fit a dozen people if they could cling at different heights on the inside without having fingers and toes crushed by the passing ice. Failing that then maybe five or six could cram in together at the bottom, but getting in would require climbing up the slanting outside, and once inside they would be helpless, exposed to any attack until the thing was eventually hauled back up into the ice.
When running for your life it pays to keep your attention on the ground in front of you. Something snagged Yaz’s foot and she went down hard. The air exploded from her lungs. Her crossed arms saved her face from striking the stone but the impact still left her vision crowded with new lights and her mind full of fuzz. She was dimly aware of Kao catching up and thundering past her.
By the time Yaz managed to roll and sit up, the leading Tainted were almost on her, their shrieks filling her ears. The nearest, ahead of the dirty wave washing toward her, was a thin man with long, matted hair streaming behind him, and a wild gleam in his eye. He had blood around his mouth and chin, running down a filthy neck. Probably not his own blood.
Paralysed in the moment Yaz could do nothing, she hadn’t even time to be afraid. Something large and dark passed over her. The ragged man reversed direction as something far more solid hit him. Kao crashed in among the first of the Tainted with a roar, bringing four or five of them down. As he rolled to a halt he managed brief eye contact and in that moment yelled at Yaz to run.
Yaz gained her feet and staggered back. Kao had vanished beneath a heap of snarling Tainted. He surged up once, shedding bodies, but more piled on, bringing him down again. Further back the Tainted’s gerants were drawing closer, led by the older red-haired gerant that Theus had possessed when he left Thurin.
Although she could do nothing for the boy Yaz found herself unable to abandon him. Any energies she took from the river that flows through all things and flung at the Tainted would break Kao just the same. Her power was a blunt weapon.
On all sides the Broken, scattered by the flood, were going down in isolated ones and twos beneath the attack. One of Pome’s gerants had made a stand before a corroding girder, skewering a Tainted on his iron spear, then a second, then swinging both spear and impaled bodies as a club to sweep others from their feet.
Another fleet-footed Tainted, clearly part hunska, leapt over Kao and his attackers, coming straight at Yaz. Erris came out of nowhere to fell the man with a punch. The next three to come at her fell to a blindingly swift combination of kicks and punches that Erris executed with a dancer’s grace.
More attackers flanked them. The sounds of battle rang out across the ruins, a dozen different fights, with knots of defenders holding out here and there. In the midst of the Tainted, like an island that the sea has swept around, Pome’s hunter flailed bloody limbs. Theus and six other gerants had brought with them thick, rusty lengths of chain and swung them at the hunter, careless of any others who might be hit. The clatter and boom of their assault could be heard even above all the screaming and dying in between. They weren’t trying to batter their enemy to death though. They swung to snare and entangle. When a leg or arm became trapped then other gerants would join in to haul at the hunter, seeking to unbalance it and drag it across the rock.
Arka and a knot of her faction had emerged from one of the larger entrances to the undercity not far from Yaz, and now battled to hold their position. They stood with shield on arm, swinging hide-wrapped iron bars, trying to club down the Tainted. Even as Yaz glanced their way, the woman beside Arka, a gatherer named Mirri, fell backwards into the hole, grappling with two assailants, neither older than twelve.
Erris fought like ten demons, felling even the biggest Tainted as if they were children while twisting from the thrust of spears and the swinging of blades. Those he felled seldom rose