Chapter 33
Mark the stock precisely on the brow and tongue
if grazing the higher pastures, place a tar-salt brand
on the rightmost foot.
—Practicalities of the Longer Years, Softcatch, herder
‘… and let no man do you harm.’
Swift, precise strokes, brush and needle working over skin like a feeding bird.
The echo of the crowd like celebrants.
do you harm.
The broad honeycomb of the Stump above their heads, its paths worn smooth by the feet of generations, its caverns roiling with the echoes of the ritual.
Quickfish stands amid the gathered people of Thell and feels deeply alone. Distantly there is the sound of bells, doubled and discordant. The needle dips, spits, colours. Geometrics of stunning intricacy, black on red on white. The colours of the city; blood and bone and stone.
A half-stripped man sits on raised steps, the crowd clustered around him young and old alike, but almost all of them lean, hard as mountain rock.
The tattooist works over his shoulders, weaving a right-angled web, her head dipped low in concentration.
Her short brown hair is marked with ritual scars, laced with charms that rattle softly with each twist and turn.
At her side stands a small cup of some clear spirit that she swirls around her mouth every time she licks the needle clean of ink.
Her lips are tight against his cheek, whispering words to him that he needs to echo back.
With every square completed, he repeats the refrain.
‘Know the dead. Honour the dead. Let them be still in you. And as they are you … let no man do you harm.’ A pause in the incantation as the tattooist’s head dips, as her teeth skirt shoulder blades and bite deep.
Blood flows, pools in the corners and lines of the forming geometrics, fills them precisely. Not a drop escapes.
The lights above hiss and spit, fuelled by the same bright energy that pulses through the rest of the Stump, some kind of sorcery that Quickfish has never seen worked before.
Under their glare, the blood stiffens and hardens.
Over and over the process is repeated, the hall filled with soft, insistent call and response, the voices of the crowd as steady and regular as the patterns that gradually thread over the man’s shoulders and spine.
By the time they are finished, the man’s back is a sea of squares. He moves, stretches, and the geometrics shift softly, riding against muscle and tendon.
The tattooist staggers as she inks the final line, falls, is caught by willing, ready hands. She disappears into the shadows of the Stump. In the distance, a bell tolls.
Quickfish glances across at Roofkeeper. He looks vaguely sick, fingers tugging at his beard, like there’s a thought in his head that he doesn’t like.
Quickfish leans across, runs his chin against his cheek. ‘Go on then.’
Roofkeeper smiles. ‘That obvious? OK, fine. I miss Hesper. I’m not sure we should have come here. I don’t think these people can help us.’ He pauses, coughs out the incense-thick air. ‘Or want to help us. You’ve seen what Icecaller’s like. We’re a joke to her.’
Quickfish sucks at his teeth, slips his fingers into Roofkeeper’s hand. ‘Maybe. Maybe. I don’t see what other choice we have right now.’
Roofkeeper watches as the crowd disperses, flowing up and down into the other levels of the Stump.
They hadn’t been allowed to explore much yet, but he’d quickly figured out that the portion of the city which jutted out from the mountain was just a sliver of something much larger.
Multiple storeys, running up and down, maybe even into the bedrock, or the caverns beneath.
He could feel them under his feet, a sense of something vast and echoing.
A little like those moments on the very edge of a roof. Hanging by nothing but a few feet of rope and harness. Your belly clutched by the wind, and acres of hurling air between you and the ground.
All these people had to go somewhere; there were a couple of hundred in this room at least. Factor that up by the size of the mountain, and Thell was holding two, three thousand. Somewhere. None of them particularly helpful.
He turns to Quickfish. ‘Just because this might be our only option doesn’t mean I have to like it.
How long have we been here now? Two days?
Three? What do we actually know about these people?
What have they actually offered us, other than insults and’ – he waves his hand after the crowd – ‘whatever that was.’
He watches Quickfish’s mouth open to correct him. Holds up a finger.
‘A minute, Fish.’
He waits, bless him.
‘I’ve been thinking. I’m not even sure this is our only option. My granddad always said, the Burners …’
Quickfish butts in. Roofkeeper wonders if he got that from his dad.
‘The Burners are hedge magic. Nothing of theirs works for long out of the forest.’ He laughs, ‘Dad bought a present for Mum one time. Spent a fortune on it, if you believed him. Some kind of bird, made of blossoms. It’d sing every morning when the light hit it.
