The Girl and the Stars (Book of the Ice #1) - Mark Lawrence Page 0,145

of course, but surviving until the next one could prove to be a problem. The scale of her task daunted her. She might be working a thousand times faster than the Tainted but the odds were still against her finding a part of Theus in the time allowed to her.

Erris followed her dutifully as she drove her star to new efforts, saturating the black ice with its fierce illumination, to leave small constellations of dark stars in the ice, then focusing ever more intense beams on these stubborn spots and melting paths to the toughest of them so that Theus could inspect the runoff.

Hours later Erris took her arm. “This is hurting you. I can see that. You need to rest. You need to eat.”

Yaz shook him off. “There’s no time.”

“And how will you hold Theus to his bargain if you exhaust yourself fulfilling your part of it?”

Yaz pressed her fingers to her aching forehead and bit back on an angry reply. Erris was right. She’d never been so tired, but there was so much to do. She managed a smile. “I was rather hoping that if he changes his mind about letting the others go then you could change it back for me.”

Erris frowned. “It’s not just you that this is taking a toll on. The star-stone is diminishing too.”

Yaz widened her eyes in alarm and looked down at the star making its slow revolutions around her. It looked the same but now she wasn’t sure. Slow changes, like ice melting, could happen before your eyes without the mind registering them. Much like the way parents don’t see their children growing, she supposed. “Really?”

Erris nodded. “It’s a fragment, already broken. The tasks you demand of it gradually burn it up.”

“But I need it to get the demons out of Zeen and Kao . . .” The idea of losing the star bit at her in other ways too. Ways that should have been as nothing against the desire to free Zeen. But the fact was there: she found it hard to think about the star being gone, leaving her in darkness, leaving her in silence without its song echoing through her bones.

“Let’s hope we’re lucky then.” Erris smiled but it didn’t take the worry from his face.

* * *

MORE HOURS PASSED without result. Yaz had cleared the ice many yards deep along the length of one tunnel and around the edges of two small chambers. The star felt noticeably smaller when she took it in her hands now and its heartbeat had sped up, even when at rest. Despite the speed she worked at it would still take weeks if not months to make a sizable impact. The black ice covered dozens of chambers much larger than the ones she had cleared, and there was no telling how far it extended beyond the regions where the heat had melted gaps between ice and rock.

“That one has been watching us a lot,” Erris said.

“Huh?” Yaz started, jerking her head up. She was shocked to discover that she had been dozing, chin on chest. She’d only sat down at Erris’s insistence, to rest her eyes for a moment. She wiped at her mouth, hoping she hadn’t drooled. Erris watched her, a question remaining in the dark calm of his eyes. He turned toward the far end of the cavern, and there, lurking in the gloom, a gerant stood, watching her with wholly black eyes. “That’s Kao, one of my friends.”

The Tainted had long since retreated beyond sight, unable or unwilling to endure the star’s light. Yaz supposed Theus might have set Kao to watching them but it seemed a strange choice given that the boy was one of the hostages against her success. She wondered what else might be drawing him closer than the rest. “If you can hold him for me we could speak to him like we did with Etrix.”

Yaz dimmed her star to a molten glow and began to circle toward Kao while Erris slid the other way around the cavern wall. Kao watched her, baring his teeth in threat, thick arms raised but whether to attack or defend she couldn’t tell. Erris moved through the darkness, swift and surefooted. The quiescent star