The Girl and the Stars (Book of the Ice #1) - Mark Lawrence Page 0,142

kindness and still all that stretched before her was more hardship, more fear, more fighting.

“I hadn’t thought it would be like this.” The first words Erris had spoken since Etrix ran off. “Children?”

“You didn’t know they threw children down the pit?” Yaz had been trying to avoid thinking about the little ones.

Erris frowned. “I didn’t see them in the city. And I didn’t know they were being . . . infected . . . like this. What sort of lives do they live in this place?”

“I don’t know what we can do about it,” Yaz said, feeling helpless. In a single sentence she had become one with those who threw them down the pit in the first place. But she really couldn’t see a way to help them. She didn’t even know if she could get Zeen, Thurin, and Kao free.

“What if Etrix does what he says and kills this Theus you’re trying to bargain with?”

Yaz went to the cavern mouth and peered at the crowd gathered across the chasm. She worried for Thurin if Etrix kept his promise. “I think if Theus were destroyed it might be even worse. From what I see he is the only one that holds them together. Without him they’d all be like Hetta.”

“Hetta?”

“They’d be running loose, just killing the Broken, maybe eating them too. Theus needs them to search the ice for demons that were once part of him. Without their fear of Theus, the Tainted would swarm the Broken within days. They have the numbers, and you’ve seen what they’re like.”

29

WHEN THEUS FINALLY arrived the howls and hoots of the Tainted heralded him. Erris and Yaz were standing by the bridge as he emerged from the dark mouth of a black ice cavern further along the ravine. He made his way slowly, seeming to enjoy the adulation of his minions. Clearly pride was one component of himself that had already been rediscovered and added to the whole during the course of the Tainted’s searching. He wore Thurin’s body. Kao lumbered behind him, his face a vacancy waiting to be filled, and Zeen capered around them both, wild with laughter, too often dangerously close to the edge and a fatal plunge to the waters far below. Etrix followed, as frantic and unfocused as the rest of them once more.

The Tainted by the bridge parted before Theus’s advance, from biggest gerant to youngest child. Something about the fragmented soul carried inside Thurin’s slender body made those other demons fear. It made them forget the mindless pursuit of their own singular desires and listen to his will.

The black stain covered much of his face in a broad stripe from his hairline down across his forehead to his chin and trailing off along his neck.

“Yaz.” Theus showed her a wide grin. “You came back, following a star like some wandering king. And what a star! Has it led you to the birth of something great, I wonder?”

Before Yaz could answer this strange question Theus’s gaze fixed on Erris and blackness flowed into both his eyes as if this might offer more information about the newcomer. “Here’s a curio and no mistake. Alive but not alive. Human but not human. And familiar too. Very familiar.” The smile vanished. “You’re something made in the city. A marjal’s mind hiding inside the works of my people. It’s as if a dog had been given charge of a grand ship. He sits at the helm in the captain’s hat and brocade, tongue lolling out, and no clue as to what he has been given.”

Yaz willed her star forward, rising before her, red as the sun and burning brightly. The Tainted fell back, hissing, and even Theus took one step away, raising an arm to shield his eyes.

“We had a deal. Give me my friends.” She wanted to ask for them all. To free all those enslaved by the black ice. But Theus would never agree to it.

“Find the rest of me and you can have them.” Theus gestured toward the caves behind him. “Though I am rather fond of this one.” He ran his hands over Thurin’s chest and sides. “As are you, from what I’ve seen.”

Yaz hardened her