Chapter 44 #3
Heartshamer holds up a hand. ‘Let her guess, Declan.’
He folds his fingers again. ‘What am I, Shipwright?’
Her eyes take in the journals, his posture. That one bright eye.
She drinks from the cup. The taste reminds her, a little, of home.
‘A spy, perhaps. But I think more than that. A historian maybe or a broker.’ She shifts in the chair. ‘If I didn’t know better, I’d say a priest.’
Heartshamer is silent for a second. Then he laughs. ‘She’s good, Fallon.’
He turns to fix her with his eye. ‘You’re good. They’re right to talk about you, I think. Would you like to know why Fallon’s brought you here?’
‘Desperately,’ she sighs.
‘Always one for cheap theatre, our lord,’ Heartshamer murmurs. ‘He loves the suspense.’ His fingers waggle.
Fallon looks like he’s about to object, then shrugs. ‘You’re not wrong. I get my kicks where I can.’
Heartshamer scratches at his jaw. ‘I am or was all of those things, once, Shipwright. I am a historian. And I am certainly a spy, which is why I am not welcome amid those maudlin archivists, with their glass and silence. I believe most information should be free. I merely like to select the channels it travels in with a little care.’
He sighs, fingers massaging the scar tissue by his eye socket. ‘However, the reason our melodramatic lord has brought you here, is because of who I used to be. Or rather what.’
Shipwright watches those fingers, the barest shake in the bone.
‘I was a host.’
He watches her face. ‘It means little to you?’
She looks at Fallon, shakes her head. ‘Not much. We had nothing like that back east.’
Heartshamer looks faintly relieved. ‘Perhaps a Hesper term. Or a western one. What do you know of the gods?’
She thinks. ‘A little. They were a belief system here. Until three years ago. Until the south.’
Heartshamer nods. ‘Until Crowkisser. I still haven’t solved that mystery. History requires sane sources. But, I’m wandering. A belief system.’ His leg jitters. ‘A belief system, yes, in the way that a leaf believes in the tree.’
He refills his cup, barely a drop spilt. ‘Our gods were close to us. They could be propositioned. For miracles. For healing, or strength, or knowledge.’
His hands steady as he talks. ‘Magic, effectively. But not weaving, like your lover. His is a magic of edges, of the between spaces. Of will. The gods.’ He sighs, places his fingers against his temples. ‘Theirs was magic of the body. Of love. Of partnership. Sacrifice. They were golden. Beautiful.’
Shipwright listens, a suspicion unfurling in her heart like a fern. ‘Shroudweaver mentioned a little of this, but you talk about them like you saw them.’
Heartshamer laughs. ‘Saw them? I was them.’
He reaches for Shipwright’s hand, places it against his ribs. ‘The gods didn’t reach out to everyone. They chose people. People who called to them. Who needed them. Or,’ he laughs ruefully. ‘Who thought they would never need them. And they entered into them. Into us.’
He lets her fingers fall. ‘Host is a literal term, Shipwright. We could feel them in our heads, in our bodies, on our lips. They taste of spice and honey.’
She twitches at that, a jolt of recognition. Remembering tower steps under her feet, light pouring into her. But that had been shroudweaving, surely.
Heartshamer watches her, tilts his head curiously, moves on when she stays silent. ‘We lived with them, within our bodies. We gave them our breath and our blood and in return, they gave us whatever they felt we needed.’
He settles back into his chair, crosses his legs. ‘For me, that was knowledge. I was full of questions. At first about myself, about the world. Soon, I began to wonder about others. The great. The good. The people who claimed to be great and good.’
Shipwright shakes her head in amazement. ‘And the gods—your god told you these things?’
Heartshamer smiles. ‘I’d like to pretend I used the power responsibly.
But I used it like most people, I suspect.
I gathered all I could on my friends, my enemies.
I asked my god for the secrets of the rich and powerful, and I kept them close against my chest like a hundred sharp little knives, ready to cut and wound. ’
He sighs again, refills the cup. ‘I like to tell myself I guided things in their correct direction. That I used the sins of the wicked against them, that I gave the good the knowledge they needed to win. I like to tell myself that I was a sword. Ethical when used in the right cause.’
He looks up at her. ‘All swords get coated in blood, Shipwright.’
She nods. ‘So you were a broker, a blackmailer, a spy. All those things. With the help of this god?’
Heartshamer nods.
‘So what happened when Crowkisser killed them?’
His fingers move to the slack side of his face, his ruined eye.
‘Initially? I reacted … poorly. I don’t know how to communicate what I felt.
The sense of loss. Many of my friends went mad.
Gnawed their own tongues off in the dark of night.
