The Girl and the Stars (Book of the Ice #1) - Mark Lawrence Page 0,124

good with the stars and you say the regulator built them . . .”

“I don’t know how long that took him,” Yaz said. “It’s not something I know how to do.” And besides, she didn’t want to build monsters like the regulator had. She wanted friends beside her. If she could get Erris to come with her the Tainted would be powerless against him.

“This is madness,” Quell said. “We don’t need to do it. We can just go back.”

“Doing what you ask would put my mission at risk,” Maya said.

Yaz picked up the hunter’s star and let it glow more brightly. She narrowed her eyes at Maya. “You said you came after us in the black ice because you needed us to complete your mission. Or did you just need me? Were you hoping to trade me to the priests if you couldn’t escape to tell your discoveries to the Axit? Hoping if they had me they might not care about letting you run off to die on the ice.” Yaz felt another weight settle on her already heavy heart. She’d thought Maya had come back for them all, out of loyalty and friendship. “Well, the priests will be waiting. And I’m not coming without the rest of us.”

Maya at least had the grace to look shamed and studied her feet for a moment.

“Just do what I asked,” Yaz said. “You both know it’s the right thing to do.” She set the hunter’s star orbiting her and lowered herself over the edge of the chasm onto the narrow path Arka had shown them.

She met their eyes one last time, Maya’s then Quell’s, and then stepped out of sight. She descended slowly, trying to focus on the climb as the path soon vanished and she had to clamber down over fractured rock. Stray thoughts kept intruding though: Quina reaching out to save her from a fall, Kao wolfing down his first hot meal, pausing only to complain about his burned mouth and shovel in more food, Petrick dancing around Hetta as he led her away, Thurin’s smile as he lifted water from a puddle to show her his magic, the rippled light moving across his face. One day she wanted to see him work fire.

She thought of Zeen too, so proud of his knowledge about the Black Rock. Knowledge that now seemed like tiny grains of grit on an endless gravel bank. Even little Azad visited her thoughts, happy and laughing in the boat on the day before the dagger-fish took him.

Yaz reached the stone beam that crossed the gap and would take her to the first of the Missing’s chambers. The hunter’s star slowly swung into her vision, following its orbit, and she became aware of its unearthly song, a wordless refrain that had been there all along, unmooring her thoughts and letting them drift.

She fought for focus and crossed into the exposed chamber on the other side, a dusty rectangular box of poured stone, older than the ice caves but lacking their ever-changing beauty.

* * *

YAZ MADE HER way steadily, alert for hunters, descending at every opportunity. She didn’t know where Erris would be but she knew he would be deep. She just hoped she found him before she found the creature that the city had fashioned to destroy her. Its assassin. It made the regulator’s hunters look like fingerfish next to a shark—and not just any shark, one of the black kind that rarely surfaced but when they did drove all the whales from the Hot Sea.

She knew the undercity to be vast and her search hopeless, but for one thing. If she went deep enough she believed that Erris would find her. The star she held would act as a beacon for the watching minds that lurked in the depths of the undercity. Erris would find her. Or something else would.

The monotony of stairs and shafts and endless dusty halls nibbled at her vigilance and once again her thoughts began to drift with the red star’s song. Her resolve came and went in waves, iron at the peaks, rotten with self-doubt in the troughs. Quell’s desire that she return to the surface might lie in parallel with the priests’ but it was also his own, born of love.