Читать книгу The Girl and the Stars - Mark Lawrence - Страница 10

Yaz ran the way the huge woman had come, sprinting at first, then with more caution. Behind her the roaring had faded into nothing, the cannibal slowed by her injured foot.

The glow from the ice gradually lessened and the circle of Yaz’s vision drew in about her, a tightening noose. Imagination began to paint her fears into the thickening gloom. She saw the head dangling from the cannibal’s belt, its frozen stare horrific and familiar. Whatever taint had caused little Jaysin to be thrown into the pit would never show now. Yaz hoped it had been the fall that had taken his life rather than the creature that had been eating him.

In her escape the thong securing Yaz’s knife had snapped, leaving her only weapon transfixing the woman’s foot. She frowned at the murky tunnel ahead, glanced back the way she had come, then carried on, empty-handed against whatever the darkness hid.

She jogged on, careful of her footing on the grimy floor. The animal stink seemed to be increasing rather than decreasing as she opened a lead on the giant. Several times she passed other tunnels but she kept to the largest, wanting room for manoeuvre if she found herself trapped in a dead end.

The big chamber took Yaz by surprise. The tunnel didn’t widen, it just opened into a much larger space without warning. Yaz had no idea that caverns so vast could exist beneath the ice. She got a sense of scale through the change in the quality of the sound and through the slight motion of the air. Also there was the marbling effect of half a dozen seams of the tiny stars that offered the walls and roof in glowing bands, too faint to illuminate the contents of the chamber but bright enough to be seen across its width.

Yaz stood, wondering, wanting to shout out Zeen’s name but lacking the courage. Who knew what other terrors the darkness held?

Quite what made her turn her head Yaz couldn’t say. It wasn’t something she was conscious of hearing. By the time she looked back over her shoulder and focused on the great dark mass rushing at her out of the tunnel’s gloom she could finally hear the rush of its footsteps. The cannibal gave a bloodcurdling roar. This time, rather than freezing Yaz to the spot, the roar galvanized her and she ran, sprinting along the edge of the cavern where the faint illumination might at least warn her of rocks large enough to trip her or to turn an ankle on.

Wounded foot or not the huge woman came after Yaz with terrifying speed, fuelled by rage and pain, devouring the yards in great strides. The monstrosity pounded ever closer, narrowing the gap between them, roaring giving over to a determined silence punctuated by laboured breaths. Soon Yaz could hear nothing but her own gasping for breath and the thunder of her heart.

The ground before her began to rise in a slope of ice-worn shingle, channelled and heaped by some ancient flow. Yaz started to scramble up. The shifting stones sucked away the last of her strength and she slowed to a crawl. Behind her the giant followed, sounding like an avalanche.

‘Hey!’ A voice from somewhere in the gloom. ‘Hey! Up here!’

Yaz glanced around wildly but saw nothing.

‘Here! Catch the line!’

Yaz swung her head and saw something dangling to her left. A rope! And high up on it a clot of darkness hung. A person! She veered towards them but in that moment the cannibal made a last desperate lunge and fastened a hand about Yaz’s leg, encompassing it from the ankle almost to the knee.

For a second both of them lay there, sprawled on the slope of shifting stones, too winded to do anything but pant. Yaz only found the energy to struggle once she felt herself being hauled back towards her enemy. She rolled onto her side and looked down. Close up the giant was still more fearsome; the charnel stink of her filled Yaz’s lungs. The ink-black stain across her face seemed to have moved, forming a band across her eyes now, stark against pale but grimy skin. The woman’s gaping mouth began to descend towards Yaz’s thigh, the points of her teeth gleaming wetly. Feeding on Yaz rather than finishing her off seemed to be the priority. Whether it was hunger or cruelty that drove the cannibal Yaz didn’t know, but she clearly intended to eat her alive.

Yaz grabbed a rock and hammered it down, not on the fingers but on the nerve cluster in the wrist. Quell had shown her the trick years before. Yaz struck home with all her strength and with a wordless prayer to the Gods in the Sea. She yanked her leg free just as those jaws snapped shut inches from it, and rolled away.

