Not even a scream from the Emperor then. His life fading fast, and time growing short.
So there, in the dark, they’d lifted him above the water and lashed him to a stalactite that hung like a black tooth high above the lake. Lashed him there, and Shroudweaver had woven the last scrap of the Emperor’s life to his ruined bones, to his tooth-scarred jaw, and ragged legs. Had tied him between life and death, and left him there. Never dying. Pinned like a moth. His spirit held from reaching up into the mountain above. Into its people. Or so they’d thought.
Over time, water had run down the dark tracks of the stalactite, and carried the mountain’s stone over the Emperor’s wrists and arms, legs and face, until the rock swallowed him, inch by inch. Until there was nothing to be seen of him, but the shape of a thing that might have once been a man, bound in the stone, and the light of a single, mad eye, glaring out from the black.
a great scar, dark against the water
where light falls through along the path of the moon
Fifteen years later, in the thick, hot night of a Hesper summer, Shroudweaver stares into the darkness and shakes, waiting for the blink of that mad eye. Until he finally falls asleep, hearing only the sound of his own hammering heart.
44
West Tide gulls like mealy bread,
and East Tide gulls like marrow,
Astic gulls like little fish,
and corn behind the harrow
—Tannery kids’ kick song, Hesper
Morning in Hesper belonged to the gulls. Raucous calls running from roof to roof, the echoes shivering off the whitewashed walls and out to sea. Squabbling over last night’s scraps; the fish guts, the spilt food, the washes of bile and beer that tilted down the gutters and pooled in dockside puddles.
Morning belonged to the gulls, crowding the ratlines and rigging. Winkling out barnacles and mussels from the salted ropes, screaming all the while, heads thrown back, orange beaks rattling, the red shock of feathers on the crown of their heads swaying like a laughing dancer.
Fallon sidestepped the gauntlet as best he could whilst bodies swooped low over his head, thick with witless noise. He turned to Shipwright and grinned. ‘Something familiar in this, eh? Surrounded by screaming idiots, dodging an interminable rain of shit.’
She smiled stickily, clutching one of the crisp pastries the bakers of Hesper turned out in the morning to ease the ringing heads of the night before. A whole cottage industry based on dealing with drunkards, and the grey ghosts they became come dawn. This one bought for a slip of coin from a small dark-haired woman who moved like a bird in one of the dockside stalls.
Shipwright licks her fingers. ‘Aye, something.’
They thread their way portside, beneath the cries of the gullsand the barks of the dock workers as the first ships of morning sail into harbour.
Here, the biggest are anchored and unloaded, pulled into berths by dark-skinned men and women, limbs sanded by the sun.
The smaller boats slip into cut ways leading to the wider locks and canals which will carry them up the cliffs, beyond the seawall and out into the city proper to fill the ice-cellars with spirits, the parlours with tea and spices, the gambling dens with smoke and rumours.
They duck into one of the narrow alleys that slinks between the tall, bright walls of the warehouses. Through an unchained gate and down into the slim warren of shanty homes that cling to the high walls like barnacles hung to rope.
A short haired old woman steps nimbly out of their way, and clicks the gate closed behind them. Fallon flashes her a quick smile.
‘Where are we going, Declan?’ Shipwright asks.
He presses a finger to his moustache, lets a smile sneak out either side of it. He’s clearly enjoying himself.
They duck through a hanging curtain, the wooden beads at its hem clacking softly.
At their sides, small knots of people huddle in a close corridor, a muddle of styles and accents. Shipwright catches a glimpse of the black, tight twists of Heron Halls hair, hands shielding smiling lips that are blunted with eastern dusk-paint. More strangely, a man in armour she recognises as Hesper garrison, perhaps another in the grey weave of Astic, chin tucked into a set of notes being offered by someone whose coffee-coloured hands pick nervously at hair teased into Burners’ spikes.
Something wrong with the proportions of this place – they should have hit the back of the warehouse wall by now, she suspects. She gets a dim sense of what might be arch and plaster above for a moment, before they are decanted into a high, wide room, bright with light.
Across its whole expanse, stalls are stacked with the strange and the unfamiliar. Rugs are spread out where traders sift througharmour, weapons, creations of terrifying simplicity and complexity and lightness.
But it’s the walls that catch her attention. On each whitewashed stretch, maps – four, five times again as tall as a man – their inked curves stretching up and out to the ceiling high above.
Fallon turns to Shipwright and smiles. ‘Welcome to the Hall of Loose Tongues.’
