Chapter 63
we are all little lights
but what a pleasure, what a wonder
to burn so wildly before the greater dark
—Memorial inscription, west shore of the Hollows
The snow still clings to the grass here. Crystals tight against stunted blades, the earth pockmarked with the tunnels of tundra voles, humped by the broader flanks of the first cairns of the Barrowlands.
The earth continued to give up its dead. Shroudweaver stops, digging his fingers into the hard soil, finds some roots and pulls.
Mired amid the thin white strands, clumped in the dark, hangs something that might once have been a wedding band, around something that was definitely once a finger.
He turns to Shipwright, wags the plant disconsolately.
She twists her lips. ‘We’ll need something a little fresher for dinner.’
He laughs, turns the bone against the pale spring light. ‘You might be right.’
She puts her arm around him. ‘Remember eating? I’d like you to do that. This extra gaunt look isn’t doing it for me.’
Shroudweaver tries to strike a pose, slips. She catches him with both an arm and a meaningful look.
He steadies himself against her. ‘OK, point taken. I think we only have a night or two before we reach Thell anyway. I’d rather not do that on an empty stomach.’
‘Good,’ she kisses his cheek. ‘Although, we might not want to look too appetising.’
He groans. ‘Please keep that to yourself when we arrive.’
She laughs. ‘Isn’t that why you keep me around? Shit jokes and great sex?’
‘No, it’s because you have load-bearing shoulders and you can tell port from starboard.’
He looks around from the top of the outcrop. The black spike of the Burners’ woods to the east, the Barrowlands before them, the Midlands behind and Thell on the horizon like a hangover. ‘Not that that’s much use out here.’
Shipwright nods, wriggles her pack onto her shoulders, stamps her boots. ‘It’s the worry, isn’t it? It’s literally eating you.’
Shroudweaver turns his shoulders against the horizon. ‘It’s not that bad. I’m just fretting about what we’ll find. About what we’re risking. What I’m risking.’
She raises a sceptical eyebrow. ‘Not that bad? I can see the light through you. You need rest. Some food that isn’t a herb. Something with fat and life in it.’
He turns, steps gingerly down the slope towards her. ‘You’re right. I’m hard work just now. Don’t think I don’t know. But unbinding the dead could destroy so much. Everyone in Thell. Everyone outside. You, me …’
He trails off.
‘Crowkisser,’ she finishes.
He nods.
She strokes the sides of his face. The rough grey hairs that have grown in over the past few weeks. His skin is looser, sallow from lack sleep and his eyes are like smudged pits.
‘We could save a lot of lives too. If we stall her at Thell, we can finally stop jumping at our shadows. We can come up with some plans instead of chasing down every move she makes.’
He nods, shivers.
‘I just—’ he shrugs, rolling his shoulders awkwardly. ‘It’s all on me. I’m the only one that can do this. If I don’t do it right …’
She kisses his forehead gently. ‘You’ll do it right.’
He leans into her lips. ‘If I don’t.’ Stops, clears the tremor in his throat. ‘If I don’t, you’ll have to deal with me.’
She bites down on the flutter of fear that comes in response to that. ‘I deal with you every day.’
He smiles. Even now, she can make him smile. A little victory.
Taking her hands in his, he runs his fingers over her knuckles. ‘You know there’ll be a composite. Like the god in Hesper. But bigger, much bigger. And loose.’
She grips him tighter, feels the old burns from powder, rope and thread. Scars of the trade. ‘Loose? I thought …’
‘That they needed to be inside someone?’ He shakes his head softly, shivers again.
‘We were always taught that, it was Aestering law, almost. You never bind, you never create outside of blood and bone. So they said.’ He tucks into the crook of her arm, and she pulls her cloak over his shoulders to keep off the worst of the wind.
‘They? The teachers at the Aestering?’
He nods. ‘The other weavers. The older weavers.’
‘Nothing outside of blood and bone,’ he murmurs, and touches a hand to his chest. The dead still silted around his heart, still just barely held by Smokesister’s rituals.
‘Well, you fucked that one up,’ Shipwright snorts.
He smiles at her, stifles a laugh. ‘Wait until you hear my next confession.’
She rolls her eyes. ‘When did I get appointed your counsellor?’
He pulls her arm tighter around his shoulders and kisses the tips of her fingers. ‘You’re never supposed to weave a composite alone.’
She stops walking then, turns to face him fully. ‘Oh, another broken rule.’ He tenses for a second, until she laughs, and kisses his cheek. ‘I didn’t realise I was sleeping with a rebel.’
He chuckles too, in relief. ‘It’s more complicated than that.’
