It tired him out, and Shipwright wearied in return. Twenty years of this, of looking over his shoulder, of guarding his back.
He was already looking worn. Faded and drawn, like an etching washed too many times by the tide. Each night, she gathered his thin hair in her fingers, tucked it behind his ears, felt the porcelain weight of his skull.
He hadn’t unwrapped the binding threads since they stepped off the ship. They were the closest things he had to tools of the trade. Frayed lines against the dead, the strange and the unwelcome, pulled red and ragged around his fingers, his wrists twisting fretfully to shift them into new patterns, to keep them moving, keep them ready.
She understood his nervousness, in a way. Thell was always on the horizon, and the closer they drew, the more her mind fell back to those old days, to the dawn of the Republic and the fall of the Emperor. They’d been up to their hands in it, red to the wrists. Stained long after that with the choices they’d made.
The ghost of that war hung like smog. She saw it in Shroud’s eyes, reddened from lack of sleep, restless, even when she held his face in her hands, the past lodged in his mind like a rotten tooth. The thought of returning to face that past was a horror that flickered in every shallow breath.
That mountain city had been unkind to both of them. And Shipwright had been so convinced, to begin with, so convinced that they could help, that they were doing a good thing; a great thing.
She bends, cinching the saddle straps tighter and breathing in the soft, sweet musk of the little mountain horse. A quick squeeze of her thighs turns it towards the remains of the old trade roadwhich winds among the cairns like a whitened scar, the earth still chalky from rain. Shroudweaver sways at her back, dozing, for now.
They aren’t the only ones moving along that road. Travellers pass in both directions, refugees from the south, still, despite the time gone by. Three long years of watching the sky burn and roil, of breathing that strange smell that drifted north on a warm day, when the winds were high. That smell like fruit soaked in blood, bloating in the sun.
There were no refugees from where the city had been, of course, no reports in or out. It was no longer a place people could walk.
A few survivors came from the northmost edge of the desolation, from the Rim villages, Dryke, Vantage, Fallow. A pair with the lemon hair and freckle-flicked faces of Sedge stroked Shipwright’s horse with their gazes as she rode past, their bodies tense as cornered cats, their eyes flicking from hands to blades and back.
Nursing a baby close to their ribs. A little wrench in Shipwright’s heart as its small head slowly faded down the path. Born without a name, like so many children in the last three years, and who knew what that meant for them? What Crowkisser could do to them? Its small hands moved fitfully against its mother’s scarf, as she drew the edges together to shield it from Shipwright’s lingering gaze.
Other refugees were more talkative. Said Crowkisser had finally brought the Rim villages to heel, said they had got out just soon enough, when the first long men began stalking the streets, and the shadows deepened and moved against the sun.
Not many remained in the Rim towns now, a few hundred at most, but some with food, and some with hope, and when had Crowkisser ever needed more than that to encourage her? Shipwright caught Shroudweaver’s worried eyes, as stories of his daughter’s progress filled their ears, as they cinched the tack tighter, and picked up the pace, fleeing only rumours and tales, for now. Still, these days, rumours and tales were enough.
All these lost souls trickling from the south, into the humps of the Barrowlands, and eventually on into the lee of the mountains, to Thell. Some bringing goods for trade, some bringing news, some bringing relics from the south, salvaged from the city of weeping glass, they said.
Shipwright doubted it. She knew a huckster when she saw one, but she didn’t grudge someone trying to earn a coin. Out of curiosity, she bought a few strange pieces of corkscrewed glass, dark as blood.
She crushed them under a stone a day later, when she found they’d burrowed right through her pack, sharp points just near pressing against her skin.
Not much that came out of the south was understood, and not all the people walking that rode had honest hearts. In response, from the north, they began to see patrols of bright-toothed young men and women, the flat, leaf-thin blades of their spears wound around with the snapping, brightly coloured banners of Thell. Their eyes, equally flat and hard, scanned the refugee columns and bickering traders as they pulled the odd cat-skinned man or woman aside for a quiet word. Yet they weren’t shy with water, or medicine, helping those that had pushed themselves too far, too fast. That was a mercy, the people of the south had only learnt to run in the past few years, and not all had taken to it well.
Still, Shipwright found it hard to relax on roads studded with blades. She knew from experience that soldiers wanted a reason to draw them.
She says nothing to them, and Shroud pushes his hands deep into his robes as they pass, turning his face to the stones and the damp grass. There’s no point in pulling eyes to them yet. She had a feeling that announcing their arrival would only call down trouble. It had been a long time since they’d set foot in Thell. Who knew if they were remembered fondly? To say nothing of how many of these men and women might have more than one master, might spend their evenings whispering tales into the beaks of crows.
Yet, where the patrols walked, people felt the breath of theRepublic at their necks. And maybe it was a comfort for folks that had fled their homes, like a large, muscled brute of a dog. Not one to let into the house, but good enough to keep the wolves from the door.
Shipwright takes solace in the fact that not one of these bright armoured young men and women knows them from the rest of this strange, dusty crowd. Why would they? They were ghosts of another time, and the people of Thell had no truck with ghosts.
She has no idea what they’ll find in the mountain these days. Fallon had claimed that the scions of the Revolution held sway there, their mothers and fathers still crouched at the top of the pile, sifting the fragments of the world they’d broken. Dramatic old sod. It was hard to believe that Kinghammer, Belltoller and all the others might still be hale after twenty long years, but if they were, two decades could turn a lot of thoughts around a mind. There was no guarantee of a warm welcome.
She’d asked after them, in that Burners’ village, tucked in beneath smoke-stained rafters, sipping barley broth and chewing on loaves of warm, dark bread.
The Burners claimed to know little. They kept close into the forests and trusted the trees more than the hills. Said the roots held down the dead. Said the hills could hold nothing, barren and windswept as they were.
Said they’d seen fires. Not Burners’ fires, but low red glows, deep among the cairns, spilling from broken entrances and cracked graves. The people of the Barrowlands taking matters into their own hands, burning the dead before the dead could rise and burn them.
No one had seen crows. Shroudweaver always asked, and Shipwright watched his heart lift with every asking. But there was no answer which would have helped there. He missed his daughter, and he was terrified to meet her. Shipwright wanted to help him so badly, but all she could do was make tea, and hold him and pretend not to hear when he talked in his sleep; the muttered apologies, the anger, the fumbling over the hole where his dead wife’s name lay in his head.
Heading to Thell would help him, she hoped, even if he feared it. At the least, it would let him see something thriving from his efforts. Let him see the city they’d saved, the babies that had been born in their absence, and all their friends that were still alive to get fat and grey-haired.
More practically, winning over Thell would mean bodies, and blades for their cause. And beyond that, fuel for a new god. Her heart stumbles at the thought. Her mind flits to worn tower steps, the feeling of light hammering through her bones and the taste of burnt sugar after. She tells herself that it might not happen. That the composite might not need to exist. That the mere threat of its existence might somehow stop Crowkisser in her tracks.
The pony rolls under her and she pats its warm little flank, smelling hot grass and sweat, all the tangled burrs of the road.
She knew better than to hope. If something that horrific could be made, it would be. There wasn’t much point rubbing a comforting lie against your lips like a baby’s blanket.
