Chapter 12
On the Dancing of Bones
On the Infusion of Smoke into Blood
On the Cost of Negligence
—Chapter headings, Archivist’s Primer, for Transparencies I–III
Hesper, the great city by the sea, offers a whitewashed tower room that smells faintly of gull, and a thin cot with roughened sheets.
To Shroudweaver, it’s paradise. He hasn’t slept much since the war began, especially not aboard ship, where the rocking and stretching of the boat makes him feel like a ratty squirrel clinging to a slim branch over the boundless sea.
Here, the stone is solid, and the covers, though rough, are pleasant. The linen lets in the lamplight, filtering it as he pulls them over his head.
He’s never craved the softer things. Life in the Aestering had been gentle, but it was a simple place, built of simple things. Rough textures and uneven edges suited him fine.
He’s slept enough in sailcloth and sheepcloth, under tarp and straw. This is, if not luxury, something close.
The thin mattress creaks as Shipwright slips in beside him, the weight of her bowing the bed, before the warmth of her stomach lines his back as she slips an arm around his shoulders.
She smells of the port, a faint glisten of spice and oil.
He kisses her wrist, her forearm, lets his lips linger on the thin white scars of lash lines and splinters that have healed into sailors’ silver.
Every time they climb aboard the ship, she exacts her toll of blood in a thousand small cuts. The ship herself is sleeping in the deep dock of Hesper, Ropecharmer pacing the deck like a cat, tying off and stowing to.
The docks are far from here. The city spilling from the towers in a ruck of tile, staggering merrily over the grid of canals that pull Hesper’s life through her sluggish body.
Arched bridges and low porticos where the bargemen can pull to and trade in all the little scraps of sense-memory that make up this city.
Thick-rinded fruit that stains the fingers and mouth, scraps of forgotten songs that have bubbled up over the Halls and been caught in their nets.
Lean blades of copper, and fine-worked shawls that have come all the way from the mountains, from Thell.
The docks are far from here, and Thell is further still.
Hesper sinks into the night like a bone into broth, and Shroudweaver lets himself sink with it.
That thin mattress opens up to the softness of sleep.
Shipwright’s breathing at his back stronger than the sea, soft and steady.
The push of her stomach, the brush of her thigh as she settles closer.
Her hair falls over his face, and he keeps it like a curtain. The warmth of her skin is held in it, and a lightness from the herbs she washes with. She kisses his neck gently. ‘Stop smelling me.’
‘Can’t help it,’ he murmurs. And even those words come from a long way away, falling through the tiredness that pulls him down to dreaming.
Sleep like weaving, the soul unlatching from the world, and lifting to hover over dreaming bones.
Night becoming a nest of breath and pulse.
Sleep like the spaces between, where his magic lives.
A weaving not his own. The world reaching for him.
For the threads that connect him to the rest of the earth.
The docks are far from here. Thell is far from here. Even Crowkisser, dark and feathered, is far from here. There is only the solid wall of the Shipwright, and the halter of her arm.
He can rest. The world is far from here.
His world is right here. There are no lines between far and near.
He is a weight on the threads of the world, and time and distance fold under him like a sheet.
He feels Shipwright’s fingers move through his hair and across his shoulders, and he falls into sleep.
The scholars of the Glass Archive refer to sleep as the dancing of bones. Bodies twitching in dream and nightmare, sketching a map of the roads that their minds run.
Does the world feel the Shroudweaver when he dreams? Does the world recognise the mind that slips into the dark?
Something marks him perhaps. Marks him like the fish feel the shadow of the heron. The dreaming world opens up paths for him. The world opens paths for the Shroudweaver, and he chooses one. As much as we choose anything. Like a deer chooses the forest, or an arrow chooses the heart.
In that small tower room, Shipwright holds him as he shivers and twitches. The man she loves, shaking like a dying leveret, a beached fish. It doesn’t worry her. This is how the evenings go, and have gone, and will go.
The scholars of the Glass Archive will have you believe our bodies are nothing more than the metronome of our souls. Do not confuse the instrument for the song, they will say.
