Chapter 72 #9
The endless souls of the Empire meet the dead of the battle in a thunderous roiling wave. Their combined energy burns like a silent star. He’s in awe. Terrified. The sheer power of the thing he’s created already starting to burn the between places, scorching its way into the world.
He closes his eyes, bites his lips, and weaves a red binding, fast and furious, dancing around the hollow of his knuckles, the chipped beds of his nails, around that ache in his wrist that comes with every cold morning.
The dead are pulled together, herded like deer before the beaters, crushed and fused, woven and bound. It is almost a composite. A thing hung with a thousand voices, hopes and fears. Not quite a composite, though. Not yet.
Now comes the hardest part. He has to make it manifest without breaking the binding. A single snag or tear, and all that energy gets unleashed on the edge of the world. He’ll make Crowkisser look like a saint.
He weaves, one hand in the between, strung with silver, the other reaching redly out to the real world, inexorably drawing the two together, like guiding a blossom through the eye of a storm.
He weaves. Every binding filament is precise, hung with his held breath.
Until suddenly, the pattern is complete.
The living and the dead are separate no more.
The thin skin between places comes down with a whisper.
On the plain below, the people of Astic are suddenly no longer alone.
The air is thick with forgotten names, and a growing space amid them that hums with golden light.
Shroudweaver feels the heart of a new god start to beat in his hands and his own heart leaps with joy.
Then, a gunshot. Screaming down from the high places like a piece of the night aflame.
He feels it kiss his head with feral grace.
Hears Shipwright’s scream. Smells himself burning even as he’s pushed sideways, Icecaller barrelling into both of them.
She straddles him lithely, smiling. Her shield is a smoking ruin where the shot’s caromed off.
With a wink, she levers herself up and takes position in front of him.
He doesn’t have the tongue or teeth to thank her.
His body is still hung amid the unbinding, outwith his control.
At his back, he feels Shipwright’s hands lift him.
Her mouth making urgent shapes. He nods but it’s heavy.
He’s not here. He’s down on the Barrowland.
His hands are the god’s hands, his lips, its lips.
He’s thirty foot high and made of love and rage and fire.
He can feel it pulling at the edges of his mind.
If he doesn’t finish the weaving, the god will eat him, brain and soul. He leans back into Shipwright’s chest, hears the steady hammer of her heart, and looks up into her eyes. She reads the panic on his face like a storm-broken sea, smiles down, and kisses him. ‘I trust you.’
It’s barely a murmur, beneath the squall of blood and battle. But he hears her somewhere deeper and his mind clears, the god’s song lessening for the briefest spell.
In that respite, Shroudweaver reaches his hands forwards and finishes the binding. The composite, the new god, solidifies into itself, its form shuddering within each twist of red thread.
For the first time since the world drew breath, a god is strung together from nothing but will.
Shroudweaver stitches that god, tethers it.
He fetters its form and binds the thousands of souls that fill it into a single thing with a single purpose.
With each twist of his wrists the composite brightens and flares until it towers over both armies, lighting the rock and ice of the mountain.
Its edges are gold and its eyes infinite.
It is full and blossoming with limbs and voices, fire and honey.
It is beautiful. Shroudweaver feels its pull, like a velvet rope around his neck. They all do.
The people of Astic fall to their shattered knees, in the blood and mud and the roiling storm. The composite god stretches its arms wide to them, radiant. Terrible. Perfect.
And yet at its feet, Crowkisser keeps running. She is silhouetted against the bright bulk of the god for a second. Slight, windblown.
His daughter flowing out of the storm on a thousand wings. Her skin wreathed in blackness that shudders and burns in the golden fire of the new god’s radiance.
She does not bow.
The composite watches her. The entire field watches her. Shroudweaver’s heart aching for her, at how much it must be costing her to even move in the face of this thing’s glory. His lips move, wordless, begging her to give up, to bend the knee.
She does not bend.
The composite is radiant, terrible, beautiful. A patchwork of a thousand, thousand souls fused into a single being that shifts like morning. It is the sun, and the end of things. It is love and dying, spice and mourning, loss and life.
She does not bow.
Stark in the burning light, Crowkisser raises her ragged right hand, clenched tight into a fist, a scrap of the Emperor within. Its voice in her head, triumphant, confident, insistent.
‘Now.’
She pauses for the barest moment, then throws.
The smallest scrap of a dead man. A tiny, black speck, against the vastness of a sun, disappearing like a pebble in a pond.
One small, broken finger, kept by Skinpainter all these years. Now lost to gold fire as the composite swallows it.
Crowkisser lowers her hand. There’s laughter in her head; the Emperor’s voice harsh and delighted: ‘Finally.’
A sudden surge of fear spikes her heart. She takes a step back. Turns. Runs.
Shroudweaver watches in horror as the composite shudders and pulls in on itself, the souls inside twisting and distorting, fleeing every which way in panic, like birds in a cage.
Something is terribly wrong. There’s something new in the threads.
Something new but horribly familiar. The caress of a mind he thought sealed into darkness, the touch of the Emperor of the Dead on the back of his neck.
Frantic, Shroudweaver tries to pull the composite souls tight, but even as he tugs, he feels something familiar haul from the other side, with strength and conviction.
The silver threads burn, lit like flares.
His fingers cannot hold them. And in his mind, the Emperor’s voice murmurs. ‘Hello, Weaver.’
Panic coils cold against his heart. Shroudweaver wrenches, pulling silver fire over his skin. He feels his powders burn away, evaporating in flashes of light and smoke. He saws harder, threads cutting through the meat of his fingers, down to the bone.
He digs his heels in and wrenches again.
The silver threads holding the souls to him shimmer, stretch, and snap.
Like a cut hawser, the red bindings lash loose and fall away into the mud.
Shroudweaver is yanked forwards, staggers to his knees with a crack, teeth punching through his lip.
Blood in his mouth, and a hum in the blood as the dead start to hunger.
On the plain, the composite shudders, boils and screams. Purest pain, threaded through a thousand throats.
And then within the pain, laughter. Deep, delighted and familiar.
He last heard that voice in the heart of the mountain, maddened by darkness and torture – the Emperor of the Dead. Loosed, somehow.
What has his daughter done? What has she done?
The composite sways like a drunkard, reaches deep into itself and tears, ribbons of light falling from it like a sputtering lamp. The laughter louder, shriller. Anguished. Spiralling up by octaves.
As the composite crumples, Crowkisser’s army seizes its chance. All along the Astic line hands go up, voices holler, and they charge.
They’ve watched all the old gods die, and now they’ve watched her kill this new one in front of them.
At the composite’s sundering back, the remainder of Thell’s line edges towards the safety of the gates. The ravaged god in front of them roils and explodes, the dead inside boiling loose into the air. Crowkisser’s army gives chase, a howl of vengeance rising from their grey ranks.
Thell’s lines fall back in front of them.
It’s then that Slickwalker fires one last shot.
Shroudweaver watches it travel with a sick inevitability.
Above the gate, the first shiver ignites with a crack like split ice, spreading into a hissing halo of bright fire that carves into the mountain rock for a second, two, then detonates with a roar that drowns out even the dying god, the mad Emperor writhing inside its splintering form.
The side of the mountain blossoms, black and acrid.
And the gates of Thell fall open.
Slabs of rock slide in great, groaning chunks. Dust billows in clouds. Thell’s retreating soldiers scream, lost in fire and ash as the mountain falls above them, all order gone. Those that survive flee over broken rock into the belly of the Stump.
And at their back, over the heads of Crowkisser’s running army, between the falling steel and the shouts of dismay from above, the hungry and unchained dead of the Empire pour into the depths of Thell.