The Girl and the Stars (Book of the Ice #1) - Mark Lawrence Page 0,170

you thought your flame-work was stronger than your ice-work.”

A rough laugh broke from him. “I have no idea! I know I can’t set things on fire. Once it was burning I might be able to do . . . something. I don’t know for sure—I’ve never properly used my flame-work. But we don’t have any fire and—”

Erris raised his hand between them and clicked his fingers. A small flame danced on the end of his thumb as if it were an oil lamp.

Thurin’s eyes widened in amazement. “How . . . ?”

Yaz waved the question away. “It doesn’t matter. Can you burn the coal?”

“What? No! It’s all the way up there and the flame . . . is . . . here . . .” Thurin seemed hypnotised by the flame. It started to flare, growing several feet tall in the instant before Erris shut it off. He looked surprised, alarmed even, and his thumb was left gently smoking.

Yaz remembered what Thurin had said about the need to use his ice-work at least every few days or the energies built inside him and burst out more strongly and with less control when he tried to use them. His flame-work had been building up for a lifetime. When he let the talent loose the results might be spectacular.

“Come with me!” She started running.

Yaz crossed the crater and scrambled out, breaking cover. She made for the coal pile that had fallen from the shaft over a hundred feet above her.

“Yaz of the Ictha!” Pome roared, spotting her at last.

Yaz ignored the shout. She splashed through the puddled meltwater and reached the coal. Behind her came Erris and Thurin but also Zeen and Quell.

“Can you burn that?” Yaz pointed at the pile. “And lift the fire up to the ceiling, then burn the coal in the shaft?”

“I have no idea!” Thurin stared up at the two small, icicle-hung holes in the ceiling far above, one blackened with coal dust. “And why would I want to?”

“It would bring the cage down fast,” Zeen said.

“There’s no telling what it would do,” Erris said. “There are too many unknown parameters.”

“One thing is pretty sure,” Quell said. “If it works then we’re all going to get wet.”

Behind them the hunter began to advance again, footsteps clanging on the rock. The gerants were coming too, making some kind of battle chant: “Hruh! Hruh! Hruh!” A deep, throbbing sound intended to terrify.

Erris clicked his fingers again to produce another flame and crouched to hold it to the nearest coal. “If you’re going to do this do it n—”

The coal seemed to suck the flame from Erris’s fingers, drawing it in as if it were a hole rather than just a black rock. For a moment Yaz thought the fire had disappeared but Thurin extended both hands, fingers splayed as though warming them at the sigil pot in the drying chamber.

In the next heartbeat the first coal turned orange, a fierce bright orange. The nearest coals were already a dull red where they touched it.

“Stand back.” Thurin’s voice shook, though Yaz couldn’t tell if it was with the effort of burning the piece of coal or with the effort of holding back.

She stepped away, glancing over her shoulder at the advancing line of Pome’s warriors. She was about to say “hurry” when a wall of heat pressed against her. As she stumbled and fell she became aware that the whole heap of coals had turned from black to a fierce orange-yellow and that the roaring in her ears came from the column of flame rising above the blaze.

Thurin stood silhouetted between Yaz and the burning coal, his arms raised as if conducting the inferno. The tongue of fire licked two dozen yards into the air but still couldn’t quite reach the star-speckled ice. Rather than growing, the blaze had begun to shrink already, its fuel expended in one extravagant gesture.

Yaz flung out her own hand from where she lay on the wet rock and the dozen fragments of her hunter’s star shot from her pocket, streaking into the column of fire.