Chapter 76
RESURGENCE
The fiercest magic, the powers of a weaver and a painter combined, grants them but the briefest respite. For a few seconds, the dead are pushed back like tide water by geometries, ebbing in blood and teeth.
It can’t last. The Empire’s unleashed rage is snarling through the mountain. There will be more dead at their back. It’s a wild relief to see a small group still standing, Nigh clutching Quickfish’s legs, Steelfinder’s weary face beneath her helmet.
Skinpainter hadn’t dared hope they’d survive, had already half-snipped those threads, already begun to grieve.
Yet for the moment, they’ve held. This time might be different.
The relief cuts their legs from under them, and they fall to their knees.
Their breath races, as they watch Shroudweaver tumble into Shipwright’s arms. Blood thunders in their head, their pulse thready.
Perhaps it’s not just relief then. Magic howling through them like a storm, scouring them bare.
After a spell, they let Steelfinder’s hands raise them from the floor, feel the last traces of geometries fall from their aching skin, feel the nerves underneath blaze into cold, exposed fire.
There is no time to linger on the pain. Scant moments to guard the fallen against the dead.
Skinpainter grits their teeth and begins salvaging, push, pull and purify.
Hard strikes to drive out the lingering taint, quick movements to seal the broken lines of old tattoos.
Triage. Mending the injured, as best they can.
Salvaging the meat where the rot has not yet set too deep.
For a moment, they think the tide has turned. Some stillness swims in the waters of battle. They’ve travelled far though. Much as they’d like to fool themselves, they know the real rhythms of the hungry sea – first the calm, then the storm returns in earnest.
As if on cue, Quickfish screams in pain, clutching at his arm, and reels backwards.
Nigh wails in shock, and a second later, the mountain is rocked by a shout of rage and horror, an inhuman bellow that roils up through the caverns, vibrating Skinpainter’s spine, their guts, the wet absence under their ribs where scraps of the gift spasm in fear.
They watch Shroudweaver and Shipwright pull towards it like fish on a lure. They don’t need to turn, don’t need to wonder. They recognise that rage, that scream, that boundless madness. The Emperor has finally awoken.
Now he calls out from the spire above the dark lake, a lodestone in the depths.
Punishment for Skinpainter’s small mercy all those years ago, for that moment of hesitation.
Now, this creature brings a final unravelling of all the patterns they have woven to keep their people safe.
For all their work, all their care, they have been too slow, always a few steps behind the turn of the world.
Skinpainter laughs under their breath. How depressingly consistent.
As if summoned, Shroudweaver reaches Skinpainter’s side in moments, offering a hand.
Skinpainter doesn’t meet his eyes. Shroudweaver is the only other person who truly knows what cries out in the mountain’s depths.
They’ve been here before, decades ago, on the shore of the lake, as the Emperor was finally sealed in behind black rock, eyes rolling madly.
Both of them weak with mercy after the triumph of their rebellion, and sick of killing.
Skinpainter can read the recognition in Shroudweaver’s eyes, shock falling into a lined face already worn down with the care.
Shipwright is close behind him, calling over to Steelfinder. Beyond her, Quickfish is on his knees, his lover hunched over him. Skinpainter squints at them, briefly. Rolled eyes, but a steady enough pulse at the throat. He has as good a chance as any of them.
Which is to say, not much. At the very back of the room, the children cluster with their guardians.
All of them are doomed to rise ravening if something isn’t done about the Emperor raging below.
At the thought, a fury lights in Skinpainter.
This time will be different. They’re the only one that can fix this.
Them, and this southern string-twister they’ve been cursed with for so long.
They grip Shroudweaver’s wrist tighter, pulling him close.
‘The lake,’ they whisper. His assent is nothing more than a short, sharp exhalation, but it’s enough.
Time for him to make up for what his daughter has done.
The pair leave at speed, aches pushed down into the marrow of their bones.
At their back, Shipwright doggedly follows, humming with barely suppressed energy, a brass spinner stuttering to life in her hand.
