Chapter 45 #2
Shipwright reaches down and straightens the collar of his shirt. ‘I suppose you could say I prayed for them, and then I made them.’
Ropecharmer nods. ‘They’re gods, then? Amazing.’
She shakes her head slowly. ‘No, not your gods. Just me in the end, and a little eastern tradition. I have as little to do with your gods as I can.’ The words leave a sweet, sticky taste on her lips, like spiced honey. Heartshamer’s voice in her head, ‘a little more foreign’.
Ropecharmer is gone soon after, sliding down a dock rope, fingers curled around a copper hand grip. He’s ashore in seconds and off, moving with purpose; awash in errands, that boy.
The docks run a gangplank up and she watches as Shroudweaver embraces Fallon before he makes his way slowly up the thin span. The breeze picks up as he moves and for a second she sees him sway out over the water, the wind lifting his robe and flashing the silver scars on his legs.
In a moment, she is back under the blistering southern sky.
Three years unspooling in the span of a breath, pulling her mind back into the fire, into the desolation, into the first fight she ever lost. She’s picking Shroudweaver up, dragging him out of the ruins of the city, lifting him free of that tangle of rock and glass, as the air splits overheard and men burst, burn and boil around her.
The clouds stutter, the stars torn and wheeling and, for the briefest of moments, something that mimics the purple shadow of a second moon, until it blinks.
Shroudweaver’s fingers tighten on her wrist, his lips a thin line as she pulls him onwards, the glass teeth of the ruins digging deep into legs which had always been thin, so thin.
They run through pulses of golden light in the shattered streets, skirting the howls of dying gods – Crowkisser’s gift to world.
The sky’s a lurching thing, poorly pinned to the earth, and beneath it, their beautiful fleet burns from its touch.
Every crew almost lost in this nightmare of smoke and searing stone, doomed, were it not for Fallon.
Even as the sky burns, he’s everywhere at once, one arm hanging loosely at his side, writhing with something dark and feathered which worries ceaselessly at the rents in his flesh, exposing pale bone.
The other hand holds a brutal club, slick with brain and blood.
Behind him are the remains of their army; scared boys, stumbling men and women, hair on fire and eyes lost in smoke-blackened sockets.
They’re merely bodies gathered for a war that never came; bones thrown onto the pyre Crowkisser had built.
There had been no war. No contest. Crowkisser had moved straight to the killing.
A thump followed by a sickening slide, and the earth tears again, buildings disappearing, the planes of the land shifting and sliding. Walls swallowed, towers upthrust.
Shipwright is still stumbling, running for the burning shore, betrayed at some point by the ground, some sudden shifting that swallows a group of cowering sailors, their wails lost in the depths of the air.
She’s thrown onto her back and Shroudweaver is tipped from her arms to sprawl dazed beside her, his fingers still strung with scorched thread, his lips moving ceaselessly.
It takes a moment for her to find herself, breath rasping, looking up at the stars, at the purple belly of the moon, and seeing movement within it like the twitching of a sleeper’s lid.
She watches it crack like an egg and from inside its parting halves, she again feels the sensation of an eye, vast and alien and suddenly intent on her.
Its gaze is hungry as a fisherman’s hook, tugging on her heart, worrying at her like a scrap of meat. Her fingers grope weakly for Shroud even as the ground betrays her again, sliding at new strange angles. Her breath lurches in her throat as he slips inexorably into the depths.
She forces herself up on screaming muscles, dimly noticing a woman spun, caught in the flames of falling stars, her hair a bright white candle, her eyes running like wax.
A jump, a slide, a desperate scramble after Shroudweaver’s tumbling body, a leap that interlocks their fingers with the strength of prayer.
Every bone in his hand is a gift and her body curses her heart as she pulls him back, inch by scorched inch, gathering him into her arms like a child, like breath.
In the remains of the city, men tear the teeth from their heads as the sky sings to them.
The eye roves over the ground. Where it alights, the gods die and men change.
