The Girl and the Moon
Books by Mark Lawrence
The Broken Empire
Prince of Thorns
King of Thorns
Emperor of Thorns
Short Stories
Road Brothers
The Red Queen’s War
Prince of Fools
The Liar’s Key
The Wheel of Osheim
The Book of the Ancestor
Red Sister
Grey Sister
Holy Sister
Impossible Times
One Word Kill
Limited Wish
Dispel Illusion
The Book of the Ice
The Girl and the Stars
The Girl and the Mountain
The Girl and the Moon
ACE
Published by Berkley
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Lawrence, Mark, 1966– author.
Title: The girl and the moon / Mark Lawrence.
Description: New York: Ace, [2022] | Series: The book of the ice; 3
Identifiers: LCCN 2021045074 (print) | LCCN 2021045075 (ebook) | ISBN 9781984806055 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781984806062 (ebook)
Subjects: GSAFD: Fantasy fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3612.A9484 G565 2022 (print) | LCC PS3612.A9484 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021045074
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021045075
Cover design by Judith Lagerman
Cover illustration © Bastien Lecouffe Deharme
Book design by Alison Cnockaert, adapted for ebook by Maggie Hunt
Title page image by BLAGORODEZ/Shutterstock
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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CONTENTS
Cover
Books by Mark Lawrence
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
The Story So Far
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Acknowledgments
About the Author
To my readers for sharing the journey
THE STORY SO FAR
For those of you who have had to wait a while for this book, I provide brief catch-up notes to Book Two so that your memories may be refreshed and I can avoid the awkwardness of having to have characters tell each other things they already know for your benefit.
Here I carry forward only what is of importance to the tale that follows.
Abeth is an ice-bound world with a thin strip of land known as the Corridor circling its equator, kept free of ice by an artificial moon. On Abeth there are four old bloods that show in a small minority of children:
gerant, which means you grow very big
hunska, which makes you very fast
marjal, which can give you some of a variety of lesser magics, like command over shadows, water, air, rock, fire, etc.—sometimes more than one of these
quantal, which can give you major magics, including accessing the vast power of the Path, and the ability to weave the threads of existence to achieve more subtle manipulations of people and things
* * *
The Missing are the people of a fifth tribe that arrived before these four tribes and were thought to have vanished by the time they arrived.
Important figures from Book Two:
Yaz: ~16 years old, part of the Ictha clan. Yaz has the blood of the Missing and this gives her the special ability to control the stars. She also has quantal skills.
Thurin: ~18 years old, born under the ice, marjal with powers over water and fire.
Erris: ~5,000 years old. As a young man he was lost in the undercity, millennia ago, before the sun weakened further and ice covered the planet. The city adopted him. It’s unclear whether Erris is really alive or just a memory kept by the city. He now inhabits an artificial body that he built with the city’s help.
Quina: ~15 years old; hunska; a quick-witted, sharp-tongued girl.
Quell: ~17 years old, one of the Ictha clan. Quell was going to ask Yaz to marry him just before she jumped into the Pit of the Missing. He stayed in the north with her brother and clan when she went south in search of the Corridor.
Theus: age unknown, a spirit made from most of the undesirable traits of one of the Missing. His unbroken form came to Abeth from Earth as a simulation that was imprinted on a baby. Currently he’s possessing the iron dog, Zox, and was left in the tunnels under the convent.
Taproot: age unknown, an ancient simulation of a man named Elias Taproot, brought to Abeth by one of the four tribes of men that settled the planet together. Currently he occupies an empty white box that Yaz was carrying when Eular confronted her.
Eular: age unknown; an old, eyeless man who is high priest of the Black Rock but also seems to maintain a role as a very important cleric in a different faith practised in the part of the Corridor in which Yaz has arrived. A now-destroyed Hayes gate (these are also known as haze-gates) in the Black Rock allowed the priests to visit the Corridor.
Jeccis: an old woman who is part of the Black Rock priesthood.
Krey: a young woman who is part of the Black Rock priesthood.
Yaz, Erris, Thurin, and Quina journeyed south across the ice and reached the Corridor. The last few thousand miles of the crossing were achieved using a Hayes gate linked to another such gate beneath Sweet Mercy Convent.