’ He smiles at the memory. ‘For a couple of weeks, at least. Then the flowers all started to wither, and the branches of its little cage thing turned to dust.’
Roofkeeper grins, despite himself. ‘What happened to it?’
Quickfish can barely keep a straight face, ‘It stopped singing sweetly. Escaped up into the rafters. Would only respond to the moon.’ He cracks up. ‘Every night at midnight, we’d hear it screaming around up there, like a wasp in a cowbell.’
He stops, gets his breath. ‘I guess it died, after a while. Not soon enough for Dad though. He didn’t trade with the Burners for months.’
He steadies himself on Roofkeeper’s arm as they wind their way downwards. ‘What I’m trying to say is, I get your point, but can we just give this a bit more of a chance? There might be someone here who can help Mum, and, well, at least we know they’ve got some really strange stuff going on.’
Roofkeeper nods. ‘Strange is right.’
Quickfish takes his hand and leads him back towards where he thinks Icecaller might be.
‘Roof, I love you, but we come from a city where we put dead people in glass urns so the earth won’t take them. We throw ourselves off the Towers for sport. We drink in most of Hesper’s dockside pubs. We are not allowed to call other people strange.’
Roofkeeper snorts. ‘But that’s our strange, Quick.’ He catches a look. ‘Fine, fine. A good point, smugly made.’
Quickfish smiles. ‘I take after my folks sometimes.’ He thinks.
‘Actually, they might be a bit stranger here, but there’s reasons for it.
My dad always said the folks in Thell were different after the Empire fell.
Something about keeping to themselves for safety.
I don’t think they were allowed to do much together, back in the bad old days.
’ He shrugs. ‘Dad was never much for history. Even the stuff he was involved in.’
‘Rich people,’ Roofkeeper murmurs. Quickfish jabs him in the ribs.
He follows it with a soft kiss on the cheek. ‘Let’s see how it shakes out, please?’
Roofkeeper turns his jaw with a hand, kisses him back deeply. ‘You’re such a terrible optimist. I’m doomed.’
‘He’s right you know.’ Icecaller’s voice cuts in. They’ve walked to the edge of one of the stepped tunnels that slopes through the mountain. Her legs dangle from the alcove above as she looks down at them with a wry smile twisting her raw-boned face.
Quickfish tries to smile politely. ‘Right?’
Icecaller shrugs. ‘Right. You’re probably doomed.’ She slides down until she’s sitting opposite them, cross-legged, long fingers twisting expressively.
‘I mean,’ she says, rolling her neck. ‘Look at the facts. Your dad runs Hesper. Everyone knows he’s a problem.’
Quickfish’s face darkens like a spring storm. She holds up a pacifying hand, palm out. ‘A problem to that skinned nit of a girl in Astic anyway.’
She tips her head. ‘Or maybe, maybe, more of a challenge.’ She points at Quickfish, ‘Your big pappy kept his name, right? That takes, fuck, I dunno … Guts. Stupidity. Both. He kept his name, and he kept his city. That’s got to sting. Hesper’s not pretty, but it’s got clout.’
Quickfish catches Roofkeeper’s brief smile.
Icecaller continues, oblivious. ‘Clout, yeah. And. Annnnd. And he used to hang out with that mad sailor cunt, back before the Republic was a thing, fuckin’ yeaars ago.’
Quickfish nods. ‘Shipwright. Yeah, they’ve been friends for ages. As long as I’ve been alive, at least.’
‘What did they even do?’ Icecaller asks.
‘Other than set us up in our big stone home?’ She slouches.
‘I’ve never been very clear on the rest. Something spooky with Skinpainter.
Then, what, dicking around at politics and proxy wars for two decades and change until they sailed a big old fleet down south a few years ago?
I remember hearing something about that. Not much. Didn’t end well.’
Quickfish shrugs. ‘Dad doesn’t like to talk about it. I hear bits sometimes. Something happened in the south. Something big. It changed things, I think. My dad, Shipwright, Shroudweaver. They all tried to stop it. It didn’t work.’
Icecaller watches closely, all the nervous energy drained from her, still and cool as her namesake. ‘Changed things how?’
