The Girl and the Stars (Book of the Ice #1) - Mark Lawrence Page 0,144

skin feeling raw, head aching. All around her the sweating ice walls had become clear, the blackness pushed back almost too far to see. Here and there a stubborn black spot hung amid the fractured whiteness, like the opposite of the stars seen in the caverns where the Broken lived.

It stood to reason that if the Tainted had spent generations mining the ice and found only a few pieces of Theus then it wasn’t reasonable to expect to find several more within yards of the first tunnel that Yaz examined. She focused the starlight into a tight beam and shone it into the ice, directing it at the nearest of the more tenacious demons. Within seconds the patch had gone. Yaz wasn’t sure if she was destroying the demons. It didn’t seem that they could be moving through the ice, certainly not as fast as they were vanishing from it. But Yaz didn’t much care if they were escaping to some unknown place or evaporating in the starlight; either way they were gone, and that was a good thing.

Yaz focused her light on each remaining spot in turn, a little at a time until just one was left.

“It will be hard to reach,” Erris said.

Yaz shrugged. The blackness, an area perhaps smaller than a fist, lay some yards deep in the ice. She couldn’t tell if it was an arm’s length or two spears’ in. But she had seen the coal-worm at work. With one finger she traced onto the surface of her star the best approximation she could of the sigil from the heat pot. It was more than memory that guided her. When she thought of heat it seemed that it had a shape, something complex and many angled, like some small piece of the river that flows through all things. She tried to project that shape down onto the confining dimensions of a surface.

“Ow!” She pulled her hand back quickly as heat flared from the star. She let it float free and directed it against the ice in a slow spiralling motion so that the hole it made would be slightly larger than the star itself and allow the meltwater a way to escape.

It took some time to reach the trapped demon, and all the while that the star poured out its heat Yaz felt a coldness growing in her bones. But at last a pulse of blackness came out with the water running steadily from the hole.

“Theus!” Yaz recalled her star and slumped back against the clear ice of the nearest wall. “Theus!”

He came, prowling in as though she and Erris were his prey. He tried and failed to hide his surprise on seeing the cleared ice on all sides. Yaz hoped that seeing how easily it had been returned to its natural state would make Theus more worried about what she might be able to do to him if he reneged on their agreement.

“What have you got for me?” Immediately he finished the question Theus stepped into a hollow where the meltwater had collected. He lifted his foot with a snarl, the skins wrapped about it now dripping.

“Over here.” Yaz pointed to the stain trying to leech itself back into the ice at the base of the wall beneath the hole she had made.

Theus squinted, frowned, and took one step toward it. A moment of recognition pushed his eyebrows back, then he shook his head. “Quite powerful. An impressive find, but no part of me. Burn it.”

“Destroy it?” Yaz asked.

“Why would I want any competition?” Theus pulled Thurin’s lips back to reveal his teeth. “Burn it.”

Yaz shrugged and called the star’s light out in a beam, keeping it focused on the demon until the last part of it relinquished its hold on the world. “Is it dead now?”

Theus shook his head. “It’s gone to haunt the barrier between life and death. There are ways back from that place. Not many, but some.”

* * *

YAZ RETURNED TO her work. Theus had retreated from the star’s radiance and left them to it, but he could be called back easily enough. The iron collection was due soon whether she was back at the city or not. There would be more,