He’d glanced at Icecaller the first time that happened. She’d responded with her usual chattiness. ‘Tolling for the dead,’ she’d said. Then again. ‘For. The. Dead.’ Repeating it slowly and carefully, as you would for a slow child.
She was an interesting one. He could see that Quickfish thought it too, although, he, in his sweet, affable way, was clearly burning to impress her. Or if not to impress her, at least to thaw her a bit, to find some crack beneath the put-downs and the swagger. What little softness she had shown with Steelfinder was shuttered and barred as they stalked through the more public areas of the mountain.
Roofkeeper, for his part, enjoyed the severity, her hacked back hair, her stalking walk. The blood-red geometrics that thronged her temples and cheekbones.
She’d caught him watching her a while ago and stared back levelly. Something had passed between them briefly and he’d risked a half-smile. When she smiled back it didn’t feel like a connection. Itdidfeel like a victory.
She was taking them to the council chamber now, confident that she’d softened her father enough that Quickfish’s plea wouldn’t fall on deaf ears. Roofkeeper hoped she was right. Petitioning the council meant forging through the heart of the Stump. Anatomising the life of the mountain. With Icecaller at their head, they pushed into places that no one from Hesper had seen in years, if ever.
Roofkeeper was reminded of his early days working on the tiles and turrets of Hesper. Peeling back thatch, pin and beam to gaze into abandoned attics and ruined rooms which hadn’t been touched for decades, places which had sunk off plans, and maps. And of course, nowhere that looked empty really was. In Hesper, those hidden spaces had been filled by orphans and gutter rats, criminals and spies, traders in things that couldn’t been sold under clear sky.
Peel off the roof of the mountain, and Thell was crammed with life. The legends had offered a fell king, perhaps a strange warlock or a cursed daughter. The reality was a thriving city that was part barracks, part bazaar, part cathedral. The halls rolling with the sound of bells and the drift of incense. The sizzle of oil and the clink of tankards. It could have been chaos. It hadfeltlike chaos, to begin with, but the city’s founders had carved out something with purpose. The city was more organised than at first blush. He could see workshops, smithies, artificers as they walked. Everything had its place, and everything pulsed with life.
The more he saw, the less alien the Stump became. Less alien, but no less strange. A better sense of its geography helped. Somewhere, hundreds of feet above, were the tops of ancient glaciers, the beginnings of the utmost north. Somewhere, hundreds offeet below, were deep caverns. Artesian wells pushing springs up into the body of the mountain to be channelled, diverted and pooled.
Sandwiched in between, eleven or so levels of interwoven tunnels, housing the growing throng of the Republic, not nearly as inaccessible or as insular as he might have believed. Roofkeeper was surprised to find himself relaxing. Here, of all places. Now, of all times. He wasn’t the sort of man to turn down a little grace though. He slipped his hand into Quick’s, and squeezed softly, was rewarded with a smile in return. Icecaller glanced back at them and made little kissy noises before picking up the pace. He risked another smile in her direction, was rewarded with an eye-roll. Progress, progress.
As Icecaller led them onwards they moved into a broad cavern with stalls haphazardly racked up the walls, pushing through a swelling holler of voices in a welter of dialects and accents. The clatter steadied his heart further. A little hint of home, something of the burly tone of Hesper in these merchants’ voices. He could see Quick felt it too, watching his eyes light on stall after heaped stall. It shouldn’t have surprised him that Thell survived on trade. He couldn’t imagine the slopes of the mountain producing much, beyond a scattering of hardy, brutal little sheep.
Amid all that bartering and bickering, finally, a bit of breathing space. Icecaller was too far ahead to mind them, glad-handing stallholders and street rats with seemingly equal enthusiasm. Still, the clamour was almost too much to take in. The skirling sounds of some kind of flute crashing into a stringed instrument whose player kept half a hand on the music, half on turning a great spit of crackling meat which smelt mouth-wateringly good.
Roofkeeper tugged Quickfish’s elbow, pointing. A sprawl of tents marked the stalls of the semi-nomadic people from the north, elaborately painted in swirling designs of white, blue, orange. Their wares arranged with utter precision. Layered and stamped hides; dried bunches of powerful herbs, Elsta’s Folly, Slipwort, others he didn’t even dare guess at.
A few steps down from them, a burly woman lay atop massivesacks of salt, one leg cocked up as she scanned the crowds and rubbed her raw palms off on her scarves.
‘It’s like a circus,’ Quickfish whispered. Roofkeeper could only nod in agreement as they passed under raised stalls with swinging scales where moustached workers from the Midlands weighed out crops and grain, sifting the seeds between their hands, purple and red and dark brown.
Opposite them, a wiry man worked a clay oven, turning out breads studded with the same grains, that smelt soft and rich as an autumn morning.
Quickfish’s heart leapt a little at the sight of traders from the Burners’ forest. Soft pelts spread with intricately worked amber; charcoal, for painting, sketching. Their bright eyes, perpetually smudged faces, and quick hands offering charms made of beetle-shell and nut, woven with thorns. Haggling back and forth, lithe young men listening intently to elderly women bent and gnarled over the details of a brooch, a hilt, a blood channel.
More and more, in bewildering profusion, until he was almost grateful to watch Icecaller disentangle herself from a wide-eyed young man in a threadbare cloak, and swan across to them.
‘Try one,’ she says, thrusting out two skewers. Some kind of pastry, glazed with sugar that puffs hot steam into their mouths as they bite in.
She watches them as they chew. ‘You like it?’
Roofkeeper nods. ‘They’re good.’
‘Yeah,’ she says. ‘Kids love them.’
He decides to let that one slide, though he tries a barb in return. ‘I can see why Crowkisser might be afraid of you.’
She cocks her head at him, lips half stuck with sugar. ‘What?’
Quickfish turns, his face frantically miming a shut up, but Roofkeeper doesn’t much feel like it. ‘I said, I can see why she’s scared of you.’ He gestures at the market. ‘All of this. The deep wells. The community spirit. The army.’
He sucks the stick, throws it in a passing pail.
‘It’d take years to crack this place, if it ever fell. You’d need tohit it from both sides at once, and there’s no way she can pull that off. It’s really …’
He trails off as he sees Icecaller watching him like a drenched cat. Quickfish over her shoulder, slowly straining an agonised expression through his fingers.
She walks up to him, puts sticky fingers on his chest. ‘For some reason, I don’t totally hate you. I think it’s because you’re pretty. But you better keep that talk toyourselfwhen we speak to the council. Makes you sound a lot like a filthy foreign spy.’ She chews the last words like they are still sticky with sugar.
Icecaller reaches behind her, dragging Quickfish forwards by his wrist, and leaning in conspiratorially.
‘Wouldn’t it be really, really awkward if I had to kill your boyfriend?’
