The Ice House Read online

  Lesang rested the head of her hammer upon the ground and turned to the scruffy, freckled harka beside her. ‘Fetch me a brew, would you, Jib?’

  ‘Yes, Doyenne.’

  Lesang had thin, keen eyes, lit up by a great splash of white that ran from her cranial ridge to her muzzle. She was short by harka standards, with small, straight horns bracketing a spray of vanilla hair. Her apron came down to her shins and was filthy with gore. When she smiled, she showed all her teeth.

  She flicked her cigarette into the drain and beckoned to Hagar. ‘Walk with me.’

  Hagar breathed through her teeth, trying not to taste the warm, rank air. No one knew more about meat off the bone than the flesh shambles clique.

  Lesang strode on ahead, swinging her hammer, nodding to butchers as she passed. Elaborate stone archways were set into the walls, the capstones so worn that the once-fearsome visages carved into them had softened to a smooth, babylike innocence. Over a century and a half ago, enemies of the state had been tried here, the hearings brief, the judges masked. Though each trial had lasted little more than an hour, they had run back-to-back for months.

  Goats were tied in rows to low wooden racks, their slashed throats bleeding into buckets. Hagar watched a sweating butcher grasp a goat by its beard, tilt its head back and slice into its windpipe with a cellist’s grace. On the racks behind him, headless limbless torsos bucked and kicked their stumps. A boy straddled one and slit it from breast to belly. His long knife came out snared in rubbery white strands of sinew that lengthened and snapped. A cigarette jounced in the corner of his mouth.

  ‘So,’ Lesang said brightly, ‘what can I help you with?’

  Hagar had not been concentrating and tripped on a channel in the floor. She staggered a few paces, her boots skidding in slush. She regained her balance just as Lesang glanced back. ‘Hagar?’ The Doyenne’s tone sharpened, not quite impatient, but chivvying.

  ‘Last night there was an incident.’

  ‘Didn’t someone’s attic catch on fire up by the spire? I suppose it was inevitable with all those fireworks.’

  Hagar held her face still, trying not to betray surprise or nervousness.

  ‘No, not that.’

  ‘Something else?’ Lesang’s eyes widened. ‘What’s happened?’

  Hagar watched Lesang for signs of dissembling.

  ‘I’ve just come from a villa in the high town. This morning a doctor was found dead.’

  Lesang let her mouth fall open. ‘Murder?’

  ‘All they left was a skeleton.’

  ‘Goodness. That is strange.’ Lesang turned and began walking forwards again. A severed goat’s head whirled at her in a high arc from amongst the racks. She swung her hammer in a double-fisted backhand, connecting with a wet thump. It went tumbling back towards the thrower, trailing gore. Her workers sent up cheers and applause. She glanced back at Hagar, a little short of breath.

  ‘You don’t think . . .’ Lesang broke off, sighed. ‘No, I shouldn’t say anything.’

  Hagar saw an old, crook-backed harka collect the fallen head and toss it into a heap with the others. She glanced back at Lesang.

  ‘I’d appreciate it if you did.’

  ‘Well . . .’ Lesang slowed until Hagar was at her side, then leaned in, lowering her voice. ‘I wonder whether the crucibles might know a thing or two.’

  ‘Crucibles?’

  ‘Oh yes. I forget you’re not a local.’ Lesang let out a hoarse cackle, which cut off. ‘The crucible clique. Chemists. You must have seen their headquarters, down on the quay, near the edge of the stilt city. Big smokestacks and a rainbow of chemicals pouring into the ocean. No mistaking the smell. I’m no expert but this death sounds alchymic, you know?’

  Hagar pinched her brow, disguising a frown. Quite the supposition.

  ‘Perhaps.’

  Lesang straightened up and shrugged. ‘Just a thought.’ Her voice returned to its usual hearty volume. ‘What an upheaval, eh? You can see how busy we are here – what with the festival just gone and the Grand-Duc’s arrival tomorrow. Everyone’s eating like the world’s about to end.’ A little black teardrop of clotting blood hung under her eye. ‘Who do you think will win the vote?’

  ‘Honestly, I don’t think it matters.’

  Lesang said something that was lost beneath the din of slaughter. She turned and began to walk backwards, clutching her hammer just beneath its head, passing it from hand to hand.

  Hagar was feeling wheezy. Someone rattled past with a barrow of legs, whistling. The sound of terrified bleating built and built, then cut off.

