The Girl and the Stars (Book of the Ice #1) - Mark Lawrence Page 0,84

presented with a choice. Soon the sounds of her own panic—the rasp of her breath and the pounding of her heart—drowned out any other noise. Finally she tripped and fell, too exhausted to rise from the floor. She lay, hunting for breath, and when she found it there was nothing to be heard but her breathing. She was alone in the vast labyrinth of the city, with neither Erris nor Arka to help her.

* * *

YAZ SAT, RUBBING her ankle. By starlight she saw that at some point the rock had moved and created an unexpected step across a room. This had been what tripped her. The pain in her ankle made her remember Kao hobbling along after his fall. She hoped Arka had led him and the others to safety.

After a time Yaz got to her feet and limped on. She wondered how far the others might have got. It didn’t seem that she had been delayed very long. If she knew the way to go she might even beat them out. First out or last, though, she knew it would be a different Yaz that hauled herself back beneath the ice sky of the great cavern. She had seen a thing that she had never thought to see, and something amid the gentle swaying of those trees had found its way into her heart. Her imagination burned and every wild thought seemed edged with possibility.

For now, though, the floor held most of Yaz’s attention as she walked, and her ears strained for any hint of hunters or the black monster that had chased her. In these endless halls the only thing that would save her from death by thirst or a violent end in a hunter’s claws would be the marks left by scavengers to show the way.

When she came to the first decision point and saw the scratches at the base of the wall Yaz gave a broken gasp. She shocked herself by nearly breaking into tears for the second time in a day. Until she saw the small arrow she hadn’t allowed herself to acknowledge how much the thought of being lost here had terrified her. The scratches looked quite fresh, not scuffed and almost worn away like those Arka had shown them. It meant she was still deep in the city, almost at the limits of the scavengers’ explorations.

Following the markings led Yaz by efficient routes to a series of stairs, natural fissures, and vertical shafts hung with ropes. With cables, to be more accurate. Steel cables, some with plastic coatings. Yaz wondered how these words came to be in her head. They belonged to Erris. She frowned and moved on.

This deep there were no concessions to trainee scavengers and the climbs demanded both a level of skill and a tolerance for heights that Yaz didn’t possess.

“I’m not scared of heights. I’m scared of drops.” Yaz pushed the words out past gritted teeth as she hauled herself over the lip of a shaft taller than ten trees stacked one atop the next. Sore-handed, arms aching, she lay with a dry mouth and wondered for the hundredth time just how deep she was. Only her Ictha strength was keeping her alive, her grip compensating to some degree for her lack of talent when it came to scaling natural rock or tackling a hundred yards of dangling cable. It definitely helped that she could draw up the whole of her body weight with one arm.

Yaz pulled herself away from the mouth of the shaft then got to her hands and knees, groaning. She had come to the city in the hopes of securing a star large enough to safely drive the taint from her brother. She was leaving empty-handed and half-alive, knowing that the city while still a city was also a being that would use all its resources to prevent her returning. More than that, her efforts to escape had somehow bound her into a conflict between unknown gods that lived beyond reality. And now, in that strange somewhere, a being called Seus, that was both the mind of a distant city and, from what Yaz could see, also a dark god, had marked her for destruction.

“These things too the wind shall take.” Yaz found comfort in the old saying. Cursing at herself to muster the required strength she