Chapter 76 #2
That same heart lurches like a drunken cart-horse as they rush onwards through tunnels wet with killing.
The air is thick with the dead, buzzing in red swarms, barely bound to bodies now and growing stronger with every breath the Emperor takes, spasming with delight as his broken throat coughs out a challenge like a cornered lion.
Pulling them downwards to the heart of the mountain, to the black spire, and the lake.
The Emperor’s magic is still not strong enough to touch the three of them.
For a moment, Skinpainter feels the years slip away as the adrenaline spike of battle lifts their heart.
A brother on their left, a sister on their right, enemies all around – a simple pattern, solvable.
They channel that certainty into their magic, painting as they run.
The ink is lithe as a cat, stark geometrics flowing from their hands and back to their skin in a push and pull of interlocking power.
Where the dead are caught in its lines, they float like bees sung to sleep by smoke.
Chances for a little more salvage emerge down here, still pockets of resistance, hale warriors that greet their coming with cries of shock and joy.
They paint the survivors, strengthening them against the burrowing dead, the corpse-call in their blood, the avenues opened by nicks and cuts. The Emperor’s legacy.
Shroudweaver guards their back, his threads singed and fraying, bruises blossoming on his arms like puddles after rain.
They’re running out of time. Skinpainter feels hollow inside.
There are spaces in them where they’ve forced the ink outwards.
It was necessary, but now there are absences.
Power has leaked from their body, leaving them bare as the rind on sucked fruit.
Worst of all is the bleeding remnant of the gift.
An aching space beneath their ribs, scoured empty.
As if to mock them, they feel a distant pulse in their veins as Lightmender struggles far above.
The first blossoming of the gift as it latches on to its new host. The remnant that clings to Skinpainter spasms in sympathy.
Skinpainter bites their dry lips in a strange twist of ecstasy at the unfamiliar sensation, tasting spice and clove.
They have to focus. Down here, Shipwright strides grimly onwards, her hair clotted with sweat and blood, her knuckles split and strapping torn.
One hand clumsily works a struggling brass spinner which clunks and stutters.
She shoots them a weary smile, blowing a clinging strand of hair clear of her face.
Another brief moment of camaraderie. It’s about all that’s keeping them alive as the dead press in, the three of them driven closer together by swinging arms and snarling teeth, until they are back-to-back, a small flare of defiance against the dark.
They’re so close to the Emperor’s prison now that Skinpainter can smell the waters of the lake, the damp stone of the spire.
The dead skirt the edges of their small circle.
They fear the gold light, the brass stutter, the red and the black.
Distantly, selfishly, a little bit of Skinpainter’s brain rejoices at being in the heart of battle again.
The thrill of dancing just the right side of death.
The measured push of bodies moving in rhythm.
The ebb and swell of power on the edges of their tongue.
Brief flares of victory and consternation.
All of it a seductive lie that lasts until they get a good look at the faces which plunge howling towards them.
Familiar and beloved and broken. They try to strike them on the temples, the shoulders, to deal only gentle destruction.
Laying them low until there’s time to pull the dead loose.
To yank the infection from their veins. But there is no time.
Rescue isn’t coming. Recovery is a joke.
Thell’s halls sound to the guttural skirl of a dead man’s vengeance.
The Emperor’s voice clearer with every passing moment.
It pulls them onwards, a broken dog yelp in the night.
Irresistibly drawing their feet down towards the great black lake, the spire that rings with his rage.
Thell empties its guts around them, and they bludgeon their way through.
Finally the sloping darkness seeps onto the lakeshore.
Their ragged little band spills out on the eastern side of a chamber so large that Skinpainter’s eyes can’t make out the far shore.
Miles of black water, smooth and silent.
The mountain’s miracle, fed by some unfathomably deep aquifer even further below, and the reason Thell should never have fallen.
It’s normally home to nothing but pale, eyeless fish who swim the lake, bats with wings like shredded paper that skirl beneath the spire; normally guarded day and night by a few brave men and women Skinpainter had trusted with this greatest, most awful secret, rotated out every few hours lest the blackness and silence drive them mad.
That silence endures, somehow, despite the furore of the battle above, the whole cavern vast and echoing. Shipwright turns to play rearguard as they pelt toward the lake. She’s not needed. The dead pursuing them mill at the tunnel entrance, seemingly unwilling to touch the black sand of the shore.
