The Girl and the Stars

She drew the star back as far as she dared to without letting the demons that had claimed Kao surge back into his mind. “Listen to me. We’ve come to get you out of here. But first I have to do something for Theus.”

“You’re searching for him.” Kao stopped struggling against Erris’s hold on him. The city man had him gripped at both wrists with his legs scissored around his waist. “You’re searching for Theus just like we all do.”

“Yes, but when I find a piece of him he is going to let you and Thurin and Zeen go free. I just need to get on with it. You need to be patient, Kao. I’m sorry.”

Kao started to pant and choke, as if he were gulping air in the gaps between the waves of a rising tide. “I . . . I know what . . . what you’re doing.”

“Let him go, Erris.” Yaz stood and backed away. She couldn’t know what Kao was suffering but she hoped her words offered him some hope, a little comfort.

“Wait! . . . wait . . .” Kao twisted on the wet rock as Erris released him and rolled away. “The furthest cavern . . . search there . . . they . . . they’re all scared of it . . . they don’t tell him . . . Theus.”

“Scared of what?” Yaz asked, starting to find her hope.

“The great . . . great darkness . . . my demon saw—” His lips darkened, shading into black and twisting into a savage grin. “You’ll never have this one back, girl.” He rolled onto all fours, panting, reminding Yaz of the Quinx’s dogs. One eye turned crimson. He snarled and scampered off, reaching his feet only as the darkness took him.

Erris stood, wiping at the grime on his pale clothes in mild disgust. “Can we believe him?”

Yaz frowned. “Kao must have been pushing at his demons to get them to come close enough for us to notice him. He might not have much control but he used what little he could.”

“Why would the ‘demons’ be hiding things from Theus?”

“You’ve seen what they’re like. Why wouldn’t they be cruel, treacherous, and untruthful to their own kind as well? Besides, Theus rules over them, forces them to work. I can understand them not being keen to make him stronger. I’m not eager to do that myself.” Yaz repressed a shudder.

“The furthest cavern?” Erris made a slow rotation with his arms spread. “Furthest from where?”

“I think furthest from the centre,” Yaz said.

“And how would we find that?” Erris widened his eyes at her. Of all of him it was his eyes that were most alien to her, so different from the pale glances she had known all her life with the Ictha.

“Furthest from the heat. So the coldest caverns in the black ice. Out on the edge of the Tainted’s territory.” She turned and pointed in the opposite direction from the slow flow of the ice. “That way.”

Together they abandoned the work so far and walked off toward the black heart of the Tainted’s territory.

By the red light of her star Yaz saw the horrors that she had missed during the merciful blindness of her first visit. The bones of scores, possibly hundreds, had been pressed into the ice as macabre decoration, many of them clearly children. Yaz had never seen human bones before, only those of fish. On the ice something had to eat the flesh for the bones to be revealed. Clearly while the Tainted could not sustain themselves by cannibalism they all shared Hetta’s instinct for it and would not waste the dead.

In the larger chambers debris from raids on the Broken lay scattered. Precious iron and other building material scavenged at great cost from the city had been strewn carelessly. Twice they encountered some sort of construction: boards, one standing vertically, the other horizontal like a table, with chains at the corners or strong wire. Both of these were bloodstained and about them knives, broken glass, and other jagged pieces of metal sat close at hand. Yaz looked away and hurried by, trying to force her imagination to silence.

It took longer than they had to spare to find the furthest cavern and convince themselves that no other extended further into the flow of the ice. The chamber was dry and the low roof creaked constantly as hair’s width by hair’s width the unimaginable weight of ice advanced toward the city. A black frost clung to every wall like the fuzz of hair on a baby’s head. Clearly enough heat must find its way to the chamber to periodically melt the ice back just enough to fight its advance, but it must be a battle that ebbed and flowed. Currently the ice seem to be winning, crushing the chamber ever smaller.

The unfocused hatred that infused all of the black ice was fiercer here, a wild anger bubbled all around her despite the presence of her star. Yaz could feel it trying to get in under her skin. And more than that, she felt watched, as if the demons here were more intensely aware of her presence than anywhere else.

“How could Kao have seen anything in here?” Erris wondered. If he felt the weight of evil here he showed no sign of it.

“The demons see more than we do.” Yaz urged more light from her star. Even as she did so the frost began to bleach, catching the starlight and turning crimson.

Erris went to the rear where the ice sloped to the ground and he had to crouch to advance. “The blackness likes to go against the flow. It should have been swept a hundred miles from the city by now.”

The cold had a bite to it here at the limits of the caves and Yaz enjoyed the star’s warmth in her hands though her weakness shamed her.

“I can see something . . .” Erris said, setting his brown hands to the jet-black ice, seemingly untroubled by the malice frozen there.

“You can?” Yaz wondered quite how much his eyes could see and what other gifts the Missing had given him. “What is it?”

Suddenly Erris lurched backwards, sprawling on the floor, and when he spoke it was with a trembling voice.

“Big.”

30

   BIG?” YAZ ASKED. She went to help Erris to his feet, all the time keeping her eyes on the black sloping wall of ice. Something in there had scared Erris. That was something she’d not seen before. “Just ‘big’?”

“Yes.” Erris shrugged free of her grip, a little embarrassed perhaps. “Very big.”

Yaz stretched her aching body and pressed her hands to her forehead, hoping somehow to push back the pain that would soon blossom behind it. She forced a confidence she didn’t feel into her voice. “Let’s have a better look then.”

Once more she pushed the star into incandescence, driving its heartbeat ever faster, its song more shrill. She hid her face behind her arm and directed the light forward. Even so she saw the black bar of her arm bone through closed eyes. The pain that had taken root behind her forehead sent thorned tendrils deeper, as though trying to split her brain in half. At last she broke off with a gasp, willing the star to stillness and finding that she had to fight it this time, as if it had gone into panic and wanted nothing but to run and run until it destroyed itself.