“I’ve been thinking about food a lot, that’s all. You know, after this trip I may never eat meat again. The fat! The gristle! It turns my stomach thinking about it.” “You’ve got a sweet tooth.”
“You noticed. I’d kill for a plate of profiteroles right now, swimming in chocolate sauce.” He laughed. “Listen to me. The glories of Jokalaylau laid before us and I’m obsessing on profiteroles.” Then again, deadly serious. “Do they have chocolate in Yzordderrex?”
“By now, I’m sure they do. But my people eat plainly, so I never got an addiction for sugar. Fish, on the other hand—”
“Fish?” said Gentle. “I’ve no taste for it.” “You’ll get one in Yzordderrex. There’s restaurants down by the harbor . . .” The mystifs talk turned into a smile. “Now I’m sounding like you. We must both be sick of doekimeat.”
“Go on,” Gentle said. “I want to see you salivate.”
“There are restaurants down by the harbor where the fish is so fresh it’s still flapping when they take it into the kitchen.”
“That’s a recommendation?”
“There’s nothing in the world as good as fresh fish,” Pie said. “If the catch is good you’ve got a choice of forty, maybe fifty, dishes. From tiny jepas to squeffah my size and bigger.”
“Is there anything I’d recognize?”
“A few species. But why travel all this way for a cod steak when you could have squeffah? Or better, there’s a dish I have to order for you. It’s a fish called an ugichee, which is almost as small as a jepas, and it lives in the belly of another fish.”
“That sounds suicidal.”
“Wait, there’s more. The second fish is often eaten whole by a bloater called a coliacic. They’re ugly, but the meat melts like butter. So if you’re lucky, they’ll grill all three of them together, just the way they were caught—”
“One inside the other?”
“Head, tail, the whole caboodle.”
“That’s disgusting.”
“And if you’re very lucky—”
“Pie—”
“—the ugichee’s a female, and you find, when you cut through all three layers of fish—”
“—her belly’s full of caviar.”
“You guessed it. Doesn’t that sound tempting?”
“I’ll stay with my chocolate mousse and ice cream.”
“How is it you’re not fat?”
“Vanessa used to say I had the palate of a child, the libido of an adolescent, and the—well, you can guess the rest. I sweat it out making love. Or at least I used to.”
They were close to the edge of the glacier now, and their talk of fish and chocolate ceased, replaced by a grim silence, as the identity of the forms encased in the ice became apparent. They were human bodies, a dozen or more. Ice-locked around them, a collection of debris: fragments of blue stone; immense bowls of beaten metal; the remnants of garments, the blood on them still bright. Gentle clambered and skidded across the top of the glacier until the bodies were directly beneath him. Some were buried too deeply to be studied, but those closer to the surface—faces upturned, limbs fixed in attitudes of desperation—were almost too visible. They were all women, the youngest barely out of childhood, the oldest a naked many-breasted hag who’d perished with her eyes still open, her stare preserved for the millennium. Some massacre had occurred here, or farther up the mountain, and the evidence been thrown into this river while it still flowed. Then, apparently, it had frozen around the victims and their belongings.
“Who are they?” Gentle asked. “Any idea?” Though they were dead, the past tense didn’t seem appropriate for corpses so perfectly preserved.
“When the Unbeheld passed through the Dominions, He overthrew all the cults He deemed unworthy. Most of them were sacred to Goddesses. Their oracles and devotees were women.”
“So you think Hapexamendios did this?”
“If not him, then His agents, His Righteous. Though on second thought He’s supposed to have walked here alone, so maybe this is His handiwork.”
“Then whoever He is,” Gentle said, looking down at the child in the ice, “He’s a murderer. No better than you or me.”
“I wouldn’t say that too loudly,” Pie advised.
“Why not? He’s not here.”
“If this is His doing, He may have left entities to watch over it.”