Gold-blooded ghosts sprout eyes, limbs and tails as they are pulled shrieking into the void.
Shipwright watches in horror as the moon sheds the last of its lies and becomes the eye it always was.
Around her, strong women, brave women, fall to their knees, and rise again twisted and howling in the burnt light.
Still, amid it all, Fallon. Setting his own arm aflame with a burning brand, driving the feathered shadow from it with gritted teeth and curses. He has a sailor under his other arm, her limp body pulled step by gruelling step towards the sea and the ships.
Shipwright feels her mind sliding loose as she hoists Shroudweaver and staggers to join him.
She sees Fallon recoil as the air shudders, watches him glance down at the woman under his arm, realising her legs have been left far behind.
Sees him kneel, whisper an apology, and break her neck with a swift twist.
The stars spin and list. The eye looks down, and on the shore their ships burn.
The great fleet which saved Luss and defeated the Empire burns.
Marines throw themselves into a blue sea alight with the heat of dying gods.
Even as they touch the water it rises up to meet them, bright and hungry, pulling the flesh from their bones.
Great chunks of stars hammer into the roiling ocean, and detonations sound in the deep.
Shipwright sees the ship at the same time as Fallon.
Somehow still whole, the fire only just at its edges.
They run, a few marines trailing in Fallon’s shadow like kicked dogs.
She follows them with Shroudweaver slung over her shoulder, limp as wrung cloth.
Her legs are meat, but her bones are brass.
A spinner hums her nerves to lightning. She thunders across the beach, across the pieces of men who had once been soldiers, women who had once been knights.
Men and women who had followed her through the ruin of Luss now burnt to ash in the ruin of the south.
Terror pushes her legs onward. As she runs, Shipwright can feel the eye on her, can see it suspended, swallowing the sky, bleak and limitless.
Under its gaze, the horses they had brought kick loose their traces and fall on each other, teeth suddenly sharp.
The ship somehow, still waits. It burns, but it does not sink.
Another chunk of sky thunders down, and it lists in the smoking swell.
Her muscles running on memory and habit alone, Shipwright shins a thin plank up from the shore, and starts up it.
Choking down the panic that fills her chest. Tearing her eyes from the wallowing sails, the broken masts and backs of the other ships as they slide into the fizzing water.
A few survivors of the Hart’s Pride and the Maiden of the Forests limp at her back. Not much consolation.
Fallon is still behind her, almost alone now, the bodies of the soldiers who’d died in his shadow fallen to ash, or twitching, ready to rise again, swallowing star fire into themselves and staggering upwards.
Falling on each other, rending, repurposing arms, legs, fingers, blades; becoming things which could survive under the gaze of that great eye.
Shipwright feels its weight on her. Somehow she gains the deck, her arms shrieking with effort as she throws Shroudweaver over the rail. Fallon vaults after her, pulls bodies in behind him, some still breathing. Something still to save.
For a second, she catches her balance and watches the world dislocate in front of her.
Shipwright stands on the ship, looking up at a sky that is no longer a sky.
At a moon that is no longer a moon, but rather a great roving eye, and she knows that it sees her.
Not the black glass of the burning city, not the melting sea, not the falling stars.
The eye sees her. And she feels it calling.
It wants sacrifice. Something in it moves through her veins, and she knows what she must do, even as she reaches down with blistered hands and hoists Shroudweaver by the scruff of his neck.
She can hear the blood in his body, and she can feel the hunger of the great eye calling for him.
She knows what she must do. Even as the tears run down her face, even as they evaporate from her cheeks above the burning sea.
She knows what must be done. With great care, she extends Shroudweaver’s limp body out over the hungry sodium sea – an offering; a farewell.
The thundering terror in her heart is shushed by the pulse of blood in her ears, by the call of the eye.
A second before she lets go, Fallon tackles both of them to the deck like a charging bull.
