The Girl and the Stars (Book of the Ice #1) - Mark Lawrence Page 0,69

her Arka stopped and turned, the others bunching around her.

“Run.” Yaz wanted to say more, needed to say more, but that was the only word to escape her lips.

“Yaz?” Arka repeated, tilting her head.

“Run!” A shout now. “Hunter!”

The screech of metal on stone, growing louder, coming closer. Quina and Petrick were already running back. The hunter dropped from the nearest vertical shaft, scraping sparks from the walls then absorbing the impact of its landing on five articulated legs. A nightmare creature built from scraps such as the Broken hunted, iron plates, springs and coils, chains, wheels, and wires, its core a black fist from which a hot red light leaked, escaping through every chink in the monster’s armour.

The thing lunged for Arka’s group with one of several arms, none of them the same. Although too short to reach across the intervening gap the arm proved versatile: the three-fingered grabber at the end detached and flew out to hit Thurin in the back, flooring him. Yaz started forward as the others ran toward her. The long metal fingers of the grabber were closing on Thurin even as the chain attaching it to the hunter’s arm began to haul it back. Before Yaz had crossed half the gap Thurin had twisted free and was up, sprinting for freedom, large pieces of his coat dangling from the iron fingers that had so nearly trapped him.

“Run!” Arka shouted Yaz’s own instruction back at her.

The hunter scrabbled across the stone floor, claws seeking purchase, accelerating slowly but with the promise of great speed.

Yaz and Thurin were last through the doorway Arka selected, and before they were ten yards along the corridor the hunter slammed into the entrance behind them, a host of black metal limbs reaching for them while mechanical legs thrashed to try to cram the monster’s bulk in after its prey. Yaz heard the hunter’s talons snapping closed on the air just behind her. She ran on, taking a corner at speed and crashing into the wall. Behind her the hunter released a long scream of rage, a noise like a metal file being scraped across a rough edge, only magnified a million-fold, vibrating through Yaz’s bones and setting her teeth on edge.

“Wait!” Arka caught them as they came around the turn. “It can’t follow. It will look for other routes to overtake us.” She drew a deep breath, pale faced in the light of the star she held above them.

The scream came again, discordant and making Yaz’s stomach want to empty itself.

“Sounds like we made it angry.” Thurin tried to smile. His furs hung around him in tatters, his exposed body lean and muscular.

Arka did not return the smile. “It’s calling for other hunters.” She turned away, shaking her head. “We need to go slow. Be vigilant. Take the narrow ways. Too many scavengers are lost when they run from one hunter into the jaws of another.”

Arka led them at a cautious pace, muttering to herself from time to time.

“I thought she said you hardly ever see a hunter,” Maya whispered.

“Normally you wouldn’t,” Thurin said. One of the metal fingers had scored a red line across his exposed back, beaded with blood.

“Only since the drop . . . there’s been no normal.” Petrick glanced toward Yaz.

“I . . .” Yaz hung her head. She couldn’t argue. The jump that had upended her life seemed to be turning the Broken’s expectations upside down too. As if the waves from her impact hadn’t died to ripples and vanished against that stony shore but instead had passed on through the ice, growing and growing all the time.

Less than half an hour later they saw the hunter again, charging at impossible speed the length of a shadow-haunted hall, betrayed by its clatter as Arka ushered them into a narrow passage. And a short while after that a long, thin arm lunged out from some narrow pipe at foot level, scything talons that narrowly missed Quina, who leapt above them with inhuman swiftness. The rest of them edged around the blindly reaching hand, just beyond the reach of its iron claws.

After that Arka seemed to have lost the creature, though