The Girl and the Stars (Book of the Ice #1) - Mark Lawrence Page 0,177

turned to Erris as he caught her up. “Can you show me the undercity? I mean how it lies beneath the stone?”

Erris frowned in concentration then nodded. The Tainted and the Broken faded into smoky memories; even the stone beneath their feet became translucent, and shining through it she could see a confusion of chambers and tunnels stretching down into untold depths. In some places you would have to mine through fifty or a hundred yards of rock to find a void. In others the nearest chambers almost touched the surface. In others they did touch the surface, and those were the holes down which the recent flood had drained in a remarkably short time given the volume of water.

Yaz made a slow turn. Thurin had wanted them to escape to the undercity but even if the nearest entrance were just yards away, and it wasn’t, it would still be too far with all of them already grappling with the foe. Yaz tried to see if there were some way she might direct any power she took from the river into the rock to forge a new escape route. But the nearest chamber that lay close to the surface was nearer to Theus and the advancing gerants. They would reach it first.

“Send me back to the fight,” Yaz said. “I mean, wake me up, or whatever it is you do.”

“I’m not sending you. If we go we’ll go together.”

“I thought . . .” Yaz frowned. “I thought you had coral reefs to see.”

Erris smiled a slow, regretful smile. “I had coral reefs to show you. I have spent too long alone in such places. The only joy left is in sharing them. I would rather share your last minutes than spend another eternity in sunshine and green fields by myself, Yaz.”

Yaz didn’t know how to answer that. “Keep them off me for a few moments more. I’m going to try something.”

Erris nodded. He reached for her face, one warm hand shaping itself to the curve of her cheek, some urgent and unexpected need swelled within her and she opened her mouth to speak, but suddenly everything was screaming and falling again.

Yaz’s fall ended with a sharp pain and a sudden loss of breath. The Tainted that had brought her down clung to her legs while a howling child no older than Zeen hurled herself at Yaz’s face, biting and clawing.

A heartbeat later the girl sailed away, plucked from Yaz by Erris and thrown into the advancing masses. He hauled Yaz to her feet while kicking her other assailant clear.

“Make it fast!” Erris pivoted to kick a large man high in the chest, sending him tumbling back before he could swing the ice hatchet in his hand.

As Erris threw himself into the oncoming lines, kicking, twisting, and punching, Yaz tried to see past them as she had in the vision she had so recently shared. The river that runs through all things was there before her, thin, ethereal, but within reach if she could just stretch . . . She extended her arms, her eyes defocused, fingers straining. The river eluded her, like a sneeze that was there but wouldn’t quite make itself known. The screaming and roaring and falling bodies made it hard to find. She needed her stars but they were gone. She needed time but the booming voices of the gerants flanking Theus told her that she had none.

“I can’t . . .” It was too soon, and her work in the black ice with the hunter’s star must have used the same muscle as reaching for the river because it seemed to retreat before her. Her friends were dying. Innocents were falling on all sides. “I can’t.” And suddenly she could. Suddenly the river was beneath her fingers, swirling around her hands, flowing through her, filling and flooding her, trying to tear her from the moorings of her flesh.

With a cry Yaz pulled free. Even in the depths of their madness the Tainted knew to draw back as Yaz shuddered with the raw energies that pulsed through her. To her own eyes her flesh shone with a golden light. Time fractured around her, different possible Yazes trying to fall in every direction at once. The