Hogfather (14 page)

“’ere, you didn’t really put a pony in their kitchen, did you?” said Heavy Uncle Albert as the line moved on.

D
ON’T BE FOOLISH
, A
LBERT
. I
SAID THAT TO BE JOLLY
.

“Oh, right. Hah, for a minute—”

I
T’S IN THE BEDROOM
.

“Ah…”

M
ORE HYGIENIC
.

“Well, it’ll make sure of one thing,” said Albert. “Third floor? They’re going to believe all right.”

Y
ES
. Y
OU KNOW
, I
THINK
I’
M GETTING THE HANG OF THIS
. H
O
. H
O
. H
O
.

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 billowed, 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 valley 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
really
exist, how they were pleasant little stories that it was fun to know, how they were not
real
. And she had believed it. All the fairies and bogeymen, all those stories from the blood and bone of humanity, were not really
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 all. All 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 in 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 endeavored to make it look…sort of jolly.

It wasn’t jolly. The pillars at the entrance were hundreds of feet high. Each of the steps leading up was taller than a man. They were the gray-green of old ice.

Ice
. Not bone. There were faintly familiar shapes to the pillars, possibly a suggestion of femur or skull, but it was made of ice.

Binky was not challenged 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 sleigh had stood here. Animals had milled around. But the snow was covering everything.

She dismounted. This was certainly the place described, but it still 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 pillars 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 small lumps of ice thumped into a snowdrift.

The raven popped into existence and fluttered wearily onto a stump of ice beside her.

“This place is a morgue,” said Susan.

“’s goin’ 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 all 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 typecasting now, is it?” said the raven. “I’m missing meals here, you do know that?”

It swiveled its independently sprung eyes.

“So where’s all the lights?” it said. “Where’s all the noise? Where’s all the jolly little buggers in pointy hats and red and green suits, hitting wooden toys unconvincingly yet rhythmically with hammers?”

“This is more like the temple of some old thunder god,” said Susan.

S
QUEAK
.

“No, I read the map right. Anyway, Albert’s been here, too. There’s cigarette ash all 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 followed. 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 pillar groaned and twisted slightly.

S
QUEAK
.

“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.

S
QUEAK
?

“Well, it
could’ve
happened. Pigs are not notably aerodynamic, are they? And with all 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 all over bar some lucky mountaineers making an awful lot of sausages and finding the flight recorder.”

S
QUEAK
!

“Yes, but he’s an old man. Probably shouldn’t be in the sky at his time of life.”

Susan pulled 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 fall in. Next thing you know you’re a squiggle in the sandstone. We shouldn’t hang around is what I’m saying.”

Susan walked farther in, lost in thought.

This was all 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 all those things that had been suspended, like time and physics, would roll 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, afterward, 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 spread-eagled, 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 fallen 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 secondhand light of the glowing snow, his face looked like someone had been sick with it.

“Are you all 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 fell down in the far depths of the building and exploded in a shower of sharp little shards.

“You may have come to the right place,” said Susan. She grabbed the boy under his arms and hauled him out of the snow. “I think leaving would be a very good idea around now, don’t you? This place is going to fall apart.”

“Oh,
me
…”

She managed to get one of his arms around her neck.

“Can you walk?”

“Oh,
me
…”

“It might help if you stopped saying that and tried walking.”

“I’m sorry, but I seem to have…too many legs. Ow.”

Susan did her best to prop him up as, swaying and slipping, they made their way back to the exit.

“My head,” said the boy. “My head. My head. My head. Feels awful. My head. Feels like someone’s hitting it. My head. With a hammer.”

Someone was. There was a small green and purple imp sitting amid the damp curls and holding a very large mallet. It gave Susan a friendly nod and brought the hammer down again.

“Oh,
me
…”

“That wasn’t necessary!” said Susan.

“You telling me my job?” said the imp. “I suppose you could do it better, could you?”

“I wouldn’t do it at all!”