As she takes in her surroundings, Shipwright’s gasp echoes off the slick walls and fades into the darkness. Even the dead at her back fall quiet, subsiding into snapping and growling like cowed dogs.
Shroudweaver glances nervously behind them, but Skinpainter’s attention is focused on the black spike suspended above.
The stalactite still not fully sealed after twenty long years, marred by a jagged crack along a third of its length.
They half imagine they catch a glimpse of white bone, the gleam of a madly rolling eye.
The three of them take a few nervous steps forwards, cautious as cats, sand crunching softly beneath their boots, as the pale shells of things that have never seen light are slowly ground into dust.
‘All of this down here,’ Shipwright murmurs, her voice hushed with awe. ‘I never knew.’ She shoots a glance at Shroudweaver. ‘You never told me.’
In reply, Shroudweaver raises a cautionary finger to his lips, and points.
There’s something in front of them, a heap of bodies on the shore beneath the spire, softly twitching. Skinpainter’s stomach lurches. They don’t need to wonder what happened to the guards any more.
They start forwards, then slide to a halt as the bodies are pushed aside from within, sloughed off as a larger figure hauls itself atop the pile.
Its ravaged, ripped back is turned to them, but even in the half-light of the lake cave, Skinpainter knows that shape, the broad shoulders, the salted hair. Every tattoo on their shifting muscles was painted by Skinpainter’s own hand. Kinghammer.
Every one of those tattoos now broken and torn, the body beneath heaving in huge, jagged breaths.
Skinpainter curses under their breath and glances over their shoulder at Shroudweaver who shakes his head, tight-lipped. The dead have filled the passageway behind them. A snarling mass of limbs and steel. There’s no way back.
Their mind races. There are other ways out, but all on the other side of the lake, miles distant, which requires passing the pile of corpses and Kinghammer, who remains silent, back turned, bare feet shifting unsteadily on the softly writhing bodies beneath.
Atop the pile, their old friend slowly tilts his head back, until his gaze is fixed on the spire. His hands extend from his sides. The left still clutches the hammer, matted with hair.
‘My lord?’ Skinpainter says.
Kinghammer’s head turns slowly, juddering with the scrape of bone. One eye glints in the half-light, their lower jaw hanging loose on red ropes of tendon.
And from that mangled maw, the Emperor’s voice.
‘No.’
At that, something breaks in Skinpainter’s heart. They should fight. They should raise their geometrics in defence, but the horror hits like a wave, blood rushing in their ears like the sea.
They hear Shipwright’s shocked scream, hear their own voice saying. ‘How?’
The Emperor laughs at that. A jagged, choking thing that slides over Kinghammer’s broken teeth.
‘Thanks to his lovely daughter.’ A mangled hand waves at Shroudweaver. ‘Such an ambitious girl.’
Shroudweaver starts forwards, and Skinpainter puts a hand across his chest. ‘Not yet.’ The barest whisper. ‘Please.’
‘Let him go,’ they say.
The Emperor cocks its head. Kinghammer’s puppeted skull listing as it twirls the hammer nonchalantly in slow, long circles. Bits of meat fly off and spatter the sand.
‘Let him go? No, Painter. I can’t do that.’ Kinghammer’s shoulders roll as the Emperor’s voice continues. ‘This body is so much better than what you left me with. What you both left me with.’
It flicks its eyes up to the spire. ‘You do remember what you did, don’t you, Skin?’ Its voice a guttural hiss. ‘Let your people devour me. Shattered the remains piece by piece. Bound even those.’
Skinpainter breathes deep, tries to fight waves of nausea, cold sweat wreathing their skin.
The Emperor continues. ‘How clever you thought you were! Painting my own people with your foul patterns. Locking me out of their blood, even as your pale friend locked me away from the dead.’
Kinghammer’s head snaps to Shroudweaver, its voice a snarl. ‘Thief.’ The hammer swings in an arc, smashing down into the writhing dead. ‘A slow death for you, dabbler.’
Skinpainter breathes in, lets it slide out slowly. ‘Let him go. I offer you a trade.’
The Emperor’s eyes light. It digs a finger deep in its new mouth, pulls a strip of skin loose.
‘A trade? From you, Painter?’ Its smile is wide. ‘How desperate.’
Skinpainter ignores the barb, ignores Shipwright’s urgent protest behind them.
‘Me. For him.’