Chapter 48
hung by their neck, where the wind is howling
hung by the tall bones, the long bones
the ones that stretch close to the gods.
—Headsman’s Cant, Mirth
The wind is high on the coastal road, scouring down from the eastern hills and meeting the air off the sea in violent gusts.
The bleached wood of the Teeth list against its force. The base of each signal fire scorched black from the countless flames lit in their depths.
Crowkisser stoops against the nearest pyre, resting her fingers on the cold, damp wood as she lets her lungs snatch a breath from the gale.
The burning in her legs is cooling as she pauses from her ascent.
She’s exhausted. It’s her third night of no sleep, her mind skirling with visions, her ears still slithering with voices.
She lets her head lean back and inhales the lingering scent of smoke, only half-tamped by the rain.
For years this shoreline has danced with warning fire, as the fleets of Hesper harried and burnt any ship that tried to bring her people aid. Years of waking to that line blazing in the night. Knowing it meant death in the morning and empty stomachs for weeks after that.
She knuckles the sleep from her eyes. Enough. That ends soon.
All she needs is to break Hesper. To take Fallon, and her father, and that damned Shipwright out of the frame.
Now, there might even be a chance to do that without sinking the world further into death. Thanks to Quickfish.
A brave boy, running all the way to Thell. Stupid, of course. No magic in that mountain would bring his mother back her name half-torn as it was, a lingering ghost between worlds. A half-remembered thing. Stupid, stubborn woman.
But, with Quickfish in Thell, Crowkisser had everything she needed. A few light nudges, a few strings pulled, and the stars had started to align.
Her dad had jumped at just the right moment.
The slightest push from Slickwalker, the slightest threat to Fallon and his friends, and he’d run north.
Seeking an army in the living and the dead, she suspected.
A rekindling of that old alliance that had won him the last war, and the electric taste of new souls for the pyre.
Predictable. Admittedly, the prospect was worrying, on some abstract level, but she doubted he had the stomach to pull it off, or whether the welcome that awaited him would be as warm as he hoped.
And beyond that, she wondered if he’d really turn the dead against her, even if they could be brought to heel.
She couldn’t quite imagine it. He was still her father.
Somewhere, out there, under all the rest of it.
Five years and more since she’d defied him. Left him with the corpse of her mother and his excuses.
All those years, and he’d never lifted a finger against her. Not directly. True, there’d been a lot of noise and fuss around the edges hampering her, holding her back. But nothing direct. He didn’t have the guts for it.
Or he hadn’t, until now. She wondered if Shipwright would push him to attempt something more final. If Fallon’s bitterness would give him enough sway to send some red-threaded death her way, a little bit of payback for his dreaming wife.
She needed something to tip the scales.
And she hadn’t found it.
Not that she’d let on to Slickwalker, or to her people. Astic was prepared for war. Slickwalker already yearning to stalk off across the country, living out all his dreams of the bold, lone hero.
And she hadn’t found her ace in the hole.
Months of searching, and cutting, and bleeding questions into the dark, and she had nothing. Her blood lit with fire at the thought of it.
The prophecies were too vague. The omens could mean pretty much anything. A mess of squawks, of hints that echoed some great defeat for her enemies, and an unsuspected alliance. But nothing concrete, just a sense of the change to come, the sense of her own surprise when it would hit her.
All she had for certain was Fallon’s son, in that mountain. And if there was a place more foreign to her on this entire blasted earth, she didn’t know it. Locked down on land by an army still hardened from their last war, and in the air by the wild, strange warlock that stalked the mountain scarp.
She would have to go there herself, alone, before she dragged her army halfway across the world. She needs to see the mountain, and see what she can use to make its people bow.
She doesn’t want them dead. She doesn’t want her father dead. However much she hates him for what he did or didn’t do, she can’t wrap her head around a world without him.
As for the people in the mountain? Thell’s “Republic”? They’ve been ruled before. And she needs bodies. And supplies. It would be a waste to kill them, and she doesn’t waste anything.
The solution is to make them bow.
She just doesn’t know where to start.
The wind rises to a shriek, driving her into the lee of the Teeth, down onto the trade road.
