Chapter 76 #3
Silence for a moment. Kinghammer’s eyes wet and limpid. His whole face seeming to writhe as the Emperor’s spirit moves underneath.
Then laughter, loud and raucous, splitting the echoes of the cavern into howling shards.
‘You.’ Its pitch drops. A cat’s purr, wet and thick with spit. ‘You.’
A shake of Kinghammer’s head. ‘No, Painter. No.’ Its hand waves.
‘If only you’d held onto that last piece of me, you traitorous thing.
’ A vicious smile on Kinghammer’s face. ‘The smallest piece of me. Couldn’t trust it to anyone else, could you?
Couldn’t tell anyone else.’ Its snarl deepens. ‘Didn’t think anyone else was capable.’
The Emperor begins to walk towards them on Kinghammer’s bloody feet. With every step the dead around him awaken, burrowing like rats in garbage. They see Skinpainter and howl in recognition with a hundred mouths.
As the Emperor’s feet hit the sand, it staggers slightly, and laughs. ‘New legs. A little tired from all the running.’
Skinpainter tries to summon some scrap of power as the Emperor approaches, but they’re spent.
The torn gift aches under their ribs, their muscles worn out with a hundred inkings.
The stench of the Emperor’s magic fills their mind like a black wall, its voice like wolves feasting, ‘No trade. No deal. I have this body. Soon, I will have all the bodies within this mountain.’ Kinghammer’s mouth splits impossibly wide.
‘I should thank you, Skinpainter. Without all those years in the dark, I would never have been driven to explore just how much I can do.’
The Emperor draws closer, until it’s a breath or two from Skinpainter, Kinghammer’s massive, ruined chest moving in ragged sighs. The dead coil behind their master, fat as leeches crying out for blood.
At their back, Skinpainter can hear Shroudweaver and Shipwright shouting, can feel slick fingers tug on their arm, even as the Emperor leans in close, so close they can see the muscles working inside its jaw, can see Kinghammer begin to fray as the body is pulled into new shapes by the spirit within.
‘A secret for you, Skinpainter, before you die.’
Its breath is wet against Skinpainter’s cheek, its voice delighted.
‘Kinghammer’s flesh is good. Strong. Perhaps he’s still in here, somewhere, but that won’t last. And even if it did, I have his daughter too. I have them all, thanks to you.’
Skinpainter’s heart sinks, the loss enough to crush them, like the depths of the sea, enough to drown in.
But beneath that, a voice, a single thought: this time has to be different.
They reach a shaking hand towards the Emperor, and push outwards with the last echoes of their power, faint geometries fizzing and burning against cold skin.
Kinghammer’s body staggers, and laughs.
As the sparks fade, Skinpainter faces him, steeling the breath within their chest. Their rags float lazily. The air hums. Patterns shift and move, blackening like blood under a bruise. Hiding their treacherous, hammering heart.
‘You are dead. A nothing. A relic,’ they snarl, lashing out with ink that licks across the surface of Kinghammer’s skin. At its touch, his body shudders, and all the dead at his back turn to face Skinpainter as one.
The Emperor replies with a hundred tongues. Smiles with a hundred jaws. The eyes of Skinpainter’s friends look back at them from its broken choir with hunger in their hearts.
‘I. Am. Whole,’ says the thing that was Kinghammer, as its jaw hangs slack and loose. ‘I. Am. Whole. And you …’ It raises a bloody hammer that drips, slow, black clots. ‘You. Have. Lost.’
Skinpainter turns their face to Shroudweaver. ‘Bind it.’ Fury riding their breath.
Shroudweaver’s hands move frantically. Red thread spins and loops. The air burns. ‘Easy for you to say.’
Skinpainter frowns, a rage kindling in them, cold and hard as ice. Behind them, the Emperor laughs in lurching rasps, as it picks apart a jawbone tooth by tooth.
They retch and begin backing away, painfully slowly, keeping their body between Shroudweaver and the wreck of Kinghammer, giving him time to work.
They glimpse Shipwright at his back, warding the other dead off with slow, buzzing swings of her fists. For a moment, Skinpainter wishes she would let them all through, so they could watch this stupid arrogant man taste a consequence for once in his life.
An indulgence; Shroudweaver can’t die yet. He owes them answers at least.
