The Girl and the Stars (Book of the Ice #1) - Mark Lawrence Page 0,123

unrusted by the years, subject only to a slow powdery corrosion.

The collective song of the stars overhead, tiny and numberless, pervaded the whole cavern. Yaz hadn’t noticed it on her previous visit but her sense for such things had sharpened. The ancient refrain filled the silences between the groaning of the ice. Amid the girders it seemed closer to a dirge than Yaz had ever heard it. The unvoiced chorus somehow sketched the city that had once towered here, suggesting form and shapes, eulogising lost beauty.

“What I don’t understand”—Quell cut across her contemplations—“is if the regulator made the hunters—and the fact that he gave one to Pome seems to back up what you learned in the city—then why on Abeth would he set them to guarding the city and killing the Broken? They’re attacking the very people trying to gather the iron the priests need for trade.”

Quell made a good point. So good in fact that it overcame Yaz’s resolve not to talk to him. “They take them.”

“What?”

“The hunters take the Broken that they get hold of. Nobody knows what they do to them. The bodies aren’t found.”

Quell pressed his lips into a flat line—it was the way he looked in the tent. Lamplit, considering a difficult move in the game of eight. “Well, it still doesn’t make sense.”

* * *

MAYA WAITED FOR them at the crack through which Arka had first led them down into the city chambers. She stood staring down into the darkness below. “We don’t have any food.”

“Or water,” Quell replied.

“It doesn’t matter.” Yaz took the regulator’s star from her pocket, held it out over the edge of the chasm, and let it fall. She looked slowly from Quell to Maya. “You both turned out to be different from the person I thought you were.”

Quell winced. “Yaz—”

“I haven’t changed though. Somewhere in all that escaping and running away I forgot who I was.” She looked out over the ice-scoured rock, scarred by the city’s foundations. “I threw myself down here after Zeen and I’m not going anywhere without him. Or,” she said, “any of the others. I’m taking them all back.”

“That’s madness, Yaz.” Quell reached for her, but thought better of it and let his arm fall.

“It would take a miracle to get them out of Theus’s clutches,” Maya said.

“Yes, it will.” Yaz gazed back at the long slope. “But while I was down in the city I met someone who knows all about miracles.”

26

I’M GOING DOWN into the city to find my friend.” Yaz looked at the others, daring them to object. “Maya, you’re going to the settlement to scavenge water flasks, heat pots, salt, and anything else that could come in handy on the ice. Quell, you’re going harvesting. Bring as many fungi as you can find and pile them up somewhere discreet. When you’ve got a really big heap team up with Maya and start bringing material for shelters and sleds. Lightweight boards and the means to join them together. The settlement must have plenty to spare.”

“If you’re going into the city, I’m coming with you,” Quell said.

“No. You’re going to do what I said.” Yaz turned and looked behind her, stretching out a hand. “This is coming with me.” The hunter’s star rolled from the distant hollow she had placed it in after freeing it from the ice. It looked as if it were a ball of iron still cooling from the forge, glowing a dull red in places, a darker red elsewhere, almost black. Maya and Quell backed away along the chasm edge as it approached, a little smaller than Yaz’s fist, its heartbeat the pitter-patter of a child’s.

“I still don’t see how this Edris—”

“Erris,” Yaz said.

Quell scowled. “Erris. I don’t see how one man is going to—”

“You’ll understand when you see him.”

“He’s like a hunter but friendly?” Maya asked.

“It’s more complicated than that. But yes.”

Maya frowned. “Couldn’t you just . . . build your own hunter with that?” She nodded to the red star that had rolled to a stop at Yaz’s feet. “I mean you seem so