Fallon feels laughter well up inside him again. Dangerous. Keep it together. It’s only a few swift steps to Shroudweaver’s side. He wraps his arms around the man’s sliver of a waist, and whispers in his ear. ‘Bring ’em in, Shroud. You can do it.’
Shroudweaver’s smile is a thin thing, his eyes closed tight, caught in the shadow and rhythm of his work. But fuck him if he doesn’t smile. With a lunge, he hauls backwards, his wrists pulling like a conductor, a fisher, a surgeon.
Fallon braces against his back, feels the immense weight of a hundred stolen lives on the other end of the line, sees the desperate light in their eyes. And then, like a fire kindling in a dark room, he realises what Shroudweaver is doing. The ship rides on the hopes of the dying, like the crest of a wave. And here the dead come, like a flock of birds, bright and chattering. In over the thundering waves, away from the burning beach and its ragged sky.
Fallon watches Shroudweaver sketch their path home, watches his broken, bloody lips murmur the words they want to hear.
itsokI’llbehereI’myourbrotherI’myourfather
I’myoursonnothingislostnothingnothing
The dead throng him like a flock of starlings, filling the sails, their song bright and beautiful and broken. Fallon watches their silver lines thread the shining waves, ducking and weaving to avoid the falling stars, twisted and guided by Shroudweaver’s dancing wrists. Too fast to follow, too fast to stop.
The eye wants them. Wants to hold them and pin them like flies in amber. Fallon can tell that much, can feel it lowering over the fleeing dead like a drunken lover. But who would stand still with someone they love calling them? And Shroudweaver, he loves all these broken souls, he loves them in red thread and silver. In smoke and blood. In something like prayer.
The dead flee the burning shore, and their frail, desperate hope pushes the ship to speeds beyond anything Fallon’s ever felt. A surge under his feet. Lifting and filling the timbers. Flaring up through his legs. Filling his hips, his heart with something bright and savage.
Laughter tears loose from his chest and reels off into the sky. Beside him, he sees Shroudweaver’s face warm with sudden relief. So when the girl appears on the shore, she hardly seems to matter. A slim, frayed thing. Almost another walking corpse, her grey shift pressed against her bare legs by the scorching wind. She staggers her way to the sea’s edge and stops, swaying slightly. Fallon often thought he should have noticed the way the bent and broken vestiges of his army avoided her, circling like hyenas. Should have wondered about the shattered remnants of gods dragging themselves from her path. Should have taken some warning from the great eye twisting to focus on her, from the way it widened in sudden shock. But all Fallon remembered of that day was the swaying girl’s upraised hand, fingers spread wide. And then the crows.
Memory’s a vile dog.
When he comes to, three years and too many leagues later, the dockside cobbles are slick with vomit. His physicker helps him up with a frown and a heave, his soft stubbled face twisting disapprovingly. Eventually, Fallon’s feet reel their way back into the heart of the city, but for a time, his mind remains in the past, out on the ocean, on the sea, in the shards of the burning south.
47
a temple may be erected anywhere the gods can see
the home is a temple
and so the cattle shed
and so the skull.
—Meditations on the Vanished Arts, lecture series
The twilight is cut with the first strands of night, the wind low and lazy between the pillars, slinking like a loose-limbed dog over the cobbles of Astic. Lamps gutter, spit and fall to curfew. Shutters are pulled tight, latches dropped. Evenings turned to the spit and crackle of embers.
The hands of the people of Astic are scarred, scrubbed raw. Blistered by forges, scoured by pickling brine. The hands of the people of Astic are methodical as they set coals, stoke fires, turn skillets, push smoky hair from tired eyes.
Hundreds of little grey houses fill with warmth, with the smell of meat and oil, the close-lipped bubble of heavy-lidded pots. Bars fall across doors, feet slip under blankets. Swords lie loosely over knees given up to the whetstone kiss.
In the streets outside, blades walk on long, dark legs. The shadows are filled with the tall, thin strips of men who tend to the city as she sleeps.
As the last lantern goes out, the lights of the gallowswatchers wink on, one by one. The slow swing of their bones against the gibbets. Lambent eyes casting listlessly into the gathering dark.
The long men run fingers over the knots that hold them tight. Murmur instructions to each other. Carve sigils into skin, quick and precise, as Crowkisser’s instructed them.
In the warming houses, the timbers stretch and settle as theyshake off the evening cold. Strong arms tickle squealing ribs, and small heels kick a frenzy of rushes and laughter and bathwater.
Ladles swim and stir, and steam rises to the eaves which shuffle with rats and owls.
Lips brush each other, stubble against cheek. Quick handclasps are snatched against ranges, by bedsides, beneath covers.
In the streets, the long men climb the winding path to the old temple. It stays open to the sky, its belly boned with pillars which hint at the ghosts of carvings. These are the spaces where the story of the gods used to be told, spaces where offerings could be left to the hosts and priests, in hope of wisdom, or favour, or peace.
Their hands are quite full with different offerings by now. With meat, bones and secrets. Sometimes, they carry them two abreast, their long limbs bowing under the strain.
Above their heads, the moon is a coin in the clouds. Above the clouds, the first black specks of crows begin to spin and fall towards Astic’s sleeping heart.
