OH, YES. IT’S IN THE KITCHEN.
‘I’m sure you’re making a little joke, Hogfather,’ said Mother, sharply.
HO. HO. YES. WHAT A JOLLY FAT MAN I AM. IN THE KITCHEN? WHAT A JOKE.
DOLLIES AND SO ON WILL BE DELIVERED LATER AS PER YOUR LETTER.
‘What do you say, Euffie?’
‘ ‘ nk you.’
‘ ‘ere, you didn’t real y put a pony in their kitchen, did you?’ said Heavy Uncle Albert
as the line moved on.
DON’T BE FOOLISH, ALBERT. I SAID THAT TO BE JOLLY.
‘Oh, right. Hah, for a minute–‘
IT’S IN THE BEDROOM.
‘Ah . .
MORE HYGIENIC.
‘Wel , it’l make sure of one thing,’ said Albert. ‘Third floor? They’re going to believe
al right.’
YES. YOU KNOW, I THINK I’M GETTING THE HANG OF THIS. HO. HO. HO.
At the Hub of the Discworld, the snow burned blue and green. The Aurora Corealis
hung in the sky, curtains of pale cold fire that circled the central mountains and cast
their spectral light over the ice.
They bil owed, swirled and then trailed a ragged arm on the end of which was a tiny
dot that became, when the eye of imagination drew nearer, Binky.
He trotted to a halt and stood on the air. Susan looked down.
And then found what she was looking for. At the end of a val ey of snow-mounded
trees something gleamed brightly, reflecting the sky.
The Castle of Bones.
Her parents had sat her down one day when she was about six or seven and
explained how such things as the Hogfather did not real y exist, how they were
pleasant little stories that it was fun to know, how they were not real. And she had
believed it. Al the fairies and bogeymen,
al those stories from the blood and bone of humanity, were not real y real.
They’d lied. A seven-foot skeleton had turned out to be her grandfather. Not a flesh
and blood grandfather, obviously. But a grandfather, you could say, in the bone.
Binky touched down and trotted over the snow.
Was the Hogfather a god? Why not? thought Susan. There were sacrifices, after al .
Al that sherry and pork pie. And he made commandments and rewarded the good and
he knew what you were doing. If you believed, nice things happened to you.
Sometimes you found him ‘m a grotto, and sometimes he was up there in the sky …
The Castle of Bones loomed over her now. It certainly deserved the capital letters,
up this close.
She’d seen a picture of it in one of the children’s books. Despite its name, the
woodcut artist had endeavoured to make it look … sort of jol y.
It wasn’t jol y. The pil ars at the entrance were hundreds of feet high. Each of the
steps leading up was tal er than a man. They were the greygreen of old ice.
Ice. Not bone. There were faintly familiar shapes to the pil ars, possibly a suggestion
of femur or skul , but it was made of ice.
Binky was not chal enged by the high stairs. It wasn’t that he flew. It was simply that
he walked on a ground level of his own devising.
Snow had blown over the ice. Susan looked down at the drifts. Death left no tracks,
but there
were the faint outlines of booted footprints. She’d be prepared to bet they belonged
to Albert. And … yes, half obscured by the snow … it looked as though a sledge had
stood here. Animals had mil ed around. But the snow was covering everything.
She dismounted. This was certainly the place described, but it stil wasn’t right. It was supposed to be a blaze of light and abuzz with activity, but it looked like a giant
mausoleum.
A little way beyond the pil ars was a very large slab of ice, cracked into pieces. Far
above, stars were visible through the hole it had left in the roof. Even as she stared up,
a few smal lumps of ice thumped into a snowdrift.
The raven popped into existence and fluttered wearily on to a stump of ice beside
her.
‘This place is a morgue,’ said Susan.
‘ ‘s got to be mine, if I do … any more flyin’ tonight,’ panted the raven, as the Death of
Rats got off its back’I never signed up for al this long-distance, faster’n time stuff. I
should be back in a forest somewhere, making excitingly decorated constructions to
attract females.’