“Well,
someone’s
got to do it,” said the imp.

“He’s part. Of the. Arrangement,” said the boy.

“Yeah, see?” said the imp. “Can you hold the hammer while I go and coat his tongue with yellow gunk?”

“Get down right now!”

Susan made a grab for the creature. It leapt away, still clutching the hammer, and grabbed a pillar.

“I’m part of the arrangement, I am!” it yelled.

The boy clutched his head.

“I feel awful,” he said. “Have you got any ice?”

Whereupon, because there are conventions stronger than mere physics, the building fell in.

The collapse of the Castle of Bones was stately and impressive and seemed to go on for a long time. Pillars fell in, the slabs of the roof slid down, the ice crackled and splintered. The air above the tumbling wreckage filled with a haze of snow and ice crystals.

Susan watched from the trees. The boy, who she’d leaned against a handy trunk, opened his eyes.

“That was amazing,” he managed.

“Why, you mean the way it’s all turning back into snow?”

“The way you just picked me up and ran. Ouch!”

“Oh,
that
.”

The grinding of the ice continued. The fallen pillars didn’t stop moving when they collapsed, but went on tearing themselves apart.

When the fog of ice settled there was nothing but drifted snow.

“As though it was never there,” said Susan, aloud. She turned to the groaning figure.

“All right, what were you doing there?”

“I don’t know. I just opened my. Eyes and there I was.”

“Who
are
you?”

“I…
think
my name is Bilious. I’m the…I’m the oh God of Hangovers.”

“There’s a God of Hangovers?”

“An
oh god
,” he corrected. “When people witness me, you see, they clutch their head and say, ‘
Oh God
…’ How many of you are standing here?”

“What? There’s just me!”

“Ah. Fine. Fine.”

“I’ve never heard of a God of Hangovers…”

“You’ve heard of Bibulous, the God of Wine? Ouch.”

“Oh, yes.”

“Big fat man, wears vine leaves round his head, always pictured with a glass in his hand…Ow. Well, you know
why
he’s so cheerful? Him and his big face? It’s because he knows he’s going to feel good in the morning! It’s because it’s
me
that—”

“—gets the hangovers?” said Susan.

“I don’t even drink! Ow! But who is it who ends up head down in the privy every morning? Arrgh.” He stopped and clutched at his head. “Should your skull feel like it’s lined with dog hair?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Ah.” Bilious swayed. “You know when people say ‘I had fifteen lagers last night and when I woke up my head was clear as a bell’?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Bastards! That’s because
I
was the one who woke up groaning in a pile of recycled chili. Just once, I mean just
once
, I’d like to open my eyes in the morning without my head sticking to something.” He paused. “Are there any giraffes in this wood?”

“Up here? I shouldn’t think so.”

He looked nervously past Susan’s head.

“Not even indigo-colored ones which are sort of stretched and keep flashing on and off?”

“Very unlikely.”

“Thank goodness for that.” He swayed back and forth. “Excuse me, I think I’m about to throw up my breakfast.”

“It’s the middle of the evening!”

“Is it? In that case, I think I’m about to throw up my dinner.”

He folded up gently in the snow behind the tree.

“He’s a long streak of widdle, isn’t he?” said a voice from a branch. It was the raven. “Got a neck with a knee in it.”

The oh god reappeared after a noisy interlude.

“I
know
I must eat,” he mumbled. “It’s just that the only time I remember seeing my food it’s always going the other way…”

“What were you doing in there?” said Susan.

“Ouch! Search me,” said the oh god. “It’s only a mercy I wasn’t holding a traffic sign and wearing a—” he winced and paused “—having some kind of women’s underwear about my person.” He sighed. “Someone somewhere has a lot of fun,” he said wistfully. “I wish it was me.”

“Get a drink inside you, that’s my advice,” said the raven. “Have a hair of the dog that bit someone else.”

“But why
there
?” Susan insisted.