and from her eyes, she struck the hunter’s heart a blow.
The hunter fell with the slow inevitability of ice cliffs calving into the sea, its heart stunned, limbs slack as the beat sought to reemerge from a confusion of irregular fluttering. Yaz came back to herself with the claws tearing gouges into the rock on either side of her while the beast fell away. She was falling too. Her hands caught the craggy edge as she jolted over it. A shake and a twist of her leg and the slack metal coils around her shin released their grip. Her own hold proved firmer and with a scream of effort she hauled herself back onto level ground.
The second, much smaller hunter stood over Quell’s inert form, one jagged pincer reaching down for his neck.
“No.”
Yaz reached out for the hunter’s star, smaller and less fierce than the other one’s, its heartbeat that of a child. She reached out and twisted, ignoring the broken pain that flooded through her. Between one moment and the next the hunter fell apart, lurching back as it did. All that remained were its constituents, a pile of ill-matched junk, more than a scavenger might show for a year’s work. The star-stone rested amid the pieces, a dull red with darker patches drifting over it—clouds across the face of a dying sun.
Slowly, spitting blood, Yaz crawled to Quell’s side. Pieces of the hunter lay scattered around him, toothed wheels, iron plates, black wires, all of it sharp with an unnatural stink that clawed at her throat.
Too weak to move him she lay down at his side.
Once when she had fallen ill Quell had stolen cubes of harpfish from Mother Mazai’s tent. They had eaten them together in his boat, rocking amid the mists of the Hot Sea with the water steaming all around them.
Yaz closed her eyes. There had been a time, before she was old enough to go out and fish, that she had thought of water only as molten ice. But the vastness of the sea changed all that. The largest of them, the Hot Sea, stood ten miles and more across in some seasons. Her father had once told her the waters of the sea ran beneath more ice than the rock did. How he knew that she didn’t know, but her father spoke very seldom and when he did it was never to give voice to a lie.
Her weakness felt like a sea now, and she sank into it, even her thirst not enough to keep her afloat. But when she heard the groan beside her Yaz opened her eyes again and rolled her head to the side. “Quell?”
“D-did . . . did I get him?”
“Yes.” She couldn’t help smiling.
“Good.” Quell levered himself up, his face bloody. “Don’t think I could take more than two or three others though.” He moved with caution as though every part of him hurt. He should be dead but the toughness of the Ictha was a thing of legend.
“Just need to . . . rest a while yet.” He lowered himself back to the rock with a gasp and a wince. “Are you okay?”
Yaz considered the question. Something inside her had broken and she didn’t know what. She did know that she had begun to shiver though. For the first time since she had jumped into the pit and escaped the wind the Broken’s caverns felt cold.
17
HERE!” QUELL REACHED a hand down to pull Yaz from the undercity.
Yaz grabbed hold and in a moment stood beside him in the great starlit cavern. Quell immediately recoiled, a confused horror etched across his face. He ended up sprawled on his backside, yards away, trying not to retch.
“Sorry. I’m so sorry.” In her other hand Yaz held the smouldering star-stone that she had taken from the destroyed hunter. “I forgot. I—”
“It’s fine.” Quell shuddered. “Just give me a moment.”
She moved away from the hole and crouched, shivering in her torn furs. Even a star the size of the one she’d taken from Pome made most people uneasy close up. This star had driven the hunter, supplied its energy, bound the pieces of it into