Skinpainter edges closer to his dancing hands, their voice low, furious. ‘How did this bastard get loose, Shroud?’
The Emperor laughs thickly inside Kinghammer’s skin, the possessed man’s eyes rolling in his head. Bloodstained lips quirking in a smile. ‘Ask his daughter, inktwister. Wait, no. Ask him.’
It waves a hand expressively, small flecks of red flesh dance along the bone.
Shroudweaver tears his eyes away. ‘You know I needed the dead, Skin. I needed a composite. To stop her.’
Skinpainter half turns, regards him levelly. ‘And you thought she wouldn’t have something up her sleeve? Your own daughter.’ They shake their head. ‘You idiot.’
Shroudweaver’s voice is cold, his hands dancing. ‘Something that she stole from you, it seems.’
The Emperor chuckles again, throat full, ‘As I said, a clever girl, his daughter. Just a little overconfident though. Like her father.’ It grins wetly. ‘Helpful that she hates you more than she feared me.’
A few steps away, Shroudweaver ignores it all, as best he can. He can’t focus on the terror, on how quickly this is all spiralling, on the implications for Crowkisser. For the world.
As if it senses his wavering heart, the Emperor throws its head back and howls, the sound utterly inhuman, feral and hungry, splitting Kinghammer’s lips with the force of the shout.
The mass of the dead bays in response, loping and lurching ever closer.
Side by side, held in a wary knot, Skinpainter, Shroudweaver and Shipwright slowly retreat, pushed back towards the cave entrance, towards the lakeshore and the freezing cold water beneath the spike of the Emperor’s prison.
The possessed dead crowd ever closer around Skinpainter, ragged hands stretching as tattoos dance across their broken skin.
So much undone in such a small span. And Shroudweaver at the heart of it.
Or his daughter, at least. A flicker of rage again.
They shrug it away. Useless. A clear head’s needed if they want time to sling blame later.
They roll up their sleeves. Ink flows down their muscled arms as they turn to Shroudweaver’s dancing hands and nervous face. ‘Do you want to undo this?’
Shroudweaver shakes his head. ‘I wouldn’t know how. The binding was hard enough the first time round. Now? With all this?’ His shrug is liquid, eloquent.
Skinpainter grins. ‘The only regrets that kill you are the ones you don’t own, Shroud. Time you southerners took a leaf out of our book.’ Their fingers work quickly, sketching patterns on the dark sand. Ink flows into a pulsing square, black and red and black again. ‘Get inside.’
Shroudweaver complies, leaning against them gratefully. His ragged little body shakes with the effort.
Shipwright’s at his back, her eyes a hard iron. ‘What are you going to do?’ she asks Skinpainter and they hear the warning in her tone.
They shrug, pushing their hood back as they turn to face the crowding dead.
‘I have no fucking idea, but unlike your boyfriend. I didn’t spend the last twenty years moping over my bad choices.
’ Their smile is broad, a little wild. ‘I made contingencies.’ They glance at Shroudweaver. ‘But it’s going to hurt.’
As they turn back to the mob, the thing in Kinghammer’s skin is suddenly near, pressing to the front of the throng, its bulk waxing with every second.
Kinghammer’s shape already fraying under the strain, skin splitting and veins bursting as the Emperor’s soul takes a firmer hold.
Its voice falls into a shuddering drawl as Kinghammer’s jaw distends, snakelike.
‘Hurt? I’ll show you hurt.’ It shoulders closer, muscles shifting, using the hammer like a massive, wasted limb.
Stops just short of the outermost ink and lets out a guttural snarl. ‘This won’t stop me.’
Skinpainter pretends calm, clamping down on the voice in their head that says it’s probably right. Their hands work furiously. Ink flows as geometrics unlatch and dissolve on their body, running like water into the designs on the sand beneath their feet.
Kinghammer’s eyes linger on the patterns for a moment, then flick to Skinpainter’s face. They can sense its confusion and watch as it scrambles to cover it up. A little spark of hope there, even as the Emperor grins, loose and wet.
‘So nice to see you, again. Skinpainter. All those years in the dark, and not a glimpse.’
Skinpainter ignores it as best they can, presses their lips together, and paints. Shroudweaver still limp as a beached fish against their side. The spinner in Shipwright’s fist screams like a beaten dog as it stutters and fails.
