The Girl and the Stars (Book of the Ice #1) - Mark Lawrence Page 0,174

again but even as they lay groaning they reached to snare his ankles or rolled to trip him.

Despite his efforts Erris couldn’t defend on all sides and Yaz fell beneath a raging, blood-soaked woman foaming at the mouth. Erris kicked the woman clear but a near-identical Tainted caught him in the side of the head with a wild swing of her bone club. As Erris twisted away to deal with some new threat Yaz found herself looking up from the ground at the descending foot of a large man, part gerant.

The stamp that might have crushed her head never arrived. The man fell back, spraying crimson, to reveal Quell swinging his makeshift axe at another attacker. Yaz got to her feet and raised her trembling blood-speckled hands before her. Quell had killed a man. The look his face bore made a stranger of her oldest friend. The carnage she had feared so much unfolded on every side. And as the Tainted died, the demons inside them would surely find fresh blood and bone to wear. Soon they would be tainting new victims, sliding in past their rage as they joined the fight and flung the wells of their most primal emotions wide open.

All around Yaz her friends were fighting and dying. She had no idea where her brother was, where Thurin or Maya were. It was like when the dagger-fish took Azad from the boat in front of her. A disaster seemingly dragging itself through the heartbeats and yet still too swift to stop. A nightmare that could be turned around if only she had the strength, if only she weren’t broken. But she had nothing to strike with and even her enemies were innocent victims of the black ice. Her only strength lay in the river that flows through all things, and that was an axe far larger than the one that Quell was swinging. If she used it then friend and foe alike would burn.

Another wave of Tainted charged in while Erris and Quell were still engaged off to Yaz’s left and right. More screaming lunatics flung themselves at Yaz and yet somehow they deflected away before reaching her.

“We need to get down into the undercity.” Thurin stepped up beside her, wet black hair framing his pale face. Another Tainted leapt at them and Thurin slapped him aside without making contact, the power of his magic hauling on the water inside the man.

Theus and his core of tainted gerants came through the rest of the Tainted as though they were wading through chest-high water. Somehow they had finished with the hunter. When they reached Yaz there would be no stopping them.

Even as Thurin shouted again about the undercity a fallen Tainted lunged up to catch him around the knees and bring him to the ground. More of the Tainted closed in. Yaz swung a fist and found she still had enough strength in her arms to fell the first of them.

The attack that brought Yaz down came from behind. Two impossibly strong hands clamped to either side of her head and hauled her back. In the next instant she was falling. She never hit the rock. Instead she found herself pressed to warm soil, grass around her face, the slow buzz of something passing by her ear. An insect. A bee! Erris’s names rising to her tongue.

She lifted herself and found Erris sitting nearby, his knees raised enough to rest his forearms on. Behind him blue sky, puffy white clouds, distant trees. And although he looked the same, something about the rich brownness of his skin and the tight black curl of his hair seemed more real than the body he had made to leave the city with her.

Panic seized her. Images of the Tainted howling past bloody teeth. “Where—”

“I’m sorry. I can’t save you. There are too many of them.” Erris offered a sad smile.

“You’ve killed us!” Yaz gasped in horror.

Erris shook his head. “Time is passing much more slowly here. We are close enough to the city to reach the void. But only because it remembers us. In many senses part of us never left.” He raised a hand against her next question. “We have time to talk and to still go back to the fight before