Chapter 53 #2
No one had seen crows. Shroudweaver always asked, and Shipwright watched his heart lift with every asking.
But there was no answer which would have helped there.
He missed his daughter, and he was terrified to meet her.
Shipwright wanted to help him so badly, but all she could do was make tea, and hold him and pretend not to hear when he talked in his sleep; the muttered apologies, the anger, the fumbling over the hole where his dead wife’s name lay in his head.
Heading to Thell would help him, she hoped, even if he feared it. At the least, it would let him see something thriving from his efforts. Let him see the city they’d saved, the babies that had been born in their absence, and all their friends that were still alive to get fat and grey-haired.
More practically, winning over Thell would mean bodies, and blades for their cause.
And beyond that, fuel for a new god. Her heart stumbles at the thought.
Her mind flits to worn tower steps, the feeling of light hammering through her bones and the taste of burnt sugar after.
She tells herself that it might not happen.
That the composite might not need to exist. That the mere threat of its existence might somehow stop Crowkisser in her tracks.
The pony rolls under her and she pats its warm little flank, smelling hot grass and sweat, all the tangled burrs of the road.
She knew better than to hope. If something that horrific could be made, it would be. There wasn’t much point rubbing a comforting lie against your lips like a baby’s blanket.
A lovely little lie, that all the power of a composite could scour Crowkisser from the earth, and still leave the world untouched, leave Shroudweaver’s daughter standing.
The sort of thing they used to sing to the wee ones back home, Lu-lay, your mother will be safe, and lu-lay, the sun will still shine.
Still, that was the fiction Shroudweaver clung to and the hope he had sold Fallon.
That they could make something that would finally put an end to this, and still be able to look each other in the eye after.
Which made it a hope not just for Shroudweaver, but for everyone north of the Rim villages, north of Crowkisser.
Shipwright didn’t really have the heart to burst that bubble.
She might yet be wrong. She would love to be wrong.
And she wasn’t surprised Fallon had bitten so readily.
To him, the composite was just another weapon, a means of gaining access to the real prize – the mountain.
It’s people. Allies. She knew that old bull well enough to hope that if he could lay his hands on Thell’s steel and see its soldiers arrayed in squares, if he could imagine those soldiers driving that steel into Crowkisser’s body, then it might kindle the spark he needed to win this war.
Might. Blood and brass, that was a long shot.
She had a hunch that even if Crowkisser could be knocked on her heels at Thell, it would take more than a miracle to drag Fallon outside the walls while Arissa still faded in a high tower bed.
So, why call down that fire? It was easier if she told herself rousing Fallon would save everyone in Hesper. It was the closest place she had to a home here.
Something in that felt right. Or close enough to right that she could live with it for now.
And maybe saving Hesper would … Well, she didn’t know what it would do, exactly.
Slow things down at least. Slow her down, Crowkisser.
And give Shipwright time to breathe. There wasn’t much to be aimed for beyond that at the moment, not in her mind.
All of it had happened too fast, over the last three years.
The little she knew about this world, the little she’d learnt of its people, its places, its logic, had been ripped out from under her, burnt to glass and ruin in the destruction of the south.
All of the years after that nothing but a whirl of sea under her keel.
Of sailing from city port to village port, to hidden cove.
Trying to help Shroudweaver make sense of it all.
Trying to find something to salvage. Some solid ground to build on in the ruins. Something in the shape of a life.
All Shipwright needed was for things to slow down. A beat to figure out what could be done. She was sure if she just had a moment or two, she could do so much better.
The little horse crests a rise, stumbling slightly as scree shifts under its hooves.
They’re pushing further across the Midlands now, the landscape rumpled like a poorly laid cloth.
Beyond the rise, the trade roads cut onwards into shallow curving hills that hold mist against their flanks.
The wide, broad plains of the Midlands narrow to shallower bowls of green which shelter villages skirted by knolls and hillocks, small outposts of stone in the great ripple of the land.
To the east, the dark scrape of the Burners’ forest colours the horizon, and somewhere beyond that, the other sea.
Somewhere on that sea, home. Home that she hasn’t seen for twenty years or more.
Twenty years of being a little more foreign than usual.
Two decades, and she was still struggling to catch up, to understand these people, and their hatreds.
All of it was still so alien to her; Crowkisser, angry enough to turn half a world to ash and kill its gods.
Somehow, that girl had to be stopped. Fallon would kill her in a heartbeat.
The wound of losing Arissa wouldn’t permit anything less.
And yet she was the daughter of the man Shipwright loved.
Shroudweaver would never let Crowkisser be killed, not that child who held the shape of his dead wife inside her bones, her face, her movements.
Which left Shipwright, as always, to find some way in between.
Her stomach twisted at the thought, the last dregs of that dark Burners’ bread threatening to come back up her throat.
The little horse fidgets, and she clucks consolingly.
She has no idea how to begin. She needs time, for things to move just a little bit slower, to open up their options.
Thell, if nothing else, gave them a chance at a different way out, of defeating Crowkisser without killing her.
Threading that impossible needle. A chance at peace.
That’s what she really wanted – peace. An end to wars – to any wars – just peace. She can barely imagine it, time to get bored, to have your biggest concerns be an unplanted field or an early frost or the cat lost after dark.
But she can’t make it happen all at once. So here she is, on the wet back of a tired horse, stumbling north through the Midlands to Thell.
