The Girl and the Stars (Book of the Ice #1) - Mark Lawrence Page 0,180

before, now host to one of the devils from the black ice.

Immediately another of the Tainted tackled Yaz and for a time punctuated by blows and screams they wrestled each other, rolling back and forth, locked in a vicious struggle. Finally Yaz banged the man’s head against the rock, hard enough to take him out of the fight.

A cry rang out as she raised herself. A cry that cut through the noise, not because it was louder than the din but because she had known that voice all her life and never heard terror in it. Her eyes found the knife in Quell’s side, buried to the hilt, which was still gripped by the grimy hand of the young girl grappling him. Jerra had stabbed him. Jerra who had lowered the rope to save her from Hetta. Even as Yaz looked, Quell was falling, hauled down from behind by a heavily muscled ice-miner, another of the Broken newly overwhelmed by devils freed from the Tainted he’d killed.

“No!”

The Tainted closed on all sides. If Thurin and Erris were still fighting they were lost in the press of bodies.

“No.”

A slow calm closed around Yaz, deadening the screams and shouts. Another Tainted hammered into her and although the impact shook her it didn’t reach her core. The world slowed again like it must for a hunska in the throes of their quickness, though it gave her no liberty to act.

“No . . .” She kept eye contact with Quell as he dropped. His hand wrestled for control of the knife whose blade reached deep into his flesh, but his pale-on-white Ictha eyes held hers.

“No.” The same denial that had wrapped her when the regulator pushed Zeen into the pit now owned her once more. She had fallen from her life and now the dream of freedom lay broken. It had always been a dream, like the green ghost in the south taunting her with ancient memories of softer times. But the ice held them. The ice was truth. And now at the end of things she found herself too cold for dreaming.

Another half-felt impact and she too was falling. She saw only the river that flows through all things, impossibly distant, the thinnest of lines far below her, too far to reach. The river couldn’t be touched twice in a day, let alone twice in the space of minutes. When she had touched it twice in a day it had been the stars that allowed it. The stars brought it closer.

As she fell Yaz became aware of the stars, constellations of them, watching her from the ice-locked heavens. Stars like dust. A line joining each of them to her and her to each of them. Stars above her in the ice. Stars below her in the undercity. Stars on every side. A million threads, with her held weightless at the centre.

The river lay too far below her and too thin, but she was falling. Hadn’t Theus said that, ancient in his darkness? Hadn’t he told Thurin that we fall through our lives? Yaz fell toward the river and with each moment it grew closer. Somewhere far away there were screams and howls. In that place there was pain and the dying of friends. “No.” Yaz couldn’t reach to touch the river. But she could dive into it. And she did.

In the black skies of the long night when the dragons no longer lash their aurora tails across the heavens and only the uncountable crimson eyes of the dying stars bear witness, there comes from time to time a white and shooting fire. It is as if one of those low-banked hearths has gathered all its fuel in a last blaze of defiance and hurled itself from the impossible heights to burn a brilliant path toward the ground.

Mother Mazai had a tale wherein once during her youth a white light reached in through the hides of her family’s tent and rolled their shadows across the far walls. And scrambling from their beds into the killing cold Mother Mazai’s family had watched, ankle-deep in the dry ice of the polar night, as a ball of blinding whiteness carved through the sky, shaking the ice with thunder until it fell from view with one last crash that