Skinpainter feels it lift them, like the push of a wave moving from fresh to salt water. More use than her paramour by far.
Well, perhaps that’s not entirely fair. Shroudweaver too plies quick and clever craft; saltpetred brows and sulphured fingers, strands of red thrown to catch and bind, defend and destroy, clearing their path through the dead.
Yet all of this is performance. It takes Skinpainter only a moment to realise the reality that moves down here in the dark.
The battle is lost.
The dead crowd the halls, wearing the bodies of friends and allies. Skinpainter watches all they have worked for fail, over and over again. All around them, the last few living defenders fall, squirm, rise and rend.
A great heaviness fills their heart, the sadness like a choking weight.
Their home is broken. The Deadsingers missing, Belltoller dead.
Kinghammer vanished. Icecaller too. Only they are left from Thell’s old guard, and at their back, only Shipwright and Shroudweaver.
What can they possibly hope to save now?
Yet despite the carnage, Shroudweaver walks with purpose, his fingers moving in soft tarantellas as the air fills with blood, and the dead things that move through the blood.
The red threads around his wrist are wound tight, sulphur and saltpetre smoking at his temples, his lips set in a thin line.
When the dead rush them, the threads loosen, gold light pulses on their brows, and they jerk like string-cut puppets and fall.
Behind Shroudweaver comes Shipwright. Like a wall, like a high-roofed church.
When the dead pass him, her hands move. A spinner in the left, slicing the air into strips that she slides between, her right hand balled into a fist that swings slow and easy, to catch throats, shoulders and calves.
She kills nothing. She shouts as she fights, in a language Skinpainter has never heard.
Something fierce and old in a voice like bellows-brass. It lights their mind on fire.
Always, she holds Shroudweaver, catching him when the dead drive forwards, forging like a prow through screaming waves.
Still they come. A voice curdled black with hate howls below, the Emperor calling to his subjects.
As the trio plunges downwards, the mountain shakes with the aftershocks of Slickwalker’s work at the gate.
The fire of the shivers is likely dead by now, but the vibrations they’ve unleashed wrack ice and stone, great chunks of glacier slip and crash into nothing.
Shipwright flinches with each battering impact, but drives them onwards regardless.
Skinpainter tries to keep pace, their breath harsher with every step, painfully conscious of every small scrape on their body opening to new life as they hammer into the depths of the Stump.
The ink on their skin smoulders with constant fire as they hurtle ever downwards, towards the lake.
Distantly, far above, they sense the people of Astic gain the deeper tunnels beyond the gate.
Still, still they’re singing, the light of their voices bright upon the pattern.
Skinpainter would curse them, but they haven’t the breath.
Some of their own people must still be alive up there, because Skinpainter can sense them striking back, can feel the cut and thrust of their blades, their bodies, their dying.
It doesn’t matter who wins above. The dead rule the depths now. Crowkisser’s army have no idea what they’re cutting their way into.
All of it is far, far beyond their control.
The sheer scale of the disaster fills their thoughts, a swirl of panicked voices in Skinpainter’s head, teetering on the edge of mad, hopeless, laughter.
Sweat beads on their skin as their ink flicks out like a whip.
They can’t stop. Can’t surrender. This time has to be different.
The dead don’t give two shits for the hopes of an old mountain warlock.
They strike in yowling waves, more careful now, perhaps wary of the power the three of them can bring to bear.
Perhaps more closely guided by the Emperor’s mind as the fractured parts of his soul slide together amid the growing dead.
Still, Skinpainter presses onwards. Shroudweaver and Shipwright follow, uncomplaining, except for the harsh hiss of their breath, shouted warnings and cries of concern.
Professionals – that’s what’s needed to salvage this, hard heads in front and the valuable assets far, far away.
Skinpainter needs to find the other lynchpins.
They’ve seen Quickfish and Nigh, both secure, or as secure as can be.
But where is Icecaller? Where is the blasted Kinghammer?
The rest of the mountain can be sacrificed in a pinch, but not them.
They are too important to Thell, too dear to their old damn heart.