The Girl and the Stars (Book of the Ice #1) - Mark Lawrence Page 0,113

He looked at Kao and took a sudden step toward the boy, making him flinch. “You should run. A big one like you might win free!”

“None of us are running,” Yaz said, afraid that if the Tainted started screaming and roaring again her nerve would break. She steadied her voice, coaxing still more light from the star. “Why don’t you tell us what you really want? It can’t be just to capture the last handful of the Broken.” That didn’t seem a particularly grand ambition for Theus to have nurtured for so long. “What are you hunting for out here?”

Theus raised a hand and peered at her from behind the shadow it cast across his face. He rested his black gaze on Yaz and where the others among the Tainted radiated only hate and rage, she sensed something more complex in his stare. He shook his head slowly, seemingly in admiration, and clapped his hands together. “Quina, you’re the clever one. Why don’t you tell Yaz what I’m doing in these miserable caves?”

Quina gave him a suspicious look. “How would I know? Drinking demon-juice?”

“Hunting for something you’ve lost,” Kao said.

Theus smiled a black smile. “Young Kao has it. Just drinking demon-juice, Quina? You’ve got to credit your enemy with some intelligence if you want to beat him. The Golin clan know that, so Kao knows it too. I’ve ridden many Golin over the years. Good workers. Don’t ever think your enemy is just wasting their time.” He waved a hand at the black ice above them. “The stars, as you call them, are said to purify. Their effect on my people, the ones who made them, is similar to their effect on your kind. They give voice to different parts of who we are and split them away. The Missing . . . let’s call my people the Missing . . . the Missing purged themselves of anger, greed, malice, and all the other traits they considered to be impurities. What you call demons, the creatures like me that saturate the black ice, these are all unwanted elements of the Missing. They wanted to be gods, sublime, spiritual beings who could ascend to a new level of existence. They felt the more basic of their instincts pinned them to the dirt, imprisoned them in their flesh. And so they shed these things, carving them away with stars of which you have seen only fragments. They trapped these unwanted pieces of themselves in impregnable vaults, and they moved on.” Theus seemed to relish an audience and looking at the Tainted Yaz could understand why. All of them, even Zeen, seemed barely restrained, not really listening to what was being said, just a heartbeat from violence, as if each of them were the fragments Theus described, too shallow to hold on to much interest in the world beyond the exercise of their singular passions. In many ways the title that the Broken had taken for themselves would sit better with Theus and his fellow demons, so broken that they could act only when infecting someone else like a disease beneath the skin.

“The vaults weren’t so impregnable as they thought though?” Yaz gazed at the snarling faces of the Tainted. She avoided looking at Zeen. It hurt too much to see the madness in him. “You got out.”

Theus made a mock bow. “Time is a digger, time scratches and claws its way into any prison sooner or later. Time is not a healer, it’s a destroyer. Time is ruin. Time opens old wounds. The ice scraped away the cities that the Missing had abandoned, and one by one the ancient vaults failed. We spilled out into that ice. Creatures like me. Broken pieces, overpowered by our nature.

“Over years, however. Decades, centuries. I did what my fellow escapees seem unable to do and set my will to regathering myself. I did not agree to being torn apart and discarded. When I have reunited all that was shriven from the original me I plan to seek out the rest among the golden halls of the Missing and make myself whole once more. A person rather than a thing.

“So the truth is simple. Those that you call the Tainted are hunting something, and what they’re hunting is me. Pieces of who I was, scattered amid a multitude, lost among