“Come with me!” She started running.
Yaz crossed the crater and scrambled out, breaking cover. She made for the coal pile that had fallen from the shaft over a hundred feet above her.
“Yaz of the Ictha!” Pome roared, spotting her at last.
Yaz ignored the shout. She splashed through the puddled meltwater and reached the coal. Behind her came Erris and Thurin but also Zeen and Quell.
“Can you burn that?” Yaz pointed at the pile. “And lift the fire up to the ceiling, then burn the coal in the shaft?”
“I have no idea!” Thurin stared up at the two small, icicle-hung holes in the ceiling far above, one blackened with coal dust. “And why would I want to?”
“It would bring the cage down fast,” Zeen said.
“There’s no telling what it would do,” Erris said. “There are too many unknown parameters.”
“One thing is pretty sure,” Quell said. “If it works then we’re all going to get wet.”
Behind them the hunter began to advance again, footsteps clanging on the rock. The gerants were coming too, making some kind of battle chant: “Hruh! Hruh! Hruh!” A deep, throbbing sound intended to terrify.
Erris clicked his fingers again to produce another flame and crouched to hold it to the nearest coal. “If you’re going to do this do it n—”
The coal seemed to suck the flame from Erris’s fingers, drawing it in as if it were a hole rather than just a black rock. For a moment Yaz thought the fire had disappeared but Thurin extended both hands, fingers splayed as though warming them at the sigil pot in the drying chamber.
In the next heartbeat the first coal turned orange, a fierce bright orange. The nearest coals were already a dull red where they touched it.
“Stand back.” Thurin’s voice shook, though Yaz couldn’t tell if it was with the effort of burning the piece of coal or with the effort of holding back.
She stepped away, glancing over her shoulder at the advancing line of Pome’s warriors. She was about to say “hurry” when a wall of heat pressed against her. As she stumbled and fell she became aware that the whole heap of coals had turned from black to a fierce orange-yellow and that the roaring in her ears came from the column of flame rising above the blaze.
Thurin stood silhouetted between Yaz and the burning coal, his arms raised as if conducting the inferno. The tongue of fire licked two dozen yards into the air but still couldn’t quite reach the star-speckled ice. Rather than growing, the blaze had begun to shrink already, its fuel expended in one extravagant gesture.
Yaz flung out her own hand from where she lay on the wet rock and the dozen fragments of her hunter’s star shot from her pocket, streaking into the column of fire.
What happened next occupied only a frozen fraction of a heartbeat, making no sense until her mind unfolded it in the next breath. A dark line passed over her head. An iron spear flung at Thurin’s back. The horror wouldn’t hit Yaz until after the spear had struck its mark. The force behind such a missile was enough to punch a hole through a man whatever bone or flesh might get in the way. Thurin’s first understanding would come after the crimson spear emerged from his ribs, flying away from him, leaving a trail of his own blood hanging momentarily in the air.
But somehow a figure managed to rise beneath the spear in the same instant it flew above them and to press upon it in such a way that it deflected upwards by just a few degrees. Zeen!
The skins over Thurin’s left shoulder danced as the spear sliced through them. The wind of the shaft’s passing fluttered the dark hair around his ear.
Yaz’s handful of stars rose in an accelerating spiral, travelling faster than she had ever made them fly before. She pictured the fire sigil in her mind and, as the stars broke from the top of the flames, the gyre they made carried the fire with them, a twisting vortex extending the tongue of flame to lick against the ceiling itself.
“Now!” she shouted.
Thurin’s release of pent-up potential, though not directed her way, shuddered through Yaz like something primal, both shocking and thrilling, filling her with want. Above them the ice lit with an orange glow as his flame-work, unused for all the years of his life, launched those long-banked energies into the column of coal. Like Thurin the coal was itself a store of energy held inert for its whole existence and now able to release that heat in one glorious burst. Driven by Thurin’s talent the fire exploded up the column far faster than any natural spread.
“Run!” Yaz shouted before the first drop of water had even hit the ground. “Secure the supplies!”
The first instruction was for everyone. The second was for Thurin. Only someone with power over water could hope to stop their food and shelter washing away in the coming flood.
Even as she shouted, though, she could see Thurin drop, as if the release of his flame-work had hollowed him, leaving an empty skin to flop to the ground. It likely saved his life as a second spear scythed past him and another skewered the empty space where his head would have otherwise been.
The flood came so swiftly that few there would have had time to take hold of something fixed, let alone to start running. Yaz found herself swept along by a white wave of water, tumbling over and over, swiftly losing all sense of direction. She knew enough from fishing the Hot Sea not to scream or to try to draw breath.
Where the rolling beneath wild water turned into rolling to lift her face from cold wet stone she wasn’t sure. She was equally unsure how long had passed between that rapid, uncontrolled spinning and the effort-laden flop that brought her groaning to her side.
The flattened ruins of the city seemed unchanged save for the scores of pools and puddles reflecting the stars above them. A muted gurgling sounded from many quarters as the thirsty depths below drank down the deluge.