‘That’s bower birds,’ said Susan. ‘Ravens don’t do that.’
‘Oh, so it’s type-casting now, is it?’ said the raven. ‘I’m missing meals here, you do
know that?’
It swivel ed its independently sprung eyes.
‘So where’s al the lights?’ it said. ‘Where’s al the noise? Where’s al the jol y little
buggers in
pointy hats and red and green suits, hitting wooden toys unconvincingly yet
rhythmical y with hammers?’
‘This is more like the temple of some old thunder god,’ said Susan.
SQUEAK.
‘No’ I read the map right. Anyway, Albert’s been here too. There’s fag ash al over the
place.’
The rat jumped down and walked around for a moment, bony snout near the ground.
After a few moments of snuffling it gave a squeak and hurried off into the gloom.
Susan fol owed. As her eyes grew more accustomed to the faint blue-green light she
made out something rising out of the floor. It was a pyramid of steps, with a big chair
on top.
Behind her, a pil ar groaned and twisted slightly.
SQUEAK.
‘That rat says this place reminds him of some old mine,’ said the raven. ‘You know,
after it’s been deserted and no one’s been paying attention to the roof supports and so
on? We see a lot of them.’
At least these steps were human sized, Susan thought, ignoring the chatter. Snow
had come in through another gap in the roof. Albert’s footprints had stamped around
quite a lot here.
‘Maybe the old Hogfather crashed his sleigh,’ the raven suggested.
SQUEAK?
‘Wel , it could’ve happened. Pigs are not notably
aerodynamic, are they? And with al this snow, you know, poor visibility, big cloud
ahead turns out too late to be a mountain, there’s buggers in saffron robes looking
down at you, poor devil tries to remember whether you’re supposed to shove
someone’s head between your legs, then WHAM, and it’s al over bar some lucky
mountaineers making an awful lot of sausages and finding the flight recorder.’
SQUEAK!
‘Yes, but he’s an old man. Probably shouldn’t be in the sky at his time of life.’
Susan pul ed at something half buried in the snow.
It was a red-and-white-striped candy cane.
She kicked the snow aside elsewhere and found a wooden toy soldier in the kind of
uniform that would only be inconspicuous if you wore it in a nightclub for chameleons
on hard drugs. Some further probing found a broken trumpet.
There was some more groaning in the darkness.
The raven cleared its throat.
‘What the rat meant about this place being like a mine,’ he said, ‘was that abandoned
mines tend to creak and groan in the same way, see? No one looking after the pit
props. Things fal in. Next thing you know you’re a squiggle in the sandstone. We
shouldn’t hang around is what I’m saying.’
Susan walked further in, lost in thought.
This was al wrong. The place looked as though
-it had been deserted for years, which couldn’t be true.
The column nearest her creaked and twisted slightly. A fine haze of ice crystals
dropped from the roof.
Of course, this wasn’t exactly a normal place. You couldn’t build an ice palace this
big. It was a bit like Death’s house. If he abandoned it for too long al those things that
had been suspended, like time and physics, would rol over it. It would be like a dam
bursting.
She turned to leave and heard the groan again. It wasn’t dissimilar to the tortured
sounds being made by the ice, except that ice, afterwards, didn’t moan. ‘Oh, me . . .’
There was a figure lying in a snowdrift. She’d almost missed it because it was
wearing a long white robe. It was spreadeagled, as though it had planned to make
snow angels and had then decided against it.
And it wore a little crown, apparently of vine leaves.
And it kept groaning.
She looked up. The roof was open here, too. But no one could have fal en that far
and survived.
No one human, anyway.
He looked human and, in theory, quite young. But it was only in theory because,
even by the second-hand light of the glowing snow, his face looked like someone had
been sick with it.
‘Are you al right?’ she ventured.
The recumbent figure opened its eyes and stared straight up.
‘I wish I was dead . . .’ it moaned. A piece of ice the size of a house fel down in the