Chapter 19
other halos
the barley crown
dawn across the sea
the hills before rain
the light that comes after
Shipwright takes the stairs three at a time.
Her hair is pale gold, electric, haloed around the shout on her face.
A few steps behind, Shroudweaver watches in delight.
His lips move rapidly and quietly, his fingers flying in front of him, laced with silver thread, spinning a cat’s cradle of incredible complexity.
His heart is thick with elation, the thrill of real magic, strong magic.
A true weaving, the first he’s done in years.
In the streets of Hesper, the dead bodies of the canals burst from the thick water and hang in confusion as their scoured limbs are wrapped in threads of golden light.
Giving up the last dregs of their sodden souls, lending them to Shroudweaver.
They blaze as they are harvested. Bone, weed, barnacle and tooth consumed as they’re rendered down into the light that moved them.
The hastier the binding, the hotter it burns.
The Grey Towers of Hesper are suffused in gold, a sunrise of dead men.
Shroudweaver had felt Slickwalker arrive like a knife pressing on the inside of his tongue, all his old bruises aching as the blood in them fought to escape. Arrogant boy. Stupid boy. Did Slickwalker really think he could hound them for near on a year and they would never learn to look for him?
He knew his daughter, knew what she might teach a lover, or a stupid, heart-struck acolyte. A hundred ways of moving swiftly, beyond lock and bar.
He feels another shudder of activity from somewhere near Arissa’s rooms, exploding like rotten fruit on his tongue.
He spits, wrenches, the red-wrapped fingers of his right hand closing into a fist, falling into the silvered threads of his open left palm.
Shreds of souls gathered, then reflowed into a single stream, aimed upwards at Shipwright’s heart.
Old corpses were the trickiest, barely offering a scrap of energy.
Hesper burnt most of its dead. The only recourse was the canals – the lost, the drowned, the unmourned.
He is scavenging the dregs, bottom-feeding.
It’s tempting to take too much. Hesper is a hungry city and her disregarded dead are legion. Their bodies spin slowly above choked, reed-thick waterways, bleached white from lack of light, hung with leeches.
And they glow. How they glow. He pulls the light from them with studied care, piece by piece, their bodies falling to ash and ruin as the brightness leaves them.
Even these discarded shells have a kick.
He’s lifted by it, almost physically. There’s a lightness in his bones, like they were taken from a bird.
Later there will be pain, the slow crusting of residue around his ribs, dull as old heartache.
For now, high over the loops of the city, the light of the weaving scorches the shadows into sharpness.
The streets slow to a crawl as drunkards, dockers and soldiers stop and gaze open-mouthed.
The skies of Hesper are birthing gods. Pulses of new, pure, thundering energy that run silver lines of light and loss straight to the tower, to the steps, into the body of the Shipwright.
The stolen light hammers into her with increasing speed, a crescendo of brightness and beauty. And vengeance.
Raising a god in a living body is a dangerous thing.
Worse still if that god was stitched together from the scavenged shards of a thousand souls, a swill of barely formed memories and lives jockeying for existence, a tattered sack of power slammed into a host body, for a few brief moments.
Gods lingered, though. Fragments were always left in the muscle, the bone, like hedgerow burrs waiting to blossom.
Still, needs must.
Shroudweaver opens his left hand, and pushes outwards.
Above, Shipwright keeps climbing. She’s not sure how she got here or when she started, but she knows that Fallon’s in danger. Shroudweaver’s magic is like a fish lure in her lip, pulling her upwards.
Stranger things there with it, hammering into her back, her shoulders, a series of soft concussions. Each one like a shot of strong spirit. Her legs are lit with cold fire and her lips are sticky with remembered sweetness, teeth sharp.
All the spaces left in her filled with fire.
Her boots crack the stones. When she hits the door at the top of the stairs, it vaporises.
Fallon’s in the room, on the floor, and over him stands a thing of shadow, blood and murder.
She hits it from the side like a thunderbolt.
It tears in half from the impact, its torso scrabbling for purchase on the unforgiving boards.
