The Girl and the Stars (Book of the Ice #1) - Mark Lawrence Page 0,130

by several lengths of cable and a glowing star almost the size of a newborn’s head.

With a groan Yaz rolled over into a sitting position and began to scramble back. It looked as if some dark core remained amid the wreckage of the hunter. Even as she watched, it seemed to unfold, shedding iron cables, metal plates, toothed wheels, and a great blue-black spring coil. The thing revealed amid the hunter’s ruin was something almost human and perhaps only a little taller and wider than Hetta or Jerrig, though cast in black metal. It followed a careful design rather than the seemingly improvised hunters that the regulator had created. And although Yaz had never had a clear sight of it before she knew exactly what it was: the assassin that the city had sent to stop her escape. On that occasion only Erris’s sacrifice of his own iron body had slowed it sufficiently for her to escape.

The assassin had torn into the hunter’s back and emerged from its wreckage. The hunters were the regulator’s doing and now the city had risen against them. Though it seemed that the avatar the city had sent was focused on Yaz. The hunter had merely been an impediment, stealing its prey.

The assassin raised its hand toward her, fingers extended and tight together. Yaz realised that even if she thought she could master the city’s creation where she had failed to master the regulator’s, the only star that she could hear was the one in her hand. Whatever powered this killer it was something new, something over which she had no influence.

With a soft click four black points appeared at the ends of the extended fingers. The next two things happened simultaneously. Four black darts shot toward her with the same velocity that had seen them hammer into stone on their last encounter. And Yaz plunged both arms into the river that flows through all things. For a moment she became one with the universal current, the awful power flowing through her with a force that should strip the flesh from her bones. In the next moment the river rejected her and she lay gasping in the same place she had been before though it seemed to her that she had been carried a great distance. The energies still inside Yaz made her feel like a plucked harp string resonating to the note of creation. Her body wanted to break apart, to stride off in a dozen different directions, each part carrying away a different piece of her mind. She stood, shuddering like a flag in the wind, scarcely noticing the four flattened pieces of black metal that slid from her lap. The spent projectiles tumbled down across the shield of golden light that encased her and struck the ground with ringing tones. Yaz and the assassin faced each other, one golden, one dark.

Yaz thought of her friends, of her purpose, of Thurin and Zeen trapped amid the black ice. With a great cry, half rage, half ecstasy, she managed to grab the tatters of her being and drag them back into a unity. She became united, drawn more definitely into the world than she had ever been before, understanding at the same time how very close she had come to dispersing across the surface of her stolen power like oil spilled across the face of the sea.

Yaz spread her hands, cupped, half-surprised not to find them full of fire. Something invincible ran through her veins, her lungs didn’t need to draw breath, her muscles screamed with a strength that could easily tear her asunder. When she took a swift step forward, the black assassin took a swift step back.

Yaz struck. Not with her hands, but with everything that was in her, a blast of something white and black and chaotic and loud. The force of it flung the assassin away like a child’s toy, hurling it yards back on a rising line to hit so high up the wall that Yaz couldn’t have reached it with her fingertips.

Her opponent fell back to the ground, face forward, hitting with a clang like an iron bell. A rain of fractured stone pieces rattled down around it from the impact crater high above them. Yaz stood, trembling, watching the inert, gently smoking form at the base of the wall. She was glad it