The Girl and the Stars (Book of the Ice #1) - Mark Lawrence Page 0,163

him a better way. The Broken had been working with this material for generations after all. He seemed to sense her watching him and turned to look her way. For a moment his black eyes held her gaze with what seemed a dark and starless passion. Erris made some observation that brought Thurin’s attention back to the matter in Quell’s hand, an observation that had both of them looking to him with a grudging admiration of the kind usually reserved for a leader. She wondered what they would think if she told them Erris was over a thousand years old and that his body wasn’t flesh and bone but something Missing-made, like the boards before them.

She watched the three of them, her mind half dreaming. One from the world above, part of her life from her earliest memories. Solid, strong, dependable. One from this strange world below, owner of curious magics, dark, conflicted by tragedy, broken by experience. And one from the world before, a time when there had been no above or below, a mystery who had kept the company of the Missing’s works for so long that even he didn’t know how changed he might be.

Once she had thought she would share her tent with Quell and her life would be a slight variation on the song that sang out her mother’s life and her mother’s mother’s and hundreds more joining her in a long chain to a time of gods when only Zin and Mokka walked the ice. Now she didn’t even know how the old stories fitted with the ones that Erris told her, or with the green world they had walked together in the dreams that the city made real for him.

* * *

“YAZ?”

Yaz blinked and realised that she had been asleep. Maya stood before her, a shy half smile on her lips, every inch the young girl rather than the shadow-weaving Axit assassin.

“Good to see you, little sister. You’ve done well here.” Yaz forced away a yawn. She stood stretching. “How long have I been dreaming?”

“A long time.” Maya turned away, pointing. “Others are coming.”

That woke Yaz up quickly, a cold wind blowing away her mind-fog. “Who is it?” Following Maya’s line she could see figures in skins coming down the long slope with spears on their shoulders. “Didn’t we have anyone on guard?” Had it been her responsibility, she wondered, to organise things like a perimeter?

“Thurin went up there to watch not long after you fell asleep,” Maya said.

Yaz tried to spot him in the group coming down. There were more than ten of them in view now, and none of the figures looked like Thurin.

“Arka!” Kaylal hauled himself from the depression where he’d been working on Maya’s haul of stolen boards and other material. “Arka!”

Yaz relaxed. With Thurin absent none of their company was better placed to recognise Arka and her company than Kaylal.

Arka raised a hand in greeting and came to the fore of her group, leading them cautiously across the scraped ruin of the city. The dozen or so Broken with her all kept low, moving between the holes that would offer them an escape into the chambers below if a hunter were to surface.

Yaz searched desperately for Quina among the shuffling, exhausted group but saw no sign of the girl.

“Yaz!” Arka looked tired. A bloody wound on her forehead would add to the collection of scars that Hetta had given her, if it ever had the time to heal. Grey streaks stood out in her dark hair where none had been before. “Kaylal.” She reached down for his hand. “Exxar?” She looked around at the others approaching from the stashes as her own followers came up behind her.

“Gone.” Kaylal’s voice fractured around the word and he let her hand go.

“I’m so sorry, Kaylal.” Arka lowered her head. After a long silence she turned to check her people. One was the girl, Jerra, who had been with her when they rescued Yaz from Hetta. Yaz had still been wet from her drop. It seemed a lifetime ago but couldn’t have been much more than a week. Jerra had graduated from her rock-and-bone hammer to an iron spear, lighter and shorter than Arka’s