50
Big fires, little bones, soft petals. The world burns.
The world turns.
—Fireside recitation (apocryphal), Thorndaughter
Icecaller wakes slowly, consciousness tugging gently at the fringes of her body. It’s late, the rock heavy around her, the air thick with smoke and drink. She wriggles free from her blanket of legs and arms, trails fingers loosely down a spine softened by low light.
She grabs a pitcher of water, cold from the ice above. Drains one mug, then two. Better. She presses her lips together, shivers, reaches behind her for a blanket. The wool feels scratchy under her fingers. Another scratch in the back of her brain that’s pulled her awake
Around her Thell mostly sleeps. Some of the dreamers move slow as snakes, slipping fingers and tongues inside each other, sketching the floor with shadows, sticky and shuddering. She’s a little envious, but not by much. All fucked out tonight. And it didn’t quite take the edge off the tension inside her. There’s a sharpness in the air, something heavy under the smoke.
She traces her tattoos lightly, takes another swig of ice water. There’ll be no more sleep tonight. Reluctantly, she swings her legs over the side of the alcove. Her feet flex against the cool stone of the floor as she rolls her neck back and forth, enjoying the subtle clicks and pops her body makes.
Her spear lies just against the wall, and her fingers close over it reflexively. She feels the wood kiss her palm and exhales. Better. The night might have its edges, but, well, so does she.
She smiles slightly at her own idiot humour. Time to find out what the fuck’s got her so jumpy.
It’s a fast climb through the winding passages of the Stump. Its wide, open loops are made for swift traversal. The sides of each angled spiral are cut with grooved chutes wide enough to fit packages or people and slick with the shine of decades of use. The geometrics along their edges are as good as signs, pointing up and down through the mountain, or laterally to dining halls, sleeping chambers, barracks and markets. Of course, she barely needs them at her age. She knows this mountain like her father’s hands, like her lover’s ribs. Both of them still snoring below, Kinghammer doubtless sprawled under bearskin, and Steelfinder exactly where Icecaller left her, curled up in the hollow of their bed. It’s just her and the mountain tonight. She picks up speed as she moves, the spear in her left hand, the fingers of her right brushing the walls lightly, tracing the shapes and curves which will take her to where she needs to be.
Whatever’s bleeding into the Stump is coming from outside. She can smell something feral on the wind. Maybe Fallon’s pup had brought it in. God, but he was a worry, so wet; a slip of a ghost of a thin reed of a pup. How he’d even made it here she didn’t know. Several hundred miles, past the fucking Midlands swamp cults and flint-eyed merchants that would sell the fingers of your left hand to your right. Skirting the Burners’ forests, with their dark eyes and strong snares, through the Barrowlands, where the hills of the dead still lit green with corpsefire on cold nights. Risky enough, if you were a nobody. Mad, if you were the spuff-headed son of the last mardy lord south of Thell to stick it to Crowkisser. A long way for a thin boy and a miracle that he’d made it. That was mostly down to his burly carpenter, she suspected, with his sharp jaw and his clean lines and his suspicious eyes. Although there was something in that scrawny little nit that thrummed like iron.
She’d have had them both, in a different time and a different place. Pretty and lost and handsome. That wasn’t the worst mix.
But you didn’t fuck a plague dog. You didn’t invite it into your house. You filled it with arrows and let it bleed at the gate as a warning to others.
So why, then, had she let them over the boundary? Why had she made them tea, and brought them home, and given themhope? She wasn’t even sure herself. Curiosity maybe. Curious to see what the south had spat out, to see what the other idiots standing in the crow-bitch’s crosshairs looked like. To try and get a sense of what might be coming. More than that – to try and get a sense of what might be possible after.
Her feet hit the stone, faster, harder. She speeds through the corridors of the Stump, leaping gaps and crevices, the old scars of the uprising, swinging one-handed down stairwells burnt and warped by a battle that had ended when she was still a brat.
At the end of the day, she’d wanted to see what Declan Fallon’s kid looked like. Wanted to see where his father was hiding inside him.
She’d heard so many stories of Fallon growing up. Fallon, and the others that followed on his heels, like hawks on the storm. When she was a young sprat, she’d crouched goggle-eyed at the feet of the Deadsingers, stilled from her restless fidgeting by tales of the great fleet that sailed north to save them from the Empire, that had broken its hordes at Luss, and sent the Gem howling back to the feet of its master. Heads rocking like moored boats, the Deadsingers had sung of that golden fleet, of that sprawling army of sorcerers and warrior-women and foreigners wielding terrible magic. Most of all, they’d sung of the three at its head: the Lady of the Falcons, Arissa Fallon; the Shipwright, golden-haired and implacable; and the Shroudweaver.
Shroudweaver, who had taken the living and the dead of Thell and parted them at last, who had pulled up the cairns and filled them, taken the halls and emptied them. Put the dead on one side and the living on the other and said to the living. ‘Don’t look, don’t touch, don’t even talk about them. Here is the wall that will keep your new kingdom. Let your bodies be the bricks and let your lips hold the key. Keep your wall strong, for I will not preserve you if it falls.’
And he had stood with pride and joy, the Deadsingers said. Pride and joy and contentment, for here was the end of a darkthing and the start of something better. And he had looked at the people of Thell and said, ‘Is it not a good thing, to live your own lives, free from the spent and bitter ghosts of the past?’
And the flags on the cairns had flown bright, said the Deadsingers, and bright the blue sky above.
Seventeen years later, that fleet had sailed again, to save the south instead of north, and burnt to ash, save for two or three broken boats. So much for blue skies.
Yet the cairns were still there. The bright flags still flew. That was something, Icecaller supposed, but it was hard to take comfort in it, when the back of her brain itched like an ant’s nest. Muttering to herself, she scrambled goat-footed and hot, higher, to the outlooks that would unfold the barrows before her. Something was out there, and she was going to find it.
It was time to see what the bright cairns did in the dark of night.
She had not been surprised at the last twist in the tale of the Empire’s fall, the Deadsingers raising their thin-boned hands in mirrored misery above her wide-eyed little face.
For the Shroudweaver, they said, he could not let well alone. He could not rest without knowing the start and the beginning, the finish and ending. So it was with those who worked with death. So, he stayed in Thell when he should have fled. He slept under stone when he should have sailed.
And under the stone he came to know the Emperor of the Dead, reduced to the lowest station. And the Emperor said to him, ‘Do not let them do this to me.’
Icecaller recalled the bright whites of the Deadsingers’ eyes, their spit-slick lips as their bodies tremored with the horror of the tale.
In the shadow of the mountain, the Emperor said to the Shroudweaver, ‘Do not let them do this to me, I beg you.’
And the Shroudweaver, he said nothing.