Roofkeeper coughs, clears his throat. ‘Changed the … what would you call them? The rules, the fundamentals.’
Icecaller picks her teeth with an old tattoo needle. ‘Rules of what, vagueboy?’
Roofkeeper purses his lips. ‘Magic, I think. Religion, definitely. That’s when the gods went. And our names.’
Icecaller examines the end of the needle. ‘Wow. That’s a lot.’
Quickfish nods. ‘Yeah. From what I can figure all this …’ – with a despairing sweep of an arm – ‘all this is fallout from that. Where Crowkisser comes in, I don’t know.’
Icecaller smiles, picks at the muck between the crazed tiles of the alcove. ‘I can hazard a guess. I gotta theory. Want to hear it?’
Quickfish waits.
‘OK then, so think on this. Your dad, and Shipwright, and the other one. The skinny bloke.’
‘Shroudweaver,’ Roofkeeper supplies.
She waves dismissively. ‘Yeah, that guy. So the three of them get this big old fleet. We’ve all heard the stories.
Golden sails, amber winds. The burnished armour of the brave people of Hesper.
The first show of any fucking unity since any dusty old cock can remember.
’ She frowns, ‘Or since they helped us out, at least.’
She pauses, grabs a passing wrist, kisses it, slaps the ass of the man who owns it.
‘All of them, all of them sail down to this mysterious southern place. That big old city that must have existed, and none of us can bloody remember. And we don’t know what they do down there.
But …’ and here she raises a finger. ‘But who comes back? Three people, and one ship. And a story about a ragged girl that does supremely unsettling shit with birds. The rest of us kicking our heels up here, we don’t know anything.
Except, if you read the records, what does it say?
’ She grins toothily at Roofkeeper. ‘Go on, you say it. I’d like to hear it come out your sweet wee lumberjack face. ’
Roofkeeper winces. ‘The books say …’
Icecaller widens her eyes and paints her face with excitement.
Roofkeeper sighs.
‘The books say, that on the last day, before the Shipwright and the Shroudweaver came to the city in the south, that the sky grew sick, that the clouds fled like sheep before a wolf, the sun and the moon split and ran and that the roof of the world peeled open.’
Icecaller claps excitedly. ‘Go on, this is my favourite bit.’
Roofkeeper scratches at his beard. ‘The way we tell it, it wasn’t an accident.
The way we tell it, the daughter of crows peeled the roof of the world open, so that the eye of the heavens was turned full on us and the stars fell into the south.
And ever since, the rules have changed. But no one knows how.
Not exactly. Depends who you talk to. Some things are harder, but I’ve heard that you can do stuff now that wasn’t even possible before.
’ He coughs, ‘People agree on some of it. There’s no gods. There’s no hosts. There’s no names.’
Icecaller grins delightedly. ‘Except your fuckbuddy’s dad. Always a wrinkle. Still, you’re well-informed for a … whatever you are.’ She looks at Roofkeeper quizzically.
‘Carpenter,’ he mutters.
‘Carpenterrrr,’ she draws the word out, lets it hang thickly on her lips. ‘The wayward spunkpocket of a famous war hero. And a carpenter.’ She snorts. ‘This is getting interesting.’
Quickfish smiles. ‘What’s your theory then? Before the compliments overwhelm me.’
Icecaller doesn’t bat an eye. ‘Yeah, so, all this goes down in the south. And we know it’s true right because it’s in books and when have they ever lied to us?
’ She rolls her eyes. ‘OK, so the fleet sails down. With your dad, Shipwright, Shroudweaver. Then, somehow, the sky falls. Seems safe to assume everyone in the south dies. But,’ she grins.
‘Where the fuck does she come from? Crowkisser. Where. The. Fuck. Does. She. Come. From?’
Quickfish and Roofkeeper glance at each other, puzzled.
Icecaller’s face splits wide with satisfaction.
‘It’s simple, pups. Armies don’t fuck shit up that badly.
Allies don’t fuck shit up that badly. Friends don’t fuck shit up that badly.
’ She holds up her fingers and ticks them off.
‘There’s only two things in the world that can fuck shit up that badly.
Families.’ She fixes them with a hard stare. ‘Families. And lovers.’
It hangs in the air between them for a moment, before she pats them both on the cheek. ‘Speaking of which, let’s go and meet mine.’