The Girl and the Stars (Book of the Ice #1) - Mark Lawrence Page 0,172

bloodcurdling screams lead her gaze toward the long slope.

“Tainted!” She tried to yell but broke into a fit of coughing before shouting with more force, “The Tainted are coming!”

A ragged swarm of the Tainted were surging down the smooth stone of the slope, their numbers far in excess of Arka’s and Pome’s forces combined. A screaming, raging horde, some armed for war with spears, shields, and bone clubs, many empty-handed, carrying nothing but the furious desire to kill.

“We have to run.” Quell came to help Yaz to her feet, still shaking water from his hair.

Yaz glanced at the gaping hole in the ceiling with no cable hanging from it. At the Broken scattered in disarray, and at the massed insanity sweeping toward them. The cage hadn’t fallen, there was to be no rescue.

“There’s nowhere to run,” she said. “I’ve killed us all.”

36

THE FIRST OF the Broken to be reached by the lead runners of the Tainted were those that had been swept furthest by the flood. The lightest. Mainly the youngest, those the tribes would still call children, and the elderly.

Theus must have been watching from the heights of the slope, waiting to see how the conflict with Pome would resolve, waiting for the best time to strike, when the Broken were at their weakest. Now his minions swept over the most vulnerable of their foe, clubbing them into submission rather than killing them. Yaz saw skin hoods being pulled over faces, wires looped about wrists and drawn tight. The Tainted had a worse fate than death in store for those they captured and they were bent on captives where they could be taken without too much risk. Those who proved resistant to possession would be tortured for sport. Yaz had seen the gruesome evidence with her own eyes.

One of the most far-flung gerants rose before the charge, bearing her large square shield before her, and the advance broke around her, one Tainted bouncing off her war-board with a bone-crunching impact. They closed about her though, pulling her feet from out beneath her.

Pome’s hunter managed to right itself and went clanking toward the attack. Its master still lay hidden somewhere but he had clearly seen where the main threat now lay.

“Yaz!” Kao reached her side, dripping wet and desperate. “What are we going to do?”

Yaz opened her mouth but found no words. She didn’t know what they were going to do. The Tainted were sprinting toward them, just fifty yards away, grinning, howling, frantic, weapons raised. Yaz had nothing but her empty hands. Even her stars were gone.

“Yaz!” Kao repeated. Despite his fear he balled both fists and braced himself for the impact.

Yaz looked past what lay before her. It was hard to see the river that runs through all things with scores of maniacs charging straight at her, but she saw it, its bright waters flowing through the strange angles that lie behind the world. Even as she reached for the power she shuddered to think of the carnage to follow. She doubted it would even save her. The Tainted would leap over the shredded remains of their front ranks and come at her through the gore.

For a moment Yaz thought the noise she heard was some new horror rushing at her through the Tainted’s charge, or even that it came from the river itself. Within the space of two heartbeats the sound swelled behind her, a crashing, whooshing that drove a wind before it, and then ended with the loudest boom in the world.

The Tainted faltered but kept coming, forced on by their own momentum.

“Run!” Yaz grabbed Kao’s arm, hauling him around.

In the place where the coal had fallen a huge piece of ironwork now lay at an angle, partly supported by a cable that led off into the great hole funnelling up into the ceiling. The sudden melting of the shaft must have taken the priests by surprise or been seen as what it was, a cry for rescue, and led to them dropping rather than lowering the cage into which the Broken would load their scavenged iron.

The cage was a tube about two yards wide and six yards tall, large enough to