Chapter 14 #2
He slumps back down, digging a finger in his ear. ‘If. But most of the ships on this side of the world are at the bottom of the sea. We can rebuild, but it takes time, takes money. Worse than money, it takes boots on the ground.’
He slaps the papers on the table. The staff recoil. ‘Money, I have, for a little longer. Arissa’s father was a parsimonious prick, and I’ve always been good at stretching it. Boots are trickier.’
Shipwright opens her mouth, but he holds up a finger.
‘People keep dying, Ship. And the ones we have left are looking after their own. No matter how hard I tug on the gilded hooks.’
She says nothing, drumming her foot under the table as the blood starts to sing in her ears. She glances at Shroudweaver for a bit of back up. Finally, he surfaces from whatever thought is holding him, his voice quiet, tired.
‘So it’s coming to a fight?’
Fallon scratches. ‘Might do. We’re fine here.
We’ve got the walls. The guns. What we don’t have, like I said, is the people.
’ His lip curls. ‘Most of them are growing weed down south with my fucking ships. And the rest are tied britches-and-bollocks to the guilds, who have no interest in burning bodies against that little witch. So, no people.’
‘I don’t think she has the people either,’ Shroudweaver mutters.
Fallon’s face is sceptical. ‘You know that?’
Shroudweaver shakes his head. ‘Not for sure, but you saw what happened.’ He presses his lips into a thin line.
‘I’d say at best, she’s got the northern line of towns.
Astic, of course, but that was a stroke of luck.
’ He ticks them off on his hands. ‘Sedge, Fallow, Vantage, Dryke.’ Holds up five fingers. ‘It’s not much.’
Fallon sucks his teeth. ‘Not much for now, but we didn’t expect Astic to fall so fast. That bitch is persuasive when she wants to be.’
Shipwright takes her eyes from the map. ‘There’s another problem.’
‘Oh good.’ Fallon waves a hand. ‘Go on. Keep shitting on my doorstep.’
She makes a face. ‘Thanks, Declan.’ Her fingers sketch a route on the map, from Astic, up the coast, and past Hesper.
‘She doesn’t need to come here, she just needs to push past us. If she can get far enough north or east, she’ll open up new supply routes, at the very least. More likely, she’ll roll up a few more villages into her loving arms. Tips the numbers against us even more.’
Fallon purses his lips. ‘Do you really think those Midlands swamp-lickers will fall for her shtick?’
Shipwright shrugs. ‘Maybe not. I can’t guarantee it though.’
Fallon tuts. ‘There’s not enough of them to make a difference. There’s nothing big enough to give her the bodies she needs, unless she makes a run right up to the mountains and the Republic.’ He raises an eyebrow, pointedly.
Shipwright blanches. ‘She wouldn’t?’ Just the thought of it chokes her. That mountain. That war. The blood hammers in her throat.
Shroudweaver looks between the two of them. ‘Just because we haven’t? She might, if she was desperate enough.’
Fallon pinches the bridge of his nose. ‘If for example, she’d been starved out by a ragged-arse naval blockade for the last two and a half years?’
He stabs the point of his knife into some unlucky squab.
‘Which brings me back to my original, miserable option. We have to beat her to it, to Thell. We need them back onboard before we get squeezed between north and south like a nut in a vice.’
Shipwright and Shroudweaver glance at each other. Shipwright shifts awkwardly.
‘When was the last time you were up there?’ Shroudweaver asks, gently.
Fallon walks his fingers up the map. ‘Fuck knows. Ten, fifteen years. It’s over five hundred weeping miles.’
‘Exactly,’ Shroudweaver says. ‘We haven’t seen them since the fall of the Empire. Near enough twenty years. Who knows what they’re doing up there? Heaven knows we didn’t leave reeking of glory.’
‘Dog piss,’ Fallon says. ‘They only chased you out because you saved them. Nobody likes owing their life to someone. And fucking nobody likes their saviour popping in every couple of weeks.’
He uncorks a fresh bottle of something amber and acrid and swills it morosely.
‘Those bloody-lipped stone-fuckers crave independence like mother’s milk and your skinny little arse reminds them they’d still be dancing on the Emperor’s ragged strings if it wasn’t for you.’
Shroudweaver grimaces. ‘That might all be true, but we’re a generation down from any good we ever did.
Skinpainter’s the only real friend we have left up there, and they can’t tell half of what they saw.
Kinghammer’s grateful, I’ve no doubt, but he’s ambitious too.
I don’t fit his plans. And his kids have had decades to hear tall tales about me.
The problems I caused. The hands I forced.
’ He twines a loose hair, pulls. ‘We might find allies up there. We might get a spear between the ribs.’
Fallon leans in. ‘I get it, but we have a window. Kisser won’t get a warm welcome up there either.
Not from what I’ve heard. Tight lips and tight borders.
Scared of the gods, and of what killed them.
That’s why Kinghammer’s closed himself up tighter than a spinster’s clam.
That’s why half my scouts are riding back with damp breeks and lame horses. ’
Shipwright pushes aside the thrum of her own pulse and fumbles for the glass. ‘It’s too much of a risk.’
Fallon’s eyes narrow. ‘Since when did you run scared of a little risk?’
‘Since I fished the crew of the Volante out a cold sea, Fallon. If we go back to Thell, we have no idea what we are walking into. They have done everything to push us away. And nothing to invite us.’
She looks to Shroud, beseeching. ‘Tell him, love. Tell him that we can’t go through that again.’ And he, more than anyone should know. This should be the easiest sell.