  Up ahead, a blinkered white mare was being led out of one of the tunnels, nickering and stamping. And behold a pale horse.

  Lesang raised her hammer and hailed the butcher leading the animal. ‘Morning, Trem. Mind if I take this one?’ Up close, the mare was a yellowish ivory, slathered in filth up to its hocks. Probably Stokeham stock.

  The butcher Trem had a bad eye and distended prognathic jaw. He gave a little grunt of assent and, nodding, handed her the horse’s grubby halter. Lesang led the horse to the beginning of a channel in the floor. She set down her hammer and patted the horse’s withers and the horse settled. She turned to Hagar. ‘How strong are you?’

  Hagar regarded Lesang’s lean brown forearms, the lustrous bulk of living muscle. She glanced down at her own scrawny limbs, locked in perpetual juvenility.

  ‘I surprise people.’

  Lesang held out the halter. ‘Would you like to help?’

  Hagar hesitated. The mare scuffed its hooves on the stone. Lesang was waiting expectantly.

  Hagar took the rope. It was heavier than she had anticipated, slightly greasy.

  Lesang picked up her hammer. One face was flat; the other tapered to a long cylinder. She took a knife from her apron and dug about in the cylinder’s hollow end, teasing out a plug of grey meat. Hagar felt the mare tug on its halter. Its nostrils flared as it sniffed its strange pungent surroundings.

  ‘Now, Hagar, if you’d be so kind as to step this way. Get a good firm grip on its head.’

  With a lingering sense of unreality, Hagar came closer, reached up and snaked her fingers through the rope nosepiece. The mare resisted, shaking its head.

  ‘Shh shh shh.’ Lesang rubbed the horse’s nose, brushed back its dirty blond forelock. She stepped aside, out of the creature’s range of vision. ‘The saltpetres have designed a contraption with a little recessed bolt.’ Her voice became soft and lilting. ‘Uses gunpowder. Blasts a hole through the skull. Pop – and there you go. Takes all the love out of it.’ She lifted her hammer and gently, almost tenderly, lowered the long tip until it was just above the creature’s brow. The horse strained and flinched. Hagar clung on, her feet slipping. ‘That’s it, that’s it.’ Lesang kept the hammer perfectly still. ‘We’ll make the change, of course. Can’t fight progress. But for me . . .’ The horse began to settle. Lesang met its gaze. ‘. . . the real craft comes in disguising your intentions so well, she doesn’t recognise the instrument of her destruction – even when it’s right in front of her eyes.’

  Lesang raised the hammer.

  Hagar felt the mare’s hot damp breaths against her knuckles. And they had tails like unto scorpions, and there were stings in their tails.

  The hammer fell.

  She felt the impact through her arm. The horse’s legs tucked and the beast dropped, dragging her with it. She landed on her shoulder. Her hand was trapped in the bridle. The horse thrashed and convulsed and she felt each kick. Through the high glass ceiling the sun was white-gold, blazing.

  Strong hands gripped her wrist. They unhooked her fingers. Another grabbed her collar and hauled her to her feet. The butcher Trem gave her a glance, then stepped round the bucking horse. He carved a long slit in its top lip and used the loose skin as a handle, wrenching the head back and dragging his knife across the throat. Blood gushed from the ragged hole, blush red. The mare pedalled its forelegs in slow, ersatz circles. Already another
butcher was dragging a meathook on a long chain and attaching it to the animal’s rear.

  ‘Looks like you caught the worst of it, there,’ said Lesang. The boy from earlier returned and handed her a steaming mug. ‘Ah. Cheers, Jib.’ She blew on it. ‘Is it right that your order forbids eating meat?’

  Hagar tried to brush the straw and excrement from her breeches, but found she was mostly spreading it, grinding it in. She spat on her gloves and rubbed them against each other. The stench wafted from her palms, vinegary, nauseating.

  ‘Death is sacred,’ she said.

  Lesang sipped her tea. ‘Do you ever resent it? Being his servant, for all time?’

  Hagar wiped her hands on her gilet, considering her answer. ‘It’s all I know.’

  Lesang held Hagar’s gaze. Then she smiled.

  ‘Hmm. Just wondered.’ She drained her tea in a single steaming gulp. ‘Well, good day to you, Hagar. Thank you for your news. Do give the other Doyens my regards . . . if you happen to see them.’

