The Girl and the Stars (Book of the Ice #1) - Mark Lawrence Page 0,41

ink his Axit sons tattooed the flames of dragons’ tails across their necks, licking up over their cheeks. Their threats cracked the ice. His daughters wore bones through their eyebrows and came running before their men with spears in hand.

In the east the Quinx had found a dog and it had become many, as dogs will when fed. Zin’s Quinx sons were tall and wore their hair in warrior braids. His daughters there drove dogsleds and with their teams hauled even the Green Whale from the sea. No memory of Zin remained in all of the Quinx. They prized stone beads from such rocks as the Gods in the Sky sometimes cast upon the ice, and because he wore none they counted Zin as lesser, despite his age and the whiteness of his beard.

Far to the south Zin’s Joccan sons walked beneath strange stars in such heat that sometimes molten ice would run and flow even outside a tent and delight the children before it froze again. Joccan wives painted their eyelids black and their hair grew in many shades. The Joccan had forgotten the face of their father and replaced the stories of their mother with lies of the green world that only the gods know.

At last, growing weary, with the sun falling, Zin turned north and walked to the lands where the cold is born and where it hunts. Here the ice grew hard, the landscape fractured, the voice of the glaciers sharper, louder, more fierce. Zin’s Ictha sons turned their pale eyes toward his approach and were amazed for the first of men came among them bare chested and they knew him for their father and wept. And as the sun descended on the last day of the first man his children of the north feasted him with harpfish and tuark and the eggs of the great loach, and sang the oldest songs that told of his love for Mokka and the days of his youth when Zin had taught his offspring what secrets of the sea the gods had given into his care.

And come the night the Ictha gave back to the sea that had birthed him all of Zin save that which they held in their hearts.

* * *

YAZ STOOD WITH the others outside the food hall. She found her shoulders hunched and forced them to relax. It wasn’t cold. It was just the strangeness of the place, the twilight gloom, the glistening ice sky lit with its own stars, the constant dripping, and on all sides shadow-wrapped buildings full of strange angles and built from gods knew what. Here and there the occasional star-stone hung, alive with light and whispers, drawing Yaz’s eye, reminding her of the star she held on the previous night, burning in her hand, its song pulsing through her.

Arka coughed for attention. “There are six main tasks we turn our hands to here. On the surface we all did everything. Here we choose a role and we stick to it. You can change, but not from one day to the next. We have . . .” She raised her hand and spread the fingers, closing the first one as she began. “Harvesters, who seed, protect, and collect the fungi. Hunters, who catch rats for meat and skins, and blindfish from the rivers. Scavengers, who gather metal and building material from the city. Smiths, who melt down the metals and work them into new forms. Miners, who hack star-stones from the ice.” With four fingers and a thumb closed in, Arka now held a raised fist. She brought it smacking down into the palm of her other hand. “And warriors, who keep us safe from the Tainted.”

“The warriors don’t have to do anything except fight?” Kao asked.

“They patrol and practice their weapon skills. Actual fighting is rare, thankfully, but still too frequent for us to replace our losses.”

“I’m going to be a warrior!” Kao nodded as if the matter were settled.

“First we do the tour,” Arka said. “Spend some time seeing what goes on here. Sometimes the dullest-sounding tasks are more interesting than the most exciting. Harvesters always have something to do, warriors can find themselves bored, then terrified, then bored.”

“A warrior! Not grubbing around with those . . . plants,” Kao said.

“They do get