The Girl and the Stars (Book of the Ice #1) - Mark Lawrence Page 0,127

of a doorway to haul itself through. The star inside it shone in bright crimson lines through every joint and chink in its iron armour. The heartbeat of this hunter was slower than that of the one she had shattered to gain the star currently trying to lift her from her feet. A bigger star, a bigger hunter, a more deadly threat.

Yaz snarled in frustration and stepped to the lip of the shaft. “Gods save me.”

Ignoring the cable at her feet she stepped off, trying to force the star in her hands upwards. For a moment she hung there, feet dangling in space, her body suspended below the star as its light pulsed bloodily through her hands. Then, slowly at first, she began to fall.

About fifty yards from the ground Yaz understood that she was travelling down too fast. The stone floor rushed toward her at ankle-breaking speed. Grunting with effort she tried to force the star upwards more strongly. She slowed but not enough. With twenty yards remaining she reached out in desperation, trying to grab the cable flashing by her while retaining a hold on the slick ball of light with one hand.

What happened next was too fast for her brain to make sense of it. She caught hold of something, had something ripped from her grasp, turned in the air several times, and hit hard.

* * *

YAZ LIFTED HER head slowly as if it weren’t already far too late for such delicacy. Crimson light swamped her vision and the taste of blood filled her mouth. She drew a slow breath into lungs from which all air had been driven at speed, and daggers stabbed her chest from both sides.

The sound of iron clanging on iron got her crawling, blood drooling between mashed lips. She got through a doorway into the darkness of another room before the awful screeching began, the sound of the hunter’s claws as it dropped down the shaft she’d come from, scoring the four walls to tame its descent.

Yaz reached back and her red star rolled after her, coming to a halt in her hand and illuminating the room beyond.

Another dusty chamber, two doorways in the rear wall, a vertical shaft in the middle of the floor. Yaz crawled on. The doorways seemed too far away, the clattering clanking charge of the hunter too close. She rolled over the lip of the shaft, clutching the red star. Gravity reached for her with its implacable strength and yanked her away into the darkness of the fall.

Once again Yaz hung from nothing but her will for the red star to rise. The fear of the drop filled her stomach while the pain of opposing it sliced through her head.

She dropped into a huge chamber, slower than falling, more like a diver plunging into water. The starlight glowing scarlet through her hands made of her something like those strange fish that are sometimes carried from the deepest depths of the ocean by swift upwellings, the ones that hang in darkness, carrying their own light before them. The glow partially illuminated the nearest wall as she fell past it, the light painting red stone and black entrances. The chamber seemed to be something of a junction where dozens of shafts met, some opening at various heights along the walls, a similar number piercing floor and ceiling.

Yaz hit the stone with an “Oooff!” that crumpled her into a ball of hurt and swallowed her vision amid a constellation of spinning lights.

* * *

FOR UNCOUNTED TIME Yaz hung among those lights in a bliss of forgetting. Without memory of destination or recollection of pursuit all urgency left her. She drifted, moved only by an idle curiosity. Stars . . . she floated amid the stars, not the red scatter dying in the black heavens above the ice but marbled giants that swung through the void in slow majesty. Close by, a huge crimson star burned like a banked fire, and just as Yaz could make stars orbit her this great star had smaller ones that orbited it. One among a dozen that spun about the dull heat of the red star caught Yaz’s eye, a ball of pearly white on white, all aglitter with the reflected light of the greater star, as if ice