The Girl and the Stars (Book of the Ice #1) - Mark Lawrence Page 0,168

her, a terror rose through her in place of the anger that had helped her before. A terror that not only would she die, slashed open by the swing of a well-forged sword, but that Zeen, barely twelve and huddled behind her, would die, run through with an iron spear. And Kao, white-faced, his bravado gone, would spill his blood on the rocks, and that Thurin, Quell, even Erris would fall beneath a flurry of blades. The horror of it paralysed her and set both hands trembling against the stone slope before her.

“This is not going to end well.” Thurin joined Yaz, leaning up against the side of the crater.

“I thought this Pome wanted Yaz returned to the surface?” Erris slid up on her other side.

“Well, he does . . .” Yaz admitted. The presence of Erris on one side and Thurin on the other released Yaz from her paralysis. She drove back her fear, trying to keep it from her voice. “But he wanted to send me up as a tribute to the regulator.”

“Pome wanted you delivered to the man who Quell has contacted to arrange this collection so that you might be brought to him?” Erris asked.

“Well . . . yes.” Yaz wanted to protest that it wasn’t the same. Pome was doing it because he wanted something from the regulator. But she knew that Quell was also doing it because he wanted something from the priest. Only in Quell’s case that something was her rather than a kingdom under the ice.

“So the only people here who might object to your going are those who have given their loyalty to Arka?” Erris pressed on with his relentless logic.

“Pome is a . . .” She stretched for an insult. The Ictha used them rarely and had few to choose from. “He is cruel and unworthy. I wouldn’t want him guiding the Broken even before he tainted himself.”

“But won’t Theus and the other Tainted overrun them all soon in any case?” Erris sounded sincere, as if he genuinely didn’t know that he was bringing out into the light all the issues she had been hating herself for.

“It’s not that easy—”

Thurin exclaimed, “He’s got more gerants at the back than at the front!”

Yaz looked away from Erris, grateful for the interruption. Pome’s whole force was on the slope now. At the back were ten gerants bearing the large square shields she remembered from the meeting in the Icicle Cavern. Rather than focusing their attention ahead of them, though, these ones kept glancing over their shoulders.

“I don’t think they’re chasing Arka at all,” Yaz said. “I think they’re being chased.”

35

POME’S FORCE TIGHTENED ranks as they approached the city. Yaz watched their advance, her eyes level with the edge of the crater. Though they were just children of the tribes, the Broken seemed very different from those who had cast them down from the ice, and not just the hulking gerants. The wind hadn’t sculpted their features, and they wore a pitiful mix of patchwork rat skins, the aging remains of whatever they had worn on their drop day, here and there a cloak of woven hair or a pelt sent down by the priesthood along with their payments in salt and fish. And yet despite their beggar’s garb they carried in iron the wealth of many clans, all of it shaped for war.

They halted some fifty yards shy of Yaz’s position, though Quell was hiding much closer, about halfway between them. Pome came out from behind his hunter and three of the hunskas moved to protect him, as if they might be fast enough to pluck any spear out of the air before it could hit home. He stood wrapped in the thickest hides the Broken had with an iron breastplate over the top. In his right hand he held a short iron rod with his star glowing crimson at the other end. Taller than most Ictha and of slighter build with his thin brown hair and narrow face he looked a man of little consequence but somehow, like parasitic worms, his words burrowed into the minds of those around him, swaying them to his cause.

“I am not here to make war!” he shouted. “I have come