Except she sees his fingers stiffen, and his shoulders set, and she knows that secret he’s been hiding is about to slink forth. All those unspoken equations finally adding up.
‘I had a dream,’ he says, and there’s a dry humour to it, because he knows how stupid it sounds. And of course, she remembers the dream, and his shaking, twitching bones, but he hadn’t said anything, just sipped his water and gone back to sleep.
Fallon clocks it though. He sees the shift, and practiced politician that he is, moves in.
‘A dream?’ Careful, considered. It’d be easy to mock this, but Fallon knows when to play it close, play it kind.
‘Shroud,’ Ship says, but he waves her away. His fingers flutter again.
the heart like breathing, the truth like breath
And it isn’t fair for him to say that. But she loves him, so she chokes down the fear coiling in her lungs and waits.
Shroudweaver speaks, and the way he holds himself, you’d think his entire body was trying to move away from the words. ‘If we want to stop a godkiller, we need to build a new god.’
‘Bloody shit,’ Fallon says. He holds his hands out in front of him, palms out. ‘OK, give me a damn second. I was expecting a gunshot and you fired a broadside.’
Shipwright watches them both and tries to nail them to their chairs with sheer willpower. She wraps her fingers around the delicate stem of that pretty glass and tries to stop the world from turning. It fails, like it always does, catastrophe rolling in on the riptide again.
Fallon levers himself up, swearing and carping. He walks around the table until they are all on the same side, until he’s close enough to shove himself between Ship and Shroud, close enough to lay a meaty hand on the weaver’s thin shoulders.
‘What are you saying to me, Shroud? Could we hit her with one of your gods then? A sucker punch? If we find a body fresh enough and strong enough, could one of those little golden bastards blow a hole through that feathered bitch?’
Shipwright watches Shroudweaver compose himself, the tiny pulse in his neck the only sign of his racing mind.
He shakes his head slowly, chews his lip. When he speaks, his words click into place like the tumblers of a lock.
‘No. No, I don’t think so. Whatever she’s done, she’s changed the rules.’
He pauses, turns, stretches fingers through worried hair.
‘Or at least, she’s changed the rules as I understand them. Calling gods. It’s … not what it was. It costs more. They burn out faster. The fuel required is … unimaginable. Even little gods cinder quick.’
He breathes, thin and shuddering. ‘Perhaps though, if it was big enough. There’s only once place we could get the bodies for it. Only one place where enough of the dead will linger long enough.’
Fallon frowns. ‘I don’t follow.’
Shroudweaver glances up at him, then takes his hand. Traces his fingers over scar and callus as he talks.
‘Calling a god. It’s like striking a light. Building a home. Making a body into tinder and kindling. Building a god? That’s like taking every light you could have struck, and stitching them into a sun. Everything burns. And the light of its burning takes on a life of its own.’
His fingers tighten. ‘I can’t begin to describe the scale of it. The cost of it. It took years for me to grasp it, even though they hammered it into us day after day. The cost of creation. The howling flame of gathered fire. The forging of a new god. A composite thing.’
Shroudweaver drops Fallon’s hand, the blood leaving his face. ‘Put it this way, Declan. Only Thell has seen enough death. The death it was born in, the death we caused. The death that came before.’
Fallon’s eyes are wide. Shipwright can sympathise. He’s touching on the wild edge of the world where only a Shroudweaver walks. That kind of talk does strange things to the heart.
Shroud himself is oblivious, running the numbers again.
He coughs and dabs at his lips. ‘I think if we can beat Crowkisser to Thell then I can summon something that will be strong enough to stop her.’ He pauses.
‘If she gets there first? At best she takes the city; at worst she finds allies. We can’t let her do that. We won’t survive that.’
There’s something else in his tone there. Shipwright sees it for a second, like a grey fish dipping under grey water, another lie slipping beneath the first. She grips the stem of the glass hard enough that it creaks. Now is not the time.
Shroud is still talking, leaning into Fallon’s arm, his irritatingly attentive head.
‘Stopping her though. That needs something that can knock her flat. That needs a composite. A gathered flame. I can do that.’
His voice quietens, drops into his chest, emerges cold, and thin. ‘I’ve become the kind of person that could do that.’
The admission knocks something out of him and he shrinks in on himself.
Shipwright watches Declan. She’s expecting a clever line or some brutal sentence that still gets him what he wants, but that stupid, bullish man surprises her again.
Shroudweaver flinches when Fallon puts an arm around him and pulls him tight.
It feels genuine. She desperately wants it to be genuine.
They stand like that for a moment, his slim frame held close to Fallon’s broad chest, his forehead light against his ribs.
Shipwright wants to hold on to the fury inside her, to nurse it until it’s a knife that will cut away the half-truths still clouding the air.
But the look of them, the pair of them – a wounded deer and a ruined house.
Shipwright watches Shroudweaver unravel, and when he begins to cry, she feels something hard break inside her. Something that’s been inside her since Astic. Since Crowkisser. Since the end of the world.
That knife she wants to keep hold of crumbles into nothing. And Declan Fallon, that big, drunk, arrogant prick, he puts one broad hand on Shroudweaver’s shaking shoulders and he kisses the top of his frail head.
‘It’s OK,’ he murmurs. ‘It’s OK. We’ll put it all back together. You and me and Ship.’
Shroudweaver shakes quietly. And Declan Fallon, Lord of the Grey Towers, Warden of the Free City of Hesper, holds him as he cries.
Shipwright smiles softly, despite herself. When Declan beckons her with one broad arm, she joins them, and it almost feels like coming home. It almost feels like coming home, even though the blood thunders in her head, and her palm aches from the pressure of near-shattered glass.