  Hagar touched the brim of her hat, allowing her expression to harden for just an instant.

  ‘Good day to you, Doyenne.’

  Hagar felt threat roiling off Lesang like bloodsteam. The Doyenne held herself with a conqueror’s ease.

  A chain tightened and the white horse began to slide backwards across the slaughterhouse floor, its lips dragging, limp jowls trailing a black-syruped smear.

  As the short, pale, human girl left the slaughterhouse, two harka sat at a wooden table across the wharf, smoking pipes.

  Watching.

  The girl tilted her black hat against the mid-morning sun. Lank sandy hair dangled from beneath the wide brim, spilling in clumps down the back of her cloak. She wore a padded gilet and riding breeches, heavy boots and a thick belt from which hung various small lacquered boxes. She looked no older than ten.

  The first harka blew smoke from his nostrils. When he spoke, it was in Low Thelusian, with its slow, throaty cadences and grinding vowels.

  ‘Chi vis va, fra?’ See yon girl, brother?

  ‘Ja, fra.’ Aye, brother.

  ‘Sin neco.’ Kill her.

  ‘Ja, fra.’ Aye, brother.

  The second harka – flat-skulled, boxy – upended his pipe into the ashpot and moved to rise. Two of his fingers were splinted together, bound in yellow gauze.

  The first harka glanced up, his eyes wet and pink beneath thick, flaking lids.

  In Low Thelusian, he said: ‘It must look like a kill.’

  ‘Rope, then.’

  The first harka lifted his clay cup, pressed it into the hollow of his broad grey chin. ‘No. A maid might hang herself from sorrow.’

  ‘Aye, she might.’ The second harka was watching a fat, filthy gansa that had landed in the water. The bird paddled between smashed barrel staves and oil rainbows, gnashing at the bloated rinds of discarded market fruit, gobbling them, flesh and all. ‘But this world has no sorrow as would make a maid skin herself first.’

  He moved his knife back and forth, flensing the air, the blade flipping and flashing like a miraculous fish.

  The wind was low and the skiff-taxi crept sluggishly across the bay, lurching in the wake of steam ships, waves clapping against its hull. On opposite spits of land, the great lenses of Fat Maw’s twin lighthouses caught the sun and flared, refracting shafts of emerald, cinnabar, magenta.

  The sea was a chalky, turbid green. She remembered the days when you could toss a silver duke from the stern of a caravel, peer over the taffrail and see it shining at the bottom of the bay. Schools of black fish used to whip through weeds in diamond formations while flat, boneless bottom-feeders shuffled across the seabed, breathing clouds of silt. Now all that lay beneath the surface was run-off from the industrial district and the browning bones of the drowned.

  A trio of islands stood in the calm waters of the bay. Locally they were known as Les Trois Soeurs. The skiff was crawling towards the middle sister – the old jail.

  Hagar stared at the rat.

  The rat stared back. It was brown and improbably fat. It had wedged itself under the skipper’s seat in the bow and sat on its haunches, twitching, alert.

  ‘Does he normally ride with you?’ she said.

  ‘Eh?’ The human skipper was lounging over the gunwale, trailing a bare foot in the water and eating a peach sweetheart left from the Festival of Tides. He was bony and tanned and one of his calves was inked with a picture of a blue taldin, tucking its wings in a hunting dive. He wiped honey from the corner of his mouth.

  Hagar wrinkled her nose and nodded at the seat.

  He bent down and peered between his legs. ‘Oh! Nah. He’s a freeloader.’ The skipper remained doubled-over, his voice taking on an increasingly strangulated quality as blood rushed to his head. ‘Look at that. Staring straight at us.’ He pursed his lips and made a squeaking noise. ‘Cocky bastard.’ He sat back up, crimson-faced. ‘Rats in this city been acting strange lately – coming out in broad daylight, snatching food right off your plate.’ He took another bite of his sweetheart, batter crackling, juice streaming down his chin. ‘I saw one in the market, squaring up to a fox, trying to steal its lunch.’

  ‘Perhaps they’ve found a champion to rally around.’ Hagar tipped her hat forward and lay back against the prow. A ship’s bell rang across the calm water.

  ‘Dad told me it’s a sickness.’

  She ignored him, hoping he would take the hint.

