Their hood tips back ever so slightly, and finally he can see their face.
Shroudweaver’s breath catches in his throat.
They smile, wiping blood from their lips. In the depths of their hood, bright, clever eyes shine.
‘You must be Shroudweaver. I’m Skinpainter. I’m the one that’s been whispering in your ear, I’m afraid. We have work to do.’
Shroudweaver opens his mouth to reply, when that faint tremor returns, louder this time, roiling up the walls, shuddering the stones and listing buildings.
Skinpainter staggers, and the soldiers behind them look around in confusion.
The sound grows like an undammed river, stones crackling and rolling. It’s only when he sees the walls surrounding the sunken courtyard bow inward that Shroudweaver realises what is happening.
This is how Luss fell.
He can hear screams, shouts of caution and panic. Bodies flurry around him. The collapse happens with deliberate, awful slowness. First, a hand at the top of the walls framing the courtyard, then more, followed by an impossible tangle of legs, limbs and teeth. A profusion of ribs and spines. The stones crack as a wave stitched from flesh and marrow hurls itself against them. The shapes of individual people still recognisable within the morass, but the way they move is like nothing human.
Abominations piled against the stones of the city like ants, pushing them down with the sheer weight of their bodies. As they move, a wet rattling accompanies them, like someone shaking a bag of bloody dice, teeth and bones running loose inside their raggedly stitched shapes.
Shroudweaver sees the dead advancing with unnatural speed, heedless and howling, crashing against the hastily locked shields of the marines.
The circle of soldiers backed against the pit draws together, bodies pressing tighter and tighter. The soldiers of Thell scramble into their ranks, adding their own long shields and wavering spears to the thinning defensive line. The conjoined dead roil towards them without the slightest pause, their shifting mouths leaking a sound like a file on bare stone. Shroudweaver feels it dig into his heart, sees the other soldiers shudder, near breaking.
Then, of course, Arissa rides in. A grey banner rises as she pulls her horse back, its hooves striking sparks from stone. A brief shake of her shoulders and she digs her heels into its flanks,driving it forwards. It leaps over the first wave of the dead, as she lashes down with the sword, severing throat, bone, sinew. Heads, hands and limbs tumble.
Her soldiers cheer her, and follow her. Shroudweaver’s heart soars with terror, and in that moment he knows they’ll die if he doesn’t do something. Hesper will fall, and everything else with it.
He stands unmoving as the charge flows past him. His breath stills to shadow within his chest. His mind empties of everything but the pattern of the birch trees by the Aestering. Silver and shadow, dark and light, the rhythm of it.
Absently, he hears the lines hit. The clash of blades. He lets it all fall away, and reaches out to those awful, twisting things. He can sense the Emperor somewhere within all the risen dead, his soul infesting them like a worm in an apple, a sliver of glass in a finger. The only way to stop this is to drive him out.
How though, that’s the question. He’s never seen magic like this. It’s almost like weaving, in a way, but more brutal. Parasitic, dominating. No care, no craft, no symmetry.
Through lidded eyes, he watches Arissa as she’s dragged from her horse. That beautiful beast going down beneath an avalanche of teeth and nails. There’s no time to plan. The square is slick with blood. The marines have fallen back, cutlasses drawn. The soldiers of Thell marginally fresher, but still driven to their knees, their spears outthrust in a desperate, last-ditch defence. If the strewn bodies slow these things down, he hasn’t noticed. Still more come, surging forwards from alleys, battering against shields and blades.
A few familiar faces rail against the tide. Dropdancer wearily at his side, their cutlass falling rhythmically, mechanically, their dodges staggering with exhaustion. At their back, their captain, that dark-skinned, silver-bearded man, pivots with surprising grace, his teeth locked in a grimace. By his side, Brimlicker perches on a piece of shorn masonry, braces herself against a boathook, catches one of the conjoined dead under the armpit, and pulls. It tears wetly. Blood flecks her face and her gleaming teeth as shecalls to Shroudweaver across the seething mob. ‘Can’t hold them forever, Weaver.’
On the other side of the square, a marine is caught and tossed in the air like a dog. The hellfire in his pack detonates, and the thing that seized him screams as half of its body ignites.
A cheer goes up, then turns to shouts of horror as the burning wreck stoops to the corpses below, gathers a welter of limbs to itself, and presses them close to its flesh which melts and reforms. Shroudweaver hears the souls inside it scream.
He can’t delay any further. A heartbeat or two longer and he’ll be too late.
The fighting swirls around him. He struggles to stay focused, to find the rhythm he needs to weave. Half a hand away, Shipwright reels into view, her hair plastered down with sweat. She catches his eye, reads the worry in his face and shouts over the clamour. ‘What do you need?’
‘Give me space,’ he replies.
She nods, flexes her neck and turns the spinner in her right hand, shuddering into a blur of fists. The first creature to come for her she simply grips at the wrists, and tears. Red rain, and chunks of something warm. The second is faster, getting its jaw around her hand before she hooks her fingers under its teeth, and the spinner burrows out the side of its skull in a spray of bone.
A third takes the legs from under her, before losing its long, undulating neck to a savage blow from a sword – Arissa, still somehow standing, the banner ragged and bloody, her sword-arm shaking with exhaustion. The two women move back-to-back as the creatures circle.
Still more come. Hesper’s marines, Thell’s soldiers, all pushed back, teetering on the edge of the pit. A glimpse of a hammer swinging. An ink-stained spear. A bell. Shroudweaver can’t help them. He has to stay separate. Close enough to the dead to free them.
He rubs powder on his temples, letting the smell of saltpetre push him down into the between spaces. The skin between death and life. He can almost feel his instructors’ hands on his forearms,easing him down into that place between the worlds where the silver threads are clearest.
He can see the souls of the dead immediately, snarled and bound to each other, writhing in confusion. And like a spike at the heart of each creature, a barb that gleams bright and slick. The Emperor, he suspects.
He should do something careful, something smart. He doesn’t have time. His body rocks as something buffets into him from the side; Shipwright and one of those things battling tooth and nail, Arissa’s sword flashing like silvered lightning. He feels it distantly, like thunder under water.
