The hunter drew closer, moving at speed, an urgency in its heartsong. Yaz took a narrow turn and followed a long stair upwards even though her destination lay far below. The hunter continued to close, its direction swinging around her in a manner that indicated it to be racing through the empty rooms at reckless speed.
A wide shaft, down which scavengers had hung cables, offered her a quick descent of two hundred yards. She reached the bottom with her arms limp and trembling. The strength of the Ictha had left her and she wondered at how the other tribes survived with such weakness in them.
A metallic clatter echoed down the shaft after her, the hunter growing ever closer. With a curse Yaz began to run, bathing the corridor ahead of her with red light, alert for any narrow passage or crack through the foundations of the city by which she might escape.
She reached another shaft, narrower and deeper than the first, hung with a single thin cable, secured by an iron peg hammered into the poured stone floor.
“Gods in the Sky!” Yaz’s arms felt like jelly. She wasn’t ready for another long climb.
A crash far back along the corridor told her that the hunter had reached the bottom of the earlier shaft.
Seized by a sudden idea Yaz snatched the red star from the air and held it in both hands. She willed it to rise and let it do so until her arms were stretched out above her. She could feel the pressure of it against her interlocked fingers. Grinding her teeth she commanded the star to rise and at the same time hauled down on it. The thing nearly escaped her to go hammering into the ceiling, but she held it back, just barely, standing on tiptoes.
A red glow insinuated itself into the far end of the corridor. Growing brighter until the black bulk of the hunter emerged, hooking its claws all around the edge of a doorway to haul itself through. The star inside it shone in bright crimson lines through every joint and chink in its iron armour. The heartbeat of this hunter was slower than that of the one she had shattered to gain the star currently trying to lift her from her feet. A bigger star, a bigger hunter, a more deadly threat.
Yaz snarled in frustration and stepped to the lip of the shaft. “Gods save me.”
Ignoring the cable at her feet she stepped off, trying to force the star in her hands upwards. For a moment she hung there, feet dangling in space, her body suspended below the star as its light pulsed bloodily through her hands. Then, slowly at first, she began to fall.
About fifty yards from the ground Yaz understood that she was travelling down too fast. The stone floor rushed toward her at ankle-breaking speed. Grunting with effort she tried to force the star upwards more strongly. She slowed but not enough. With twenty yards remaining she reached out in desperation, trying to grab the cable flashing by her while retaining a hold on the slick ball of light with one hand.
What happened next was too fast for her brain to make sense of it. She caught hold of something, had something ripped from her grasp, turned in the air several times, and hit hard.
* * *
YAZ LIFTED HER head slowly as if it weren’t already far too late for such delicacy. Crimson light swamped her vision and the taste of blood filled her mouth. She drew a slow breath into lungs from which all air had been driven at speed, and daggers stabbed her chest from both sides.
The sound of iron clanging on iron got her crawling, blood drooling between mashed lips. She got through a doorway into the darkness of another room before the awful screeching began, the sound of the hunter’s claws as it dropped down the shaft she’d come from, scoring the four walls to tame its descent.
Yaz reached back and her red star rolled after her, coming to a halt in her hand and illuminating the room beyond.
Another dusty chamber, two doorways in the rear wall, a vertical shaft in the middle of the floor. Yaz crawled on. The doorways seemed too far away, the clattering clanking charge of the hunter too close. She rolled over the lip of the shaft, clutching the red star. Gravity reached for her with its implacable strength and yanked her away into the darkness of the fall.
Once again Yaz hung from nothing but her will for the red star to rise. The fear of the drop filled her stomach while the pain of opposing it sliced through her head.
She dropped into a huge chamber, slower than falling, more like a diver plunging into water. The starlight glowing scarlet through her hands made of her something like those strange fish that are sometimes carried from the deepest depths of the ocean by swift upwellings, the ones that hang in darkness, carrying their own light before them. The glow partially illuminated the nearest wall as she fell past it, the light painting red stone and black entrances. The chamber seemed to be something of a junction where dozens of shafts met, some opening at various heights along the walls, a similar number piercing floor and ceiling.
Yaz hit the stone with an “Oooff!” that crumpled her into a ball of hurt and swallowed her vision amid a constellation of spinning lights.
* * *
FOR UNCOUNTED TIME Yaz hung among those lights in a bliss of forgetting. Without memory of destination or recollection of pursuit all urgency left her. She drifted, moved only by an idle curiosity. Stars . . . she floated amid the stars, not the red scatter dying in the black heavens above the ice but marbled giants that swung through the void in slow majesty. Close by, a huge crimson star burned like a banked fire, and just as Yaz could make stars orbit her this great star had smaller ones that orbited it. One among a dozen that spun about the dull heat of the red star caught Yaz’s eye, a ball of pearly white on white, all aglitter with the reflected light of the greater star, as if ice were burning. She drifted closer until she began to realise that even this small star was vastly bigger than her, its unending whiteness beginning to fill her vision. And at the last, as its shadow threatened to swallow her and she saw that it was larger than mountains or seas, she was able to make out a thin, dark line about its middle. The shadow deepened, the great red star falling behind the growing bulk of the white star, and in those last moments of light the line about its middle turned from a black thread to something with a hint of thickness and a hint of colour. And that colour was green.
The darkness engulfing the world became the shadow of a hand, and suddenly Elias stood there in a space with no walls, his clothes like Erris’s, being made of something that was neither hide nor fur.
“Hello.” In his narrow, long-fingered hand he held the white star, barely large enough to cover his palm. He looked at her without recognition. “Who are you and what do you want?”
“I’m Yaz of the Ictha. We met . . .” She tried to recall how long ago it had been. “. . . before.” A part of her purpose returned to her as she reached for her answer. “And I’m looking for a star.”
“I can’t let you have this one, I’m afraid.” He held up the white ball. “I’m supposed to protect it.”
“From Seus?”
Elias twitched, worry entering his quick, dark eyes. “Yes.” He closed his hand around the star. “Elias Taproot, pleased to meet you, young lady. But you say we’ve met before?”