She feels Shroudweaver’s arms tighten around her and wonders if he can hear her thoughts. The two of them ride together now. Their other little horse had disappeared in the night, its hitching undone, its trail vanishing in the hard scree which collected between the rolling hills.
He shifts his head against her shoulder blades and murmurs softly. ‘Not long now.’ His voice is slurred with sleep.
‘I know,’ she says.
‘Skinpainter won’t be happy,’ he says.
‘Won’t be happy with what?’
‘When I turn them loose.’
She pulls the reins, steadies the horse as it picks its way past the wreckage of a cart abandoned in the road, axel broken, sides scarred.
‘What are we setting loose? I thought we were raising a …’
She chokes on it again, coughs the feeling of honey from her lips. ‘What did you and Skinpainter do in there? Nearly twenty years and you’ve never really told me.’
There’s silence for a while, nothing but the horse’s hooves, and the rattle in his lungs. She feels the words form in his chest, feels them fall back unspoken.
She pushes. ‘It was bad enough that I had to knock you out at Luss. I remember that. I can still feel your idiot skull on my knuckles.’ A tightness in her voice. ‘Why does this feel similar?’
She turns her head slightly, so that her cheek is touching his unshorn stubble. ‘What happened in Thell? What did you do in there? What are we going to do in there?’
Still, he’s silent. His breath is ragged on her shoulders, stiff with tension.
‘Shroud?’ her voice low and wary. ‘What are we setting loose? I need to know.’
His voice, when it strokes the back of her neck, is the barest ghost of a whisper. ‘The dead.’
She turns to glimpse him. ‘The dead? Aren’t they all buried up there?’
She turns her gaze to the black line of mountains on the horizon, the spill of barrows pocking their skirts.
He shakes his head. ‘Not all. Not enough. Half of that is just bones and dark earth.’
She hisses between her teeth. ‘So, the rest are somewhere else?’
He nods.
‘And we need to loose them to make the composite? All of them?’
He nods again.
Awkward silence for a few moments more. The horse’s feet beat damply along the road. Ahead, the Stump presses against a sky which seems to buckle with its weight. Distantly, Shipwright glimpses the first cairn flags, hears them snap in the wind.
‘We’re setting loose all the dead,’ It sounds ridiculous even as she says it and she snorts. ‘The Empire’s dead.’
‘Yeah,’ Shroudweaver says. ‘If I can.’
There’s something far too familiar in his tone. A truth skimmed above a lie. She stiffens reflexively. Tries to hide the frustration in her voice. She needs to know.
‘What would stop you?’
He shifts awkwardly. ‘Well, nothing. It’s keeping the dead bound that’s always been the trouble, but …’
‘But what? Don’t be so bloody cryptic.’ She jabs an interrogatory elbow.
He flinches, and she regrets it immediately.
He’s quiet for a while, his breath flickering against her neck, the rhythm of his ribs playing against her spine.
She gives him room. This is the most he’s spoken since leaving the stitched villages of the coast.
The words come slowly, falling against one another. ‘The end of the Emperor. The binding of the dead. The foundation of the Republic? Skinpainter.’
She makes a noncommittal noise in her throat.
His fingers tighten in her belt. ‘All of it. All of it wasn’t what it seemed.’
She tastes it then. On her tongue, even as she asks the question. Tastes it coming. The revelation she never wanted. ‘What was it then?’
Shroudweaver lifts his head, looks at the Stump in the distance, watches its shadow fall across the mounded ranks of the quiet dead. ‘We needed a victory. Clean and clear. We needed to see our enemies gone.’
She sees his eyes close. The faint lines tight at their corners.
‘But the dead were never our enemies.’
His hands tighten, thread flashing bright and red.
He taps her shoulder to slow the horse and dismounts, sandals and thin legs down into the mud. Slowly stoops to wet his fingers in it. The air’s cold here, slick with damp.
When he looks up at her, the wind pulls his thin hair across his face.
‘All bindings need a vessel, Ship. All of them. Largest to the smallest.’
She watches him. ‘Like in Hesper. When we saved Fallon.’
He nods. ‘Like in Hesper. You were the vessel then. For the god.’
Shipwright coughs to clear her lips of a sudden sweet stickiness. She’s angry, but that’s not going to get her answers. She chokes the spite down with the sugar and composes herself.
‘I’m with you so far.’
She tugs at the scarf around her head. ‘Can we pick up the pace though? It’s a hair off freezing out here.’
Shroudweaver takes a few steps to the nearest cairn. Sifting through the broken rock at its base, he lifts out a shard of pottery. ‘Every vessel has its limits though, right? You can’t pour a wine bottle into a pint glass. You can’t drain the sea into a lake.’
She nods. ‘Odd examples. But sure.’
He smiles, turns, skips the shard away over the stones. It clacks and rattles into the distance scaring up a few low-dwelling birds that peep across the sky.
‘All the dead in that army, all their souls, they were bound by the Emperor, to the Emperor. If I’d cut them loose of their bodies, he would have scooped them up like so many fish in a net.
Or if they’d flown free, they would have gone mad, and frayed and strange.
There was only one place to put them, really. Only one place I could keep them safe.’
She realises it before he says it, and her heart breaks with the swiftness of a spring thaw.
She’s down off the horse and her arms are around him, his cold back under her gloved hands and his shaking body pressed tight against hers.
‘It was you. You idiot. You stupid, stupid man. The vessel. For twenty damn years. For all those souls. It was you.’
His voice, when it comes, cuts through the wind, the ice and the sky and she shivers.
‘It was me. It was always me.’