The Girl and the Stars

When running for your life it pays to keep your attention on the ground in front of you. Something snagged Yaz’s foot and she went down hard. The air exploded from her lungs. Her crossed arms saved her face from striking the stone but the impact still left her vision crowded with new lights and her mind full of fuzz. She was dimly aware of Kao catching up and thundering past her.

By the time Yaz managed to roll and sit up, the leading Tainted were almost on her, their shrieks filling her ears. The nearest, ahead of the dirty wave washing toward her, was a thin man with long, matted hair streaming behind him, and a wild gleam in his eye. He had blood around his mouth and chin, running down a filthy neck. Probably not his own blood.

Paralysed in the moment Yaz could do nothing, she hadn’t even time to be afraid. Something large and dark passed over her. The ragged man reversed direction as something far more solid hit him. Kao crashed in among the first of the Tainted with a roar, bringing four or five of them down. As he rolled to a halt he managed brief eye contact and in that moment yelled at Yaz to run.

Yaz gained her feet and staggered back. Kao had vanished beneath a heap of snarling Tainted. He surged up once, shedding bodies, but more piled on, bringing him down again. Further back the Tainted’s gerants were drawing closer, led by the older red-haired gerant that Theus had possessed when he left Thurin.

Although she could do nothing for the boy Yaz found herself unable to abandon him. Any energies she took from the river that flows through all things and flung at the Tainted would break Kao just the same. Her power was a blunt weapon.

On all sides the Broken, scattered by the flood, were going down in isolated ones and twos beneath the attack. One of Pome’s gerants had made a stand before a corroding girder, skewering a Tainted on his iron spear, then a second, then swinging both spear and impaled bodies as a club to sweep others from their feet.

Another fleet-footed Tainted, clearly part hunska, leapt over Kao and his attackers, coming straight at Yaz. Erris came out of nowhere to fell the man with a punch. The next three to come at her fell to a blindingly swift combination of kicks and punches that Erris executed with a dancer’s grace.

More attackers flanked them. The sounds of battle rang out across the ruins, a dozen different fights, with knots of defenders holding out here and there. In the midst of the Tainted, like an island that the sea has swept around, Pome’s hunter flailed bloody limbs. Theus and six other gerants had brought with them thick, rusty lengths of chain and swung them at the hunter, careless of any others who might be hit. The clatter and boom of their assault could be heard even above all the screaming and dying in between. They weren’t trying to batter their enemy to death though. They swung to snare and entangle. When a leg or arm became trapped then other gerants would join in to haul at the hunter, seeking to unbalance it and drag it across the rock.

Arka and a knot of her faction had emerged from one of the larger entrances to the undercity not far from Yaz, and now battled to hold their position. They stood with shield on arm, swinging hide-wrapped iron bars, trying to club down the Tainted. Even as Yaz glanced their way, the woman beside Arka, a gatherer named Mirri, fell backwards into the hole, grappling with two assailants, neither older than twelve.

Erris fought like ten demons, felling even the biggest Tainted as if they were children while twisting from the thrust of spears and the swinging of blades. Those he felled seldom rose again but even as they lay groaning they reached to snare his ankles or rolled to trip him.

Despite his efforts Erris couldn’t defend on all sides and Yaz fell beneath a raging, blood-soaked woman foaming at the mouth. Erris kicked the woman clear but a near-identical Tainted caught him in the side of the head with a wild swing of her bone club. As Erris twisted away to deal with some new threat Yaz found herself looking up from the ground at the descending foot of a large man, part gerant.

The stamp that might have crushed her head never arrived. The man fell back, spraying crimson, to reveal Quell swinging his makeshift axe at another attacker. Yaz got to her feet and raised her trembling blood-speckled hands before her. Quell had killed a man. The look his face bore made a stranger of her oldest friend. The carnage she had feared so much unfolded on every side. And as the Tainted died, the demons inside them would surely find fresh blood and bone to wear. Soon they would be tainting new victims, sliding in past their rage as they joined the fight and flung the wells of their most primal emotions wide open.

All around Yaz her friends were fighting and dying. She had no idea where her brother was, where Thurin or Maya were. It was like when the dagger-fish took Azad from the boat in front of her. A disaster seemingly dragging itself through the heartbeats and yet still too swift to stop. A nightmare that could be turned around if only she had the strength, if only she weren’t broken. But she had nothing to strike with and even her enemies were innocent victims of the black ice. Her only strength lay in the river that flows through all things, and that was an axe far larger than the one that Quell was swinging. If she used it then friend and foe alike would burn.

Another wave of Tainted charged in while Erris and Quell were still engaged off to Yaz’s left and right. More screaming lunatics flung themselves at Yaz and yet somehow they deflected away before reaching her.

“We need to get down into the undercity.” Thurin stepped up beside her, wet black hair framing his pale face. Another Tainted leapt at them and Thurin slapped him aside without making contact, the power of his magic hauling on the water inside the man.

Theus and his core of tainted gerants came through the rest of the Tainted as though they were wading through chest-high water. Somehow they had finished with the hunter. When they reached Yaz there would be no stopping them.

Even as Thurin shouted again about the undercity a fallen Tainted lunged up to catch him around the knees and bring him to the ground. More of the Tainted closed in. Yaz swung a fist and found she still had enough strength in her arms to fell the first of them.

The attack that brought Yaz down came from behind. Two impossibly strong hands clamped to either side of her head and hauled her back. In the next instant she was falling. She never hit the rock. Instead she found herself pressed to warm soil, grass around her face, the slow buzz of something passing by her ear. An insect. A bee! Erris’s names rising to her tongue.

She lifted herself and found Erris sitting nearby, his knees raised enough to rest his forearms on. Behind him blue sky, puffy white clouds, distant trees. And although he looked the same, something about the rich brownness of his skin and the tight black curl of his hair seemed more real than the body he had made to leave the city with her.

Panic seized her. Images of the Tainted howling past bloody teeth. “Where—”

“I’m sorry. I can’t save you. There are too many of them.” Erris offered a sad smile.

“You’ve killed us!” Yaz gasped in horror.

Erris shook his head. “Time is passing much more slowly here. We are close enough to the city to reach the void. But only because it remembers us. In many senses part of us never left.” He raised a hand against her next question. “We have time to talk and to still go back to the fight before we hit the ground. Or we could accept the inevitable, ask the city to take us back, and if it does, stay here, abandoning our bodies. But we do need to decide. If we are destroyed up there without making the proper transfer then we will face the final death. And there is barely enough time to make that crossing from the flesh to the void star.”