Chapter 16
Twice sang the mother to her pretty baby
Twice cried the baby in the crib so cold
Once came a rider, chasing bitter weather
Blood spilt and bones split, all for hate of gold
—Merryweather’s Lament
Some towns sat on the earth like they were ashamed to be there.
Squat, ill-favoured things. Clusters of cottages and byres that had come together on soft Midlands soil for no other reason than water was available, or this was where the thin roads crossed, or this was where their founder had set down sword and shield, and fell to his bloody knees.
Quickfish was happy to see even the miserable ones. They weren’t in the Midlands proper yet, just hauling across the scattered roads and sighing grass that split the world that still lived from the devastation to the south.
A glance over his shoulder is enough. Something always burning against the sky, and the sky always the sullen colour of a bruise.
‘What’s even left to burn?’
Roofkeeper’s voice is shooting for cheerful, but dying before it gets there.
The weight of his arm on Quickfish’s shoulder is comforting; the smell of his body, the scratch of his shirt. Fish leans in and kisses a bicep lightly where it sits against his chest.
‘Plenty, I suppose. They say Kisser’s still hunting stragglers. Even after the border towns were burnt out.’
Roof scans the treeline, the sallow fringe of hills brooding to the south. ‘We should keep moving, we’re too exposed up here. Might get better shelter at the next town. There should be one just over the rise.’
Roofkeeper says this with a map in front of him. He turns and twists it as if that changes where the roads might lie.
‘Give me that,’ Quickfish says. ‘For a lad that spends most of his time on the tops of buildings you’re terrible on the ground.’
‘I hate the ground,’ Roof says. ‘I only come down for you.’
Quickfish raises an eyebrow. ‘Smooth today.’
‘I get one day a month. Come on. We really have to move.’ This said with a glance southwards. Distantly, a copse of trees coughs up a flock of feathers that wheel, and move towards the smoke colouring the sky. Evening is falling faster than he would like.
They turn and track up the next hill along a path carved by goats as much as people, twisting with a shepherd’s logic up the crown and turning underfoot at every chance. Stones skitter away down green flanks, pocked with rabbit warrens and their liberally gifted shit.
‘We’ll be lucky not to break a leg before we find a bed.’
And of course, as soon as he says it, his legs go, a strange dizziness rising to meet him, like the ground singing. The lines of the world fall away for a second, just enough to turn his ankle, and leave him teetering on the edge of the track.
Roof is there. Not that there’s anything more dangerous down below than gorse and sheep skulls, but he’s there, and his grip is strong on Quickfish’s wrist. He’s light-headed for a second, and not just from the dizziness. But from the intimacy of it, the tightness.
‘Again?’ Roof says, and he means the seizure.
Quickfish tries to focus. There’s a strange light creeping around the edges of his vision, as if the air is burnished and twitching. He blinks, and it clears.
‘Again,’ he says, his voice more pathetic than he would like.
There’s no judgement in Roof’s face, just the same soft lines he’s grown to love over the days they’ve been on the run, and in the years before that – the sharp twist of his jaw where it broke as a child and the way the stubble shadows under it.
He knows how it feels against his skin. Part of him wants it now, to burrow into that hollow like a rabbit pulling against the cold of the night.
‘How many times now?’ Roof says, as Quickfish’s vision steadies. The feeling is fading like a dream, like the echoes of a small spell. He scratches at his palm.
‘Five? Six maybe?’
‘Worse since we left Hesper?’
Quickfish thinks of the nights before that, when he’d been awoken by the feel of the night pressing on his chest, by sweat dancing on his skin. Too many to count.
The lie is easier. ‘Worse. Maybe just … adjusting to the road.’
Roof frowns, ‘Worry does strange things to a body, Quick. If you need to stop, or turn back?’
‘No.’ And there’s the voice he wants to find, strident and commanding. He regrets it immediately as Roof’s expression slumps. Tries to prop it up again with a smile and a shrug.
‘What I mean is … there’s no time. The Teeth are burning. Signal fires all along the coast. Crowkisser is moving, and we have— I have run out of options.’
Roofkeeper opens his mouth to say something, and Quick stops it with a kiss. He lingers for a second then pulls away.
