The Girl and the Stars (Book of the Ice #1) - Mark Lawrence Page 0,17

the fair boy.

The woman shrugged. “We’ll join up with the rest of the Broken and find out.” She held up a hand as Yaz started forward. “Once we’re sure the regulator has finished.”

“He has,” Yaz said. “The Ictha were the last clan. And I was near the end.”

“Three Ictha.” The man with the light looked at the woman. “I can’t remember the last time there was even one.”

The woman shrugged again. “Two now. Or maybe just one. We’ll go find out once Petrick is back.”

“The boy who attacked the giant?” Yaz asked. “Gerant.” She corrected herself at the young man’s frown.

Back down the tunnel something rattled. “Speak of the devil.” The woman nodded to the girl who had whispered about “the Tainted.” “Jerra, go let the rope down.” The girl ran off into the darkness. “Check first!” the woman called after her. “And don’t fall down the hole.”

The woman turned back to Yaz. “I’m Arka. That’s Pome.” She motioned toward the hard-eyed young man with the star. There were other names but somehow they didn’t stick. Zeen was the only name she wanted to hear.

The girl, Jerra, and the boy Petrick, who close up didn’t look much older, came hurrying back, the girl clutching the rope. Yaz wondered how it had been secured. Her mind always threw in tangential questions at unhelpful moments.

“Hetta?” Arka asked. Yaz saw the cannibal’s mouth descending toward her leg again, drool hanging from pointed teeth.

“Still raging.” Petrick grinned. “I lost her in the threads. The new girl stuck her good. Hand and foot!”

Yaz frowned, her hand returning to her side where her knife should be. Even now the loss weighed on her.

“And the pools? Any more arrivals?”

Petrick shook his head. “Think that’s our lot.”

“Let’s go then.” Arka led the way, Pome at her side, holding his light-stick aloft as though he were some grand official at a clan ceremony.

Yaz followed, her mind still spinning. Twenty years. That’s how long Arka said she’d been down here. Twenty years. It was as far beyond Yaz’s imagination as a tree. Or the thin green belt the gods were said to have put around the world’s waist, a place where the oldest tales said there was as much life on the land as in the sea.

* * *

ARKA TOOK THE group along a series of tunnels. Many were clearly the work of meltwater but others seemed to defy logic, rising, falling, and twisting in a way that flowing water never would, and yet smooth and round, bearing no mark of pick or chisel.

Yaz jogged in the middle of the band. The Broken they had called themselves. Her new clan, she supposed, bound together by the fact that they had survived the drop and wished to keep on surviving.

The darkness gave way to a dim and diffuse illumination as the ice began to be populated once more by the tiny stars. The others seemed to take the same comfort in this that Yaz did, even though they must have seen it every day for years. Little Jerra paused to gaze into the ice and dark-haired Petrick had to give her a tug to get her started again. “Slowcoach.”

“Everyone’s slow next to you.” The girl blinked, glanced at Yaz, and carried on.

Shortly after that, Arka sent Petrick ahead to warn of their arrival. The boy scampered off at speed and was soon lost in the gloom.

The further they went the more dirty the ice beneath their feet. Eventually they emerged into another rock-floored cavern, not so large as the one in which Yaz had escaped Hetta but still large and better lit.

The air here was warmer than in the tunnels and the soft drip of meltwater filled any brief silence. A crowd of maybe four dozen of the Broken stood in an arc around the entrance, lean, grimy, their clothes cloaks of woven hair over old hides and crude patchworks of small skins. Here and there points of light winked among their number, tiny ice stars sewn onto clothing or dangling from an ear.

More than half of those gathered were huge. Not