measure. His ice-work had advanced seemingly in leaps and bounds. When they first met he showed off by lifting a puddle. Now he steered the currents of a wild flood and threw grown men through the air. “We need to load it. Quickly. And search for the others.”
Quell opened his mouth to speak but at that moment the cage began to straighten up. “They’re hauling it back!”
“No,” Thurin said. “They’ll lift it a little off the ground. So they know it’s vertical and easy to load.”
“How do they know?” Yaz asked, ready to grab the bars should it start to rise beyond reach.
The cage straightened but instead of rocking on its base it scraped across the ground then began to swing free beneath the still-rising cable. A moment later it stopped rising and just hung there swinging slowly.
“They must be able to tell by the weight on the lifting mechanism,” Erris said. “Let’s hurry.”
With the dust settling all around them and visibility heading back to normal the four of them hurried to get the stashed food and shelter. They worked in pairs heaping fungi onto stacked boards then carrying the loads to the cage. The Tainted and Broken resumed their fights, knots of Arka’s and Pome’s factions struggling against the possessed intruders from the black ice. Even with Theus and his gerants removed from the battleground along with a score or more of others the Tainted still had more than twice the combined numbers of the Broken factions. The pause had, however, allowed the Broken a moment to organise their defence.
Guilt dogged Yaz’s steps as she worked. They were preparing their escape while others fought and kept the enemy from them. Worse still, Zeen was still out there. But without the cage and supplies she had no salvation to offer her brother even if she could find him. She knew though that she would not be leaving without him.
Yaz and Quell were returning to the cage with their third load before the first band of Tainted came running at them. Quell set down his end of the boards, spilling fungi, and raised the bloody axe hanging at his hip.
Yaz looked at the five Tainted sprinting toward them across the wet rock. Two ragged children, two painfully thin women, their dirty hair flying out behind them, and a man of more solid build, his chest bare and bleeding from several long cuts. She could already imagine the ruin that the swing of Quell’s axe would wreck. “Couldn’t we . . .” She raised her fists and mimed a punch.
“They want to kill us, Yaz!” Quell readied himself for his strike. “There’s more coming.”
“Please!” The feeling Yaz put into the word was aimed at the gods as much as at Quell. It wasn’t his fault they were in this impossible situation. It wasn’t his fault she had jumped.
Despite his shorter legs it was the smallest of the two boys who reached them first. A child with a touch of hunska in him. Zeen had been just like him until she drove out the demons. Yaz stepped in front of Quell to intercept the boy, swinging a punch. The boy proved too fast, ducking under her swing and leaping onto Yaz, tearing at her face.
The boards went skittering across the ice as Yaz grabbed and rolled, scattering and crushing carefully hoarded fungi. She got on top of her attacker and banged his head against the rock, once, twice, until the fight went out of him. A sharp pain in her shoulder told her another child had leapt on her. Yaz got to her feet, rearing up beneath the second attacker as a third hammered into her. Close by, Quell felled a man, clubbing him two-handed across the chest, his axe abandoned.
The Tainted came too quickly and too many to be fought off. Food and shelter were kicked aside, trampled, her last hopeless plan in ruins. Yaz managed to shrug off the child on her back, crying out as the girl’s teeth lost hold of her shoulder. The child fell to the ground and as the girl rolled to grab Quell’s leg Yaz saw that it was Jerra, the girl with the short brown hair who had arrived with Arka an hour