The Girl and the Stars (Book of the Ice #1) - Mark Lawrence Page 0,131

was dead. She had, in that one act of violence, discharged herself, shedding everything the river had given her. It would be at least a day before she saw the river again. A week before she could touch it with anything even approaching safety.

Yaz slumped, the fear leaving her body and uncovering all her aches and pains as it retreated. Exhausted, Yaz turned to examine the closest of the downward shafts.

The scrape of iron on stone turned her sharply back around and reversed the tidal flow of her terror. A great metal hand twitched. Joints groaned in protest and the assassin slowly levered itself up, turning its blank face toward her once more. Even in her fear she wondered for a moment if she were looking into the face of the Missing. Had the city crafted its assassin in their image?

The assassin stood and stepped toward her, limping on one leg, grinding metal on metal. It smouldered here and there, the energies she had unleashed on it still sparking across the formerly glossy exterior, now deeply scored and etched in almost geometric scar patterns. It held its hand out and the fingers shuddered, but the black spikes that would have torn through her didn’t come. The mechanism that threw them seemed broken.

Part of her wanted to turn and run. To throw herself down yet another shaft. But she didn’t want to die with her back to the thing. Exhaustion wanted to put her on her knees, but that wasn’t an option. Not for an Ictha. She would meet death standing.

She raised her star, thinking perhaps to throw it. She had felt ready to die before, back there beneath the black ice, but maybe that had been the weight of the demons’ malice crushing her spirit. Now she was anything but ready. She had unfinished business. People that only she could save.

Yaz wasn’t ready but she understood she had nothing left. Just holding her arms out before her with the star was taking all her strength.

Without warning something struck the ground between her and the assassin. A something that must have fallen from one of the shaft openings on the ceiling. It hit fast as a thunderbolt but without any sound other than a slap like a palm against stone. Yaz blinked. A figure, a human figure, coiled against the impact, crouched between the towering assassin and Yaz, who realised only now that she was on her knees.

The star fell from Yaz’s hands as Erris unfolded from his crouch. Facing her, rather than the metal giant. Not Erris in his body of mismatched parts but Erris as she had seen him in the green memories of his life, tall, calm, his skin the same rich brown she remembered, hair close to his skull in tight black coils. He wore a white linen tunic and leggings. Yaz discovered that she knew the word “linen” and what cloth was. Something else that had slipped into her mind while wandering Erris’s memories with him.

“Yaz. I told you not to come back.” A sad smile played at the corner of his mouth.

Behind Erris the assassin took a step closer, now directly behind him. Erris’s head reached only just above its hips.

Erris turned and looked up at the assassin’s blank face. “I can’t let you have her.”

“How . . . how are you here?” Yaz struggled to her feet, heavy with exhaustion. “You said you didn’t have a body.”

“Actually, I said I had two. One better built than the other.” Erris kept his back to her.

“But . . . the other one was metal, like a hunter’s.”

“And this one has metal in it too.” Erris’s gaze remained on the blank plate of the assassin’s face, where symbols suddenly began to glow, many of them, flowing down over the iron like a slow waterfall.

“No!” Erris said.

The assassin backhanded him. A seemingly lazy blow but one that sent him flying across the expanse of floor. Yaz cried out as he fell into a shaft, but somehow his fingers caught the edge and heartbeats later he had hauled himself out.

The assassin reached for Yaz and she backed away. With impressive footspeed Erris returned to interpose