Dug their entrails out looking for a missing glow of golden light. ’
His eyes tighten. ‘Or just neatly dropped themselves into the sea to end the silence.’
He pauses for a second, his breathing ragged. It takes a moment for it to stabilise. Fallon reaches towards him, but he bats it away.
‘I was lucky, I suppose. There’s a woman that works for Fallon. She found me. Kept me from the worst of it. Taught me how the rest of you lived without a voice in your head.’
He laughs, bitterly. ‘In time, I returned to the only thing I knew. Buying and selling information. Gathering those little knives back to my chest.’
He looks at Fallon. ‘Recently I’ve been directing my enquiries more specifically, however. Towards Crowkisser. Towards the world she destroyed.’ He waves the cup at Shipwright, his movements loosened with anger. ‘You need to know how that world worked if you’re going to fix it.’
Shipwright frowns. ‘I think Shroudweaver would be better placed than me.’
The cup slams down on the table. ‘Hardly. He’s rather at the root of the problem, wouldn’t you say?’
Heartshamer runs his fingers through his hair. ‘My apologies. Rationally, however, he has a southern perspective, influenced by the teaching at the Aestering. I – we, want someone with a more … impartial, viewpoint. Will you listen to what I have to tell you?’
She nods. ‘OK, but you know that he’s my priority. Always.’
Heartshamer’s voice softens. ‘I do. That’s why you need to know this, for his sake, as much as ours.’
He stands stiffly. ‘Let me tell you about our kind parasites then, Shipwright. Our strange world.’
His hands move horizontally, one above the other. ‘I don’t know what they teach you over the sea, but know this. The world falls in layers one atop the other.’ His hands move apart. ‘Above us, beyond the clouds and the stars, the home of the gods. Our golden gods.’
He sucks his teeth. ‘But the gods did not work without symbiosis. They sought something in our souls. Or our bodies. Perhaps our blood. Our life. I’ve never been able to truly tell.’
‘Remora,’ Shipwright murmurs.
Heartshamer shoots her a look. ‘What?’
‘Scavenger fish,’ she says. ‘They latch onto other, bigger fish, take scraps from them, but they keep their host strong. Keep its blood clean.’
Heartshamer frowns. ‘That’s distressingly accurate. I may never forget.’
His fingers harrow his hair again. ‘So, remora. The gods. They take, but they also give, for they are bound this way.’ He holds up a finger.
‘One cannot occur without the other.’ He shakes his head, ‘However, they make no promises not to change us in the process. A host for the gods becomes stronger. Age wearies them less. The burdens and failures of the flesh can be made anew.’ He sits, scratches at his socket. ‘You miss it once it’s gone.’
Shipwright nods. ‘And you gave back to your god in turn?’
Heartshamer hums affirmatively. ‘Every host does. The cost was simple. Your blood, and space within your mind.’
His eye glints. ‘This was how I plied my trade. That act of sharing opened my ears to the endless voices of everyone else’s gods as they chattered to one another across the miles.’
He smiles. ‘A wise person, a canny person might have learnt to play this web of sound, to sift information from it, rolling their attention from conversation to conversation. Learning the thoughts of distant peoples, politicians, kings and beggars and spies.’
He shoots a glance at Fallon. ‘A very clever person might use this information to advance their station, their city, their nation.’
He coughs. ‘The very cleverest would do nothing of the kind, but would hoard their secrets like whispering treasures, waiting for the day when a dagger needed to twist in the hearts of men. The very cleverest would do this. In effect, the man you see before you. Heartshamer. Me.’
‘Modest,’ Fallon murmurs.
Heartshamer rolls his eyes. ‘Like it never benefitted you.’
‘Sounds costly,’ Shipwright says. ‘Draining.’
Heartshamer shrugs. ‘It was a fair deal, mostly. A trade, of course, but everyone involved knew what they were giving up.’ He breathes out slowly. ‘And the god’s voices were always there. The power was always there.’
He taps the saucer. ‘Until they weren’t. Until Crowkisser broke the world and I could hear a thousand heads all filled with the wings of crows.’
Heartshamer’s tongue scrapes dryly on his teeth, his fingers fretting with the cuff of his shirt.
‘I heard them screaming so loud it tore loose their lips, their tongues, the roofs of their mouths. I could feel their teeth rattle in their jaws and the hair rising on their heads.’ His legs shake in sympathy, muscles dancing.
When he looks up, his face is twisted in anguish. ‘After that, the power was gone.’
He points at Shipwright. ‘And you have to go out there to try and stop the woman that took it away. That killed our gods. Will you try to bring it back? That power? Will you?’
Shipwright shakes her head. ‘I don’t think we’ve thought that far ahead.’