Chapter 43
a great cleft, black against the water
where light falls through along the path of the moon.
—Geographical Features of the Farther Reaches, Vol. IV
Fifteen years ago, and Shroudweaver’s down in the guts of Thell, in the near-lightless passages which flee from torchlight deeper into the bowels of the mountain.
Miles of rock, ringing with the sound of water slowly dripping out and down into the dark lake that fills the hollowed heart of the Stump.
Skinpainter standing at his side as the Emperor knelt in front of them, a thin, gaunt shape breaking the black sand that framed the lake.
This was his final interrogation, the last flurry of questions before the victors of the Republic consigned him to the depths.
Shroudweaver hadn’t asked to be there. Hadn’t wanted it, but the voices of the dead held inside him had grown too loud and he hadn’t had the energy to fight the rebels’ demands.
The newly minted Republic wanted their victory, and Shroudweaver wanted to get home.
The Emperor knelt in front of them. Knees bruised. Naked, and chained. Fingers crushed by Kinghammer’s maul so no weaving could take place.
His mangled hands moved slowly, absently, like fronds in water.
‘So you’re the one.’ His voice rusted from lack of use. ‘Caused me a lot of trouble, for such a thin little man.’
His hair had grown long, his grey stubbled jaw stark in the half-light. If he was in pain from the ragged cuts that ran across his body, it only showed in his laboured breathing.
From above, the sounds of reconstruction rattled down into the belly of the mountain. The crack of stone sheared clean by belltollers, the bellow of voices shifting carts, men and supplies.
Amid it all, Skinpainter had moved forwards, their voice low as smoke. ‘Don’t give him a moment, Weaver, we have no idea what he’s capable of, even like this.’
A brief laugh from the Emperor then, his smile thin and bright as a rake’s dagger.
‘That’s the first true thing you’ve said, Skinpainter.’ He’d raised his shattered wrists pointedly. ‘Your friend with the large hammer made sure of me though.’ He smirked as he shot a lidded glance at Shroudweaver. ‘Ask him, if you don’t believe me.’
As he waggled his fingers the bones ground audibly, his smile hanging loose. ‘We’re not much without our digits, are we?’
Loose fingers, ragged bone, Shroudweaver had seen them in every hand since that day, in every twitching nail. A decade and a half did nothing.
In the smoky backroom bed of the Gull, his ribs ache. He remembers stepping forwards, past Skinpainter’s cautioning arm, taking the Emperor’s hair and pulling his head back to look into his eyes. He can remember the hatred he had felt.
‘We are nothing alike.’
The Emperor had laughed at that. ‘Like the sound of that tune, do you? Keep singing it, Shroudweaver. You know what I’ve done, and you know how I’ve done it.’ His chains shook with the mirth rattling around his gut.
He had grinned at Skinpainter. ‘Did you never stop to wonder how your clever friend was able to unpick my work so neatly? I’m almost impressed.’ Dark lips thinned over his sharp teeth. ‘I’m mostly furious.’
A flicker of rage for a moment, until a smile slid back over the Emperor’s tongue like a shark.
‘But there’s a price isn’t there?’ His crushed fingers jerked pointedly towards Shroudweaver’s chest. ‘They’re all in there now, aren’t they? Whispering away. Making themselves at home. All my stolen subjects.’
Shroudweaver had looked away as the voices in his head surged in response, clamouring for revenge.
The Emperor jerked forwards, the burr of his voice delighted, thick with clotted blood, rasping on the edge of that wet, hot breath. ‘You’ll have to let them go sometime, Weaver. I’ll be waiting.’
Hunger slicking his face, until Skinpainter’s fist had cracked against his jaw with an audible snap. ‘Shut your mouth. You’re going nowhere but to the council of the Republic. They’ll decide what to do with you.’
The Emperor spat redly on the ground, eyes hooded with fury. ‘I bet they will. Won’t that be satisfying for them?’
His head rose again, one pupil glinting madly from beneath the ribbons of blood-caked hair and torn scalp.
‘Doesn’t change a thing, Weaver. You made the biggest mistake. We should never take souls into ourselves. Arrogant. Stupid.’
Shroudweaver had sucked in air, damp, cool with moisture from the lake which lapped the underground shore, somewhere out in the darkness. He’d bitten down on the panic rising inside him and thought of what Shipwright would do: get the job done; deal with the fear later.
Then he’d found his voice. ‘So you are a weaver?’
The Emperor had laughed, his hunched shoulders shaking, before he turned his head to fix Shroudweaver fully.
