Chapter 24 #2
Ropecharmer runs his hands through his hair. It’s short-cropped, pale as death along the side where Slickwalker’s last shot came too close.
‘I don’t get it, Cog. All this shit because the gods are dead. And yet the weaver’s running around doing … what, exactly? Because it sure looks like god magic to me.’
Cog sighs. ‘I know, lad. If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck and all that. But sometimes it’s just a bastard dressed as a duck.’
Rope seems unconvinced, so she beckons. ‘Come over here. Get off your arse for once.’
He laughs at that, levers himself up and joins her by the stove. This close the smell is nearly crippling, garlic, butter, spice and herbs dancing on iron. Chicken fat rendering into that crunch he’s loved since he was a little boy.
‘Close your mouth or the flies’ll get in, lad, I’m trying to educate you.’
Cog jabs at the broth where a chicken carcass rolls like a submerged lugger, a slick of fat and flavour slowly boiling from the bone.
‘Gods are like soup. Or god-magic is, at any rate. Least far as I can tell, and I’ve had some very serious conversations with some serious folk about it.’
‘The hosts? The temples? They were begging for what they got. Asking, not taking. Getting the odd spoonful of grace and power, in return for the right offerings and mumbo-jumbo’ – she waves the ladle – ‘but the pot was elsewhere. Out there. In the sky or the stars, or whatever, doesn’t matter.
Distant. Got to ask for every spoonful. Some of the hosts, they went further, dressed themselves up as bowls to make themselves seem more appealing to the soup.
Kept little bits of the gods inside themselves, brewing up stock in their bones, so they could offer a more consistent supply of grace to their parishioners. ’
She smacks her lips. ‘Repulsive.’ She breaks up a carrot into softer chunks and flips the meat again. It’s getting close.
‘You following?’
Rope nods. ‘Amazingly, yes.’
Cog smiles. He notices there are some new scars on her forearms, like she was working with something sharp. He says nothing.
She damps the coals beneath the griddle, and turns back to the stock.
‘Weaver magic, I don’t fully scan. A lot of it was kept pretty close to the chest even when there was more of them. Now? The way they talk about him? You’d think he was a god himself.’
She coats the back of the spoon, lets it drip. ‘He’s not, just another sack of bones carrying more power than he should.’
‘Here, try.’ She shoves the spoon in Rope’s face, and he sips, obediently.
‘Good?’
‘Great,’ he says, and it is, thick and salty and humming with flavour.
‘Flatterer,’ she says. ‘I’ll kiss the pan with it once the birdies are done, and then we’ll eat proper.
What was I saying? Aye, Shroudweaver. Prick.
Powerful prick at that. Fallon’s always happily sat on his hand and got diddled, but we need him out of the picture if we’re ever going to get anything done. ’
She scrapes the pot. ‘That magic of his? The god stuff? He’s been throwing enough of it around pissing about on Dec’s errands that I think I get the rough shape of it.’
She moves to the table and adjusts the place settings, all two of them.
‘Two kinds, basically. One folks have seen, the other I just hear sots and tremblers talking about every time that ship sails into harbour. Your floating corpses? All that gold light? That’s making soup from raw stock.
Not asking for it. Boiling it up yourself from whatever’s been left lying around.
Sure, maybe the gods put the base material in our souls, in our hearts, way back when’ – she pats her chest – ‘but it’s like ore.
It needs to burn to become usable. Once it does, you get all that slinky, sugary, gold power which you can hammer into anything you like. A ship, a gun. A body.’
Ropecharmer stirs the stockpot, the bones cresting and subsiding. ‘Seems dangerous.’
Cog nods as she politely elbows him out the way, and does the same thing, but better. ‘You bet your tits it’s dangerous. Doubt he cares though. Or more like, he’ll convince himself every time that there’s no other choice.’
She kills the fire beneath the pot. ‘That’s what they all do, lad. Tell themselves every day that they’re the ones making the smart decisions.’
Rope helps her tilt the pan and strain.
‘So if that’s the first kind of god-magic, what’s the second?’
Bones, roots and gristle catch in the mesh. Cog grinds it all mercilessly against the wire.
‘Well, depends who you talk to, but the official term is “composite”. Dry as a bone. Like when they call all the lads that die in battle “losses”. It’s god-building, lad.’
She thumps down the sieve full of split bone and skin.
‘Starts the same as the other kind, stealing from all the scraps of life that are lurking in the world since the gods put them there. Except it doesn’t just cinder them up and shove the energy into something else, no.’
She tips the strained sauce over the birds, where the glaze sweetens and clings.
‘No, some clever shit back in shroudweaving school obviously thought too damn hard about how far they could push things. Isn’t that always the way? Can’t just have power. Got to see how much power you can have, how far it will take you.’
She flips the skewers a final time. ‘Well, it took them far enough. There’s talk that weavers could build a god from nothin’. Burn up enough souls and mash them together into something stronger than the sum of its parts.’
She pokes the skin of a bird, and sucks her thumb. ‘Think of it this way. All my little leavings and choppings and marrow renderings? All of them sit together and the thing they make is finer than it ever should be. Same idea for these gods they build.’
Rope watches as she licks the last bits of nail clean.
Cog takes a thin knife and slips the birds off the skewers onto the plates.
‘Except, you make a thing that big, that powerful? The weight of it distorts the world.’ She pairs the birds with another round of soft bread and some oil flecked with spice.
‘So the weavers outlawed it. Told themselves it was too far, and that they were too good and kind and just to ever do it. And then almost all of them had the grace to die before the world found how much their promises were worth.’
She snorts. ‘So now there’s only one left, with his back to the wall, and what do powerful people with their backs to the wall do? What did Crowkisser do?’
‘Desperate things,’ Rope says, holding a chair out for her.
She sits and pats his hand as it rests on her back. Her grip is strong, the knuckles stark against the skin.
‘Aye, my boy. Desperate things.’
She sighs, follows it with a smile. ‘Which is why we do what we do.’ She glances at the carcass lying in its bed of peelings and clippings. ‘Removing the stuff that’s not good for us. Leaving something finer behind.’
He sits opposite her, and they clink bottles.
She holds his gaze after, her eyes bright as a surgeon.
‘Eat up lad. You’ll need every scrap of strength for what comes next.’