The Girl and the Stars (Book of the Ice #1) - Mark Lawrence Page 0,126

that had drawn Erris’s attention. That meant she had to wake the city again. She would have to prod the bear in its lair, and hope that she could cope with what came next.

Lacking instructions Yaz decided to experiment. She took the red star in her hand and began to trace the symbol with it, reaching up above her head to start at the outermost coiling line. She scored the star’s smooth surface through the shaggy lichen along the faintly glowing lines of the symbol. Everywhere her hand went the symbol blazed more brightly behind it, until at last the whole thing shone with enough light to illuminate the chamber. Other smaller symbols began to show now, as if the light had leaked from the larger one into their dry channels. A host of tiny script now shone weakly from the rear wall and as Yaz approached it she heard music. Not the wordless song of the stars that seemed to belong to a voice, but a complex spiralling melody, at turns sad then joyous, the sounds of instruments though none that Yaz had ever heard.

Ghosts filled the room, phantoms that she almost saw, like words spoken just beneath the threshold of comprehension. An impression of dance. Graceful whispers haunting the emptiness of the air. Fading then gone.

Yaz found herself in the darkening hall with a tear on her cheek and a profound sense of loss. This had been a place of music and light and movement once, unimaginably long ago, and now only the sorrow of the vast city’s crumbling mind remained.

She moved on, hoping to encounter some other way of drawing Erris’s attention.

* * *

THE FIRST SIGN of the hunter was a variation in the song of the star in orbit around her. Yaz heard a harmonising, as though a second voice had joined the first. And then, as she focused her thoughts on the problem she became aware of its heartbeat, very faint but growing stronger. With the heartbeat came an idea of direction, and, as she strained her senses, she became aware of other hearts still fainter and more distant. She wondered how she and Quell had wandered into two hunters as they tried to leave the city. All she’d had to do was listen and it was there for the hearing.

The hunter drew closer, moving at speed, an urgency in its heartsong. Yaz took a narrow turn and followed a long stair upwards even though her destination lay far below. The hunter continued to close, its direction swinging around her in a manner that indicated it to be racing through the empty rooms at reckless speed.

A wide shaft, down which scavengers had hung cables, offered her a quick descent of two hundred yards. She reached the bottom with her arms limp and trembling. The strength of the Ictha had left her and she wondered at how the other tribes survived with such weakness in them.

A metallic clatter echoed down the shaft after her, the hunter growing ever closer. With a curse Yaz began to run, bathing the corridor ahead of her with red light, alert for any narrow passage or crack through the foundations of the city by which she might escape.

She reached another shaft, narrower and deeper than the first, hung with a single thin cable, secured by an iron peg hammered into the poured stone floor.

“Gods in the Sky!” Yaz’s arms felt like jelly. She wasn’t ready for another long climb.

A crash far back along the corridor told her that the hunter had reached the bottom of the earlier shaft.

Seized by a sudden idea Yaz snatched the red star from the air and held it in both hands. She willed it to rise and let it do so until her arms were stretched out above her. She could feel the pressure of it against her interlocked fingers. Grinding her teeth she commanded the star to rise and at the same time hauled down on it. The thing nearly escaped her to go hammering into the ceiling, but she held it back, just barely, standing on tiptoes.

A red glow insinuated itself into the far end of the corridor. Growing brighter until the black bulk of the hunter emerged, hooking its claws all around the edge