He could remember how he had smiled. Confidence roiling in his blood. ‘You’re building a new world, Skin. No better time to build a new religion. Make it permanent, deep, lasting. Etch it in their minds. Their bones.’
How arrogant. How stupid.
Skinpainter had looked thoughtful. ‘What about the dead?’
Shroudweaver had shuddered as phantom bodies moved within him. Kept his face composed. ‘I’ll take care of them. I can hold together long enough to figure something out.’
‘Lies,’ the Emperor had snarled. ‘Do you not hear it, you painted thief? Your weaver friend’s promises are as empty as glass.’
Skinpainter’s fist cracked again. ‘Quiet. You’ll run out of teeth before I run out of enthusiasm.’ They rolled their shoulders. ‘Wearewinging an awful lot of this, Shroud.’
Shroudweaver had watched the Emperor roll a split tooth around his mouth. Felt that anger rise again. A desperate desire to see this thing over, finished.
‘We don’t have a choice. We can deal with the consequences later.’
He’d held up two fingers. ‘So we can handle the living and the dead, with a little creativity. As for him’ – his lip had curled – ‘bind him, chain him, lock him up, but take a piece of him. If he’s not whole, if the anchor’s not whole, then we have some power, we have just alittlecontrol.’
He’d glanced at the Emperor. ‘I have an idea, but not in front of him. Something that’ll give Kinghammer his pound of flesh, and give us what we need.’
What they’d done in the end, Shroudweaver’s mind hesitated to recall. But there had always been that reminder, swinging in a pouch at Skinpainter’s belt. A finger, as pale and thin as his own. The nail still crusted with dark, dry blood.
Tangled under the covers, Shroudweaver sweats, and his skin runs cold. He remembers a show trial, the voices of the rebel mob baying for blood, their teeth white in the light.
The look in the Emperor’s eyes as he realised what awaited him. The strength of his fingers on Shroudweaver’s wrist. The bruise they left behind as the blood flushed away. The shake in his voice, low and frail and human. ‘Don’t let them to do this to me.’
Shroudweaver remembered the sickness that had settled in his heart, feels it rising again to choke his throat in that small bed. Remembers turning his back on the council chamber and the mountain, even as the bowl of the Stump filled with a mass of seething bodies, falling on a single, kneeling figure. Like wolves, like eagles.
He’d returned a few days later, from walking the high places, from breathing the ice on the wind. Finding the Emperor afterwards near gone.
Torn by teeth and hands.
He’d driven the guards away in fury. A light in his eyes that sent them reeling backwards, and finally, when he was alone, he’dlooked down at the stripped bones of the thing that had been the Emperor of the Dead.
And the first thing he’d said was. ‘I’m sorry.’ Guilt choking his throat like soft cloth.
He hadn’t expected a reply, but he’d got one, falling out of red ribs. That ragged breath still somehow caged within the wreck of the Emperor’s body.
It had laughed as it coughed, ratcheting gobbets of spittle and blood out of half-chewed lungs.
When it eventually found its voice, there was still a trace of the man Shroudweaver had come to know. Wry and arrogant, even as the ruin of its face slid and dripped. ‘Sorry. Oh Weaver, they surprised even you, didn’t they? That noble Skinpainter, big strong Kinghammer, the Deadsingers with their wide eyes. All of them so hungry for revenge.’ The Emperor’s breath rattling around hollow ribs, a gouged stomach. ‘So hungry.’
Its lung wheezed, wet and laboured, the air sucking through the torn gaps in its throat, its chest.
‘Part of you knew though. Part of you knew deep down what I’vealwaysknown.’ Its voice rising, catching, hacking on chunks of half-strung meat.
‘All order is founded in blood, Weaver.’
It had smiled then, a slash of ruin and glee.
A moment passed, or two, in the heart of the mountain, on stone wet with blood, with nothing but the sound of the Emperor’s rattling breath, in and out and in again, like the cascade of sea to shore.
A horror in Shroudweaver’s heart so dark, so massive, that for a moment, he had just crouched next to the broken form of the thing he’d once feared, his partner in the dance. He moved a hand next to its body until their fingers were not quite touching, but he could imagine the push and pull of the weave between them. He had stayed that way until Skinpainter arrived, flanked by spears, and horror gave way to ritual, to necessity.
It was then that Shroudweaver had seen the real stone in Skinpainter’s soul, the thing that kept them at the heart of the mountain, in the veins of its power.
It was then that they’d taken what remained of the Emperor down into the black, into the deepest hollow heart of the Stump, where a dark lake hung below sharp stalactites.
It was there that they’d bound the Emperor, his thin hair still neat around the long bones of his shattered skull. Bound at wrist and ankle, to hold his magic tight. His fingers and arms stilled. His wrists pinned and shackled, inked with geometries, to hold his spirit back from roaming. Skinpainter watched the Emperor like a hunting cat, and Shroudweaver watched Skinpainter with his heart held between his teeth, until they reached forwards, and snapped off the smallest finger, wrapped it, and stowed it close.
