Hogfather

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