The rope hung less than ten yards off, vanishing up into the gloom. The figure on it had gone. Yaz ran, knowing even as she did that she wouldn’t have time to climb high enough before the giant hauled her down.

She grabbed the rope, a crude thing of twisted hide strips studded with knots, and turned to check her opponent. To Yaz’s surprise the giant hadn’t advanced. A much smaller figure danced around her, throwing fist-sized stones. The missiles seemed only to annoy the giant but when she lurched towards her assailant the boy just danced away. His speed and timing were breathtaking.

‘Climb!’ A girl’s voice, high above. ‘Bring the rope with you!’

Yaz reached up, taking hold just above a large knot, and began to climb. It was not something she had done before. The ice tends to be flat. But fortunately the Ictha are strong and what she lacked in technique she replaced with muscle power. A short way off the ground Yaz reached down, groaning as her bruised body complained, and grabbed a lower section of the rope to tuck into her belt. Then, bringing it with her, she continued upwards. She had to assume the boy had another means of escape. If he could run as swiftly as his dodging implied then the giant would have no chance of keeping pace.

Yaz reached the top of the rope in darkness. For some yards she had been climbing alongside an ice wall, presumably a vertical shaft in the roof of the cavern. Hands reached out to help her over the lip. More hands than she had expected. A number of strangers crowded around her, drawing her back from the hole.

‘Zeen?’ Yaz asked. Nobody answered, they only hustled her along, blind in the dark. Yaz frowned, then stopped moving. She braced herself against the slickness of the ice. ‘How did you do all this? Make a rope? Get up here? We weren’t that late to the gathering. You couldn’t have been more than an hour ahead, maybe two.’

Suddenly there was light. All around her figures shielded their eyes, some gasping as if it had been unexpected for them too. Shadows swung as the light moved, a bright point held between two prongs at the end of an iron rod clutched in a young man’s fist. Yaz squinted and could see that the source of the glare was one of the stars she had seen locked in the ice, though this was a larger one, considerably larger than her thumbnail. Despite its dazzle Yaz found herself staring at it, ignoring what its light revealed. It looked like a hole in the world, opening onto some bright place. For a moment the air seemed full of whispers just beyond hearing, the space between them strange and echo-haunted, as if a heavy stone had dropped, rippling the fabric of everything.

A cough broke the spell.

Six strangers surrounded Yaz. She spun around. Zeen was not among them. Two were younger than her, two around her own age, one a man in his twenties, carrying the light, and beside him a scar-faced woman in her thirties perhaps.

Yaz’s frown deepened. What was a grown woman doing here?

‘We had more than an hour’s head start on you, girl,’ the woman said. ‘The younglings came down last gathering.’

Yaz blinked. ‘Four years?’ Four years in the blackness. Four years under the ice.

The woman coughed a bitter laugh. ‘I’ve seen five drops since that old bastard gave me the shove. It’s still Kazik, is it?’

Yaz nodded. Kazik had been regulator even before her grandmother’s testing.

‘Shame. He’s lived too long.’

Yaz looked about her at the others. All of them were lean, cheeks hollow, eyes bright, all grimy, all wrapped in gut-sewn skins. The two boys of her own age held makeshift clubs, smoothed stones the size of a fist lashed with hide to the end of bones that looked suspiciously like the thighbones of a large man.

‘My brother?’ She held a hand to indicate his height. ‘Where is he?’

The others looked down, their mouths in grim lines. Yaz grew suddenly cold, stomach knotting, a twitch coming to her cheek. The scar-faced woman shook her head. ‘Hetta got him.’ She pursed her lips in the direction of sympathy. ‘Nearly got me once.’ She indicated the parallel lines scored across her face as if torn by claws. ‘Nearly got you too.’