His voice a snake’s hiss. ‘Weaver! Everything you’ve learnt, everything they taught you in that pathetic birch grove you call an Aestering. Everything you think you know is but the briefest sliver of the world I could show you. The world I have walked in since before the ice lay on the stone.’
Shroudweaver recalled his twisted fingers reaching upwards, his eyes wet and luminous in the dim light. ‘You have not even begun to know the touch of death, Weaver, the mysteries of the soul.’ That smile, pale as bone. ‘You’re like a blind child lost in a forest. I’m the moon above.’
Shroudweaver had shivered, something in the words lodging under his heart. ‘You’re talkative, that’s all I know.’
A light had gone out in the Emperor’s eyes, which turned flat and hard.
‘Laugh it off, Shroudweaver.’ He’d chuckled.
‘How many voices laughing in you now? A thousand? Five thousand?’ He shuffled forwards, chain links stretching.
‘I was widespread, little weaver, like a seed in the wind, like a lie in the heart, there was a shard of me within everyone, living or dead in this mountain.’
He lunged on the chain, his knees striking the wet sand. ‘That is where my magic surpasses yours, blind child. I will always be in this mountain, in its people, in their blood and bone. I have woven myself into them in their smallest spaces. Every hollow of their heart is a home for me.’
His smile radiant again, a preacher spreading the gospel. ‘This brief separation of yours will fail, Weaver. You cannot hold these stolen souls forever.’
Impossible to forget the feral light in the Emperor’s eyes as his voice soared.
‘And once they are unbound, they will flow forth into every single little shadow, every drop of blood. Every cut, every mouth, every wound will be as a door to me. I ride their souls like skin upon flesh, like wind upon the land, like the buzz in the heart of the fly. You cannot hold me forever. You cannot hold me.’
His face twisted with glee, the echoes falling into the black lake, which ate the sound. Shroudweaver remembered the way the words had died, sifting into the black.
Skinpainter had simply rolled their eyes and rubbed their knuckles. ‘Are we about done here Shroud? We’re getting nothing useful, and I’m growing tired of the sound of his voice.’
The Emperor was now nothing but a grinning, tilting head, hissing into the dark. ‘Are we done here, Shroudweaver? Do you grasp what I am telling you?’
He ran a tongue over crusted lips. ‘Such hubris, Shroudweaver. You took them all into you. Desperate. Thoughtless. Crude. Taking when you could simply … give.’ Sand sifted between his fingers.
‘They are all mine. Everyone in this mountain, in Thell, in that shrieking city called Luss. I bound a shard of my soul to theirs on death, and for those still living I prepared a home in their flesh for me to find them when they died.’
The Emperor’s head had tipped back, something close to wonder in his eyes.
‘You cannot destroy me. You cannot stop me. I am forever in this mountain. And the moment you release those souls I will reclaim them, every one. I will move into their bodies like glass into water. And all it will take will be a single cut. A single tear. One, small, mistake.’
Shroudweaver had watched the man in front of him rant, and heard Shipwright’s voice in his head, climbing above his hammering heart. ‘Folk are always loudest when they’re scared.’
She’d said that the night before the last battle, in camp, as the people of Thell and Hesper fucked and yelled and fought each other just enough to keep the fear of dying away. She’d been right though. He had seen the edges of that fear around the Emperor’s eyes.
‘Do you buy it, Shroud?’ Skinpainter’s face clouded.
‘Perhaps,’ Shroudweaver had said, as he felt a little steel flourish in his spine.
The Emperor had snarled. ‘Perhaps? You know it, Weaver.’
Shroudweaver had thought for a moment. Taken a little of the calm he was taught at the Aestering. The drip of water over stone. The heat of his own breathing. Had felt his mind quiet a little, felt the run of those other voices slow.
He’d looked to Skinpainter, to their broad, expectant face.
‘I can’t hold these souls forever. That much is true.
But we have time to figure out a solution to that.
’ He had pressed his fingers against his nose, trying to quiet the chattering that pushed on the inside of his skull and pointed to the Emperor.
‘His soul might be spread all through the mountain. It might be bonded, somehow, with those that have already died. I don’t know.
This is seven grades of wrong beyond anything I was ever taught. ’
‘Lies,’ the Emperor had growled, before Skinpainter cuffed him again, then turned to Shroudweaver with bruised knuckles and a heavy brow.
‘Speak Shroud, I need your advice here. Before I found you, I had no idea anyone could even play this bastard at his own game. You’re our best hope, and you’ve done right by us. Tell us what needs done, and we’ll do it.’