The Girl and the Stars (Book of the Ice #1) - Mark Lawrence Page 0,181

set the powder-ice dancing into the air.

Mother Mazai said her own grandmother had gone to find where the star had fallen. She went alone, wrapped in so many hides a hoola would have run from her if any such roamed so far north. There was no sense in it, Mazai said. It was not the Ictha way to spend precious energy in the long night, but her grandmother said she had seen the end of her days approach and that the Gods in the Sky would want one of the true people to stand witness to the fall of this star. And so she went.

She returned long after they had given her up for dead, and she died soon after for the cold had its teeth too deep in her for the warmth of the tent to draw them out. But before she fell asleep that last time she said she had found the crater where the star fell and that it was as large as the wandering seas, and in all that great wreckage of ice there was only darkness. The light that had lit up the world was gone. Wholly spent in one last defiance.

* * *

YAZ KNEW SHE was that star.

* * *

SHE STOOD AND her flesh was burning. The Tainted fell away screaming. She held a thousand times more power than she might possibly contain and direct. It would burst from her in every direction, taking her bones with it. But like the shooting star she would have defied the darkness if only for a short time, and when her moment of glory was done there would be nothing of her for the darkness to claim.

Even in her instant of release Yaz thought of the ones she loved. The lines that joined her heart to theirs radiated from her. Quell, her foundation, Thurin, as broken as she had become, Erris, both ancient and young, Zeen, her last tie to family, and all the other friends around her. But growing stronger and more clear than even these connections were the million threads that joined her to the stars. The power in her made each star in the ice above and city below known to her with a clarity she had never experienced before. She knew their position, their song, their nature. Even the void star, further below her than the surface of the ice lay above her, even the void star echoed her song. Even its heartbeat quickened in response. Those million threads thrummed and sang with power, a celestial harmony leeching energy from her through uncountable pinpricks.

“No!” Yaz raised both arms, fingers splayed. Above her the ice lit, alive with the colours of every star, from those that would cover a thumbnail to those that could be lost among grains of dust. Beneath her the dark, dead chambers of the undercity knew light once more as the script walls burst into brilliance and the stars as yet unscavenged began to burn with a new fire. Light woke in rooms that had stood for millennia in silent, unbroken blackness. The shadows ran from galleries where the last flame had been borne in the hands of the Missing.

Yaz found herself at the midst of a constellation, of a galaxy, and as she shouted her denial every star orbited around her centre. Each one carved its own curved path through the ice, burning with heat stolen from the river in which she swam.

“Come!” Yaz roared, and the closest stars answered, tearing from the ice to swarm through the air in shimmering tendrils.

The stars broke upon the battlefield like a deluge, a rattling flood of light, surging in response to Yaz’s desire. She wrapped the Tainted in cocoons of glowing stars, flexible dusty skins studded with larger stars.

“Go!” Yaz commanded, feeling through the stars as if they were somehow extensions of her own hands, feeling the number and disposition of the devils in each of their victims. “Leave!” She struck as she had struck with her hunter’s star against first Kao’s chest and then Zeen’s, but now with many thousands of lesser stars and with far greater clarity. The pulse of light as the stars gave out the last of their stolen energy was enough to burn out many of the smallest, leaving nothing of themselves behind.

Yaz