The Girl and the Stars (Book of the Ice #1) - Mark Lawrence Page 0,107

The battle raging inside Thurin dragged on. Finally, with the hunter’s glow colouring the tunnel ice and warning of its imminent arrival Thurin looked up again, his eyes bright, his determination rekindled. “Alright then. Let’s go.”

22

THURIN LED THE way to the Tainted’s caves. He took them through coal-worm tunnels too narrow for Pome’s rogue hunter to pursue them along. Yaz followed Thurin, Quell close behind her. Quina and Kao coming next, with Petrick bringing up the rear. The hunska boy had followed when Quina beckoned him to join them. He carried a slender sword over his shoulder, the hilt and the pale hand holding it nearly lost in the dark mats of his hair. Normally only the warriors were allowed swords and spears but normal had made itself scarce of late.

This time the taint didn’t appear as a questing tendril of blackness spreading through the ice but as a slow greying. The air had been growing colder, the stars thinning, winking out until there was no light but the blue glow from the star slowly orbiting Yaz. She drew her skins closer about her, shivering, though more from the pervading air of malice and threat than from the dropping temperature. Ahead madmen haunted the darkness in thrall to demons, all bound to the will of this Theus. And Zeen, if he still lived, was one of them.

The darkness seemed to press in on all sides, squeezing the light of Yaz’s star, speeding up its heartbeat. Whispers haunted the shadows and they all felt watched. Thurin continued to find his way with the same surety he showed in the Broken’s territory.

“Demons live within this ice.” Thurin spoke loudly enough to be heard at the back. “They want nothing more than to find their way under your skin. Let one in and it will fill your mind with its ugly thoughts and you’ll lose yourself to its will. The longer we stay in the black ice the more certain that is to happen.”

In the next chamber the ice shaded darker still, save for the opposite wall where Yaz’s light showed what seemed to be a bruise, the centre black but ringed with halos of colour: a deep maroon, a sickly yellow, a green that came from a different palette than the one used to paint Erris’s world of grass and trees.

“Where demons of one particular sort gather, the ice can take on their colour,” Thurin said. “Red for rage, green for envy, the yellow ones particularly enjoy inflicting pain. You’ll find many shades here. Where they come together they are black.”

Yaz moved slowly toward the blackest area, where the ice devoured her light and returned not even a glint. The nothingness of it shared the same draw as the void in which Erris lived, the same fascination that dwelt in the jaws of the Pit of the Missing itself. This darkness held more than that though. The malice there, the ancient evil, the sense that it was waiting with endless patience for her touch, all of these turned that initial pull into a push. Even so, she pressed on, closing the gap still further.

“Yaz!” Thurin turned back. “Don’t!”

Yaz held her star before her and moved forward, pouring its light into the ice, sure that she must see something of the surface if she only got close enough. “We’re going into this stuff. It’s going to be on all sides, under us, dripping on us. Better to find out about it here than a mile inside the Tainted’s territory.”

“What’s to find out?” Kao wrapped his thick arms around himself. “It’s evil and it hates us. I can tell that from here.”

Yaz pushed forward, the radiating malice almost a physical thing. The star in her hand blazed with blue-white light, and slowly, as the distance narrowed from feet to inches, the ice began to grey, revealing itself in glistening ridges. The effect was far from uniform; the blackness pushed back in a ragged circle but some patches of darkness proved more resistant than others, as dirt will cling here and there beneath a flow of water that has carried the bulk of it away.

One persistent black spot remained amid almost clear ice and Yaz nearly had to touch the star to it before with great reluctance it