During the journey it became clear that the spirit known as Theus had possessed the iron dog, Zox, that they’d brought with them from the Black Rock to pull their sled. The creature that calls himself Theus is made from all the “undesirable” parts of one of the Missing, carved out of that person before what was left of him ascended to some other plane/place with the rest of the Missing. Theus’s goal is to reunite with the rest of himself and have a reckoning with his fellow Missing who forced this unwanted purification on him.
The Missing came from Earth. They were the first of five waves of humanity that eventually ended up on Abeth as the stars started to die. The Missing were thought to have departed before the other four waves arrived, though a small number, rebelling against ascension, hid out in the far north and later mingled with the newcomers.
The Missing’s last instruction to their cities was that none should follow them—an instruction aimed at the city intelligences and their minions, with the intention of gifting them the world. Unfortunately, after the passage of millennia and the unforeseen arrival of more humans, the cities interpreted the order as being aimed at the new people and acted to undermine their civilization so that they wouldn’t have the means to follow the Missing.
The leader of the city minds, Seus, is now working to bring down the moon so that the ice will close over the Corridor and reduce mankind to an ever more tenuous survival on the ice.
Theus, like many of the Missing, was born on Earth and brought to Abeth as a machine-hosted intelligence, though as with Erris it’s not clear if he is truly alive or a copy of a man who is now dead. Where Erris was eventually downloaded into a realistic but mechanical body, Theus was imprinted on a baby. This was the baby seen in the prologue to Book One, the baby for whom the ice-witch Agatta predicted greatness and fire. The fact that Theus managed to “pull himself together” and is able to function so well is a clear indication that, whoever he was before, he was an individual of exceptionally strong will and also someone who required the majority of his personality to be purified before he was deemed fit to ascend.
Yaz’s group acquired a new member on the ice—Mali, a novice from Sweet Mercy.
Almost immediately after their arrival at the convent, Yaz and her friends discovered that Eular, whom they had known as an elder among the Broken under the ice, and as the high priest of the order that lived in the Black Rock, was also maintaining the role of a powerful cleric in the ancestor-faith practiced in this part of the Corridor. Eular seems to be in charge and has falsely accused them of murder. He told Yaz she had come a long way to die.
1
Yaz and Mali
Yaz had walked on water her entire life, and now in this place where it fell molten from the skies they planned to drown her in the stuff.
She knelt on the rock, staring down into a sinkhole at the water some forty feet below. A black depth waited for her, unrippled by the wind, untouched by the sunlight that reached only halfway down. The sheer-sided hole might have been poked into the stone by the finger of a god. The far wall lay more than ten yards away and on that side an iron ladder led down into the depths, marking the stone with rusty tears.
Even if the ladder were on her side it would have been of little help to Yaz. Her hands were held out to either side of her neck by a heavy iron yoke that had already scraped her wrists raw. The metal was hot, having soaked in the sun, which seemed to shine more strongly here on Abeth’s belt. To her left Quina knelt, similarly yoked, her ankles bound with rope where Yaz’s remained free. To Yaz’s right, Thurin then Erris wore the same iron restraint and watched the same dark waters.
Throughout all her troubles since dropping into the Pit, Yaz had never come quite as close to death as that day fishing the Hot Sea when the dagger-fish had dragged her brother beneath the waves and she’d gone down with them, unable to let go. Here she was again, facing the same end.
The audience this time was much larger and far less friendly. Nobody would be paddling to the spot where she went down. None of them would try to save her.
Eular, who had been high priest at the Black Rock, was somehow a major figure in a very different faith down here in the green lands. Now he stood with his masked and eyeless face turned towards Yaz and the others from the far side of the sinkhole. Standing with him were the abbess and the two sisters superior: Mistress Path—or Sister Owl as she had first introduced herself—and Mistress Shade. Nuns and novices ringed the perimeter. None of them looked happy about the proceedings.
