The Girl and the Stars

“You’re lying. This was all fields and forest. I’ve seen it.”

Theus shook his head, continuing to back away from the light. “Each time I add to myself I recover fragments of memory, and some of the things that once seemed nonsense become comprehensible. I’ve been many places. All across this world. But I started my journey in the north. My parents . . . I had parents . . . they were of a sect that turned its back on technology. They lived in the far north. As a baby they took me to see . . .” He paused, fingers moving as if trying to assemble some lost truth from thin air. “. . . a wise woman . . . a witch! As a baby they took me to see a witch!” He shook his head again. “So many broken pieces . . .”

“I don’t care about that. Give me what you promised!” Yaz shouted. She narrowed the star’s light into a single brilliant beam that struck Theus in the chest, driving him back, pinning him to the cavern wall. “Now!”

Theus twisted, trying to struggle free, his breath escaping him in gasps and snarls. They fought, Yaz forcing herself to keep the star working at an intensity that didn’t allow the creature inside Thurin to turn his ice-work against her. At last, sucking his breath over red teeth, Theus raised his face and fixed Yaz with a black stare. “The time will come when you realise what you need is here. You’ll want me back, Yaz of the Ictha, and you’ll find this boy to have been a poor exchange.” He snarled, trying to break free. “You don’t even know what you’re looking for. Some remnant of the green world? Nonsense. All of us are looking for ourselves. That’s how we spend our lives. At least I’m honest about it.”

Yaz’s pain had escaped the confines of her skull. She hurt in places she didn’t own. She was certain that blood must be running from her eyes, her nose, her mouth. It wasn’t possible to contain so much hurt. Even so, she forced herself to brighten the star and to speak, grating the words out past her teeth. “What. You. Promised.”

With a howl part rage and part exasperation Theus called out to the Tainted thronging in the next cavern. Yaz didn’t understand the language he used. Mother Mazai said that in distant parts of the ice other tongues were used, but Yaz had only half believed her and had never expected to hear with her own ears words that weren’t words.

Three figures came reluctantly into the chamber, hunched against the light, feet shuffling on the wet rock. Kao, Zeen, and one other, even larger than Kao, an older gerant with a dirty shock of red hair, blank eyed and scarred around the neck and face.

The gerant crossed the chamber, reaching out toward Theus though reluctantly, as if he were on fire and the gerant lacked the courage to dare the heat. Theus lunged, stretching to clasp his hand around the gerant’s. In that moment of connection something dark flowed from the sleeve of Theus’s skins, a mottled stain moving swiftly across his wrist, a trailing darkness in the veins. It seemed to pass between them, blooming across the back of the gerant’s hand and rippling up through the meat of his forearm.

“A poor exchange. One you will regret.” The gerant rumbled the words, Theus’s words falling from a new mouth as Thurin collapsed to the floor, a puppet whose strings had failed him. The gerant’s eyes darkened, the whites shading through greys into black. In three strides he had both Kao and Zeen gripped from behind by the neck. “These two you will have to empty by yourself. I have nowhere for their fragments to go.” Without warning he smacked their heads together, lifting Zeen from the ground in order to do so, then, dropping Zeen, he clubbed Kao to his knees with one massive fist.

The gerant snarled, turned, and strode away, ducking to leave the chamber. “Go die on the ice.”

31

   ERRIS DRAGGED ZEEN and Kao from the black ice caverns. They screamed and roared and issued threats that Yaz knew could never have sprung from the minds of either one. She closed her ears to their sickness and kept her star burning, a defence against any change of mind on Theus’s part or disobedience among the Tainted’s ranks. The light would be no defence against a spear thrown from the dark though, and Yaz kept their pace as fast as Thurin, still stumbling and disoriented, could manage. He had yet to speak though he had retched several times, spitting filth onto the floor. A cold suspicion still ran through Yaz that Theus had broken Thurin’s mind on his way out of him, leaving her just a shambling ruin to care for.

At last they heard the muffled roar from the ravine and then finally emerged onto its flanks. All of them exhausted, and speckled with the black meltwater that dripped constantly in the warmer caverns. And still they weren’t safe. The ice bridge lay to their left just thirty yards away. To reach it they had to negotiate the narrow span of rock between the black ice on one side and the chasm yawning on the other.

“Be careful.” Yaz steered Thurin ahead of her. “We’re getting out of here—just focus on what you’re doing.” A vision of Petrick falling from the bridge flashed across her mind. If the Tainted meant to stop them it would be here that the spears flew.

Thurin grunted and shambled ahead, still hunched as he had been in the low tunnels leading to the ravine. Behind her Erris manhandled Kao and Zeen along the ledge, the gerant before him, arm twisted behind his back, Zeen behind him, more or less dragged along, both of them struggling and howling.

Kao and Zeen’s protests were echoed by screams and roars from further back in the black ice. The wild cacophony seemed to be getting louder and closer very swiftly, as if the din were racing ahead of a Tainted mob. The black throats of the nearest cave mouths redoubled the sounds before throwing them out into the ravine, drowning out the complaints of the hidden waters. Yaz worried that it wouldn’t be long before they vomited forth the demon-possessed horde responsible for the noise.

Thurin stumbled and slipped. Yaz caught his arm, holding him from the fall. He flinched her off and staggered forward, reaching the ice bridge in ten more steps, each of them looking to be the last before he pitched into the chasm. He stood now at the start of the bridge fighting halfheartedly for balance like a lone tent pole victimised by the wind.

Another scream tore the air behind Yaz. Something in the swiftly diminishing wail dragged her attention away from Thurin. She turned to see with horror that where Erris had been holding Kao and her brother he now held only the gerant and a handful of torn skins. As the shock held Yaz paralysed, the first of the pursuing Tainted began to leap, whooping, from the nearest cave mouths.

“No!” Yaz stood locked in place. It was as though the regulator had pushed Zeen into the pit all over again. “No!”

“Yaz! Move!” Erris shoved Kao ahead of him. The gerant came forward, grinning hugely as if her anguish were the sweetest feast, laid out for him to savour. “Hurry!”

Behind Erris the first of the Tainted were running along the ledge, careless of their safety.

“Yaz!” Erris shouted again, more desperately. He got close enough for Kao to lunge at her and try to knock her into the ravine.