Shipwright looks at him wryly. ‘Colour me unconvinced.’
They follow the lee of the hill down to where their remaining horse lingers resentfully in the wind. Shroudweaver leans gratefully into its warm flank.
‘Let me try and explain.’
‘One minute,’ Shipwright says, unhitching the horse. ‘I’m going to lead him for a bit. He’s had enough for one day.’
He looks at her oddly and she sticks out her tongue. ‘It’s not all about you, love.’
They pick their way between the rising humps of the Barrowlands, many of them untended this far out, fallen to ruin, or half-ruin, the grass high on their crowns and the stones loose over the graves beneath.
Shipwright feeds the horse some fruit, picking the berries slowly out of her hand and offering them to its eager lips. ‘Explain then. We’ve got a while yet to go.’
Shroudweaver tends the horse, keeping it steady on the thin, tumbled roads that wind behind the larger green barrows; a mess of rock chips and old bone, broken grave markers and long-rotted flags.
When he talks across its nose to her, the horse’s ears prick up, and he wonders if it’s learning.
‘OK, so. To understand composites, you have to understand souls, and the gods. We always believed that they were basically the same thing. That gods were just big, old lumps of souls that got clever and sentient a long time ago. Impossibly perfect composites, if you believe what the hosts used to say. My wife used to think so.’ He shoots Shipwright a look, but neither she nor the horse responds.
‘If you follow that logic, souls are like little gods. Or god-fragments. We’re not sure.
Pieces of something that could be divine.
Shroudweavers, we can take those souls, and use them.
If I snare one of those fragments, coax it, let it wick along the outstretched thread of my will, guide it with the red thread and the silver, it’ll spark into something much stronger, for just a little while. A small god.’
‘Lit from somebody’s soul,’ Shipwright replies.
He nods gravely. ‘That’s the cost of it. Weaving destroys the soul. It’s burnt out like a candle flame, like waxed paper.’ His face is wistful. ‘The things we can do, though.’
His hands absently move through the motions. ‘I’ve woven that light into bodies, to make them faster and stronger. I’ve made the sails of a boat leap and the blade of a sword sing with bright, howling speed. All kinds of tiny ascensions.’
Shipwright scratches the horse’s ear. ‘It sounds like the stuff of stories. By which I mean, horseshit.’
Shroudweaver smiles shyly. ‘It’s incredibly powerful. And utterly unsustainable. Every one of those little stabs at godhood – the sheer fire of them burns up their source, a person’s soul.’
He lifts a leg carefully over a tilted stone. ‘At the Aestering, we were raised as caretakers. We’re supposed to protect people, protect their souls. We only weave like this in the most desperate circumstances.’
‘You weave like that a lot,’ Shipwright says, and her tone is wary.
‘The last twenty years have been one big desperate circumstance,’ he replies. ‘Besides, it gets easier.’
They crest another small rise, and Shipwright clucks gently at the horse, who’s getting skittish in the gathering dusk. ‘I’m not sure that’s a good thing.’
Shroudweaver follows, a pale ghost against the setting sun. ‘Neither am I. That’s why I prefer composites. The effort they take. The skill. It’s not something you do lightly.’
She hums thoughtfully. ‘So why not just use them all the time?’
His voice comes down from the slope of a barrow. ‘Because we’re building gods, basically. Clumsy, malformed gods. But gods nonetheless. If souls are just fragments of gods, and composites are woven from souls, then what else do you call the end result?’
She frowns. ‘But they’re not like the old gods?’
He skids down the side of the hill to join her, pebbles bouncing. ‘No, something simpler about them. Something missing. We might just be bad creators. Or there might be a level of craft we can’t hope to reach. That’s getting a bit too abstract anyway. All this stuff has very real consequences.’
He points out over the Barrowlands. In the gathering dark, small lights kindle haphazardly across the skyline.
‘See those fires? They’re lighting them against the dead.
We’re still so scared of it all. And composites are something to be scared of.
We were always taught that they needed a vessel.
A human body.’ He shoots her a pained look.
‘But they alter the person that receives them. Placing souls inside someone can change them, permanently, if it goes on too long. All those little shards of god-power stick inside you, like burrs from a hedgerow. We used to think they left hooks for the real gods to get in. To alter your thoughts, your behaviour. It’s why the Aestering hated hosts so much.
We didn’t understand them. We still don’t. ’
Shipwright picks a stone out the sole of her boot. ‘What happens with composites now? Now the gods are dead?’
Shroudweaver shrugs. ‘I have absolutely no idea.’
She snorts. ‘That’s reassuring.’