‘Hesper? They haven’t had the stones to knock on our doorfor years.’ His interrogator wrinkles her nose warily, ‘Are you Fallon’s kid?’
Quickfish sighs. ‘Among other things.’
Her posture shifts. The spear withdraws and she leans on it quizzically. ‘Fallon’s kid?’ She snorts. ‘You?’ Another ripple of laughter.
Roofkeeper rumbles next to him. ‘I can vouch for him.’
She snorts again, a smile fighting the official frown. ‘Oh. This is too much. You’re adorable. Vouch for him?’
She moves down the hill with sudden speed, heavy solid footfalls that bring her face to a stop an inch from Roofkeeper’s open mouth. He can smell her breath, sweet and slightly spiced. ‘You know how much we value your words here, pup?’ – a twist of the head, a spit, a two-fingered stab in the chest – ‘This isThell, you wet-eared nit. We value stone and steel and bone.’
Roofkeeper swallows.
She grins wide as a shark. ‘Cute little pups are always a plus though. Especially if Fallon’s dribbled them out.’
She steps back and bows mockingly, arms stretching to encompass the cairns, the buildings, the mountain fortress which looms at her back.
‘Welcome to Thell, pup of the Grey Towers. I’m Icecaller. And we’re like nothing you’ve ever seen.’
26
the body can be enumerated in several ways
by the crenelations of the teeth
by the wet tumuli of vein and artery
—Redwork and Bonework, Wicktwister
Quickfish’s first few hours in Thell prove how inadequate a statement that is.
Icecaller is an unforgiving tour guide, seemingly taking great delight in hurrying them through a whirl of unfamiliar sites with nothing but a few cryptic remarks flung over her shoulder.
They crest the low-slung mounds that hide Thell’s dead, marked with intricate boundary posts and hung with brightly coloured flags which snap and bite in the freshening wind. The land stretches out for miles to east and west, peppered with small homesteads, framed by raised cairns with deep defiles between, where the grass lingers dark and weak, mixed with never-quite-thawed ice.
The buildings become sturdier the closer they draw to the mountain. Squat, scalloped structures, that might be forges or tanneries, and some that he doesn’t recognise, their walls slashed with broad strokes of paint in deep red, burnt black.
‘Inkworks,’ Icecaller says, unhelpfully, gesturing to great pots which seem to roil ceaselessly over stretched fire pits. The air above their rims is thick with fumes. His eyes sting.
The inhabitants of the cottages watch them pass with flat eyes. Their hands twisting the necks of speckled mountain birds, plucking feathers from their breasts with quick, practiced movements, driving their fingers down the throat to remove guts, innards. The most wretched scraps are tossed to the animals thatroot around the mire of the cairns, squat as houses, bigger and wider than a cat, their shoulders and hips armoured with some kind of cartilage that shifts and clacks as they waddle about industriously. The cottagers chuckle as their striped jaws wrap around old bones, cracking down into the marrow, and pulling it out with strong, black tongues.
That morbid little feast merits more comment.
‘Bonebadgers,’ Icecaller says, toeing one out of the way to a chorus of yips. ‘Ornery little shits.’
She stoops, throws a scapula low, underhand, and watches them race off, grinning. ‘My sister loves them.’
She wipes her bloody hands on her trousers. ‘You’ll see why. Come on. A ways to go.’ Quickfish tries to hang onto the brief enthusiasm in her smile as he slips over the half-thawed mud. Behind him, meat is skinned and the air simmers.
Even the geography of Thell leaves him feeling like an outsider.
The curves of the outbuildings fade back into the hills as they grow closer. The scent of ice is sharper as they thread their way higher, towards a brutal edifice that clings to the mountain like a scab on a wound. Pocked with shadowed chambers and walkways, it looms imperious; a ravaged, many-eyed face looking down on the dreaming dead.
‘The Stump,’ Icecaller says, her blue eyes bright and fierce. ‘This is where the magic happens. And I mean that very fucking literally.’
She laughs a thin, sniggering laugh as she looks at their blank faces.
‘No? I’m wasted on you, pups. You’ll see. That’s Skinpainter’s thing. They basically’ – her fingers wriggle – ‘made it all up.’
