CHAPTER 15

THE BONE PET

The Sluagh did not move for a very long time, his ears straining to catch the tiniest creak or murmur of breath from the darkness in the corridor beyond the cell. He was good at staying still because for him time was a very different thing than it was for normal beings. He had also been so weakened by the iron Mr Sharp had put round his neck that he’d felt his vigour drain away like blood from a butchered pig at the slaughterhouse. He had never felt this bad, this bled-out, this mortal.

Not even when he had been alive.

When he was sure there was no trick, and that Mr Sharp or the bulbous-nosed innkeeper were not standing in the dark waiting to spy on him, he began to move. First he knelt, and his fingers started to pick at his clothes, the hand on his uninjured arm removing the bones used instead of buttons, then working at his beard and hair, untwining the plaits and freeing the other small bones and vertebrae which had been braided into them. He put them all on the floor in front of him as he worked, and once they were all laid out on the wood, he bent over carefully and began to read them with his fingertips, searching through touch alone until he found the ones he was looking for.

He sorted as he went, grouping the thicker neck bones next to the long column of thoracic and then sacral vertebrae, a chain that then diminished further in size as he recreated the tail all the way down to the tip of the last tiny caudal vertebra. Next he made separate piles of ribs and radii, the tiny phalanges and the almost impossibly miniscule metatarsal bones of the paw, matching long tibias to fibulas and tarsals. Once he had laid everything out, he counted the bones twice, his face wrinkling in frustration when the count came back wrong both times, until he remembered his ears and removed the two miniature shoulder-blades of a stoat that hung from his earring like sycamore keys carved from yellowing ivory and added them to the piles.

Next he painstakingly took the bones from the piles and placed them in a different sort of order on the floor. If there had been a light in the room he would have been seen to be spreading out the seemingly random collection of bones to reveal an exploded diagram of a strange rodent’s skeleton. It was no rodent that had ever walked the earth, however, mainly because he was mixing a stoat’s skeleton with that of a red squirrel, which gave it a lopsided appearance. And the thing that topped it off was not a stoat or a squirrel’s skull but a woodcock’s, with a long beak like a needle.

Once he was satisfied that all the parts were there, he neatly scooped every bone into his cupped right hand. Then he took the woodcock’s beak and jagged it into the fleshy part of his left hand, just below the thumb. Once this was done he spat three times on the bones, and then squeezed his left hand over the spittle-flecked pile, splashing blood on them.

He rose carefully and went to the door, taking care not to spill the bone pile. He flattened his palm and slid it through the judas slit so that his hand stuck out of the room and into the brick-lined hall. He pushed his arm as far as it could go so that it was clear of the damping influence of the triple-wood cell and flexed his palm open, bending it back like a child preparing to feed a horse.

Then he whistled into the dark.

At first nothing happened. Then the bones on his open palm began to slither around, slowly at first, seemingly randomly, then faster and with more purpose. There were snicks and crunchy noises as the skeleton began to join itself together, starting with the ischium and the pubis. The ripple of something close to life spread out and fizzed and outwards along the hind legs, then back in to the backbone, and in a very short time–had there been any light–he would have seen the fully self-assembled skeleton of a rodent with a stiletto beak standing on his hand, now unmistakably alive. The ribs opened and closed as if there were invisible lungs penned within their yellowing bone cage.

The eyeless skull swivelled and a blank socket stared back at him as the beak gaped, like a fledgling waiting for food to be dropped into it.

The Sluagh hissed through the slit.

“It is done. They have taken the girl in. The bone pet will lead you back to me. Free me soon.”

The bone pet snapped its beak shut as if trapping the words.

The Sluagh squeezed his other hand through the slit and awkwardly jammed it forward far enough to be able to stroke the strange creature’s skull with something like affection. It arched its back with pleasure as his hand ran down the tiny vertebrae, like a cat.

“They wait for you. Go.”

The bone pet flexed and jumped, landing on the floor with a scrabble that diminished into a skitter of claws as it ran for the gap beneath the ale cellar door and the stairs beyond.

The Sluagh slumped against the cell wall and smiled.