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 judgement. 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 towards the hole.
‘Ssshhh.’ 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 nine, 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 ice to keep them from warring upon each other.
‘I’d rather just be left out of the tent,’ Zeen said. ‘If I was broken I’d rather just be left out.’
Yaz shrugged. A quick death beat a slow death, and at least this way you gave honour to your tribe. Also there was the issue of metal. Clan-Mother Mazai said that the priesthood was the only source of metal in a thousand miles, and not just pieces of it as might sometimes be traded between the tribes, but worked metal, fashioned to meet demand, be it knife or chain. The ceremony honoured the god of the Black Rock and that in turn earned the clan favour with the regulator. Dying here would help the clan.
A sudden cry jerked Yaz from her thoughts. The regulator was standing alone, the wind tugging at the tattered strips of his cloak. There was no sign of the child that had failed his inspection, just the faint and diminishing echoes of their screaming that still escaped the hole. A stillness pervaded the watching crowd, and they had already been still.
With a bored gesture the regulator beckoned the next in line.
‘I’m scared.’ Zeen’s hand found hers. He had been scared all along of course, but this was the first time he’d spoken the words.
The world turns whether we will it or not and everything, longed for or feared, comes to us in time. The queue leading to the regulator advanced slowly but it didn’t stop, and at last Yaz’s world narrowed to the point towards which it had spiralled for so long.
‘Yaz of the tribe Ictha and the clan Ictha,’ the regulator said. He never needed to be told name, clan, or tribe. The other tribes had several clans, but in the north they shrank to the same thing.
‘Yes,’ she said. To deny your own name was to cut a small piece from your soul, Mother Mazai said.
The regulator leaned in towards her. He had the familiar white-pale eyes of her own clan and seemed unconcerned by what the southerners called cold. The burns across his face, head, and hands looked as if he had been branded with some kind of writing, but with lines of symbols at differing angles and sizes, overwriting each other into confusion. He bent closer, showing his teeth in something that was not a smile.
‘Yaz of the Ictha.’ He took hold of her hand with hard, pinching fingers.
His scent was unfamiliar, sour and as different from the Ictha as the dogs had been. He was old, stringy, gaunt-faced, and looked displeased with the world in general.
The regulator had not touched Yaz on her first visit. Now he seemed unwilling to release her. The tattered strips of his cloak blew about them both and for a moment Yaz considered what would happen if she grabbed them when the time came that he threw her down. The image of his surprise at being hauled in with her struck through Yaz’s fear and she struggled to suppress the burst of hysterical laughter that was pushing to escape her.
‘You’ve seen it, haven’t you, girl?’ He looked up from his inspection of her hand and met her eyes.
‘N … No.’ Yaz shook her head.
‘You should have asked “what?”. All the ice tribes are terrible at lying but the Ictha are the worst.’ The regulator ran his tongue over the yellowing stumps of teeth worn down by years. Without warning he jerked Yaz’s hand to his face and began to sniff at her fingertips. She tried to pull away, disgusted, then realized that if he were to release her as she tugged she would fall back with only the slick gullet of the pit to receive her.
‘Seen what?’ she asked, too late to be convincing.
‘The path that runs through all things.’ He let her go with a last sniff. ‘The line that joins and divides. Seen it and …’ His gaze fell to the hand she now clasped to her chest. ‘And touched it.’
‘I didn’t …’ He was right though. She didn’t know how to lie.
‘That makes you rare, child. Very rare.’ Something ugly twisted on the regulator’s thin lips: a smile. ‘Too good for the pit.’ He nodded to the other side of him. ‘You stand over there. You’ll come with me to the Black Rock.’ Excitement tinged his voice. He had thrown children to their death without affording them the respect of caring. But now he cared.
So, numb and trembling, with her wrist still pale where the regulator had gripped her, Yaz moved on. She stood on the flat ice of the tier, watching without seeing while the others shuffled forward one place. She had survived. She was grown and equal to any in the clan. But still she stood here, forbidden to return to where her parents waited. To where Quell waited. Her gaze tracked back up the stepped ice, across the sea of faces, towards the heights where the Ictha families stood.
‘No.’ The regulator’s quiet announcement drew Yaz’s attention back to the line. His skinny old hand was