The Girl and the Stars (Book of the Ice #1) - Mark Lawrence Page 0,189

and Zeen, who hung from her ankles.

The cage jolted. Far above, whatever was hauling them up began the task in earnest and they began to rise faster still. Yaz locked eyes with Thurin for an aching moment before a groan from Kao demanded her attention.

“Can’t hold . . . much longer.”

Even after his beating Yaz had thought the gerant equal to the task of supporting a man and two children. Kao started to breathe in short desperate pants. In addition to his own muscular body Kao was carrying Erris, and Yaz had never considered what the body Erris had built for himself might weigh.

“Hold on, Kao!” Yaz wanted to reach down between the board stacks and set her hands to Kao’s bloodless fingers but with her wrists bound outside the cage she could offer only words as comfort. The strength left to her was barely enough to get her to her knees, though once she might have been able to tear free of such bonds.

Beneath Kao the human chain that ended with her brother swayed dangerously. Erris frowned in concentration and slowly, very slowly, brought his knees up, still with the end of the iron rod trapped beneath his heels. Impossibly he brought his knees to his chest with Yaz expecting Maya and Zeen to fall away at any moment.

To the accompaniment of Kao’s puffed breath, and now an agonised keening, Erris released one hand from Kao’s foot and reached down to take a grip on the rod that Maya had killed Bexen with.

Erris raised the rod and its burden of two children one-handed while straightening his legs again. Grim-faced and hurting almost as much as Kao was, Maya transferred her grip to Erris’s ankles.

Erris discarded the rod. Yaz hoped it would miss any of those beneath them, craning their necks to watch. “Zeen. Climb up,” Erris ordered.

Kao’s eyes bulged bloodshot from their sockets. “Gods in the Ice!” His gasp was hardly audible.

Zeen began to climb Maya, the sheer terror of the fall beneath him overriding the Ictha shyness around close contact. He clutched her with an intimacy that would make married Ictha blush in private. Even so he looked precarious, poised to drop, risking his life time and again on the strength of patchwork skins and the stitches holding them together. Twice something tore and he slipped back with a despairing shriek only to catch himself again, both arms hugging Maya’s waist then neck.

Above them the yawning throat of the ice shaft loomed, fringed by dripping icicles. Bands of glowing stardust marbled the first twenty yards of shaft and above that all was darkness. Zeen reached Erris, who grabbed his wrist and lifted him to where he could set both hands gripping Kao’s leg.

Yaz met Kao’s despairing stare. “Hold on, just a little longer!”

Before Zeen was halfway done climbing Kao, Erris lifted Maya to pursue him. They both reached the cage together and hung from the bars, reliving Kao of some of his burden. Next, Erris began to climb up Kao.

By the time the cage entered the shaft Maya and Zeen had moved hand by hand to the edges of the cage bottom, still looking ready to fall at the slightest bump. It was Kao who fell though, dropping away with a despairing wail as Erris reached his neck. Quick as any hunska Erris shot a hand out to grab the cage bars even as the pair of them dropped. The whole cage jolted and Zeen cried out in fear. Yaz’s own scream died in her throat as she saw that Erris now had Kao’s thick wrist clasped in one hand while the other kept them both secured to the cage.

Maya managed to get herself from the bottom of the cage onto the side, holding to the bars with hands and feet while the walls of the ice shaft came closer and closer as they rose. She cut the bonds on Yaz’s wrists as she passed.

Gathering her strength Yaz moved the board stacks a little then helped Zeen with the transition to the side of the cage, making sure she had hold of him while he reached and strained.

Finally, with the dark now broken only by the red