He inhales sharply, face whitening to a ghost before she bursts out laughing. ‘Oh. Why are you southern boys soeasy?’
Another arm drags Roofkeeper into a sticky huddle.
‘Come on stupid boys. More sightseeing later. If we take any longer, my father’ll have my tits.’
Easy for her to say. It was hard to hurry, when Thell was suddenly opening itself up like the intricate, twisting clusters of gears that spun behind the great carillons of Hesper. All the machinery of life thundering in these dark vaults. Echoing caverns swelling with a holler of voices in a welter of dialects and accents. Deep redoubts where mushrooms grew in upsetting profusion and thick, luminous algae sat in colossal, creaking tanks. Brighter passages housing what might have been drinking halls, or taverns, with long rock tables, channels cut in the centre, piled with fruits and meats, and banked fires smouldering gently below. Small horn cups filled with something fierce, and all around them people, most of them boisterous, in close contact. Light touches, hugs, kisses in passing. A few held apart on the edges of rooms. Strong hands resting gently on spears, bright and alert.
The honeycomb of the Stump rose in easy inclines and as they climbed the life of the fortress pushed past them in carts, in groupsof joking soldiers, in the occasional glimpse of a tattooist tracing geometric shapes and muttering softly.
War was everywhere in Thell. Roofkeeper could taste it in the air. But this was not Hesper’s war. In Hesper, the city lashed in frenzy. The walls were raised and strengthened. The foundries dripped hot streams of bullets and blades into a populace itching to raise them.
Hesper was a sea city and she fought like a pirate. Brutal and ragged and bloody.
He hadn’t seen Thell in action yet, but he could guess from the way the city moved, she would hit hard. Perhaps only once. Whatever was left would be … dismantled, at best. And if the truth of the city was intimidating, the legends were worse.
Stories first spun at his father’s knee had been fattened by the rumours he’d heard as he walked north with Quickfish. Of the dead of Thell. The endless, restless, dead. Some old, paranoid legacy from the days of the Empire, though they seemed pretty restful to him. Barrows and cairns pockmarked the foothills for miles around, but within the Stump, there was no sign of anything beyond the living.
Icecaller was quiet on the subject and Roofkeeper had only ever heard the word mentioned in ritual. It didn’t seem smart to pry.
It didn’t seem like superstition, exactly, but there was something in the way that people avoided mention of the dead, in the space they left around them, that made Roofkeeper uneasy. He wondered what Shroudweaver would make of it, if he ever came here. The stories said he was close to the dead. Too close, Roofkeeper’s father had muttered, too close by half.
The sound of Quickfish’s voice pulled him out of his own head. He was talking animatedly to Icecaller, commenting on the carvings on the walls, asking questions about the Republic. She responded with steady, laconic patience and the occasional eye roll.
Roofkeeper watched them both, and remembered meeting Quickfish for the first time. Five years ago now. He had beenmuch like this. Full of energy and questions, slipping from one topic to another like, well, like his namesake.
Standing in the stable yard of the Towers, frustrated and sweaty from trying to tame the massive bastard of a horse his father had saddled him with, his dandelion-shock hair pulled high by the movement of his fingers.
Roofkeeper sometimes wished their first meeting had been more romantic. More storybook. He had to admit Icecaller was right. The fledgling lord and the carpenter. It had a ring to it. But even then, especially then, he’d mostly been thinking about fucking him. There was something about Quick, something about the way he moved, the jut of his hips, the curve of his ribs, the lines of him that filled Roofkeeper’s head whenever he saw him.
So, they’d fucked and fucked often. Face down and gasping in the stables, his hands tight in Quick’s light hair, pulling his teeth down onto his neck. Running his lips down his stomach, falling hot and sticky into one another with the city clattering its pirate-song outside.
What had surprised him then, what surprised him now, was how quickly that first hot fire had transformed into something fiercer. The lust never went. He felt it even now. A desire to push him against the wall, to taste him on his lips, but beyond that there was something else. There was something about Quick that made Roofkeeper want him nearby. He got restless when they weren’t together. His mind replayed their conversations, selected out his laugh, his tired voice, his slow, easy smile.
It had taken Roofkeeper a little while to realise just how in love he was. It had all seemed a bit stupid. Fallon’s son and the boy that pulled the ticks off the horses. Afterwards though, he threw himself into it with complete abandon. The shape of his days changed as he made space for Quick, brought him as near and close as possible.
When Quickfish’s mother had her name taken by Crowkisser, he’d held him in the night. He’d found him naked in the kitchen, shaking, staring into the fire. He’d found him drunk on the battlements, one foot already in space. He’d held him as all theloss and the confusion tried to swallow him. He’d fought it with everything he had.
At some point, he’d won. Quickfish came back from the grey places and started to smile. It was a sadder smile than before, with death at its edges, but it was there, and Roofkeeper counted it a victory.
A pity then, about Fallon. If his mother’s loss had hit Quick hard, it had destroyed his father. When Quick needed him, he was gone. In wine, or in war, or in trade, Declan Fallon had responded to the loss of his wife by trying to work himself out of the world.
He wasn’t cruel to Quick. There was never a harsh word between them, not a scrap of judgement. He was just gone, inaccessible. Striding the boards of a trade ship, or spitting curses at Crowkisser from the top of the Grey Towers.
Roofkeeper wondered what Fallon was doing now. If he was looking for his son – hisonlyson. He wondered what Fallon thought of the man who had persuaded his son to leave.
Part of him hoped they were being hunted. It would show interest, at least.
Part of him thought they weren’t. Roofkeeper had become good, long ago, at moving through places without leaving much trace. There was no real art to it, just an eye for detail and a relentless precision. Hesper’s guilds always needed someone to get goods to and fro without much fuss, and roofkeepers had always been respected for the work they did.
When they left Hesper a couple of months ago, they had done so as ghosts, from the dawn gate, perfectly legally. No one was expecting them to leave, so no one thought to stop them.
The journey north had been similar. No frantic flight. Weeks of steady, measured progress, always inwards, away from the coast. Away from ships. One eye on the sky perhaps, trying to pick out the daggers of crows as they spun and wheeled.
It was hard to stay tense though, with the world opening up to the first warmth of spring. The woods and coppices rattling with the hollow tock of woodpeckers, strung with the smokeof charcoal burners, and in the evenings, around the fire-sucked embers, bitter beer and the slow chat of dark-eyed men.
Beyond the Midlands villages which fed Hesper’s appetites, they’d followed the rivers which cut down from the foothills, slicked across the landscape by some lazy cartographer, meandering across broad fields, spilling over scattered scree, stabbed with the beaks of kingfishers, herons. Only sometimes pushing the scoured shadow of bones to the surface, whitened by water and time, echoing the fields where dark humps spoke of the graves from the last great war. The southernmost edge of the Empire. And before that, the other, countless battles that had scarred the earth and the soul of the Midlands.
Roofkeeper’s grandfather had told him sometimes of the old wars, when a plough had turned a shattered blade or caught in the empty sockets of a sleeping skull. When he was younger, the markets of Hesper had been scattered with the occasional carts of treasure seekers, amateur archaeologists who poured forth scraps of dented armour, teeth, and finger bones like the gems from some dragon-haunted hoard.
