The Girl and the Stars (Book of the Ice #1) - Mark Lawrence Page 0,165

shoulder. She offered no thanks. Her authority stood on the assumption that Yaz owed her obedience, but there was gratitude in that contact. She moved away as Erris came in close. “Positions!” Arka gestured to Jerra and the others with her. “As we discussed.” Together they moved away toward nearby openings leading down into the city.

Yaz watched them go, feeling unsettled. Pome was hunting Arka and her people. When he found them gone from the main caverns he would follow them to the city. She felt that she was abandoning Arka’s faction to their fate, and it made her feel dirty. Jerra wasn’t the only child among them, but it seemed that the caverns of the Broken weren’t large enough for childhoods. Quell had said she couldn’t save them all, and it was true. Lately life seemed full of ugly truths and attractive lies.

* * *

“HOW LONG DOES the cage normally stay down?” Yaz had gone to eat in one of the craters. This one had a rectangular shaft at the bottom of it, sheer sided and too narrow for any hunter she’d yet seen.

“Two days,” Thurin said. “It takes a while to load all the iron securely.” Quell had taken over his guard duty above the slope and Zeen had gone with him, though Yaz had wanted to protest it. “Sometimes three.”

“We won’t have two days. Not with Arka here and Pome hunting her.” Maya bit into a large mushroom without enthusiasm.

“But the regulator is sending this cage down for you, right?” Kao asked. “So he might just leave it there long enough for someone to get on, then haul it back up.”

“True.” Yaz nodded.

“This means the regulator is going to be right there waiting for you up top,” Thurin said. “With gods know how many priests. He’ll want the rest of us back down here to work for him.”

“But he won’t be expecting the rest of you.” Yaz offered a smile. “And you can pick a man up without touching him, Thurin. If the regulator tries to stop us going south then you can throw him down the hole to scavenge his own iron.”

Maya and Kao nodded. Thurin looked worried. They ate without speaking, and after a short while Maya and Kao left the pair of them alone, going to join Erris, who was still working on fashioning their collapsible shelter from the materials that Maya had recovered from the settlement.

“Eular wasn’t with Arka,” Thurin said.

“No.” Yaz had noticed the blind old man’s absence and had worried for him. “Pome must have caught him after the Icicle Cavern. If he’s wise he’ll do whatever Pome asks and hope Arka can rescue him.”

“Oh, he’s wise.”

Thurin said it with such conviction that it prompted Yaz to share what the old man had said to her when Pome first brought her before him. “He predicted all this, you know.”

“All this?” Thurin raised a brow. “That must have taken some telling.”

“Well, not all of it. He said I was an agent of change. That I had been dropped into the middle of something that was ready to become a new thing.” For an eyeless man it was impressive vision. Though his foresight had been blind to Theus lurking inside Thurin. “What did he tell you?”

Thurin’s pale skin reddened and he turned his head away to watch the distant star-littered ceiling. “He talked about . . . you, I think . . . well, I’m not sure what he was saying. But I remember what he said, if that makes sense? He said when you put some people together for the first time there’s a kind of gravitation, a slow spiral dance as they’re drawn into each other’s orbit, each opening to the other by degrees, discovering how closely their wants and hopes and passions align.” Thurin kept his eyes on the distant stars, speaking the words from memory as if he had spent many hours turning them over in his own mind. “He said there’s a darkness in each of us, afraid to show itself, wrestling with such blunt tools as words and deeds to make itself known to the darkness in another person similarly hidden behind walls of camouflage, disguise, interpretation. Honesty is