‘Trust me. You don’t know how hard I’ve searched. Everyone washes up in Hesper. Quacks and cursers and healers of every stripe under the sun, and none of them have been able to help her.’
He puts a hand on Roof’s throat, just below the chin. ‘I have to help her, Roof. I’m all she’s got.’
‘Your father,’ he says, and Quickfish winces. ‘Declan’s … not reliable when it comes to my mother.’
‘And they will be?’ Roof can’t quite keep the scorn from his tone. It’s to be expected, he was raised near the south, and all the ghouls of his childhood live in the wild north.
‘Thell will be,’ Quickfish says.
Which isn’t to say he wasn’t nervous. He hadn’t even thought of Thell for years, save for when another messenger failed to return and his Da cursed the mountain city to the bottom of a bottle.
Not many folk knew what happened up there, especially since the rebellion.
Quick had picked up a little as he grew, first playing beneath the tables while the guild heads bickered and carped, later finding the gaps behind the walls and tapestries where he could peek out and glimpse the pirate finery of Fallon’s confidants as they complained.
And if Roofkeeper was sometimes hiding with him, and if he sometimes forgot to concentrate, what of it? It was basically a bunch of adults telling each other ghost stories anyway.
The empty mountain; rumours of a deposed king; a new leader with the unsubtle name of Kinghammer; a leader disinclined to play the usual games of copper and compliments. Thell had had its revolution, and it wanted to be left alone.
Things had got worse since the south burnt. If Thell had been standoffish before, it was actively hostile now, patrolling its borders with enough vitriol to send the odd unlucky plaintiff home feathered in a pine box.
It isn’t worth dwelling on, not with his head still ringing six bells. They have more pressing problems.
The last few feet are a scramble to a twisted thorn tree clinging grimly to the crown of the hill, desperate for rain. Beyond that, a gentle course down the valley, to where the town should be.
Roof’s breath hisses between his teeth, and Quickfish steps to join him. Even from this distance, it’s clear the town is gone, little left except charred wood and broken stone; dark marks on the land like blood under the skin. Whatever has passed through here has been merciless.
Even the small stable is shattered, the bleached bones of its last horse sinking slowly into the earth. A few echoes remain of what might have been here – the stone shaft of a well, the pillars of something slightly grander behind.
Quickfish hates that he isn’t surprised. These little towns have never been particularly safe, shielded only by the lee of softer hills, the goodwill of the landholders, and the billhooks of a few second cousins and energetic uncles who drink too much cider at the weekends.
The world had hardened since the south burnt, and these gentle little towns had been caught up in the wave.
Some hit by bandits, some by famine, several by Crowkisser as she ranged out from the south to make sure her curse had stuck.
He knew this because Hesper had traded blows with her for a while, running militia out to vulnerable towns and trying to train the farmers to scan the sky for crows and sharpen their blades.
Hesper, and his father, had lost their taste for that pretty quickly.
Hesper fought best on the sea; on land, Crowkisser sent home one too many soldiers for morale to hold.
He’d glimpsed one, once, hustled to the infirmary after delivering a report, clutching a hole in his arm the size of a fist, burnt clean to the marrow and stinking of lemon and rot.
So the little towns die, and the maps are slow to update. But they are still here, and night is still falling.
Quickfish takes Roof’s hand. ‘Come on, let’s find somewhere out of the wind, at least.’
They find more than that.
The death of the village unveils itself in a series of small sadnesses – the discarded weapons at what would have been the west gate; the bones that would have comprised a few second cousins and uncles, if the dogs hadn’t had their way with them, before they too died.
The whole town clustered around a well, which still ran clear, mercifully, fed by some natural spring deep below, sluicing away whatever petty murder had occurred up here.
Roofkeeper rinses his hands and scrubs his face.
‘This is fucking awful,’ he says. ‘What happened here?’ Quickfish hears him, but he’s already a little way from the well, climbing the steps of that pillared structure beyond.
It’s a little familiar to him. Smaller, cruder, but familiar.
Memories of holidays in the south with his mother, his Da off betting on horses or staking a fortune on calcio.
And in some sun-kissed plaza, a half-remembered temple, pillars like this, steps like these.