The name itself is something of a joke now. The carts and drovers that used to come from the north have stilled to a trickle, and the ways from the south are empty of anything beyond the villages she’s brought into the fold.
Every mile or so, the road rises briefly to black spars of wood. Old ship timbers and the like, strung up to form sturdy gibbets that even now creak and bend in the wind.
Over those black crossbeams, black rope, and hanging from those ropes by the neck, the corpses of the last idiots to get in her way.
She never wastes anything.
As she draws near the closest spar, its inhabitant turns to watch her approach.
The green light of its eyes bright within its hollow skull, shining through the drawn skin of its temples like parchment.
Its neck creaks gently, the withered flesh straining as it patiently follows her approaching feet.
Those eyes could see for a mile, two on a good day. Nothing moved on this road that they didn’t catch.
One of her better ideas, she thinks.
The corpse’s jaw clacks gently as she stops at the base of the gibbet, its teeth nut-brown from rot, knocking together softly, curiously.
The common folk called them gallowswatchers, a little grim, but not inaccurate. Nice, tangible reminders of what happened to anyone that threatened her, and her people.
This man had been a raider, one of the opportunists that had come calling after the burning of the south, thinking the Rim villages were easy pickings, stunned by the devastation that lingered over the horizon.
Perhaps the first few villages had been, those that had turned her away, their headmen and women full of bluster and propriety, denouncing her heresy, her arrogance.
Her lip curls a little at the memory of those self-important little towns, filled with self-important little people.
Once she tore the names from their leaders, their villages became home to nothing much except bleached bones, rotten fruit, and, ironically, crows.
Not many had kept their names after she’d cleansed the south.
A few hardy souls, that drew followers to them like a lodestone, like flies to shit.
Dangerous, the lot of them. Every holdout she found, she dealt with herself, with as much mercy as you’d give to a rabid dog.
For most, the process was also the solution.
There weren’t many who could survive the stripping of a name.
Crowkisser had a lot of respect for Fallon’s wife, much as she’d lingered on.
For the rest, it was over quickly – a mess of beak and feather down the throat, and the name plucked free like a struggling worm, torn apart and thrown to the sky.
It only took a few, public, examples for the rest of the Rim to come to their senses.
Those that accepted her in Dryke, Vantage and Fallow soon found that their highways were watched by the dead.
The men who had once stalked their roads now danced a blackwood jig that kept their glowing eyes fixed for any new idiots with knives and ideas beyond their station.
When more bandits had rolled down the old approach roads that winter, the Rim villages had known for days ahead.
The ambushes had been merciless, the pits deep, and the stakes sharp.
And in the spring, the highway had sprouted another crop of vigilant, dangling watchmen.
Nothing was wasted. She idly spun the gallowswatcher by the dried sinew of his legs.
Her fingers lingered on the scars at his ankles, the tattoo of a bird that skirted his shoulder.
She’d killed this one herself. She remembered the rolling whites of his eyes, the desperate pleading spilling from his lips, even as the barn he’d burnt kindled higher and brighter.
She pats the withered leg consolingly. He didn’t seem to hold a grudge. As he spun, his lambent eyes occasionally lilted towards the sea, the bones of his neck grinding quietly in the wind as he turned. So much more useful in death than life.
A slight smile of satisfaction flits across her lips.
Raising the watchers now felt like the simplest cantrip.
Just the start of the vast whisper of power she’d been given.
But it was undeniably effective. Sentries with no need for sleep, no fear in their hearts.
Only the salt wind eating away at their flesh, day by day.
She pushes again, watching the twirl of leather, skin and bone.
Try to pull one of these down and it would scream to high heaven.
Try to hood its face and its weathered hands would pull you close and hold you tight until the long men arrived, faces weary and grim, sad to have been pulled from their dinner tables but glad for a chance to keep their children safe.
The wind gusts as she watches the gallows turn, sending the dead man’s thin legs dancing in ungainly spasms, his neck whipped back and forth.
The voice, when it comes, hangs on the edge of the wind, brushing the edges of the corpse’s lips like a bird’s wing, ‘… kisserrrrr.’