjal’s mind hiding inside the works of my people. It’s as if a dog had been given charge of a grand ship. He sits at the helm in the captain’s hat and brocade, tongue lolling out, and no clue as to what he has been given.”

Yaz willed her star forward, rising before her, red as the sun and burning brightly. The Tainted fell back, hissing, and even Theus took one step away, raising an arm to shield his eyes.

“We had a deal. Give me my friends.” She wanted to ask for them all. To free all those enslaved by the black ice. But Theus would never agree to it.

“Find the rest of me and you can have them.” Theus gestured toward the caves behind him. “Though I am rather fond of this one.” He ran his hands over Thurin’s chest and sides. “As are you, from what I’ve seen.”

Yaz hardened her features against any blush. She imagined that she felt Erris’s questioning gaze against the back of her head and wasn’t sure how she would feel about such jealousy. “I don’t have time to hunt the whole of the black ice for you. I said I could help you, not do it all for you. Consider what I’m offering as proof of concept. It will be up to you to refine it and make it work.”

“That was not our deal!” Theus snarled, the rage he was holding in check now beginning to slip free.

“Our deal was made with your knife at my throat,” Yaz growled back. “Accept this one or I’m going to see just how well you stand up against this star.” She increased the intensity of the light pouring out. Theus backed two more steps. The rest of the Tainted crowded in the gloom now, a good twenty yards further away on the chasm’s edge to either side of the bridge’s far end.

She softened her tone. “How long has it been since a piece of you was discovered down here?”

Furrows lined themselves across Theus’s brow. “Many drops. Long enough for a child to grow old.”

Yaz paused, astonished and horrified in equal measure. Astonished at his tenacity and horrified at how many lives had been lost in this creature’s cause. “If I find another you let them all go, not just my friends.”

“I would promise it if I thought you’d believe me.” Theus shook his head. “But even you are not that naive. Find a new fragment of me and I will let these three go with you.”

Yaz could feel Erris behind her, judging. “Agreed.”

Erris said nothing but as he came to stand beside her she thought that she felt the weight of his disapproval settle on her shoulders and she slumped, accepting her guilt. Erris, though, however long he had lived, was new to this world of ice and hardship. Compromise was how life had to be lived. Everyone had to lean against the wind. Yaz would free them all if she could, but she saw no way to reach that goal. Although she hated the idea she began to see the position her parents and the rest of the Ictha were in with the pit and the weakness in their broken children. She didn’t know if the priests’ poison was starting to infect her or if this was just what growing up was—a series of compromises that twisted a child’s idealism into something shameful.

“Stay out of my way.” Yaz advanced across the bridge. “All of you.” She swept her star’s light across the ranks of Tainted. “But be close enough for my call.”

She stepped onto the far side of the ravine and recalled her star into her hand, striding toward the closest of the yawning cavern mouths, the one that Thurin had first led them into with promises to guide them safely in the dark. She glanced back toward Theus, staring at her hawk-like, and wondered what kind of darkness Thurin was lost in now, helpless in his own flesh while a demon used him to its evil ends. He’d been returned to the nightmare he had so recently escaped, and why? To save her brother, someone he had never met, one of the Tainted that he cared about least. He was here because of her. Another of her victims.

Yaz stepped into the black ice, Erris at her heels, and let the red star float free a yard before her. She strained that unknown muscle somewhere deep at the base of her mind and made the star blaze until its heart began to beat faster and its song became a war chant. Rather than focusing the light into a beam she let it shine before her in a wide arc, and even then the small fraction of it that reached her burned on her cheeks and forehead, dazzling her eyes behind a shielding hand. She moved slowly, letting the star’s light reach into the blackness of the ice and purge the foulness there. Malice and hatred turned to terror as the knife that had once cut these demons free of the beings that owned them now returned to cut them once again.

“Enough!” Yaz quieted the hunter’s heart and stood there panting, her skin feeling raw, head aching. All around her the sweating ice walls had become clear, the blackness pushed back almost too far to see. Here and there a stubborn black spot hung amid the fractured whiteness, like the opposite of the stars seen in the caverns where the Broken lived.

It stood to reason that if the Tainted had spent generations mining the ice and found only a few pieces of Theus then it wasn’t reasonable to expect to find several more within yards of the first tunnel that Yaz examined. She focused the starlight into a tight beam and shone it into the ice, directing it at the nearest of the more tenacious demons. Within seconds the patch had gone. Yaz wasn’t sure if she was destroying the demons. It didn’t seem that they could be moving through the ice, certainly not as fast as they were vanishing from it. But Yaz didn’t much care if they were escaping to some unknown place or evaporating in the starlight; either way they were gone, and that was a good thing.

Yaz focused her light on each remaining spot in turn, a little at a time until just one was left.

“It will be hard to reach,” Erris said.

Yaz shrugged. The blackness, an area perhaps smaller than a fist, lay some yards deep in the ice. She couldn’t tell if it was an arm’s length or two spears’ in. But she had seen the coal-worm at work. With one finger she traced onto the surface of her star the best approximation she could of the sigil from the heat pot. It was more than memory that guided her. When she thought of heat it seemed that it had a shape, something complex and many angled, like some small piece of the river that flows through all things. She tried to project that shape down onto the confining dimensions of a surface.