Everywhere the Broken lay scattered, Arka’s faction mixed with Pome’s, some beginning to lever themselves up onto their arms, others still lying dazed and sodden. The gerant ranks had been swept away, the individual warriors littered here and there. Pome’s hunter lay on its side, starting to scrabble for the purchase needed to right itself. Of its master there was no sign.
Water still torrented from the shaft but at a fraction of its original rate. The shaft’s mouth now gaped like a crater and chunks of ice lay all around, swept along with the meltwater as they broke from the ceiling.
Amid the crash of water hitting stone after its long drop, and the hunter’s clatter, and the groans of the Broken recovering themselves, there was another sound, more distant but chilling. A howling.
Yaz raised her head and without needing to gather her bearings let the bloodcurdling screams lead her gaze toward the long slope.
“Tainted!” She tried to yell but broke into a fit of coughing before shouting with more force, “The Tainted are coming!”
A ragged swarm of the Tainted were surging down the smooth stone of the slope, their numbers far in excess of Arka’s and Pome’s forces combined. A screaming, raging horde, some armed for war with spears, shields, and bone clubs, many empty-handed, carrying nothing but the furious desire to kill.
“We have to run.” Quell came to help Yaz to her feet, still shaking water from his hair.
Yaz glanced at the gaping hole in the ceiling with no cable hanging from it. At the Broken scattered in disarray, and at the massed insanity sweeping toward them. The cage hadn’t fallen, there was to be no rescue.
“There’s nowhere to run,” she said. “I’ve killed us all.”
36
THE FIRST OF the Broken to be reached by the lead runners of the Tainted were those that had been swept furthest by the flood. The lightest. Mainly the youngest, those the tribes would still call children, and the elderly.
Theus must have been watching from the heights of the slope, waiting to see how the conflict with Pome would resolve, waiting for the best time to strike, when the Broken were at thei
r weakest. Now his minions swept over the most vulnerable of their foe, clubbing them into submission rather than killing them. Yaz saw skin hoods being pulled over faces, wires looped about wrists and drawn tight. The Tainted had a worse fate than death in store for those they captured and they were bent on captives where they could be taken without too much risk. Those who proved resistant to possession would be tortured for sport. Yaz had seen the gruesome evidence with her own eyes.
One of the most far-flung gerants rose before the charge, bearing her large square shield before her, and the advance broke around her, one Tainted bouncing off her war-board with a bone-crunching impact. They closed about her though, pulling her feet from out beneath her.
Pome’s hunter managed to right itself and went clanking toward the attack. Its master still lay hidden somewhere but he had clearly seen where the main threat now lay.
“Yaz!” Kao reached her side, dripping wet and desperate. “What are we going to do?”
Yaz opened her mouth but found no words. She didn’t know what they were going to do. The Tainted were sprinting toward them, just fifty yards away, grinning, howling, frantic, weapons raised. Yaz had nothing but her empty hands. Even her stars were gone.
“Yaz!” Kao repeated. Despite his fear he balled both fists and braced himself for the impact.
Yaz looked past what lay before her. It was hard to see the river that runs through all things with scores of maniacs charging straight at her, but she saw it, its bright waters flowing through the strange angles that lie behind the world. Even as she reached for the power she shuddered to think of the carnage to follow. She doubted it would even save her. The Tainted would leap over the shredded remains of their front ranks and come at her through the gore.
For a moment Yaz thought the noise she heard was some new horror rushing at her through the Tainted’s charge, or even that it came from the river itself. Within the space of two heartbeats the sound swelled behind her, a crashing, whooshing that drove a wind before it, and then ended with the loudest boom in the world.
The Tainted faltered but kept coming, forced on by their own momentum.
“Run!” Yaz grabbed Kao’s arm, hauling him around.
In the place where the coal had fallen a huge piece of ironwork now lay at an angle, partly supported by a cable that led off into the great hole funnelling up into the ceiling. The sudden melting of the shaft must have taken the priests by surprise or been seen as what it was, a cry for rescue, and led to them dropping rather than lowering the cage into which the Broken would load their scavenged iron.
The cage was a tube about two yards wide and six yards tall, large enough to fit a dozen people if they could cling at different heights on the inside without having fingers and toes crushed by the passing ice. Failing that then maybe five or six could cram in together at the bottom, but getting in would require climbing up the slanting outside, and once inside they would be helpless, exposed to any attack until the thing was eventually hauled back up into the ice.
When running for your life it pays to keep your attention on the ground in front of you. Something snagged Yaz’s foot and she went down hard. The air exploded from her lungs. Her crossed arms saved her face from striking the stone but the impact still left her vision crowded with new lights and her mind full of fuzz. She was dimly aware of Kao catching up and thundering past her.
By the time Yaz managed to roll and sit up, the leading Tainted were almost on her, their shrieks filling her ears. The nearest, ahead of the dirty wave washing toward her, was a thin man with long, matted hair streaming behind him, and a wild gleam in his eye. He had blood around his mouth and chin, running down a filthy neck. Probably not his own blood.
Paralysed in the moment Yaz could do nothing, she hadn’t even time to be afraid. Something large and dark passed over her. The ragged man reversed direction as something far more solid hit him. Kao crashed in among the first of the Tainted with a roar, bringing four or five of them down. As he rolled to a halt he managed brief eye contact and in that moment yelled at Yaz to run.