Shroudweaver reaches the door in time to watch Shipwright as she grabs Slickwalker’s echo by the hair and dashes his skull against the window frame, where it bursts into sticky threads, writhing over the walls.
There is a brief space, a void of furious light around her.
The fleeing darkness sizzles. Shroudweaver watches it as his fingers dip and weave, picking atoms from the air, opening paths, switching channels, keeping the energy within Shipwright as stable as he can.
His mind is frantically cataloguing the risks involved in stitching so many souls into a single body.
He’s seen where a single mistake can lead.
She can handle it though. Right now, he’s sure she can handle anything.
At the heart of the roaring light, Shipwright is laughing, her face wet with tears. Shreds of shadow slip from her fingers and are burnt away like mist in the dawn. So much for Slickwalker.
Shroudweaver starts laughing too. The light and the love are infectious. Shipwright blazes with golden warmth. Beneath her feet, slowly, painfully, Declan begins to drag himself towards the door, lungs rattling like loose stones.
Shroudweaver would help him; should help him. The boards are slick with blood. Shadow flows and drips from holes scored deep into the man’s neck and arms. When it hits the light, it burns with a smell like sweet spice.
Shroudweaver should help him, but the weave cannot be neglected. His fingers twist and spin, closing off divine arteries, silencing songs. Newborn gods want to grow. Inexorably, unstoppably. They need a firm hand.
In the heart of the light, Shipwright turns to look at him. Her eyes are hot amber, her hair floating in unseen winds.
He knows how it feels, the rush of multiplying, stretching beyond the possible. The thrum in your body, the sweetness on your lips. The taste of other lives.
At his feet, Declan reaches up a bloody hand.
Shroudweaver methodically splices, cuts, silences. Ends. Feels a pressure on his wrist, red fingers. Red fingers.
Declan’s face white from shock, his broad mouth working in fury. ‘Help me, damn you!’
Declan pulls harder on his wrist, and Shroudweaver’s arm slips. The rhythm stutters. The red threads run slack.
Shipwright staggers, falls to her knees.
Shroudweaver feels the weaving slide loose. Screaming, he slaps Declan across the face, and pulls his arm free even as he runs forwards.
Shipwright is stooped in front of him, her broad shoulders shaking with each perforating pulse of light.
Shroudweaver presses his lips into a thin line, and begins to stitch, deftly and confidently.
He can feel the pressure of the weaving against his fingers.
Births generally move only in one direction.
There’s an inevitability to these things. This god wants to be born.
When Shipwright raises her head again, her eyes are clear and, for a second, he relaxes, lets the threads fall. Before he’s even realised his mistake, Shroudweaver watches the god take hold.
Shipwright’s body stiffens, her lips peeling back into a grin of savage joy. She becomes more solid in heartbeats, the lines of her sharpening against the rest of the useless, soft room.
That doesn’t matter. Nothing else matters now she’s here, properly here, not the imitation he has been loving these past years. If you can call it love. She demands something stronger now, a fiercer affection, a purer offering.
Without thinking, Shroudweaver falls to his knees and raises his head for benediction.
She looms above him, a thousand feet tall. She is gold, and brass and fire. She is love and the sea and the end of things.
His lips move, forming new prayers. Distantly, Declan screams himself hoarse, but Shroudweaver doesn’t notice. Declan’s a voice on the wind, and he’s gazing into the heart of the storm. When the big man’s body slumps to the floor, he barely sees it.
The storm reaches out her hands to him and where she touches him he feels the shadows of the last twenty years slip away. She’s light and life, she’s the salt in the waves and the cry of a clear canvas sky.
Shroudweaver gives himself over to her. Her light spreads through him, bone and marrow, warm and hungry. He feels himself dissolving into it. He’s never been so grateful.
Then like the snap of a finger, the light goes out. Shadow flows into the room like a river and from the shadow, Slickwalker, his face a mask of fury. ‘Really? Really?! Not this again. How many times?’ He raises a shaking hand, and makes a quick chopping motion.
Groggily, Shroudweaver watches something small, black and twisted fray between Slickwalker’s fingers. A thread? No, couldn’t be.