The shriek of it catches at the back of Skinpainter’s mind. As their concentration wavers, Kinghammer’s ridden body reaches forwards a bloody hand, one ragged sharp nail miming the outlines of their face. ‘I’ll take all that off. Render you back to bone. You’ll thank me.’
Reflexively, Skinpainter pushes. The line of ink flexes, catches Kinghammer’s hand with a fleck of colour.
The Emperor yowls, snatches its fingers back, circling.
Skinpainter howls in glee as they call over their shoulder to Shipwright. ‘See? Contingencies!’
She pulls a face. ‘You just pissed it off, Skin.’
As if it’s heard her, the Emperor throws itself forwards against the lines in the sand, the dead piling with it.
Instinctively, Skinpainter recoils, and raises the barrier.
The whole design bursts into shifting light, humming with small frequencies – a little gift from Belltoller, rest her soul.
The mob of the dead batters into it and recoils as ink adheres to their skin, peeling like hot wax.
The resonance of magic thrums in their heads, clearing their minds.
The momentum of their charge broken, for a second.
The sheer power of the pattern holding them at bay, pulling the Emperor’s contagion from them, like venom from a wound.
All that energy has to come from somewhere, however.
Even as Skinpainter pushes the magic outward, even as colours flare against the black glass of the water, they realise how far they’ve overreached.
Something bursts in their guts and they feel blood begin to seep outwards.
Stupid, stupid, impulsive, stupid. They grit their teeth, tilt their face towards the Emperor.
‘I’ve walked the barrows since I was born.
I sealed you away, and carved you up piece by piece. You don’t scare me.’
In response, the Emperor screams in rage, and charges again.
The speed at which it moves is astonishing.
Fists crash against the circle like hammers.
Kinghammer’s skin smokes and burns, scoured down to the bone as the Emperor rides his body past breaking.
‘I should!’ it bellows. ‘I was born before the barrows, in the great ice, when the city below still sang. And you, you hung me in the dark, gave me to the rock above the black water. Thought to keep me penned.’
Its smile is loose, easy. Eyes alight with madness in Kinghammer’s skull.
‘A child’s game. I have sung through the high frost. Through the first dying of the light.
Through the splitting of the three. As if you could ever hold me.
I swam in blood; the blood of the people, the blood of the mountain.
’ It quiets, paces, Kinghammer’s massive feet kicking up puffs of black sand as the Emperor’s voice drops to a low, guttural mutter.
‘You’ll see, I’ll show you. I’ll show you what lies beneath the earth.
I’ll show you the song I found in the heart of the spire, in the blackblackblack behind the rope and the dry blood.
’ Its gaze fixes on Skinpainter, wet and luminous.
‘I’ll open up your eyes layer by layer.’
Heart racing, Skinpainter motions softly to Shroudweaver. Their fingers dance Katkani. Torn door. Sly mouse.
Shroudweaver smiles nervously.
Skinpainter signals again. Send from shadow to shadow. The lightest thread is an unknown chain.
Shipwright watches their flickering fingers, mouthing along with the translation. As Shroudweaver nods his assent to Skinpainter she catches his wrist. ‘No, Shroud. No. You can’t. Please.’
There’s something cold in Shroudweaver’s eyes for a moment; cold or remote. Certain. A ghost of the weavers of old.
Kinghammer’s body batters against the circle again. The dead clustered around it peel themselves off the walls, scraping themselves from the floor as they shudder towards that small cage of hissing sparks, backed against the dark.
‘Please, love,’ Shipwright says. And if she’s not begging, she’s close.
Gently, carefully, Shroudweaver unpicks her fingers from around his wrist.
‘There’s no other option.’ A little steel in his tone still, a vestige of his training.
Shipwright’s shoulders sag even as his hands dance towards Skinpainter.
A quick-closed door?
Skinpainter nods in relief, steps forwards, and embraces him. Their rags flare. The ink beneath their feet fountains in streams, in spikes, pulling Shroudweaver down like a rip-stream tide. Down into the between, and gone.
Shipwright screams in frustration and fear.
Kinghammer’s body flings itself against the circle.
The world shakes, blackens and breaks.