Chapter 77
The weave first, then the world.
The god in the hand, before the god in the mouth.
The god in the heart, before the god in the hand.
At first, Shroudweaver feels nothing. The memory of Skinpainter’s breath hot on his face, the sudden twist of pain in their eyes as they tear a way into the between spaces.
He hears Shipwright’s fading scream at his back, feels the weight of the Emperor against the sparking wards, the thunder of its fists.
Then the ink reaches his legs, and pulls.
He goes under.
The world shifts, splinters. He lets himself drift loose.
It’s easy now, the between space opening up to him like a sinkhole, a cenote of darkness.
Skinpainter’s magic blurs the edges between worlds and yanks him from one to the other with a swift, merciless tug.
Shroudweaver’s already halfway there from pain and exhaustion.
A warhorse stink of gunpowder and saltpetre surrounds him like a corona, and beyond that, the thick taste of rot and the grave.
Power lingers in the between like static after rain.
The first thing he sees is his own body, sunk to its knees, head pressed against Skinpainter’s stomach, shoulders held in Shipwright’s broad hands.
When she shouts, the air filigrees her lips, coloured by scraps of spinner magic, the last dregs of the composite’s touch.
His abandoned body’s no better, enmeshed in the remains of the unbinding.
Red threads run from his hands, his hair, his eyes.
Smokesister was true to her word though.
It’s all falling apart, fraying as he watches.
Time is short if he wants to return. If he wants to return.
There’s a pull here, a call to quietness.
It would be easy, so easy, to slip back into nothing, and leave all this behind.
Except, he’s not alone here. The unbound dead of the Empire shoal in the grey between, freed as they are from the prison of his heart, from the brief hold of the composite he’d called forth, and scattered by his daughter.
Here, in the space between, they crouch like jackals over the fallen. Shroudweaver can see the souls of Thell’s people struggling weakly beneath their touch. Ripped, swallowed, and repurposed piece by piece, ridden like broken horses.
Time is short if he wishes to salvage this, and the dead are not the worst of it.
The Emperor is here, as he had always feared it might be.
Kinghammer’s body is only a rough outline in the between, a husk, a half-burst chrysalis. The Emperor’s true form blossoms in the void, unbounded by broken meat. Not a man anymore. Not even the pretence of a man, but something stranger, protean, and twisted.
It turns its eyes on him, jaw unhinging, teeth shuddering outwards along it. A tongue unfurls in the back of Kinghammer’s torn throat.
‘You.’
The between place has no distance.
The Emperor stutters across the intervening space with the black buzzing of a wakened hive. A few of Shroudweaver’s red threads snag and break loose as he recoils.
Its face presses against his, a chewed ruin pocked with teeth-marks.
A stench like a dug-up dog. Its cheeks are torn with half-healed scabs, matted blood.
Kinghammer’s bones grind when it speaks.
‘You let them. You let them. You. Let. Them.’ Beneath its skin, the pulsing dead of the Empire stretch out in rage, hands, skulls and teeth reaching for Shroudweaver.
The Emperor throws its head back, unleashing a scream that cuts the air like clotted glass.
Shroudweaver feels his skin shudder, saltpetre and sulphur blown back into his lungs.
There’s a terror in his stomach like he’s never known.
The touch of something utterly alien against his soul.
Yet still, distant, he can feel the warmth of Shipwright’s hands against his spine, slowing his hammering heart.
Time is short, but he allows himself a few panicked breaths.
It’s all that’s needed before his training comes back to him with the speed of long practice.
There is a way out of this. The Emperor must be bound, again.
He reaches for a needle, stitches, darns. Threads regathered and woven around the Emperor’s grasping limbs. Not the red of the body, but the silver of the soul.
Its eyes lock onto his dancing fingers. ‘You dare?’
Shroudweaver ignores it, focuses on his work.
Darns, tightens, mends, holding his body tight in the stillness of the between, keeping half an eye on the dead, half an eye on Shipwright, as she dodges and weaves on the black sand of the beach.
She reels as Kinghammer swings at Skinpainter’s wards.
The Emperor has taken the weapon that gave Kinghammer his name and turned it to destroying Skinpainter’s work.
The great black hammer drips screaming red sparks, smokes, and ricochets off the barrier which flares with every strike.
