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.
SQUEAK.
“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 mome…