‘No more. Enough.’ Slickwalker’s lips are black with anger, even as he reels backwards against the wall, wincing in pain.
As the light of the weaving vanishes, Shipwright gutters, sputters, and drops. In an instant, Shroudweaver’s head clears. He lurches forwards, breaking her fall as best he can, before he turns back to Slickwalker.
He’s naked, a livid purple bruise circling his stomach, but the cold smile on his face is the same as ever.
He waves a hand languidly. ‘Apologies, Shroud. You don’t catch me at my best.’ Already pulling himself together.
Composure returning as worms of shadow stitch the rents in his flesh.
He tentatively feels the remnants of the fading scar around his midsection.
‘Everyone hits harder than I remembered,’ he mutters, and laughs.
Shroudweaver ignores him, runs a finger along Shipwright’s sweat-slick neck and finding a pulse, straightens. Fingerprints still red on his wrist, he looks down at Fallon’s curled body. ‘Declan?’
Slickwalker snorts. ‘It’ll take more than me to kill that old prick.’ As he talks, the shadows crawl over him like solicitous snakes, weaving clothes onto his body.
Slickwalker grins. ‘Of course, killing him was never on the agenda. I even told him that. As if I’d really do that to …’ His mouth twists awkwardly. A flicker of shadow nudges at his lips.
Shroudweaver makes a soft, sad noise. ‘Hard, isn’t it? When you want to call them by their names?’
Slickwalker flashes him a sharp look. ‘Preferable to the alternative. Although, I don’t think there’s much point us debating that right now.’
Shroudweaver nods. ‘So, why are you here?’
Slickwalker drums his fingers against his temples. ‘C’mon, old man. Kisser always talks about how you’re so damn smart. I’m not seeing it.’
Shroudweaver looks around the room, at the blood and the wreckage, and then at the people in it. ‘Oh.’
Slickwalker smiles like a lazy wolf. ‘Give the man a prize.’ He points.
‘It’s very simple. I needed to know if Fallon was hiding you two.
But we can’t touch either of you without you’ – he sweeps an arm to encompass the room – ‘without you reacting as expected.’ The arm ends in a spear of shadow, which becomes the gun.
‘So, we tug on Declan. And, well, here you are.’
Shroudweaver bends to straighten Shipwright’s arms. ‘I didn’t think you’d force a confrontation so soon.’
Slickwalker laughs. ‘A confrontation? This isn’t a confrontation. This is my last attempt to make sure my wife doesn’t kill her father.’
Shroudweaver stops his fussing, and stares at the rise and fall of Shipwright’s chest. ‘I don’t want to hurt her.’
Slickwalker is behind him in an instant, his voice low and soft in his ear. ‘A bit late for that, I think. The only way you can hurt her now is by forcing her hand.’ Tight fingers on his shoulder. ‘I’m not going to let you do that. She’s been through enough.’
Ignoring the grip, Shroudweaver dips into his pockets and begins smearing salve on Shipwright’s lips and fingers. ‘What do you suggest?’
Slickwalker walks around Shipwright’s body, his toes nudging at her thick boots, her splayed legs. He crouches down opposite Shroudweaver and fixes him with a stare.
‘Turn yourselves in. I’ll give you a week.’ He twists his fingers into Shipwright’s hair and tugs thoughtfully. ‘If you don’t, then I take your head and hers back in a sack. And I leave that fat pig nailed to the gate for the crows.’ He taps Shroudweaver on the forehead. ‘Think about it.’
Shroudweaver closes his eyes. ‘I feel sorry for you, Slickwalker.’
Slickwalker snorts. ‘Don’t feel sorry for me, old man. I won a long time ago.’ He stands, dusts himself off, ‘The sooner you both accept that, the sooner we can stop all this. But, I should go.’
Shroudweaver nods, ‘Yes, the guards will be here soon.’
Slickwalker turns as he walks away, shadow peeling his body into nothingness.
‘No, Shroud. They’ve been dead for hours. Like I said, the fight’s long over.’
He turns, points his index finger, and drops the thumb like a hammer.
‘Be seeing you.’