Yaz gained her feet and staggered back. Kao had vanished beneath a heap of snarling Tainted. He surged up once, shedding bodies, but more piled on, bringing him down again. Further back the Tainted’s gerants were drawing closer, led by the older red-haired gerant that Theus had possessed when he left Thurin.
Although she could do nothing for the boy Yaz found herself unable to abandon him. Any energies she took from the river that flows through all things and flung at the Tainted would break Kao just the same. Her power was a blunt weapon.
On all sides the Broken, scattered by the flood, were going down in isolated ones and twos beneath the attack. One of Pome’s gerants had made a stand before a corroding girder, skewering a Tainted on his iron spear, then a second, then swinging both spear and impaled bodies as a club to sweep others from their feet.
Another fleet-footed Tainted, clearly part hunska, leapt over Kao and his attackers, coming straight at Yaz. Erris came out of nowhere to fell the man with a punch. The next three to come at her fell to a blindingly swift combination of kicks and punches that Erris executed with a dancer’s grace.
More attackers flanked them. The sounds of battle rang out across the ruins, a dozen different fights, with knots of defenders holding out here and there. In the midst of the Tainted, like an island that the sea has swept around, Pome’s hunter flailed bloody limbs. Theus and six other gerants had brought with them thick, rusty lengths of chain and swung them at the hunter, careless of any others who might be hit. The clatter and boom of their assault could be heard even above all the screaming and dying in between. They weren’t trying to batter their enemy to death though. They swung to snare and entangle. When a leg or arm became trapped then other gerants would join in to haul at the hunter, seeking to unbalance it and drag it across the rock.
Arka and a knot of her faction had emerged from one of the larger entrances to the undercity not far from Yaz, and now battled to hold their position. They stood with shield on arm, swinging hide-wrapped iron bars, trying to club down the Tainted. Even as Yaz glanced their way, the woman beside Arka, a gatherer named Mirri, fell backwards into the hole, grappling with two assailants, neither older than twelve.
Erris fought like ten demons, felling even the biggest Tainted as if they were children while twisting from the thrust of spears and the swinging of blades. Those he felled seldom rose again but even as they lay groaning they reached to snare his ankles or rolled to trip him.
Despite his efforts Erris couldn’t defend on all sides and Yaz fell beneath a raging, blood-soaked woman foaming at the mouth. Erris kicked the woman clear but a near-identical Tainted caught him in the side of the head with a wild swing of her bone club. As Erris twisted away to deal with some new threat Yaz found herself looking up from the ground at the descending foot of a large man, part gerant.
The stamp that might have crushed her head never arrived. The man fell back, spraying crimson, to reveal Quell swinging his makeshift axe at another attacker. Yaz got to her feet and raised her trembling blood-speckled hands before her. Quell had killed a man. The look his face bore made a stranger of her oldest friend. The carnage she had feared so much unfolded on every side. And as the Tainted died, the demons inside them would surely find fresh blood and bone to wear. Soon they would be tainting new victims, sliding in past their rage as they joined the fight and flung the wells of their most primal emotions wide open.
All around Yaz her friends were fighting and dying. She had no idea where her brother was, where Thurin or Maya were. It was like when the dagger-fish took Azad from the boat in front of her. A disaster seemingly dragging itself through the heartbeats and yet still too swift to stop. A nightmare that could be turned around if only she had the strength, if only she weren’t broken. But she had nothing to strike with and even her enemies were innocent victims of the black ice. Her only strength lay in the river
that flows through all things, and that was an axe far larger than the one that Quell was swinging. If she used it then friend and foe alike would burn.
Another wave of Tainted charged in while Erris and Quell were still engaged off to Yaz’s left and right. More screaming lunatics flung themselves at Yaz and yet somehow they deflected away before reaching her.
“We need to get down into the undercity.” Thurin stepped up beside her, wet black hair framing his pale face. Another Tainted leapt at them and Thurin slapped him aside without making contact, the power of his magic hauling on the water inside the man.
Theus and his core of tainted gerants came through the rest of the Tainted as though they were wading through chest-high water. Somehow they had finished with the hunter. When they reached Yaz there would be no stopping them.
Even as Thurin shouted again about the undercity a fallen Tainted lunged up to catch him around the knees and bring him to the ground. More of the Tainted closed in. Yaz swung a fist and found she still had enough strength in her arms to fell the first of them.
The attack that brought Yaz down came from behind. Two impossibly strong hands clamped to either side of her head and hauled her back. In the next instant she was falling. She never hit the rock. Instead she found herself pressed to warm soil, grass around her face, the slow buzz of something passing by her ear. An insect. A bee! Erris’s names rising to her tongue.
She lifted herself and found Erris sitting nearby, his knees raised enough to rest his forearms on. Behind him blue sky, puffy white clouds, distant trees. And although he looked the same, something about the rich brownness of his skin and the tight black curl of his hair seemed more real than the body he had made to leave the city with her.
The Girl and the Stars Page 38