  ‘You know,’ he said, apparently taking her lack of response as encouragement, ‘like the roaches sent. Back in the . . . what do you call ’em. The old wars. When the insects made people sick.’

  ‘Yes. I’ve heard those stories.’

  ‘The rats get this disease – in the water or whatever – and they lose all their fear. They don’t care if they die.’

  ‘Sounds like a blessing.’

  The skipper hissed. ‘If you don’t fear death, pretty soon, death comes for you.’

  ‘Yes. That’s the blessing.’

  Hagar dozed off for a few moments and awoke to the skiff’s prow knocking gently against a wooden pontoon. A human soldier stood on the bare planks in the dark green uniform of the Jejunus Palace Garde du Corps, her repeater carbine held loose at her hip. Behind her was a small cove, disguised by a crease in the cliffs. The soldier spoke to the skipper:

  ‘Stay in the boat.’ The soldier held out a palm; he tossed her the coiled-up painter. She crouched and secured it to a mooring post. ‘Miss Ingery. Would you please step onto the platform.’

  The old jail sat on a table of land rising from the bay in skirts of sheer grey rock. Even in the sunshine, the island had a character that steered the soul irresistibly towards thoughts of perdition. Its stark, aloof geography had suggested a jail long before tall watch-towers and grim buttresses emerged to formalise its duties. Gibbets had once hung from the western turrets, greeting ships with an edifying message about acceptable standards of conduct within the city limits. Morgellon had ended the practice after just a few decades, ostensibly on the grounds of public decency.

  In truth, Hagar suspected it had offended his sense of spectacle. Birds had learned to associate the clang of the executioner’s bell with the arrival of food, flocking round the gibbets in thick, squalling clouds. A corpse would have scarcely cleared the parapet before a liquid mass of gulls and taldins fell upon it, pecking, rending, shrieking. The weight of birds would snap the rope and send the body plunging into the sea. During the heyday of the Wind and Thunder Faction, executions had been so frequent that the walls and turrets of the western towers were blasted white with droppings. Corpses had mounted up on the ocean floor, attracting colonies of carnivorous seaworms. Fisherfolk shared stories of slicing open a giant eel’s belly to find a human, vesperi or harka eye staring out. Some said certain priests of the Six-Ways prized them as delicacies.

  To see, as one’s ship entered the bay, a line of broken gibbets and a jailhouse crusted with excrement inspired neither fear nor respect. We are
capricious and incompetent, the ragged black tassels had seemed to say. Even in death, criminals escape us. Morgellon had learned one of this fallen world’s most important lessons: that public suffering, no matter how grotesque, bestowed upon its recipient a talismanic dignity.

  Death was redemptive. In the moment the neck snapped or the executioner’s axe bit through the spine, the debt was repaid – thus the crowd found themselves gazing at the shattered body of a sinless being.

  Camps, mines, the labour fields – in denying criminals death, they denied them salvation. Fatalities were slow, incidental and distant. No one sang folksongs about corrupt aldermen succumbing to pneumonia after digging pit latrines in the snow. No one valorised the serial counterfeiters shovelling gravel to line long rural roads in northern Thelusia. No one noticed the convicts who, a year or two years into their terms, simply disappeared.

  The skiff slewed deliciously as Hagar placed one foot on the pontoon. She wobbled, reached out to the soldier for support. The soldier frowned, kept both hands on her gun.

  Hagar regained her balance, brought her second foot onto the pontoon.

  ‘Please relinquish all weapons,’ said the soldier.

  Hagar took her silver pistol from her jacket pocket. She opened the breech, showed the soldier that both barrels were empty, then handed it to her, grip-first. She gave the soldier her jacket. The soldier rummaged through the inside and hip pockets and patted down the lining. She dropped the jacket on the deck beside her. She repeated the process with Hagar’s hat, groping round the lining, checking the hat band, experimentally flexing the brim. Then she had Hagar take off her boots.

  It was trivially easy to keep the soldier from finding her dagger, using sleight of hand to wedge it blade-down between the planks of the pontoon, hiding the exposed pommel under the ball of her foot, then retrieving it when she retied her boots.

  ‘You have an hour,’ said the soldier, stepping aside.

  In the cove the air was shady and cool. Her boots scraped on pebbled mortar. There was a doorway cut into the rock, with empty crates stacked outside and a stairway leading up. Hagar glanced back over her shoulder, then began the climb.