‘No.’ Yaz drew a breath, understanding. ‘That was Jaysin. Zeen is bigger.’ As she said it the anger rose in her again. Little Jaysin, timid, eager to please, now torn apart and half eaten. ‘The giant didn’t have Zeen. It was Jaysin’s head on her belt.’

‘Gerant,’ the young man with the light said.

‘What?’

‘Gerant, not giant. The ones that grow too big. They’re gerants.’ The harsh shadows made something sinister of his face.

Yaz shook her head. She didn’t care about that. ‘My brother?’

‘He must have come down somewhere else,’ the woman said. ‘The shafts change between gatherings. We can’t cover them all. We didn’t expect anyone out here, but Hetta must have known somehow. She’s cunning, that one.’

‘The taint told her.’

Yaz glanced back, it was one of the younglings that had spoken, a fair-haired boy now holding his hand to his face in mimicry of Hetta’s black stain. Yaz had never seen hair so pale before, but then she had seen a dozen new things in less than an hour. She turned back to the woman. ‘My brother. Zeen. He’s all I care about.’

The woman nodded, biting her well-bitten lower lip. ‘The other search parties might have got him.’

‘Or the Tainted did,’ whispered the young girl standing beside the fair boy.

The woman shrugged. ‘We’ll join up with the rest of the Broken and find out.’ She held up a hand as Yaz started forward. ‘Once we’re sure the regulator has finished.’

‘He has,’ Yaz said. ‘The Ictha were the last clan. And I was near the end.’

‘Three Ictha.’ The man with the light looked at the woman. ‘I can’t remember the last time there was even one.’

The woman shrugged again. ‘Two now. Or maybe just one. We’ll go find out once Petrick is back.’

‘The boy who attacked the giant?’ Yaz asked. ‘Gerant.’ She corrected herself at the young man’s frown.

Back down the tunnel something rattled. ‘Speak of the devil.’ The woman nodded to the girl who had whispered about ‘the Tainted’. ‘Jerra, go let the rope down.’ The girl ran off into the darkness. ‘Check first!’ the woman called after her. ‘And don’t fall down the hole.’

The woman turned back to Yaz. ‘I’m Arka. That’s Pome.’ She motioned towards the hard-eyed young man with the star. There were other names but somehow they didn’t stick. Zeen was the only name she wanted to hear.

The girl, Jerra, and the boy Petrick, who close up didn’t look much older, came hurrying back, the girl clutching the rope. Yaz wondered how it had been secured. Her mind always threw in tangential questions at unhelpful moments.

‘Hetta?’ Arka asked. Yaz saw the cannibal’s mouth descending towards her leg again, drool hanging from pointed teeth.

‘Still raging.’ Petrick grinned. ‘I lost her in the threads. The new girl stuck her good. Hand and foot!’

Yaz frowned, her hand returning to her side where her knife should be. Even now the loss weighed on her.

‘And the pools? Any more arrivals?’

Petrick shook his head. ‘Think that’s our lot.’

‘Let’s go then.’ Arka led the way, Pome at her side, holding his light-stick aloft as though he were some grand official at a clan ceremony.

Yaz followed, her mind still spinning. Twenty years. That’s how long Arka said she’d been down here. Twenty years. It was as far beyond Yaz’s imagination as a tree. Or the thin green belt the gods were said to have put around the world’s waist, a place where the oldest tales said there was as much life on the land as in the sea.

Arka took the group along a series of tunnels. Many were clearly the work of meltwater but others seemed to defy logic, rising, falling, and twisting in a way that flowing water never would, and yet smooth and round, bearing no mark of pick or chisel.

Yaz jogged in the middle of the band. The Broken they had called themselves. Her new clan, she supposed, bound together by the fact they had survived the drop and wished to keep on surviving.

The darkness gave way to a dim and diffuse illumination as the ice began to be populated once more by the tiny stars. The others seemed to take the same comfort in this that Yaz did, even though they must have seen it every day for years. Little Jerra paused to gaze into the ice and dark-haired Petrick had to give her a tug to get her started again. ‘Slowcoach.’

