The Girl and the Stars (Book of the Ice #1) - Mark Lawrence Page 0,138

the city with us.”

“I can’t.”

“I’m still your drop-leader, Yaz.” Arka’s face hardened. “We need to secure the city before the next collection. Once we have the trade goods from the next shipment we’ll start to regain control. Pome’s faction won’t do so well without fish and salt.”

“The next collection isn’t for twenty-three days,” Yaz said. “Erris and I will be coming to the city once we have the others. There’s time.”

Surprise overwrote the resolve on Arka’s muddy face at the mention of twenty-three days. “You don’t know as much as you think you do, girl. There’s going to be an unscheduled collection very soon. The coal-worms are on the move. That’s a sign.”

Yaz was about to ask how Arka knew what the coal-worms were doing when she became aware that Arka was no longer looking at her or even at the hunter’s star but at some spot to the left on the wall behind her. The ice seemed to be glowing from within but Yaz sensed no star.

“What is—”

A sudden cracking sound heralded a white explosion and the chamber vanished in a tumult of roaring, curiously warm water. Yaz had no time to grab hold of anything, just a brief impression of bodies tumbling amid crimson waters and then an impact with something hard that took the world away.

* * *

YAZ CAME TO her senses spluttering and coughing water from raw lungs. She found herself facedown in several inches of the stuff and felt as though she had choked the whole lot out from inside her chest. She quickly became aware of a savage heat and a fierce red light that was not her star. She turned her head to stare across the steaming waters still draining from the cavern. On the far side a creature writhed on the wet stone. A creature not unlike the seaworms that sometimes cling to whales, only this one was too wide for her to wrap her arms around, many yards long, its soft, segmented body a putrid grey streaked with black, and where a seaworm had a complex head of ugly mouthparts ringed with bone hooks, this creature had only a glowing mass the colour of a forge pot melt and twice as hot.

“Hsssst!”

The thing looked as groggy as she was, swaying its head back and forth across the water, sending up great clouds of steam each time it dipped too close to the surface. The ice above it was in full thaw, meltwaters raining down to vaporise on the worm’s glowing face.

Beyond the creature gaped the tunnel from which it had been ejected at speed by the pressure of meltwater behind it. Water was still pouring out, colder now and less ferocious.

“Hsssst!”

Yaz had thought the worm was making the noise but now she saw Erris lying against the ice wall opposite. He had tucked himself back in the channel made where the flow of warm water had cut into the base. He was waving for her to do the same. Yaz found she’d become snagged on some irregularity in the stone floor but managed to free herself and roll to the side just as the scorching head swung her way.

She huddled back into the ice channel and looked for the others, finding no sign. She guessed Arka and her friends had been swept away in the flood, and if they had any sense they’d keep on running. Judging by the height of the tunnel and what she had been told Yaz guessed that the specimen before her was a baby. It fuelled her resolve never to meet a full-grown coal-worm.

The creature seemed disoriented, perhaps surprised at having been flushed into a void within the ice, not so adept at sensing gaps as an adult. In any event, its head appeared to be cooling as its fright wore off, now glowing only a dull red, shading into black. In a series of disturbing undulations the worm flowed across the chamber and set its head to the ice wall opposite, slowly melting its way in while pushing the meltwater out with ripples that ran the length of it.

Yaz lay shivering and in the space of a few minutes the entire length of the worm vanished into