The Girl and the Stars (Book of the Ice #1) - Mark Lawrence Page 0,85

stood and moved on.

A dozen more rooms, sections of corridor, and she started up another square spiral of steps, seemingly endless. Her legs ached now, the repetition of unfamiliar action melting the endurance from her thighs. She hoped she was returning to sanity, to clarity, and something more familiar. It seemed that the deeper into the world you fell the more unreal things became.

The only thing to take comfort in was a lack of the glowing symbols that had opposed her on the way in and finally driven her to fall. She hadn’t seen a single one in all her wandering.

Yaz rested on the stairs, half dozing, haunted by dreams of water. Eventually, feeling little better, she carried on, stumbling from time to time. Exhaustion had her mumbling to herself, promises and threats. The faces of her family came to her, distant, as if it had been years since she had seen them. She thought of Quell, then of Thurin, then of Erris. She wondered where Zeen was now, how the taints passed their time; she worried for him, for little Maya who she hardly knew, for Kao who she hardly liked, limping his way from the city.

And with a start she discovered that without realising it she had stopped climbing stairs and shuffled into a corridor pierced on one side by small windows through which a faint light was bleeding. Yaz stopped at the first, too narrow to climb through, and looked out onto a rocky cavern lit from above by faint shafts of starlight. The illumination reached down through two square holes in the ceiling. The “sky” of the great city chamber must be above those exits. The air was colder here, fresher. Hope rose in her, a fire licking up along her bones. The far wall of the cavern was a steep, rocky slope that led almost to the smaller of the two exits and in the uneven floor a shadow-filled pit reached back down toward the depths.

Relief floated away her exhaustion. After so long in the dead and dusty halls of the Missing, Yaz had begun to think she might never emerge, that the signs were a lie to deceive her, and that she would die, choking on her thirst, without ever seeing the ice again.

Yaz heard the noise as she turned her head from the window shaft. Something scraping stone. A foot? She turned swiftly, sending the light of her star lancing down the corridor behind her. Nothing but retreating shadows and dark doorways. The passage was surely too narrow for a hunter to move along at speed, but Arka had said they could reshape themselves to squeeze through unexpectedly small gaps . . .

Silence. An old silence. Yaz’s breath plumed before her. She dimmed her star to a glimmer, not wanting to advertise her movements, and advanced on soft feet. One pace, five, ten. There it came again, the slightest scrape. Somewhere ahead of her now . . . A prickling ran down her spine, sweat in her palms although she had thought herself too dried out for that. A hunter was stalking her. With freedom so close, with the voice of the ice whispering to her. To be caught here after so long climbing from the depths would be too cruel. Yaz wished she had kept the iron bar from Erris’s room of broken wonders.

She moved on, all her senses tingling, sure that unseen eyes watched her progress. She stopped, listened . . . nothing. A sigh emptied her lungs. She was being foolish. She began to walk again.

The attack came from behind. From a doorway she had already passed. The room beyond had been empty! Yaz found herself caught and hauled back with implacable power. She yelled despite herself and fought to escape. The thing that held her exceeded her Ictha strength. Even so she tore free, sacrificing furs and loosing a scream as another appendage reached for her mouth.

With an energy that she thought long exhausted, she opened her stride to run. For a moment she thought she’d won clear. Hunters have a long reach though. Yaz made it ten paces before something closed around both legs and brought her to the floor. She twisted and fought, pounding at the shape that reached over to pin her down. Somewhere in all