The Shroudweavers knew the truth was more complicated, and the last Shroudweaver is about to find this out.
For he sleeps, and worse he dreams. With all the logic that his mind has left.
And in his dream, the broken earth is singing. Lowing like a calf just born.
And in his dream, he can go to the earth and place his hands upon it. He ties his red right hand to the soil, and digs deep.
And there is sense to this. For this is how he has always been able to work his magic. By the touching and binding of things.
And in this dream, the song of the earth is a chorus.
The earth a composite of all the little lives that burrow within it.
The lives of worm and beetle. The earth a composite of all the great energies that move above it.
The weight of the glaciers, and the immense, heartless whirl of the stars.
The earth itself vast, porphyritic. The past embedded within it, and moving through it.
Great distant caverns where water falls unseen in the black.
Hidden tombs where blind life is born and dies far from the touch of the sun.
The earth’s song is the wind moving through hollows and over hills.
It whips him like a bird in a storm. Rips his hands from the skin of the world and hurls him into the air.
Still there are threads here. His red right hand trails the red of binding, and his left begins to spark with the silver of sending.
The earth follows the red, and the air takes the silver, spinning him higher.
He laughs in the dream, and in the bed, Shipwright laughs too, as she feels his chest twitch.
This is new. There is usually little joy in Shroudweaver’s dreams. But she does not see what he sees, the vast unrolling of the land, the shadows of forests and the blue cut of rivers, the black sink of the Midland swamps and the smudged trees of the Burner’s groves.
The earth’s song holds here, for he cradles the earth in his red right hand. Dark clods and red threads. The sky’s song joins it, and for a second, his heart feels light. He is a boy again. Beneath the Aestering grove, watching birches dance in the summer light. He relaxes, and the dream has him.
The land unspools below him. He can see the scars on it.
He does not look south, he cannot, but even here the earth has seen too much.
Not just the wars of Thell’s rebellion, but the smaller conflicts before and between.
The bladedrinkers. Thriceflower. The land is green with grass and the grass is thick with barrows.
He is pulled faster in the dream. Northwards, with the song of the wind. He is a brother to geese and swans. Smooth, wild cuts of feather and noise barrelling through the stripped clouds.
He is pulled northwards, along what were once pilgrim roads, over the ruins of towns that held temples, market squares scoured empty, nursing only ash and mangy dogs.
Further north still, the grey of the air falling to blue with ice, and then purple with the growing cold. The shadow of mountains stretching over the land.
And here the towns are small things, and at their heart there are shrines, cold and empty. No candles, no meat, no offerings. The people left living in the shadow of the Barrowlands draw close to each other as darkness falls, and leave their shrines to the night, stroked by the calls of owls.
The scholars of the Glass Archive will have you know that every dream is a wealth of symbols, and that the body crawls through their meanings as the evening unravels.
The Shroudweaver would instead tell you this, were he awake: your soul will go where it is needed, pulled and bound.
By the time he realises where he is headed, it is too late. His dream-self greets it with fatalism, folding his body into the curve of the wind, and plunging downwards.
Sleet licks his skin, and the mountains open up to take him.
The land outside of Thell much as he remembers. Scattered now with cattle-fold and firepit, a few smaller, softer signs of life.
Thell remains the same. This Thell, which his mind has built. A composite of memory, and map ink. A dark line that cuts the sky like an absence. The white light of glaciers hanging on its far edge, like the whole chain of mountains might be a mouth waiting to unveil sharper teeth.
His mind does not panic, but his body does. In that thin tower cot, Shipwright grumbles as his ankles kick, and his brow sweats. Resignedly, she pours water from a pitcher, straightens the covers, sips.
Here, in the Thell of times gone, Shroudweaver falls towards the heart of it all – the Stump. Rock piled upon stone, battlements and hollow windows, and the flicker of red flags, bright tongues of flame in the dark.
The threads he holds unravel. The wind takes them.
