She does as she’s told. Presses her face to Shroudweaver, pins him to the deck under her aching ribs until he coughs, shuddering into some kind of half-life. And as if by habit, or memory, or hope, his fingers begin to weave. Shipwright feels him call to the dead on the shore and the spirits of the ship. He steals from the stripped bones, the blade-bodied, the torn and the broken, the remnants of their great army, scouring the wreckage of gods and men, taking what he needs.
He steals shreds of hope and life, and feeds them to the ship which bucks like a skittish horse, the spinners whining helplessly, pinned by the weight of the great eye. The sea swirls in strange patterns from the pressure, flat as glass, then boiling like fire. Still Shroudweaver’s blackened lips move. Red thread stretches and scraps of the dead weave themselves into plank and caulk, into canvas and mast. The power of their spirits kicks the spinners into a devil’s screech, peeling the ship off the shore.
The ship strains. Shipwright feels it in the rise of the timbers, the kick of the sea against the bow, in the grudging scrape of the shallows giving up purchase. It needs a steady hand to steer her home. As if they’d shared the thought, she feels Fallon guiding her, his fingers tight against her eyes, and his strong hands bringing her to the wheel.
‘Steer her, Ship,’ he’d begged and she had, because she was the Shipwright, and the ship was brightest in motion.
She remembered the sea falling away, a poor shadow to thegrace and beauty moving under her, the beach a spit of jealous sand at her back, thick with smoke. Beyond that the planes of the ruined city still shuddered, slipping, falling shard-like into unseen configurations. Not just dying – evolving, shifting into something alien and new. The sharp smell of stone burning. And above it all, hung the eye.
The eye, twisting and twitching, feral, furious. Its gaze roamed the shuddering streets and where it fell people split and changed, bodies canted into new forms, and there were fingers where there should be teeth, teeth where there should be hands, knives where there should be hearts. And blood, over and over, blood.
In the streets, the gods spasmed and died, beautiful, golden, rent and ragged. The luckiest were dragged down, hamstrung, shredded by weight of numbers. Others lay pinned under flaming rock, writhing and changing. Infected with the weight of the purple sky.
Crowkisser had got her wish. They hadn’t come close to stopping her. Their army, their fleet had been an afterthought, an observer to some primal change, to some fundamental murder.
There is enough chaos to drown her head in nightmares, so Shipwright sticks to what she knows. She hauls at the wheel, the sea beneath caustic and hungry against the hull. She steadies her feet, spitting ash onto her hands and gripping tighter as a fury lights in her, pushing the terror aside. Let it come. They are not going to die here. She feels the ship sing to her, feels the vibration of its spinners, and the spirits inside them. She becomes more than a body. She is spar and beam. She is the stretch of canvas, tar-cord, splinter, caulk and keel. She is brass and bright-blue sky. A howl of defiance leaps out of her throat.
The ship hears her and shudders like an old steer in tight traces. High above, the eye is still on them. She feels it at her back, like a cat’s tongue against her neck. She grits her teeth until they crack, swallows the acid swilling in her throat and fixes her eyes on the horizon as the sky empties itself of stars. The sea swallows them and coughs forth gouts of bright flame in return. From below, things swarm to the falling light, dark, tentacled, ragged.
Distantly, she feels her hair catch fire.
Distantly, she feels Fallon’s hands on her shoulders, slick with blood, blistered. Holding her steady.
His body shakes. She can feel the movement down his arms. She takes it, takes every little scrap of energy she can and feeds it into the guts of the ship as Shroudweaver weaves with scraps of broken gods and dying men, pulling them into wood and sail. And the ship grows faster.
She steadies herself against Fallon’s singed frame as they tear over the waves.
He’s still shaking. It’s a long moment before she realises. He’s laughing.
46
He would not talk of the South aflame
but instead told the story of a host
who on watching his temple burn
found himself alight with a wilder fire
—On Swallowing Gold, Heartshamer
Three years later, back on Hesper’s low docks, Fallon watches the ship cast off. He lets his eyes follow the rise of its keel for a moment and watches Shipwright’s hands on the wheel, the sure dance of her fingers, the corded strength of her arms battling against the reluctant helm. It’s all a little too familiar.
Memory’s a vile dog.
The stone and scut of the docks lurches under him, and in a second, in the flick of a gull’s wing, he’s back in the south, on the deck of the ship, feeling the flame of a dying city at his back, steadying the tremors in Shipwright’s arms as she strains at the tiller above a seething sea. Somewhere overhead the sky tears with a wet shriek. He’s got more sense than to look up.
He tries to still the flicker of fear that’s running through his bowels. It’s not totally unfamiliar; late night in the pastures as a kid, and the glint of wolf eyes on the hills, things that want to eat you hanging just over your neck.
There’s a way to deal with it. Get out of your own fucking head. So he does. ‘You’ve got this,’ he says to Shipwright, steady as he can manage. She glances over her shoulder. There’s something a little unhinged at the edges of her eyes as she mouths a single word. ‘Shroud.’
Fallon nods and turns to check on Shroudweaver. He can’tsee him at first, among the lashing rigging and the smoke, the magnesium punch of a dying sky. Then there he is, outlined in the first scalpel cut of thunder, one hand on the prow. No, hand notonthe prow, but lashed to it. Red threads, corded and twined thick, burnt into the flesh of his arm, stuttering with silver light. Weaving. His other hand outstretched to the shore, trailing ribbons like a cat’s cradle. And in their wake, a beat behind, the dead.
Hungry, and bright and torn. And his. With every movement, every twist of his wrist, the souls of the dead chase Shroudweaver in a slipstream of loss. Fallon can feel the push of them, the power of them, their hunger. It’s terrifying. He fights the urge to leap overboard.
He staggers as the ship bucks with another detonation to starboard, another fallen star. Something massive crests in response and swallows it down. There’s an explosion in the deep, the water rosy with fresh blood.
The world is eating itself.