Skinpainter’s face twists in a defiant scream, their legs hammering down into ink pooled around their ankles. The wards tighten.
Shroudweaver’s mind splits between worlds, half an eye on Shipwright, half an eye on the thing in front of him, the Emperor – or the thing the Emperor has become, riding Kinghammer’s body like a sway-backed nag.
Here, in the between, Shroudweaver can see its true form, paying only the barest adherence to the outline of the man Shroudweaver had chained over twenty years ago.
Its shape is fluid now, roiling with the stress of pulling in the souls of the dead, sprouting eyes, teeth and tongues.
Kinghammer’s shape shimmers distantly beneath, like fish under water.
Overlaid on his bones, is the Emperor of the Mountain, the Dreamer of the High Ice.
He is not doing well, lips blackened and torn from decades chewing weakly in the dark.
Skin scarred with a thousand bites, marked by the memory of pain.
Shroudweaver imagines he can see the toothmarks of every revolutionary scored deep, down to the bone.
Kinghammer. The Deadsingers. Belltoller.
They’d welcomed in their new world with a feast. They’d waited until he’d left to do it.
Not left, but turned his back, Smokesister’s voice admonishes in his head. The fire of her broken binding snakes through his chest like lit wire.
There’s the briefest flicker in the silver threads as his conviction wavers. Unacceptable. He catches hold of the thought and crushes it. He is not solely to blame for this. Guilt is an indulgence he doesn’t have time for.
A binding weave is needed. That and nothing more. His tutors’ voices surface like the rill of a river, steady beneath the howling dead, the flash of magic.
The weave first, then the world.
As if his hands remember the lesson, they follow old patterns through the air with speed.
Silver thread gathers around him as he moves his body into the first form, darns, stitches, and binds.
Spider’s web, bat’s wing, the very smallest knots at first; a cast net, seeking connections with the soul of Emperor.
The hooks are easy to find – memory, hate, the shared experience of pain.
Shroudweaver gathers them all in, the smallest fragments of silver at first, teased from the very edges of its shape, then lashed to the mountain.
Bound to the air, to the stones, to each other.
They are so fragile, a broad mesh, vulnerable to a single tear, but there’s nothing else to work with down here.
Well, that’s not strictly true. Shroudweaver’s eyes flash to the struggling souls of Thell’s dead, to the bright lights of Skinpainter, and Shipwright.
There are stronger materials here, if he’s willing to take them.
He’s pulled up short again by the voice of his tutor.
The weave holds. It takes only as a last resort.
Shroudweaver shakes his head, shifts his feet into the second form. Flowing grass. River top. Wave curl. No, nothing else to work with, just himself and his skill alone. He sews, he stitches, he binds. He’ll make it enough.
The Emperor is taken in at first. The slow, silverfish movements of weaving run through Shroudweaver’s fingers, a lullaby of hands calling to the monster in front of him.
He watches its eyes turn to follow the silver, the gestures, the line of his bones.
His right hand unspools red even as his left stitches silver.
As he makes the first knot of binding and ties off, the Emperor lurches, the spell broken.
Its legs stagger and every one of its eyes snaps to his wary face. ‘NO.’
The shout shudders through Shroudweaver’s bones. He feels them break inside him. Little shards of white floating into the red.
‘NO,’ and the Emperor’s hand plunges deep into the meat of his shoulder. He feels nails brush against his veins. Feels them. Even here, in the between, where nothing should be felt.
‘NO,’ another hand strikes on the right, and, impossibly, he feels it severing muscle, burrowing deep. He screams as he’s pulled forwards.
‘NO,’ the mouths of the Emperor say, lunging for him, and Shroudweaver’s scream is cut off by a foreign tongue, foreign teeth that bite down on his own.
The form of the Emperor is distorting terribly now. The torrent of souls distending the last vestiges of a human shape. Shroudweaver can hear the pop of cartilage, the wet stretch of bone as it struggles to hold. He can feel the hunger of a thousand souls as they clamp down on his jaw.
Another set of limbs tear themselves loose from the roiling mass, plunge in below his ribs, seeking liver, kidneys, finding organs and slicing tendons. Red threads loosen and drift away. He can feel himself dying – all the rules he knows are broken, and he is dying.