He falls lower. The great escarpments loom, socketed and waiting. There is an impression of armour, of spears, but the dream does not care for this.
Instead, he falls towards a brazier that gutters against the cold. That spits as the sleet falls into the flame. As night pushes against the light, again and again.
The figure at the brazier is hooded, wrapped in rags of red and yellow. They smile, and the movement cuts the shadow of their face.
‘Weaver.’ A familiar voice; a familiar hand that passes a cup of spiced cider, thick and wild on the tongue.
‘You’re dreaming, Weaver.’
Shroudweaver answers in the voice of geese, of the snow.
The figure laughs. ‘Oh dear. You’re really dreaming’.
Shroudweaver answers in the song of the land. His hands scatter threads of red and silver into the flame.
The figure adjusts its robes, scratches its side. ‘I think this is supposed to be a prophecy, Shroud.’ They shrug. ‘Of course, it’s broken. Because the gods are dead.’
They scratch their ribs again, and the brazier flares. ‘You’re trying to dream a way to stop the godkiller, Weaver.’ The figure leans in, cloves and spice on their breath. ‘You’re trying to save your daughter while you sweat your skin off in a Hesper bed.’
Shroudweaver answers in the bark of a fox, juddering out of his jaw.
The figure by the fire starts. ‘Hm. Let’s sort this before it gets any worse. Do you want an omen?’
Shroudweaver does not answer. The ice is dancing on his skin in patterns of silver flame.
The figure’s voice deepens, their tan hands stretching against the fire. ‘I’m the omen, Shroud. Thell is an omen you made for yourself. If you want to stop a godkiller, you need to build a god.’
They stand and walk to the edge of the escarpment where the wind bites the skin. Their robes bowing back against the night, red and yellow and red again.
‘Do you remember how to build gods, Shroud?’
And Shroudweaver does, deep in his heart. But he waits for the answer anyway.
‘You build a god the same way you kill an empire – piece by bloody piece.’
The figure beckons him to the edge of the mountain, where the wind howls like a mourner.
Their arm is warm along Shroudweaver’s shoulders, where ice flickers in gouts of pale fire.
‘This is why the dream carried you here, Weaver. If you want a god to stop the godkiller, you need a composite. You need the biggest god-stitching your pallid hands have ever seen.’
They push on Shroudweaver’s shoulders until he is leaning out over the edge of the scoured field beneath the Stump. It opens up below him like a mother’s arms. The grass and roots falling away into pits of dark earth that writhe with bones.
‘We put them all here, Shroud. You and I. If you want to build a god, come to Thell.’
Their voice lowers. ‘We have all the pieces you will ever need.’
Shroudweaver tries to answer, but his voice emerges in that tower room, clipped with sleep.
Shipwright shushes him, holds him close, and in his dream, the figure does too. Their lips are dry and warm against his, their arms strong and firm.
The wind howls, and the clouds part to spill the light of the moon across their face.
And it is gold, and it is broken, and it is familiar. It has one eye, then two, then none. It smiles at him with the face of a friend, and an enemy, then kisses him again, as you might kiss a child, or a corpse.
‘Come to Thell and build me a god, Weaver.’ Its strong arms wrap around him, and the push is stronger still, sending Shroudweaver out, over the battlements and down into the bone-filled dark.
The song of the earth rises to meet him, and he screams, so much louder in that small, whitewashed tower room, that smells of gull and sweat, and Shipwright.
He is sitting, wrapped tight in sheets and white as chalk.
He tries to speak, but his mouth is full of the memory of bones, the dry weight of earth.
Softly, firmly, she places a cup of cool water in his hands.
‘Take it easy, skinny. Just a dream.’
He looks at her and she flinches, sees something in him that scares her. And he watches as she kills it, packs it away, and puts her arm around him.
‘Not just a dream, eh?’ she sighs. ‘Well, under the circumstances, I can probably let you take another huff.’
She leans her head into him. Her hair falls over his face like a curtain and he breathes deep. And for the second time that night, even as distant geese kiss the rim of the moon, he sleeps.