night still calls you home
56
night hollows fair the ancient hill
the buried ocean dreaming still
—Embroidery on robe, formerly interred in the Blue Rest, a day’s ride outside of Vantage
Too many years and a week later. The quarry cut into the land like an open sore. A little slice of white bone dug out of the green hills where the burnt earth of the south finally gave ground to the light stone of the Rim. A few days out from Dryke and Vantage, their numbers grown again. Not by much, a couple of hundred more souls, but enough to rattle Crowkisser’s head. Enough for her to leave them behind in the lee of the valley while she stalked the quarry ridge.
She’d come for peace, and she’d come for answers.
The sun is high above the white rocks, the air cut with the piercing call of some small bird, floating in looping trills from the spiked bushes that clung to the quarry’s edge.
The chalk hewn out in sheer chunks, stepping down to the lake at the quarry’s base, its water impossibly blue, picking up the edge of the sun and flicking it back at her eyes as she scours the walls for the path down.
The shore is softer on the southern side, where grass and shrub has started to reclaim the bone-white earth. On this edge, the hillside is stepped like broken teeth. Shallow cuts near the top, where the locals have come for the stone that lines the tops of the ware-dykes, dropping to cyclopean scars further down, the legacy of the Belltollers, brought here by the southern Aestering to shear the chalk into powder for their workings and teachings, and bindings.
Crowkisser remembers her dad’s dusty fingers, and pushes the image out of her head. This is not the time. She’s not here for the folklore, or the weaver’s ghosts. She’s got a different spirit to hunt.
The path is hard to follow at first, white against bone, the gravel shifting under her feet. She’d light her toes with crow feathers, get a little balance, but that feels wrong here, disrespectful.
She swallows a little retch of bitter bile and feels her hammering heart push against her ribs. She’s nervous; she hasn’t made this trip for a few years, and never with an army at her back.
About halfway down, the quarry hollows out, pockmarked with windblown caves. Man-made at first, shaped by the miners digging back for the purer rock, then smoothed by the gales which tore up from the south and whirled the bowl of the quarry, lashing the water below, and softening those angular cuts into organic lines, like the inside of an ear, or the curve of a shell.
There are shells here too, buried in the rocks and calcified over time, until only the whorls of their death showed through the stone; the faintest echo of tentacles, rendered into dust. Further back in the rock, she remembers running her hand over paintings, blown like stars around the fingers of a hand. Ochre, yellow as a bird’s eye, red as blood.
She hears the house before she sees it, the strung shells clattering in the soft wind. A smell rolls up the path, half the cool kiss of the water below, half a mess of onions and greens, skillet-fried.
The house is barely a house now, more part of the rock, like it was folding itself back into the quarry, year on year, scalloped around a bent lintel and a wooden door bleached close to the chalk by the heat of the sun. A few swoops of those strung shells, scoured, marked with symbols she half-recognises from back in the caves. Maybe an eye, maybe a hand, maybe a leaping fish or diving bird.
She stops at the lintel and knocks, partly out of politeness, partly to let her eyes adjust to the dark inside.
It’s a small room, but deceptive, with light coming in from above where the hollow bones of the chalk meet the sky. Sparse;a chair, a table, a cot; a brazier in the middle where the skillet dances, and bent over it, the Chalkwitch.
Her face like an owl in the half-light, amber skin burnished darker by the sun. She smiles, and the scar on her face pulls upwards. ‘Hello, darling.’
Crowkisser starts to reply just as the skillet coughs out a puff of smoke, and a bead of oil ignites black in the pan.
The smoke fills the small room. Chalkwitch curses and shifts the skillet off the stove. She turns back to Crowkisser, tears streaming down her face then bursts out laughing. ‘I still can’t cook, darling. The gods took that from me too.’
Crowkisser smiles despite herself, and reaches out her hand. ‘Shall we get some air?’
Chalkwitch’s hand is smooth as sanded wood, the muscles strong over stark bones. Bracelets clack on her wrists as they flee to the fresh air. Crowkisser holds her arm for a moment more in the sunlight, watching the pattern of the beads.
‘I made that one for you.’
Chalkwitch smiles. ‘When you were seven.’
Crowkisser squeezes her fingers a little. ‘It’s awful.’
Chalkwitch nods. ‘Children’s art usually is.’ She grins. ‘But it reminds me of you.’
She shoots a rueful glance back at the thin wisp of black smoke curling from inside. ‘Shall we chat out here today?’
Crowkisser nods. ‘I think that’d be best.’
