The Girl and the Stars (Book of the Ice #1) - Mark Lawrence Page 0,178

pain was as nothing she had experienced before and with a shriek she released the borrowed power before it destroyed her. She flung it forward in a thick beam of brightness that cut through several Tainted before it reached the rock just before Theus’s feet. The stone absorbed the bolt, glowing with the same spreading gold that Yaz’s hands had shown, and shattered rather than exploded. A great sheet of rock fell in broken pieces, taking Theus, his gerants, and a score of other Tainted down with it, falling into the chamber that had been hidden beneath their feet. The sound shook the ground as if the ice sky itself had fallen, raw, violent, bigger than mountains. The hole was a rough rectangle with jagged edges, many yards on each side, and dust rose from it in a big curling cloud, whooshing up toward the icy heavens.

37

THE DUST CLOUD rolled over Yaz, taking the ice sky away and most of the light with it. The boom, louder even than that of the collection cage hitting the floor, had for a moment stolen everyone’s voice. An eerie silence, as tenuous and fleeting as the dust cloud itself, hung in the air.

At first it was groans and calls to friends that nibbled away at the thickness of the silence. Yaz called for Erris and found her voice distant as if the crash of falling stone had deadened her hearing. The snarling of the Tainted came next, orienting themselves in this unexpected grey world. Yaz found a pair of bodies resuming their struggle and hauled the thinner one away to reveal someone familiar. “Quell?” She coughed on the dust, trying not to choke. The man looked almost like Quell beneath the grey.

“Yaz!” It was Quell. He gripped her arm and used her as support while he clambered to his feet.

“Get to the cage,” Yaz said.

He nodded, uncertain of the direction, then set off, pulling her with him.

“Wait. Thurin is close.”

The howls were rising again from many directions. The sounds of renewed fighting echoed out, new screams of pain and anger and fright.

“Yaz?” Against the odds Thurin stumbled from the sifting clouds.

“The cage,” she said, and let Quell pull her on. “Erris! The cage!”

Thurin limped after them. Glancing back she saw the left side of his face ran with blood, so dark as to look black in the half-light.

By the time Erris jogged into view to join them the dust had settled enough for a good ten yards of visibility. They passed ghost-grey people identifiable as the Broken only by the fact that they didn’t run madly to attack them. Quell led on, taking Yaz further from the front line where the flood had swept her, back past the positions Arka’s followers had established.

“Zeen! Maya? Kao?” Yaz called the last name without hope. The boy had been among the first to go down, throwing himself at the Tainted to save her. “Kaylal? Arka?”

They reached the cage, looming above them, a thing as alien as the hunters, having no place on the ice. It still leaned at a steep angle, supported by the forking cable at one end and by the edge touching the rock at the other. The cable end was high enough that Yaz couldn’t reach any of it with outstretched arms.

“If we climb on it they’ll have to come up at us,” Yaz said.

“Or bring us down with spears,” Thurin said.

“I have this.” Quell had picked up one of the big gerant shields on the way. A grey board as dust covered as he was. “We can hold out until they haul the cage back up. Maybe.”

“We’ve no food or shelter,” Erris noted.

“No.” Yaz hung her head. It had taken the only member of their group not to need either of these vital things to point out their absence. The boards and fungi had doubtless been washed away and swirled down into the undercity through a dozen different holes, along with the last of any remaining hope.

“They’re where we left them,” Thurin said. “I convinced the water to leave them behind.”

“Thank the gods.” Yaz blinked at Thurin, amazed and elated in equal