‘Everyone’s slow next to you.’ The girl blinked, glanced at Yaz, and carried on.

Shortly after that, Arka sent Petrick ahead to warn of their arrival. The boy scampered off at speed and was soon lost in the gloom.

The further they went the more dirty the ice beneath their feet. Eventually they emerged into another rock-floored cavern, not so large as the one in which Yaz had escaped Hetta but still large and better lit.

The air here was warmer than in the tunnels and the soft drip of meltwater filled any brief silence. A crowd of maybe four dozen of the Broken stood in an arc around the entrance, lean, grimy, their clothes cloaks of woven hair over old hides and crude patchworks of small skins. Here and there points of light winked among their number, tiny ice stars sewn onto clothing or dangling from an ear.

More than half of those gathered were huge. Not as big as Hetta maybe, but larger than anyone Yaz had ever seen before. More gerants, given time to grow. For a moment she wondered what they found to eat, and what had originally worn the skins they dressed in.

Between the Broken’s reception party and Yaz a group of four new arrivals huddled together, wet, shivering, some clutching injured limbs or sporting angry red marks that would be black bruises soon enough. Zeen was not among them.

Yaz turned back towards the tunnel, meaning to leave. ‘Let me pass.’ She advanced on the boys blocking the passage.

A hand clamped on her shoulder. ‘You can’t go!’ Arka tried to pull her around. ‘You have no idea where you are or what’s out there.’

‘Zeen’s out there.’ Yaz jerked free of Arka’s grip.

Pome, the young man with the light-stick, slipped between her and the exit. He stood nearly a head taller than her, brown hair scraped back. His mouth held a brittle smile that put her in mind of the hook-eels that play dead right up until the moment they’re hauled into a boat then unsheathe a hundred claws and start to thrash. ‘Tarko is going to speak to all the wets. After that he will decide what to do about your brother.’

Arka moved to stand beside Pome. ‘I don’t know if Zeen can be got back, but I do know you can’t do it by yourself.’ She set her hand to Yaz’s breastbone as she tried to advance. ‘I remember the Ictha being famed for making the best of bad situations … like everything north of the Three Seas.’ She allowed herself a smile. ‘So let’s see some of that alleged common sense.’

Yaz ground her teeth but the sting of the rebuke managed to reach through both her anger and her resolve. She had let her clan down in a dozen ways since the sun rose. Every act she had taken unwrote the Ictha code. She bowed her head. Her recklessness and sacrifice had been as foolish as she had always been taught they were. She would do it right this time. Wait, plan, gather resources, and strike only when reason dictated. The Ictha way. Slowly she turned back and went to stand with the others who had fallen today.

Yaz joined the new arrivals. The gerants she passed to reach them made her feel as though she were a child again despite it being the day she was given her adulthood. She went to stand at the back of the group. The girl just ahead of her turned to see, teeth chattering. She looked to be just a little older than Zeen, of slight build with long brown hair and curious brown eyes. It was the different eyes that would take the longest to get used to.

‘S-So you’re the special one.’ The girl’s voice shook with cold. Yaz hardly noticed her own damp clothing. The cavern was warmer than her mother’s tent in winter. ‘T-The one they’re excited about.’

Yaz frowned. ‘Me?’

‘T-The boy said he saved you from a hetta. I don’t know what that is but he made it sound bad.’

‘It was pretty bad.’ An image of Jaysin’s dangling head flashed across Yaz’s vision again. She hadn’t considered why they would risk themselves to help her. They hadn’t helped little Jaysin. She shook the thought away. ‘Why would they care about me? I’m not special—’ She bit the word off. They were all special down here, she guessed. Just not in a good way. Broken. Unfit for the ice. ‘Why? I’m not worth saving.’

‘You don’t see it?’ The girl hugged herself, hands to her shoulders. ‘I guess maybe you wouldn’t … I saw it as soon as you came in.’

‘Saw what?’

‘The stars,’ the girl said. ‘They burn brighter when you’re near.’