A few minutes later, they’re tucked up in a small room that sits beneath the tiled eaves like a widow under a shawl.
Decently clean, even if the beams were stained with decades of pipe smoke; salvaged wreck timbers still strung with blackened barnacles. Shipwright is out like a light, her head on the pillow. She’d never met a drink she didn’t like, from dark southern wines to herbal spirits that scoured the lining of your skull.
Sleep doesn’t come to Shroudweaver. The ticking of the beetles in the eaves, the laughter from outside the window picks at the edges of his skin. Sweat runs in cold waves over his body. He draws his knees to his chest and tries to control his panicked breathing. The song’s stopped long ago, but he can’t leave the war behind.
Shipwright shifts gently in her sleep. He doesn’t want to disturb her, to put any more on her than she’s already taken. So he closes his eyes, pulling his knees up tight.
The darkness is unforgiving.
He can see Skinpainter’s crooked smile sketched on the back of his eyelids. Hear, clear as the day, that awful question as they stood atop the broken remains of the Empire’s unbound army. ‘Do you think you can do that again?’
He could. He had.
Over the next few years they’d turned the tide against the Empire, against the legions of its entangled dead. Again and again, Shroudweaver unbound them, taking them into himself, their thoughts and their lives thronging his. Pushing into the space between his bones, threading the meat of his muscles until every breath he took was echoed in a thousand dead lungs.
Again and again, the Empire’s forces were pushed back. Without the dead they could not hold, and with the rebellion of Thell’s living, they were sore pressed. That motley crew of revolutionaries – Kinghammer, Skinpainter, Belltoller, the Deadsingers – were always at his back. A reminder of what was at stake if he stopped for even a moment.
He performed the unbinding, over and over, until the motions were as familiar as breathing, as chopping wood, as falling inand out of sleep. Fingers dancing raw and aching with thread, with the familiarity of movement. With every burning twist, the patterns became clearer, the feel of the Emperor’s sorcery under his fingers, twined round his thumbs, scored beneath his nails, as close to weaving as the out-breath was to the in-breath. The Emperor’s magic was the air on the other side of the threshold; a mirror to his own weaving, but bigger and more brutal than anything he could imagine. Spread over so many souls, and over such an age that it terrified him.
It had taken Shroudweaver some time to realise the extent of the Emperor’s influence, his ability to thread himself not just through souls, but living flesh.
Battle after battle, with a taste like old ice growing on his tongue, his mouth thickening with stagnant magic, as they drove the Emperor back. Battle after battle. Unpicking, unbinding, all his horrific work. Not a moment to do more than stitch all those souls into his own chest. To lash them to his own feeble heart, his own bowing bones.
At first, Shroudweaver had heard the voices of his tutors, rattling around his skull, deriding the arrogance of it all. The sheer nightmarish scope of unravelling bindings that stretched across half the north, over every blasted furrow of every frozen field. Bright barbs in the hearts of not just the Empire’s soldiers, but its farmers, its merchants, its children. Everything that had touched the mountain was corrupt. Infected with the Emperor. Little shards of his essence swimming in the blood. Everything that touched the mountain was corrupt and that included their new allies from Thell, who had followed at his heels ever since the last ash drifted from the walls of Luss.
Shroudweaver’s mind had started to unhinge with the horror of it. Every unbinding felt like a conversation with the monster that sat in the heart of every soul from Thell, like a weevil in a boll. Every stitch like they were singing a song together, point and counterpoint.
He’d tried to explain it to Skinpainter, to Shipwright, but his tongue ran loose with the water of other voices. A trickle, thena torrent, until there was little of him left. All these other lives burrowed into him for safety, until his whole body was a hollow, scurrying log, rattling with madness.
What even was Shroudweaver then? A head full of salvaged souls and a heart thudding with the strain of it all. His mornings cursed by blinding headaches that punched through the thin layer of his skull and lanced his brain into insensibility. Shipwright holding him through it all. The touch of her hands on his shoulders. The feel of her lips on his sweat-slick brow.
He tears himself loose from the past and glances down at her as she sleeps, running a hand over her cheek. That nick under her left cheekbone, the curl of hair at the back of her ear.
A sudden ache inside, and a sob that runs the length of him – a sadness lurking under all the souls stitched into his chest. The sorrow just another spirit riding his heart without his consent.
Perhaps their real troubles had all begun back then. By the time he stood outside the mountain, there was barely a shred of him left. His body home to a thousand refugees, and needing space for still more.
The remnants of the Emperor’s army were holed up within Thell itself, in the fort they called the Stump. As for the night they’d brought it all down – the siege that lived in the black of his mind, like a scorched wet hole – even tonight, twenty years later, full of drink and guilt and self-loathing, his mind won’t throw up the shape of that last battle in its full horror.
A few brief moments come crawling from the pit. Kinghammer, sheathed in blood from the waist up, so thick it seemed like a wet cape. Belltoller bringing the great gate down with a stroke of her hand, falling sideways, streaming smoke from her burning eyes. Skinpainter’s magic like a black snake of script, alien and terrifying. The armies of this new Republic and Hesper’s corsairs cheek by jowl in the belly of that nightmare.
Of course, the dead had come for them, one last time. And he’d unbound them, taken them into him by the hundreds. Barely noticed; what was a flood to a drowned man?
Then, without elegance or fanfare, they had the Emperor.Victory. His lieutenants seemingly gone or fled. The mountain finally, dreadfully, quiet.
He shivers, slips his feet under the covers, pressing his calves to Shipwright’s back to steal a little heat into his freezing bones. She makes a small noise of protest and flinches away, back into dreams.
He tries to calm his breathing, like Smokesister had taught him, when they’d brought the thing that was his body back to Hesper. Four in, six out, measured like a soldier’s drum. Her hands sketching intricate shapes over his heart, as she bound the dead tighter to his shaking ribs.
The Emperor’s breathing, that’s what he remembered. Not the moment of his capture, or how terribly ordinary he looked, with his heavy brow and sharp nose, hair a little thin on the top. Only his eyes were strange, like flint flecked with gold.
His eyes and his breath: ragged and layered, doubled over and over. Shroudweaver recognised it, how closely it sounded to his own.
Now, in that small smoky room his hands fidget with the covers. His nails pick at the scabs on his skin.
That breath had never changed. Always buzzing and rasping like a cheap lock. Even once they had brought the Emperor to bay, once the soldiers of the Republic had tortured him. Seeking secrets, they said, but Shroudweaver knew the wet sound of catharsis when he heard it.
He remembered that breathing, the way it threaded the first and last conversation he’d ever had with the Emperor of the Dead.
