The Girl and the Stars (Book of the Ice #1) - Mark Lawrence Page 0,128

were burning. She drifted closer until she began to realise that even this small star was vastly bigger than her, its unending whiteness beginning to fill her vision. And at the last, as its shadow threatened to swallow her and she saw that it was larger than mountains or seas, she was able to make out a thin, dark line about its middle. The shadow deepened, the great red star falling behind the growing bulk of the white star, and in those last moments of light the line about its middle turned from a black thread to something with a hint of thickness and a hint of colour. And that colour was green.

The darkness engulfing the world became the shadow of a hand, and suddenly Elias stood there in a space with no walls, his clothes like Erris’s, being made of something that was neither hide nor fur.

“Hello.” In his narrow, long-fingered hand he held the white star, barely large enough to cover his palm. He looked at her without recognition. “Who are you and what do you want?”

“I’m Yaz of the Ictha. We met . . .” She tried to recall how long ago it had been. “. . . before.” A part of her purpose returned to her as she reached for her answer. “And I’m looking for a star.”

“I can’t let you have this one, I’m afraid.” He held up the white ball. “I’m supposed to protect it.”

“From Seus?”

Elias twitched, worry entering his quick, dark eyes. “Yes.” He closed his hand around the star. “Elias Taproot, pleased to meet you, young lady. But you say we’ve met before?”

“Yes. Then Seus came and . . .”

“Ah. I must be all that survived. The basic framework, so’s to speak. Recent memory gone.” He frowned. “I can’t remember anything before . . . Well . . .” He held up the star again and studied it. “Put it this way.” The thin line broadened slowly into a wide green belt so that nearly a third of the world lay free of ice. “Since the world looked like this.”

“Is Seus the winter?” Yaz whispered.

Elias shook his head. “This world was always going to freeze in the end. He’s dead set against anyone slowing it down though.”

“What does he want? To destroy the world?”

“Never that.” Elias flashed a nervous smile. “Just all of your kind.”

Yaz suddenly found her island of the present crowded with returning past and future. She had been falling. She had been hunted and been hunting. “I need a star to save Zeen and the others!”

“Big picture!” Elias snapped his fingers irritatingly in her face. “I just told you Seus wants to close the Corridor, ice over the green zone, and kill well over ninety-nine percent of all humanity on the surface of this planet.” His eyes flitted to her collar. He reached out to tap a finger to the needle there. “You need to use this to find me. A better me who can use—who can help you to stop Seus!”

Yaz stepped back and fixed Elias with a hard stare. “Big picture” wasn’t a phrase she had ever heard spoken but somehow she understood the sentiment. It was the same mind-set that saw children sacrificed to the greater good, that saw awful deeds against the few to preserve the many. Maybe it was right or maybe it was wrong. Yaz left that for the gods to decide. But whatever they decided, her course was fixed, right or wrong. “I’ll care about your fight when I’ve finished mine. Now send me back!”

“Send you? Dear girl, you brought yourself.”

“Then how do I—” But the words were slurring from a mouth whose cheek was pressed to cold stone and a tongue that tasted blood. Her vision blurred and the great red star about which the others had orbited swung back into view out of the darkness.

Time passed and the circle of illumination from her star, now lying just beyond the tips of her outstretched fingers, began to surrender to the growing glow of at first half a dozen large symbols, themselves manifesting like stars from the general darkness of a night sky. Soon there were scores of