The Girl and the Stars (Book of the Ice #1) - Mark Lawrence Page 0,43

said. “Living under your skin as a separate thing. Or all your greed, or lust. I’ve seen it happen, once. A demon made just of you. Crawling over your body like a stain. That’s what it looks like, just a stain, no bigger than your hand. A taint. So be careful around the stars. Even the smaller ones. They weren’t made for us. They aren’t good or evil. Just dangerous. Like fire.”

* * *

THE COAL-WORM’S TUNNEL eventually descended to the bedrock again and connected with a melt chamber. The air was warmer than back at the settlement, the dripping faster; small streams wound their way across the rock, vanishing beneath the ice at the chamber walls. Yaz led them past more warriors into a cavern lit by half a dozen bright stars whose light revealed a collection of sheds beside a lake, and above them a ceiling that funnelled up into a steep but slanting shaft vanishing into darkness.

“This is where I fell,” Quina said, her narrow face growing tight at the memory.

“Me too. But I made a bigger splash!” Kao slapped his belly and chest.

“What’s that smell?” Maya sniffed. Ever since coal-worms had been mentioned she’d been jumpy. It was hard to remember that the timid child came from the Axit. If she had not been dropped she would soon have worn their bone piercings through her eyebrows and, allegedly, beneath her furs, blood tattoos recording the clan’s victories over past enemies. Walking close behind Maya it seemed to Yaz that something odd happened each time the girl flinched at a new sound. A subtle change, so slight it might just be imagination. The twilight seemed to flinch with her, as if just for a moment the shadows themselves drew in their breath. Maya sniffed again. “What is it?”

Yaz inhaled slowly through her nose. The air smelled of blood and fire and harsh, alien scents with sharp angles to them. “I don’t know.”

“Metal, being melted down,” Arka said.

“Metal melts?” Yaz blinked.

“If you get it hot enough. A lot of things do. Even rock!” Arka took them toward the huts.

As they drew closer a man in a thick hide apron emerged. The skin on his bare arms glistened with sweat and black smudges decorated bulging muscle. He grunted at Arka and took two handfuls of random metal pieces from the bin beside the hut. The mixture included toothed wheels of unblemished silvery metal, thin black wire in coils, and rusting iron rods with traces of some coating that had been stripped away.

“That’s Ixen. He doesn’t say much.” Arka caught the door before it closed and took them inside.

The heat hit Yaz like a blow and she staggered beneath it. The shed was a longish hall whose central feature was a large bowl of what looked like stone, supported on thick chains that ran to the ceiling. Ixen dumped his collection of metal pieces into the bowl, discarding one and adding some more iron rods from a nearby stack.

“It’s like cooking,” Arka said. “You have to get the mixture right.”

While Ixen added his finishing touches a bony woman, also in a scorched hide apron and little else, came from the rear of the shed to lower a heavy sigil-covered pot on another chain so that it nestled among the scrap.

“That pot looks like it’s iron but it’s not. It can get hot enough to melt all the other metals in there without melting itself.”

“So . . . how did you make it?” Quina asked.

Arka frowned. “That happened before my time. But I guess we’d be in trouble if we lost it.” She frowned again. “Though we do occasionally find metal it can’t melt.”

The woman with the skull-like face took a pole with a scoop on it and began to move stars from a box to one side, dropping them one by one into the grey pot. As she added them each ceased its shining and instead the sigils on the pot began to emit a redder glow along with a fierce heat. Yaz backed off, not wanting to cause the stars to burn too bright and drive the sigils to incinerate them all.

“It’s the heat,” she said