Chapter 77 #3
The days he’s forgotten, of fires and softness and cool water, of strong hands and rocking that ran with the rhythm of a loving heart. Fragments of moon and sun, breath and dreaming. All of them, lit and gone.
Shroudweaver lets all his memories fly free, like little birds out against the darkness, clutching silver threads stitched in their beaks.
As they fly, the mountain opens up before him, and he sees all the lives within it, thousands of souls, each cradling countless tiny birds to their breasts, bones and hearts, yearning, dying, fighting.
He ties himself to them all, and borrows the smallest fragment of power from each, bright droplets flowing into him as he hangs in the between.
The light that fills him is slow and soft, filled with the lives and deaths of strangers.
It lines his bones, his breath, pushes into the between spaces until the darkness fades, and the weight of the eye lifts.
Shroudweaver’s body floats in silver, buoyed by the wings of a thousand small, shining birds.
The whole mountain is spread before him, the struggling lives of its inhabitants flickering in a spiralling weave as the red rage of the Emperor spreads through their souls.
Thousands of panicked lives flare in hope, terror and triumph.
Shroudweaver gathers fragments of their souls to him along glimmering lines, and then delves deeper, his attention drawn to a ragged, confused thing driving down through the mountain.
It takes him a moment to recognise the thrum of Icecaller’s hammering heart, to pick out the sound of her soul beneath the fever which roils in her veins. The Emperor’s touch has claimed her.
Distantly, abstractly, he watches the red hunger seething in her flesh pull her ever closer to a knot of fears and hopes, to lights he recognises as Quickfish, Roofkeeper, the little girl, Nigh.
That last with a few bright birds clutched to her chest, held so tightly their fluttering feathers can barely move.
The only way he can help any of them is to borrow a little light from each.
To cut the infection off at its source, for a few scant moments.
If he can bind the Emperor, even briefly, he can slow the dead.
Above him, the thing that was the Emperor has no birds, no light.
Its new eye roves ceaselessly as the mouth underneath it gibbers and curses.
The fear Shroudweaver felt fades and a wave of pity crashes over him.
The eye is a horror; formless and alien, but the Emperor was a person once, and Shroudweaver knows how to bind a person.
He moves towards it slowly, precisely, like a surgeon, like an undertaker; like a Shroudweaver.
He pulls the bright silver light of the mountain’s souls into himself, and sends it out again down the threads, attenuated at first, then fiercer, wrapping around the Emperor’s rolling shoulders, its broken fingers, and wailing mouth.
Quieting, mending, deceiving. It’s still too strong.
He can feel it bucking against the weave.
Whatever shred of a man once filled this body is lost, Shroudweaver far too slow to save him.
Too slow by decades, by centuries maybe.
He can’t stop what’s already happened so instead, he does his job.
The shroud he weaves is thin at first, a few scant strands pulled together, but it thickens like lake ice.
The Emperor struggles at its touch, but then quietens, until only its eye is left roving and roiling.
Eventually, Shroudweaver covers that too, stitching it closed, letting it rest, blinding it for a moment.
Left alone, the fragments of what was the Emperor hang in darkness, the silvered shape of a man, held together and woven into silence as best he can.
With a red hand and a heavy heart, Shroudweaver reaches forwards and pushes it into the void, his last kindness to this monster.
Let it have a little sense of self, a little piece of commemoration, before the eye devours it whole. Perhaps something will escape.
Even as he humours the thought, there’s a flare in the far darkness, as if a smith’s hand had struck metal. A feeling of rage and hunger washes over him, and the last silver light from the Emperor’s soul goes out. A dull gong of dread hammers in his heart.
There is a moment where the blackness hangs empty in front of his eyes, a moment before the velvet of the between spaces shudders, and a rent splits the dark, before everything he can see becomes the opening of that terrible, merciless eye.
Shroudweaver has to get out, before the thing that devoured the south takes him too.
He can already feel the weight of it on him, like a fathomless ocean.
With shaking hands, he reaches for the silver threads holding him apart from the world, and tears them loose.
In an instant, the between spaces pop like a soap bubble.
His body hammers down onto ink-stained sand and he feels a crack as his knees strike rock.
He retches, spitting up silver threads, blood, little black lumps. Shipwright’s arms are around him, her hands soft and strong against his spine, rubbing away the convulsions.
‘You bastard,’ she says, her voice wet with relief. ‘You utter bastard.’
Skinpainter reaches around his waist and pulls him up, moving him gently back from the broken circle, the softly twitching body of Kinghammer, the dazed and confused dead, suddenly slumped like puppets with their strings cut.
‘I didn’t think you’d do it,’ Skinpainter murmurs, their voice warm and wry. ‘Always got to surprise me.’
Shroudweaver fumbles for a moment, claws at his lips, cleaning the stench of sugar off his tongue. He forces words out through the sweetness. ‘It’s not gone. Just weakened. Plan’s changed. We need to get out of here.’
As if to drive the point home, the dead begin to stir again, slowly reeling to their feet, their eyes lighting as the Emperor’s infection once again takes hold.
Shroudweaver grabs Skinpainter’s wrist. ‘I felt it in Icecaller. We have to get back to them. Now.’
Skinpainter’s face folds with sadness. ‘Ah. Of course.’ They rub their cheek with a broad hand, and glance at Shipwright. ‘Need some help with this idiot?’
She grins, kisses the top of Shroudweaver’s head. ‘Every day of my life.’
And so the pair take him in strong arms, on thin legs, back down into the deep mountain, a hundred new little birds nesting in the hedgerows of his heart.