The Girl and the Stars (Book of the Ice #1) - Mark Lawrence Page 0,135

it was him that drove her mad.”

Yaz didn’t ask how one city could be a he and the other a she. Instead she asked about the one who had seemed human. “And Elias Taproot. Is he like you?”

Erris shrugged. “Well, he is much, much older. I think he was old beyond imagining before he came to Abeth.”

“Then how is he like he is? Like you—”

“Whatever happened to him happened somewhere else, long ago. He might have been a man back at the start but now he’s a memory, an echo of that man, and he lives in minds like those of the cities. But not just one like me. He’s shared between them. Back when all the cities were still connected, when they all spoke together, he would move where he liked. But when those connections broke he was left scattered. Not in pieces, but in copies, some stronger than others though, more detailed, truer to the original, with more of their memories and the power that goes with memory.”

“He told you all this?”

Erris laughed. “No. I can uncover secrets too. Elias Taproot always had bigger fish to fry. I was beneath his notice. So count yourself honoured!”

Yaz didn’t feel honoured, she felt targeted, drawn into a larger war that she had no concept of. Taproot’s interest had focused the eyes of a dark god upon her just when she was already in the worst peril she could imagine.

* * *

IT TOOK MAYBE another hour before they emerged into the glow of the city cavern from a different hole than the one that Yaz had left it by. Erris reached down to haul her up then stood marvelling at the ice sky high above him.

“It’s beautiful.”

“It is.” Yaz came to stand beside him, looking up too but listening with something other than her ears for signs of the hunters. Overhead the bands of stardust held in the ice marbled the ceiling with muted rainbow shades. In time much of the dust would fall with the meltwater and be washed down the gentle gradient to join the oncoming ice that might carry it once again into the heights.

Erris made a slow turn, gazing at the pockmarked rock and occasional twisted beams. “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”

Yaz cocked her head questioningly.

“A line of ancient poetry that dates back to even before the beaching. Did you know that the ships that brought the four original tribes to Abeth were powered by star-stones almost identical to the ones in the city?”

Yaz shook her head. The Ictha had little mythology about the black oceans between the stars. Mokka, the first woman, had sailed her boat there once when she argued with the Gods in the Sea. “Tell me about the poem.”

Erris smiled. “It’s just a line that stuck in my head long ago. I guess it’s saying that however you try to set your mark on the world, time will come and wash it all away.” He reached out a hand toward her. “Let me show you how it was when I came here.”

Yaz found his smile echoing itself on her lips. She reached out and let him close his hand around hers. “I don’t—”

But then she did. The ruins grew around her, far taller than she had imagined when glimpsing them in the distance of an early visit to Erris’s memory. The towers reached up through the ice ceiling of the cavern to daunting neck-craning heights, and yet they were still merely stumps of what had once stood there, the metal skeletons reaching up above the poured stone to challenge the clouds. In the memory Yaz stood on rubble that covered the ground to an unknown depth, great chunks of poured stone, some bigger than whales and like the carcass of some vast beast their iron bones broke from stone flesh. Bees droned lazily by and a riot of ivy, heavy with white flowers, pursued the ruins up into the air.

Yaz gazed up at the defeated structures, marvelling, awestruck. Even their wounds seemed beautiful, exposing a complexity of floors and chambers inside, high above the ground. The buildings had their own grace, no two the same, and