The Girl and the Stars (Book of the Ice #1) - Mark Lawrence Page 0,136

few of the straight lines she had grown so weary of in the chambers below. These were variously fluting, bulbous, slender, as if like the fungi in the caves they had grown rather than been built.

“What—” Yaz felt Erris’s hand leave hers, fingers trailing across fingers, and the illusion vanished, replaced with the ice cave that now seemed small and dull by comparison to the past glories taken from her. “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.” She repeated the line. No more need be said. She understood some of the city’s sorrow now. It too had been broken and cast aside. Abandoned by those who made it.

* * *

“WHAT’S NEXT?” ERRIS rubbed his hands together and looked about expectantly.

Yaz contemplated the long slope. Taking Quell and Maya back into the black ice would put them both in danger. Maya could prove very useful, but she also had a proclivity for murdering the Tainted, and given that Yaz was going in specifically to reclaim two of the Tainted it felt profoundly wrong to be killing any of the unfortunates that got in the way.

“We’re going to go and find Theus, just the two of us, and I’m going to hold him to our agreement.”

Yaz shivered. Just before Petrick had fallen to his death Theus had boomed at her, “Yaz of the Ictha, we have a deal.”

He might have just been saying it because he saw she and the others were going to escape him and it was something that might bring her back. But whether he meant it or not it was something that she was going to hold him to.

Erris extended his arm toward the slope, tilting his head. “Lead on, dear lady.”

Yaz frowned. “Sorry?”

“It’s what people say. Said. Don’t mind me. I’m just . . . well . . . I think I’m nervous. It’s been a long time since I felt anything like this. Excited. With the city’s avatar I was scared I guess, but I knew what I was dealing with, what the options were. This, however, this is all new. It’s been a very long time since I’ve done anything this foolish.” He grinned. “I’m rather enjoying it.”

“Well, don’t enjoy it too much. The Tainted are dangerous. And so are the Broken. And the hunters. In fact everything down here is dangerous and I’ve no idea how easy it is to stick a spear through your chest or what it would do to you.”

“A spear?” Erris wrinkled his nose as if he hadn’t considered something as basic as a pointed piece of bone or metal. “I think it would be very bad news to get one of those stuck through me. So let’s avoid that.”

“Stop enjoying yourself then, and stay alert.” Yaz shook her head and led on toward the slope. Her mission had felt daunting before when she thought Theus was “just” some dark spirit capable of possessing the unwary. Then he was one of the Missing, or at least broken pieces of one of them, an enigmatic and incomprehensibly ancient being, albeit robbed of most of his memory. And now it seemed he might be Prometheus, significant even among the Missing. A figure that troubled the city’s dreams and whose relationship with such entities as Taproot and Seus remained unclear.

* * *

DESPITE HER INSTRUCTION Erris followed Yaz through the ice caverns as if the whole place had been constructed just to astonish him. At the first stream they came to he crouched and for an age would do nothing but let water run over his fingers then cup it in both hands and watch it fall as he lifted it. He marvelled at icicles and frost, at heaps of fallen ice and the banks of stones deposited by the glacial flow. He carried a rough, irregular stone in each hand for some distance, turning them over in his fingers.

“Nobody made this. No human hand has ever touched either of these stones before . . .”

“I’m very pleased for you,” Yaz growled.

“It’s just that for more than a thousand years I’ve seen nothing that wasn’t made by someone, or something. A simulation just can’t—”

“Sssh.” Yaz held up a hand to silence him.