Chapter 77 #2
‘No,’ the Emperor says, its mouth full of his, and Shroudweaver feels the word in the heart of him. Beyond the shadow, blood and bones of the between spaces, he sees Kinghammer shatter Skinpainter’s wards. His hammer arcs towards their upraised face, and they look, for a second, relieved.
Shroudweaver can do nothing, he’s held in the between, pinned like a butterfly as the life drains out of him.
Then, impossibly, a blur of motion, and Shipwright catches the hammer flat in her fist. Brass stutters and whines.
The spinner is failing, but something beyond it is giving her strength.
Her shout is golden in the heart of the mountain, in the face of the end, the ghosts of new gods lining her tongue.
The hammer holds. And it’s then Skinpainter strikes, hitting Kinghammer open-palmed above the heart.
Ink spatters, takes hold, lodges deep, as it smokes and burrows against the skin.
Kinghammer staggers, and for a second his connection with the Emperor is broken.
Shipwright presses her advantage, stepping out of the wards, and swinging a right hook that blurs with a wasp-brass sting.
It catches Kinghammer on the side of the jaw, pitching him sideways.
Skinpainter’s ink flares like a struck match on his chest.
Hung in the between, Shroudweaver watches them fight, his body held in the rot of the Emperor’s grasp, his lungs full with the breath of a half-eaten man.
He watches them fight, and he watches Shipwright win.
A wild swing from Kinghammer, that she ducks under like a passing breeze.
A weave to the left, to the right, and she’s inside his reach, a wild grin on her face, teeth bared and flecked with blood.
Kinghammer roars with rage, the Emperor’s voice hard on his tongue.
Shipwright laughs. In the face of it all, in the depths of the mountain, she laughs, then swings her head forwards with brutal intent.
Kinghammer’s nose collapses with a crunch.
He reels backwards, mired in the swarming dead.
He tries to raise the hammer, but Shipwright’s already there; Skinpainter’s ink lashing out to clear her a path that she traces like lightning to grab the hammer’s shaft.
For a moment, the pair are locked, muscles straining.
A hum in the between places, and Shroudweaver sees Shipwright suddenly haloed in gold.
There’s a sweet taste on his tongue, an explosion of honey and spice, god-magic blazing forth as she leans in, and wrenches.
The haft of the hammer twists, screams like a wounded animal and breaks.
Kinghammer lurches backward. Shipwright stands there, golden and steadfast, hair a mess, breath heavy, and Shroudweaver’s heart sings for her.
As Kinghammer staggers, the Emperor hisses in pain. There’s the briefest loosening of control, and Shroudweaver feels a pin drop in the back his mind.
Now. Saltpetre and sulphur flares, the powders on his skin burning bright into nothing. A brief actinic punch, a last line of defence against the vengeful dead, so simple he’d learnt it as a child. It’ll buy him seconds at most, and after this, he’s left wide open.
It works though. The Emperor recoils, and as its talons slide loose Shroudweaver raises his red right hand.
‘I left you,’ he says. ‘Because some things have to be left behind.’ His fist falls and opens at the last moment to spider red threads in a binding web.
They knit fast across a screaming jaw, punch their own ways in, lace tight.
‘I left you because you brought this on yourself.’ A left-handed strike, and the Emperor’s side flares in silver.
Lancing the wound. Pulling souls loose. As he weaves, its shape shrinks, eyes wink out.
Jaws slide together into a single screaming mouth.
Shroudweaver takes its head in his hands. ‘I left you because you gave me no choice. I would have saved you, if you’d only let me.’
The Emperor watches him with wide eyes, as the red continues to weave up its struggling face.
‘I would have saved you, but you chose this, long ago.’ A third strike, open palmed, to the forehead.
The Emperor of the Dead falls to its knees, its form shivering and constricting, dwindling towards something more human. It looks up at him, and the writhing threads can’t hide the words. ‘Please. Don’t let them do this to me.’ An old echo, twenty years gone.
Shroudweaver kneels next to it. ‘They already did. I’m so sorry.’
And he speaks the Emperor’s name. He holds its hands. Sends it on.
For a moment, the Emperor’s soul slips away, like a lizard under a rock, into the between spaces, almost free, almost gone.
Until Shroudweaver feels something catch it. Something alien and cold.
