The Girl and the Stars (Book of the Ice #1) - Mark Lawrence Page 0,184

boards for Thurin to catch.

Yaz called out to him. “Erris! Help me with Quell. I can’t lift him like this.”

Erris landed beside them, making the fifteen-foot drop from the side of the cage seem nothing. The bottom of the cage was already approaching shoulder height above the ground.

“Do you know what to do for Quell?” Yaz asked, thinking that in the warm years into which Erris had been born there might have been time to heal the sick rather than discard them.

“I’ll have a look at it on the way up,” he said. “How long was the blade?”

Quell shook his head. “Feels like it’s long enough to poke out the other side.”

Erris pulled himself back onto the gently swinging cage and Kao, with Yaz’s help, lifted Quell toward him. Erris took hold of Quell from behind, reaching one arm under his armpit and across his chest, then began to climb, as if Quell were a small child and his considerable weight was nothing. Quell panted through his teeth, clearly in great pain, but made no cry, just a groan as Erris lifted him over the top of the cage, avoiding the lifting cables.

Yaz turned to make a quick study of Kao. “I thought they’d killed you.” She found her voice thick, tears in her eyes, surprised at how glad she was to be wrong. “Come on. Quickly. We need to find Maya and Zeen and—” She wanted to say Kaylal, she wanted to say Arka, and even Jerra, she wanted to say all of them. But the cage was leaving too fast, and even if they had time it wouldn’t hold many.

“I’ll find them,” Kao said and immediately rushed off, shoving through the growing crowd of onlookers. They looked unusually similar, all of them grey with the dust that clung to their wet hides, their hair, and their skin. Kao swung his head this way and that, his height offering him a better view. He called for Zeen, at first in a tentative almost-hiss as if afraid someone might hear him.

Yaz set off in the opposite direction, pushing her way through the dazed survivors as gently as time allowed, which wasn’t very. They almost seemed to be ghosts, haunting the ruins, but those who had been tainted had more in common with ruins than with ghosts. They had been haunted but now stood empty. She hoped they could rebuild their lives.

“Zeen!” She shouted her brother’s name. The first loud sound since the howling fight and the falling of stars. The greetings and reunions within the grey and milling crowd had been muted, muffled by wonder, as though everyone worried that this was a dream from which too much excitement might wake them. “Zeen!” Yaz had no such worries.

She glanced back to the cage. Erris was gone from it, Quell lying at the bottom coming into view above the heads of the crowd. Thurin stood beside Quell, looking worried. He cast about then found her. “Hurry!” he yelled. “We’ll be out of reach soon!”

Yaz started back reflexively, but someone caught her arm. For a moment she tried to tear herself free, thinking it an attack.

“It’s me. Arka.” Her scars were just visible beneath the layer of damp, grimy dust. “You’re going back.” Not a question.

“Yes.” Yaz relaxed a fraction, glad to have told the truth. “Have you seen Zeen or Maya?”

Arka shook her head as if the question were a distraction. “Pome must have arranged this collection with the priests. Gods know how he speaks to them but it seems that he can.” She furrowed her brow. “But I can’t see Pome anywhere, and those you’ve returned will stand with us. It’s going to be alright here. You don’t have to go back to the priests. Not anymore.”

“I’m not going back to the regulator. I’m going back to the ice, and I’m taking anyone who wants to come with me.”

Arka stepped back, eyes widening. “To die in the wind? That’s madness. The priests will be waiting for you, and even if you could escape them there’s nothing up there for our kind. We’re broken.”

“We’re going to try. Quina—”

“Ha!” Arka barked the laugh, turning the