Shipwright’s shoulders splinter the boards, and she hisses in pain, but Fallon’s warm hands are on her eyes and his voice is in her ear. ‘Keep them closed, keep them closed, it’s OK. I love you. He loves you. Keep them closed. Don’t let it see you.’
She does as she’s told. Presses her face to Shroudweaver, pins him to the deck under her aching ribs until he coughs, shuddering into some kind of half-life.
And as if by habit, or memory, or hope, his fingers begin to weave.
Shipwright feels him call to the dead on the shore and the spirits of the ship.
He steals from the stripped bones, the blade-bodied, the torn and the broken, the remnants of their great army, scouring the wreckage of gods and men, taking what he needs.
He steals shreds of hope and life, and feeds them to the ship which bucks like a skittish horse, the spinners whining helplessly, pinned by the weight of the great eye.
The sea swirls in strange patterns from the pressure, flat as glass, then boiling like fire.
Still Shroudweaver’s blackened lips move.
Red thread stretches and scraps of the dead weave themselves into plank and caulk, into canvas and mast. The power of their spirits kicks the spinners into a devil’s screech, peeling the ship off the shore.
The ship strains. Shipwright feels it in the rise of the timbers, the kick of the sea against the bow, in the grudging scrape of the shallows giving up purchase.
It needs a steady hand to steer her home.
As if they’d shared the thought, she feels Fallon guiding her, his fingers tight against her eyes, and his strong hands bringing her to the wheel.
‘Steer her, Ship,’ he’d begged and she had, because she was the Shipwright, and the ship was brightest in motion.
She remembered the sea falling away, a poor shadow to the grace and beauty moving under her, the beach a spit of jealous sand at her back, thick with smoke.
Beyond that the planes of the ruined city still shuddered, slipping, falling shard-like into unseen configurations.
Not just dying – evolving, shifting into something alien and new.
The sharp smell of stone burning. And above it all, hung the eye.
The eye, twisting and twitching, feral, furious.
Its gaze roamed the shuddering streets and where it fell people split and changed, bodies canted into new forms, and there were fingers where there should be teeth, teeth where there should be hands, knives where there should be hearts. And blood, over and over, blood.
In the streets, the gods spasmed and died, beautiful, golden, rent and ragged. The luckiest were dragged down, hamstrung, shredded by weight of numbers. Others lay pinned under flaming rock, writhing and changing. Infected with the weight of the purple sky.
Crowkisser had got her wish. They hadn’t come close to stopping her. Their army, their fleet had been an afterthought, an observer to some primal change, to some fundamental murder.
There is enough chaos to drown her head in nightmares, so Shipwright sticks to what she knows.
She hauls at the wheel, the sea beneath caustic and hungry against the hull.
She steadies her feet, spitting ash onto her hands and gripping tighter as a fury lights in her, pushing the terror aside.
Let it come. They are not going to die here.
She feels the ship sing to her, feels the vibration of its spinners, and the spirits inside them.
She becomes more than a body. She is spar and beam.
She is the stretch of canvas, tar-cord, splinter, caulk and keel.
She is brass and bright-blue sky. A howl of defiance leaps out of her throat.
The ship hears her and shudders like an old steer in tight traces.
High above, the eye is still on them. She feels it at her back, like a cat’s tongue against her neck.
She grits her teeth until they crack, swallows the acid swilling in her throat and fixes her eyes on the horizon as the sky empties itself of stars.
The sea swallows them and coughs forth gouts of bright flame in return.
From below, things swarm to the falling light, dark, tentacled, ragged.
Distantly, she feels her hair catch fire.
Distantly, she feels Fallon’s hands on her shoulders, slick with blood, blistered. Holding her steady.
His body shakes. She can feel the movement down his arms. She takes it, takes every little scrap of energy she can and feeds it into the guts of the ship as Shroudweaver weaves with scraps of broken gods and dying men, pulling them into wood and sail. And the ship grows faster.
She steadies herself against Fallon’s singed frame as they tear over the waves.
He’s still shaking. It’s a long moment before she realises. He’s laughing.