The Emperor raises its head, slowly, so slowly.
The threads fall from its lips. Something black and acrid eating them into nothing.
Its face in shadow. And the Emperor says.
‘I’m so sorry, Weaver. I was down here so long.
In pieces, so long.’ There’s a pause, as the battle and the world spins around them.
‘I made some promises, down in the dark.’
Its face shudders, rips and melds, until it looks at Shroudweaver with a single, unblinking eye. Here, hundreds of miles from the ruin of the south, the eye that tore the world looks down on him again.
A surge of black-ice terror pierces his heart, before he’s pushed with the force of a fallen star.
He tumbles through the between spaces as dwindling threads slip through his fingers.
Shroudweaver grabs frantically at them, feels them slide over his desperate palms but there’s hardly any left.
The force of the eye is upon him again, and the weight of what lies behind the eye.
Power like nothing he’s ever felt, shredding the remnants of his control, devouring the weave.
So few threads left, and beyond, only the endless static of the between.
But within this mountain, he remains the Shroudweaver.
Within this mountain, somewhere, there is his daughter, and though his bones are tired and hollow, there’s a space in them where she lives, where he remembers her first words, her stumbling steps, her mother’s fingers on her brow, a silver brush in thin black hair.
Laughter, singing, soft sleeps, deep dreams in twined arms and years later, the face of a bold young woman, bloodied, blackened and beautiful.
He can’t watch his daughter die. He doesn’t have the strength left to stem this tide, but he can buy her time.
He can buy them all time. He just needs to borrow a little power.
As Shroudweaver falls into the between, he feels emptiness try to claim him, sliding along the edges of his arms, his mind. So he weaves with the only material he has left – hope, memory, soul.
It’s hard to tease out at first. Thin, bright threads, barely glimpsed in the growing darkness, the drowning weight of the eye on him.
A crushing, deep push, remorseless, heartless and familiar.
He can barely see the threads in its darkness; only when he turns and twists and they catch the light for the briefest moment, thin and slight, deceptively strong.
The first strand lodges around Shipwright’s wrist as she raises it above Kinghammer.
Another thread twines around Skinpainter’s waist as they scramble upwards from the black sand, blood on their lips and a curse on their tongue.
Shroudweaver feels himself wreathed in their souls, as the silver pulls flecks of their essence into his own.
Shipwright is a memory of sea salt and cold heather, woodsmoke and wool.
Skinpainter is cider, and nutmeg, worn leather and old medicine.
Their essences burn in the heart of him, spreading a fire through the places in his bones where those memories all live, in hollows, pockets and fragments.
Shroudweaver takes them all, kindling collated lives and loves, each one gathered to him like birds in a hedgerow, held against his heart; treasured.
He lights them all, and lets them go.
The first time he kissed Shipwright, on the deck of the ship, rocking on a slow swell, the southern sun hot as a hammer, her lips rough and salted, her hand on his back pulling him close and the tightening of her body in response. Lit and gone.
The time he saw her, feet thundering the earth, riding the shouts of their victorious army outside Luss. Lit and gone.
Further back, the sound of his daughter’s cries in the cradle, the way they shuffled down the registers into quiet contentment, all of her held against his shoulder, milk-breathed and drowsy. Lit and gone.
Standing at the edge of a cliff, watching her mother’s ashes sift down into the water below, a brief dark swirl in the waves, that faded as salt and spume moved onwards, onwards. Pottery shards and smudged hands. Lit and gone.
His dead wife’s spine in the moonlight, the curve of her, dark hair between his fingers and wine on her lips. Lit and gone.
Further back. The day he left the Aestering with a fresh spool of red thread and a thumping headache. Saltpetre and sulphur choking his lungs with strangeness. His shoulders still heavy from embraces, laughter, goodbyes. Lit and gone.
The day she took his hand, fingertips brushing with a passed note. Insects under the night sky, teeth against the light and drink from a jar that burnt like varnished fire. Lit and gone.
Further back. The day he arrived at the Aestering, rubbing sleep from his eyes. Fumbling with clasps and catches, straightening a robe over skinny legs. Lit and gone.
The day he awoke, drowsy by the fountain. Low winter sun on the water and golden light swimming lazily in its depths. Spiced pastries and slow songs that spun him to sleep.