Yaz kept her gaze on Eular. She remembered the debris in the hidden room behind Arges’s statue back in the Black Rock’s temple: a shattered gate. It was clear now that the gate had been broken after Eular used it to escape to the Corridor, and that he must have used it many times before that day. His double life between the caves of the Broken and the Black Rock had been a triple life. He’d maintained yet another personality, using the wonders of the Missing to skip through time and space, supporting at least three separate existences. Somehow he’d carved out a position in the green lands among the people he claimed had blinded him. His manipulation of threads could only have taken him so far—the rest must have been down to external help. Seus must have been at work in this place for years.
* * *
From her place on the rim of the Glasswater sinkhole, Novice Mali watched the four ice-tribers on their knees awaiting execution. Unlike them she had been allowed to stand, but like them she wore the yoke. The device was designed to restrain people with two hands, and Mali would have found it easy to pull her wrist stump clear, but Sister Cup had secured her elbow to the ironwork with rope. In any event, there was little Mali could have achieved with that arm free. The stump ached all the time and became agony at the lightest touch.
Oddly, when she didn’t look at the stump, Mali could imagine she still had the hand. She could even wave the fingers or make a fist, almost as if there were a ghost hand there, and that in some parallel Abeth an unmaimed Mali occupied the same space. She’d even found that when it came to manipulating the invisible threads that join each thing to every other, it was her missing fingers that were the most deft, capable of feats of dexterity her fingers of flesh and bone were not.
Mali forced herself to look at the four ice-tribers who had saved her. Sister Pine stood behind them in the white habit of the executioner. Yaz and her friends looked so lost in Mali’s world, just as she had been lost in theirs. She remembered their tears of wonder when she’d led them out of the cave, as if the trees and bushes had been heaped mounds of gold and gems. Everything had amazed them: chickens, nuns’ habits, the archon’s horse . . . And now, a day after their arrival, they were all to be killed. Mali’s heart hurt worse than her wrist.
The trial in Persus Hall had been a farce. Mali had answered the archon’s questions, protested when he called her a liar, and hung her head when he laughed at her talk of gates that crossed thousands of miles in an instant. Archon Eular had called one of his Church guards to the stand, a woman he said had survived the ice-tribers’ raid in which the white box, later found on Yaz, had been stolen from a priest named Pather, who had sadly been killed in its defence.
The woman had pointed at Mali and with unwavering conviction had stated before the court and beneath the timeless gaze of the Ancestor that Mali had been with the raiders, though possibly a prisoner.
The tribers had, Archon Eular maintained, captured Mali on the ice, slaughtered her friends, and coerced her to lead them through the empire in search of plunder. Having murdered Father Pather and stolen Church property, they came to Sweet Mercy seeking new things to steal. It seemed, he said, that they had used unknown magics or poisons to
break Mali’s will. It was the only explanation for her lies, unless of course she had turned willingly to their cause. Eular had produced the handful of stardust taken from Yaz and claimed it as an example of the corrupt magics of the ice they had used to twist Mali’s mind. He had snuffed out its light, claiming that he channelled the purifying power of the Ancestor, and had let the lifeless grains tumble through his fingers to the floor.
Yaz and her friends had said nothing during the trial. In fact nobody had asked them to. Sister Owl and the archon were the only ones who could speak to them, and Yaz had told Mali not to reveal that the two of them could understand each other. Sister Owl had watched the whole proceedings, stony-faced, saying nothing despite her curious interest in Erris. Apparently her respect for the office of archon prevented her from contradicting him in court. And, truthfully, what could the old woman say on the subject that did not come directly from the mouths of the accused?
So now Mali stood yoked beside the Glasswater. Her yoke bore a sigil that prevented her reaching the Path. She knew she wouldn’t be drowned, at least not today: the sigil made the yoke far too powerful to risk losing it in the mud fathoms down at the bottom of the sinkhole.
Although Abbess Claw had been largely silent during the trial she had been insistent on two points. Firstly, there would be no rush to judgment in the case of a novice of Sweet Mercy. If Novice Mali had been controlled then the means of that control would be identified and neutralized. Secondly, when Archon Eular had called for his men to take the tribers out into the square and behead them Abbess Claw had stood from her chair.
“At Sweet Mercy we drown.”
The archon had raised a brow at that. “I beg your pardon?”
“We execute by drowning in the sinkhole.”