The Girl and the Stars (Book of the Ice #1) - Mark Lawrence Page 0,7

for untold miles, but there was, in all that emptiness, no room for an individual.

* * *

THE CEREMONY WAS already in progress as Yaz caught up with her brother. On the lowest tier, with only the dark maw of the hole below them, the children of seven clans belonging to three tribes queued in a great circle. Every few moments the line shuffled forward as each boy or girl presented themselves to the regulator in turn.

The old priest stood cloaked in an inky black hide that belonged to nothing that Yaz had ever seen hauled from the sea. Hoola claws reached across his shoulders and fanned out across his chest, threaded on a cord around his neck. His head was bare and bald, marked like his hands with a confusion of burn scars, symbols perhaps but complex and overlapping.

The Ictha said that Regulator Kazik had overseen the gathering for generations. While the other priests came and went with time’s tide, growing old, retiring to the Black Rock, Kazik it was said remained immune to the years. A constant, like the wind.

Today he was the regulator, merciless in judgment. Tomorrow he would be priest Kazik and he would bless marriages, and laugh, and mix with the clans, and become drunk on ferment with the rest of the grown.

Yaz and Zeen joined the rear of the queue with a score of other Ictha children. One more came up behind, delayed by his mother’s arms. At the front, around a third of the crater’s circumference from them, another child escaped the regulator’s scrutiny. She scrambled away to join her parents watching from some higher tier.

Yaz shuffled forward with the line. The climb still burned in her legs and her chest felt sore from panting.

“That was tough!” Zeen smiled up at her. “But we made it.” He stood close to the edge where the ice sloped sharply away toward the hole.

“Sssh.” Yaz shook her head. It was best to avoid any thoughts of weakness. They said the regulator could read a child’s mind just by staring into their eyes.

“Has anyone been thrown in?” That was Jaysin behind them, just eight, as young as any Ictha were tested. The younger children remained at the north camp with the old mothers. “Has anyone gone down yet?”

“How would we know, stupid?” Zeen rolled his eyes. “We just got here too.” He moved behind Yaz to stand with Jaysin.

Yaz glanced at the hole and shuddered. Even here in the south the ice lay miles deep. She wondered how far she would fall before she hit something.

“Are they down there?” Zeen kept glancing at the pit. The closer they got to the regulator the further Zeen positioned himself from the edge. “Are the Missing watching us from down there?”

“No.” Yaz shook her head. Most likely all the pit held was a sad pile of frozen corpses, the broken children properly broken at last and removed from the bloodline. Some of the southern tribes spoke of the Ancestor’s Tree and of pruning it, but Yaz didn’t know what a tree was and her father, who had spoken to southerners at gatherings across the years, had never met any who had seen such a thing.

“But they call it the Pit of the Missing,” Zeen said.

“It’s the children who are thrown down there who are missing.” Little Jaysin spoke up again from behind Yaz. It seemed fear had made the boy brave. He rarely had the courage to speak outside his own tent.

“It’s a different sort of . . . Oh, never mind.” Yaz would let someone else explain it to him after she’d gone. Instead she looked up at the sky, pale and clear above her, laced with strips of very high cloud, their edges tinged with the blood of the setting sun. The Missing had lived on Abeth an age before the tribes of man beached their ships upon its shores, but they were all long gone by the time men navigated the black seas between the stars and came to this world. Many southerners treated them as if they were gods, though the Ictha knew that the only gods were those in the sea and those in the sky, with the