The gods liked their homes to conform to certain shapes.
He turns back to Roof, calls out over the blasted square. ‘I think there was a temple here.’
Roofkeeper picks his way across the rubble to join him.
‘A temple? Like, hosts, gods, the works?’
Quickfish shrugs. ‘Maybe? Certainly shaped like it. It might explain how they survived out here as long as they did.’ He scratches at his palm. ‘Might explain why they died.’
Roof spits, not one of his better habits. ‘I don’t want to sleep here, we should just keep going. Rest tomorrow. Don’t want to lay my head where the god-sick were splitting their skulls.’
Quickfish shakes his head. ‘Not … exactly how it worked, love. ’Sides, I’m done in. There’s enough of this place still standing that it’ll keep the weather off. A quick sleep, and back to it. Captain’s nap, that’s what my da used to call it.’
Roofkeeper eyes him sceptically. ‘Aye, aye Cap’n’. The loose corner of a smile makes it all worthwhile.
A short bit of work sees a lean-to and a fire, and some hides to keep off the cold. Quickfish tucks himself into an alcove, and eyes Roof across the flames. ‘One of your best features.’
Roof grins, long and easy, and pokes the fire with a stick. ‘My hair? My eyes?’
Quickfish shakes his head. ‘Nah. Your packing skills.’
Roof snorts. ‘You cosy over there, Captain?’
Quickfish laughs. ‘Not as cosy as I could be.’
The rest of the night passes like their nights usually do. The fire dips to embers, and the cold spike of the stars holds the night.
When Quickfish wakes, the air is clearer, the soft gold of morning slanting between the pillars and crumbled stone.
He stands and stretches. Walking the night’s stiffness off, first around the edge of the temple grounds, where the hosts would have taken offerings, then stepping into the bowl of the temple, where they would have opened their minds to the sky.
All of it gone now, save for a few stark markers. It’s good for a brisk walk though, clears the head.
The crunch under his foot is less pleasant. Old stone, he thinks at first, a bit of flaked marble, but stone does not have the curve, or that symmetry. He kneels and digs a little. Ribs, and beneath that a spine, and then the rest.
‘What have you got there, Fish?’ he hears Roofkeeper call. He ignores him. There’s a glint amid the bones. And it should feel wrong, should feel morbid, but his hand is already in there, searching.
So when Roof reaches him, he’s already holding what killed the people of this town.
The tip of a spear, flattened and leaf-shaped.
Beautiful. He’s seen it before, of course, in his dreams, in the bodies of those unlucky scouts.
There’s only one city on this whole continent that makes spears like that, thin enough to move the wind.
He turns it over in his hands, and for a moment, he can see it. The patrol coming from the north, wild and paranoid after the burning of the south. Best to stop the rot before it draws Crowkisser’s attention; take out the hosts and their gods with them.
And really, how much defence could this little town muster? Not with Thell’s young bucks already out for blood. All it takes is a loud voice in command. Maybe a panicked movement by one of the temple guards. Maybe a scream.
Then the spears fly, and the bodies fall. And once a host body dies, the god leaves. And once the gods leave, well, best to make sure of the others. Best to run the blade in twice. Best to set light to the thatch. In case they hid up there, in case they take root somewhere.
Burn it out. Cut it out. Burn it out.
He realises he’s shaking. The edge of the spear-point bites a thin red line across his palm that flows like ruddy gold in the morning light.
‘Tower and turn, Fish. What have you been doing?’ And Roof is there, unclenching his fingers, cleansing, bandaging.
‘Any deeper and you’d need stitches.’
‘Sorry,’ Fish says, and it’s exactly as pathetic as he deserves.
Roof crouches next to him. The bones stretch between them, sun slatting between the ribs, between the temple pillars. ‘Do I need to be worried, Fish?’
Quickfish smiles at him. His hand aches, but the sun is warm on his back. He feels bathed in gold.
‘No, never.’
Roof’s brows furrow.
‘Sure?’
Quickfish straightens and kisses the top of his head. He smells of sand and sun.
‘Sure. Let’s shake a leg.’
They turn and pull northwards again, leaving the skeleton of the town to the sun, to the shadow, to the soft shape of bones.