The Girl and the Stars (Book of the Ice #1) - Mark Lawrence Page 0,12

The sound of meltwater splashing down came from behind her now rather than all around.

Perversely it was lighter at this depth than it had been in the chamber far above. The walls had a faint glow to them and seemed much further away than she had thought they would be. Yaz swam toward the edge and realised that she was in another chamber rather than a shaft.

When she banged her knee on something hard Yaz gave a startled cry, missed a stroke, and began to flounder. It was then that she realised the water had grown shallow. Moments later she crawled out onto a shore of black rock, still yards shy of the glowing ice walls.

Yaz lay gasping, as much from the shock of it all as from the battering she had taken. Her body felt like a singular bruise, her ribs hurt, and she was cold. “Zeen.” She spoke her brother’s name through gritted teeth and forced herself back onto hands and knees. The ground beneath her was rock, scoured into ridges. Apart from pieces collected from the peak of Black Rock and shown at the gathering, Yaz had never touched raw stone before, just the smooth pebbles the Ictha kept for luck and the ones that Mother Mazai wore on a sinew about her neck, polished to a high shine and shot through with lines of colour.

She crawled further from the pool, water streaming from her parka, dripping from the black veil of her hair. Where the ice walls rose from the bedrock it was light enough for Yaz to count her fingers. They trembled with more than the chill. Her options had narrowed from a quick death crashing into ice at the bottom of a fall or a slower death drowning in a hole back to the slowest of all, starvation.

“Zeen!” She bellowed it and the loudness of her own voice made her flinch. The fall of water overrode any echoes and there was no reply. “Zeen!”

Yaz frowned and leaned toward the ice, almost close enough for her forehead to rest against it. She squinted, trying to see where the light came from. It wasn’t the red of sunlight, this was a more varied, richer illumination carrying undertones of blues and greens. Close to the wet surface the ice was clear, further back it became misty and fractured. Buried in the body of the ice like a constellation of cold stars were motes of light, none of them seeming any larger than her smallest fingernail, most considerably smaller. The larger ones burned more brightly, though none of them by itself would illuminate much more than her palm if it sat in her hand.

The ice-locked constellations exerted a hypnotic draw. It was the smell that finally broke their spell. Yaz looked away and sniffed. Blood. The scent of slaughter. She stood, wincing, and scanned the chamber. The pool dominated, the excess flowing away lazily on the far side along a channel with just a few inches of clearance. The beach onto which Yaz had crawled occupied a third of the perimeter, the pool lapping up against the ice elsewhere. A pair of tunnels led away from the beach into the ice, smooth and carved by meltwater.

Yaz went to the nearest tunnel. She crossed the rock like an old woman. Not that anyone got truly old on the ice, but Yewan, her father’s eldest brother, was past fifty and starting to slow. She felt like he looked, stiff, making each move with care as if avoiding hidden hurts.

The blood looked black, spattered across the glowing tunnel walls. This had been an attack, not the butchering of some animal. Yaz touched a finger to one of the larger splats.

“Fresh . . .” She stared at her fingertip, feeling a new kind of coldness deep inside her. “Zeen.” She started forward but stopped, her foot knocking something soft aside. Yaz crouched and patted the rock. She lifted the warm object for inspection. A thumb. Smaller than her own. The flesh chewed, splinters of bone jutting from it. She dropped it with a shudder, curled her lip, and followed the tunnel.

* * *

THE SOUND OF dripping from the pool chamber faded behind her and Yaz found herself folded in an eerie silence. The rock-floored tunnel was around fifteen feet