Heartshamer rolls his eyes. ‘Like it never benefitted you.’
‘Sounds costly,’ Shipwright says. ‘Draining.’
Heartshamer shrugs. ‘It was a fair deal, mostly. A trade, of course, but everyone involved knew what they were giving up.’ He breathes out slowly. ‘And the god’s voices were always there. The power was always there.’
He taps the saucer. ‘Until they weren’t. Until Crowkisser broke the world and I could hear a thousand heads all filled with the wings of crows.’
Heartshamer’s tongue scrapes dryly on his teeth, his fingers fretting with the cuff of his shirt. ‘I heard them screaming so loud it tore loose their lips, their tongues, the roofs of their mouths. I could feel their teeth rattle in their jaws and the hair rising on their heads.’ His legs shake in sympathy, muscles dancing.
When he looks up, his face is twisted in anguish. ‘After that, the power was gone.’
He points at Shipwright. ‘And you have to go out there to try and stop the woman that took it away. That killed our gods. Will you try to bring it back? That power? Will you?’
Shipwright shakes her head. ‘I don’t think we’ve thought that far ahead.’
‘No,’ Heartshamer says, his voice bitter for the first time. ‘I imagined not.’
He waves the cup towards her. ‘But ask yourself this. What becomes of the woman who is used to being cut and broken and cut again without end? Her flesh kept immortal and whole by the god inside her? What happens when she bleeds, when she suffers? Does she recoil in fear?’
He wipes his lips, inclines a finger to his temple. ‘Or does a curiosity, lizard-like, begin to stir? To see how much, just how much pain she can take? How much others might take in turn?’
Behind his back, Fallon rolls his eyes theatrically, and picks at a scab.
Heartshamer sighs. ‘The death of the gods bred monsters, Shipwright. I’m just the sanest of them.’ He shifts uncomfortably. ‘Ask yourself what becomes of those who feel the voices gone from a newly silent head? Does peace finally descend? Do they retreat into the simple pleasures of life, do they hold that new silence like a pearl against their chests?’
He laughs. ‘Some, admittedly. Lucky bastards. I knew others that found the silence louder than words. Who took themselves to the old places, the holy and highest places and findingnothing, despaired. Who scattered their flesh, their broken bones on cliffside and shore, who swung a gallows loop from rafters and branches.’
His head sinks into his hands. ‘They were all just trying to flee their own traitor flesh. To find the gods again.’
He smiles sadly. ‘Then, of course, the last few of us simply learnt to lie. To make our own voices a replacement for the cacophony the gods had given us. We kept selling wisdom from the tips of our tongues, until we were discovered, or worse’ – he gestures to the tent, the chairs, the journals – ‘never found out at all.’
His fingers run over the grain of the table. ‘What worries me most is that some of us might have been pushed even further, that maybe out there among the surviving few, a bare pinprick of us all, the truly devoted, the trulydrivenwill have taken their knowledge, their great whispering of the world before Crowkisser killed the gods and begun to dig. Down.’
His one eye fixes Shipwright’s gaze. ‘There’s another world beneath ours, you know. Bones turned to stone. Faint paintings upon walls that have never seen light. Sketches in caves miles below ground.’
Heartshamer’s hands trace the wood of the chair. ‘Echoes of peoples and pasts we can’t even imagine. And I’m scared that buried world had its gods. Had its voices too.’
Shipwright frowns. ‘Other gods?’
Heartshamer nods. ‘Or something like that. I gathered all the little scraps I could.’ He waves towards the tent flaps. ‘Trawled that nest of overpaid jackdaws for months on end.’
His voice is weary. ‘We like to talk about the earth, Shipwright. But we’ve always been afraid of it. Even if most of us don’t know why.’
Heartshamer’s knuckles are white under the bone. ‘I worry that Crowkisser wasnotafraid of the earth. I worry that it called to her.’
Fallon points at her. ‘See? Told you he’d know the score.’
Shipwright nudges Heartshamer. ‘Did you have to encourage him?’
He rolls his eyes. ‘An unfortunate side-effect of long association. The point is, I have a hunch that Crowkisser might be playing with things we barely understand. That we’re afraid to evenspeakabout.’
He stands. ‘Which normally, I would be professionally loath to even mention, but Fallon impresses on me the importance of your mission north to those degenerates in Thell.’
He selects a book or two from the shelves as he talks and leafs through them absently. ‘We both felt that it was important that you knew a little more about what you were getting into.’ He runs his fingers down a page. ‘Twenty years is a small scrap of time to try and get a handle on the fears of this blasted earth.’
Shipwright feels a little grey, a little sick. ‘Shroud never mentioned this. The hosts. The earth.’ She trails off, uselessly.
Heartshamer raises an eyebrow. ‘Unsurprising. Given what happened with his wife, I think he rather wanted to forget about the gods altogether.’
