The Girl and the Stars (Book of the Ice #1) - Mark Lawrence Page 0,129

them, lighting a chamber in which all the peoples of the gathering could have assembled without rubbing elbows.

Yaz got to her feet, groaning and wiping fresh blood from her mouth. She was back in the chamber into which she had fallen while escaping the hunter. The rest of it could just have been the result of banging her skull too hard against the floor. Her head and chest competed to see which could ache the worst.

“Hello?”

The vastness of the chamber swallowed the word. By way of an answer the dark mouth of one of the many side shafts lit from within with crimson light. A hunter emerged moments later, hooking black claws around the exit and hauling itself into the room in a single smooth motion that brought it crashing to the stone floor five yards below. The same hunter that had pursued her down so many falls.

A sigh escaped Yaz’s lips. She called her star to her hands and began to advance on her foe. She had few illusions about her chances of beating the creature, but the time for running had passed.

This hunter resembled a giant black crab with a complexity of many-jointed legs bearing up a body three times as wide as Yaz was tall. One arm massively outweighed two smaller ones on the other side. Where those two had fingers like tentacles the other sported a claw large enough to snatch up a gerant and snip him effortlessly in two.

Whether surprised by her advance or recovering from its drop the hunter remained where it was, close to the base of the wall, its iron carapace backed almost against another of the several dozen identical entrances.

Yaz advanced in a straight line, save where she tracked around one of the shafts that opened in the floor. She held the star out in front of her, smaller cousin to the one she could sense powering the monster ahead. In its light she saw the river that runs through all things, wider and clearer than she had ever seen it before, its power hidden but terrifying even in the hints and rumours it offered to her eyes. The star she had recovered in the city chamber had once more opened the river to her. She feared it more than she feared the hunter though. If she touched it the river could flood through her in half a heartbeat, filling her with energies beyond her capacity to own. She would sooner stick her hand in a forge pot than dare the river like this.

The hunter rose on its legs as Yaz closed the remaining distance between them. It lifted half a yard and raised its huge claw still higher, regarding her with mismatched glass eyes, gleaming darkly at the ends of two small articulated arms.

“You’re going to be mine.” Yaz spoke the words through gritted teeth as she exerted her will through the star in her hands, seeking to influence the one pulsing amid the ironwork body looming over her.

The crab advanced in quick, stuttering steps, the weight of it scoring the stone in every place that one of its sharp legs set down. The claw, big enough to squash Yaz flat, now hung poised above her head. She felt the creature’s heart with her mind, a fiercely defiant fire refusing her command. Yaz ground her teeth and raised a hand toward the claw as it descended.

“No!”

The crab hesitated, the iron bulk of it groaning as its forward momentum arrested. In the next instant its heart-star flared, deep-red light shone from every joint, and a bright pain blossomed in Yaz’s head. Something brittle fractured in her mind and she fell, blood running from her eyes. The massive claw following her to the ground.

Before the claw’s jagged teeth could close around her the whole of the monster jolted. Yaz heard an awful squealing and a swift series of snapping sounds. Then, with sudden violence, the entire crab burst into pieces. An eye hit the ground close to Yaz’s head and shattered, scattering broken shards over her. A section of its carapace bounced just past her, its edges gleaming where the thick iron had been torn. Yaz saw the claw skitter across the ground before toppling down one of the shaft openings, swiftly followed