The Girl and the Stars (Book of the Ice #1) - Mark Lawrence Page 0,64

frosty here, as cold as it had been in Eular’s small cave out on the margins on the far side of the Broken’s territory. The constant sound of dripping had faded then gone and Yaz hadn’t noticed it leave. For a moment even the ice itself was quiet—no distant groans, no creaking, just a frosty silence. Yaz found the stillness more beautiful in its rarity than even the swirling wonders her gaze tracked across the walls. A peace that held the breath in her lungs. Holy perhaps. After a life lived leaning into the wind she could imagine that silence housed its own gods.

In that moment, standing beneath the vast ethereal ceiling of the city cavern, Yaz decided that this would be her new life. She and Zeen would remain with the Broken. She would refuse the regulator’s claim on her.

“Why’ve we stopped?” Kao glanced over his shoulder then pushed to the front. He looked as though he might be about to whistle for the echo, but a dark look from Arka diverted him into another question. “Where’s the city?”

“What remains is under the ground in tunnels and chambers carved through the rock.” Arka pointed toward the middle of the chamber. “There are a great number of ways into it in that area.”

“What about the hunters?” Quina asked.

“They are generally deep in the complex, roaming the regions where there is still material to be scavenged, which is where they will find scavengers to hunt. If they try guarding some of the entrances we just use an alternative. But one hunter did come out today so we will go carefully.” As they descended the long slope Arka began to point to locations on the cavern floor. “At the first sign of a hunter we run and we hide. We do not all hide in the same place. To hide you want to get deep. You’ve already seen what kind of reach they have. The best spots are marked with purple splodges. These are the ones I’m pointing out to you. But any hiding place is better than none.”

“Hunters are made of metal,” Yaz said. “Why do they chase us? Can they eat flesh?”

Arka paused before answering. “Nobody knows. They carry their victims away and we don’t see them again. Not even their bones.” She drew in a deep breath. “It’s overconfidence that gets you captured. They take the best of us. Those who delve deepest and have been scavenging the longest. Those who start to think they’re too good at scavenging to ever get caught. Those who oppose them when they roam into our caverns.” She frowned as if assailed by a painful memory. “But hunters are certainly not the only danger down in the city. I’ve known scavengers lost to cave-ins, to strange machinery, gas, explosions . . . or just plain lost and unable to find their way back. It’s big down there. Much bigger than what you see up here. A world below ours just like we are a world below the ice clans.”

As they drew nearer to the two gateposts a pressure began to exert itself on Yaz. At first a mental pressure, a reluctance to advance, and then a physical one where the air itself pushed against her. None of the others appeared to feel it.

Yaz pressed on even as the two black posts swallowed her vision, driving everything around them into insignificance until only they and she remained. Both seemed a hundred feet tall, a thousand, taller than the Black Rock itself, and as they grew the space between them diminished, stealing away the possibility of progress.

“Are you alright?” Quina asked beside her. The girl reached to set a hand to Yaz’s arm, bird-quick, tentative, the contact broken as soon as it was made.

“Y-yes,” Yaz lied. She found herself at the back of the group, stumbling. Grinding her teeth together she set her gaze firmly on the floor before her feet and focused on taking the next step. She couldn’t let them leave her here for Pome to find. And what she needed to save Zeen lay down there, in the city under the city.

Even with her head down she could see the gateposts in her mind, huge with forbidding. “I can . . .” Each step came harder,