She tugs at the scarf around her head. ‘Can we pick up the pace though? It’s a hair off freezing out here.’
Shroudweaver takes a few steps to the nearest cairn. Sifting through the broken rock at its base, he lifts out a shard of pottery. ‘Every vessel has its limits though, right? You can’t pour a wine bottle into a pint glass. You can’t drain the sea into a lake.’
She nods. ‘Odd examples. But sure.’
He smiles, turns, skips the shard away over the stones. It clacks and rattles into the distance scaring up a few low-dwelling birds that peep across the sky.
‘All the dead in that army, all their souls, they were bound by the Emperor,tothe Emperor. If I’d cut them loose of their bodies, he would have scooped them up like so many fish in a net. Or if they’d flown free, they would have gone mad, and frayed and strange. There was only one place to put them, really. Only one place I could keep them safe.’
She realises it before he says it, and her heart breaks with the swiftness of a spring thaw.
She’s down off the horse and her arms are around him, his cold back under her gloved hands and his shaking body pressed tight against hers.
‘It was you. You idiot. You stupid, stupid man. The vessel. For twenty damn years. For all those souls. It was you.’
His voice, when it comes, cuts through the wind, the ice and the sky and she shivers.
‘It was me. It was always me.’
54
Three sifts of coarse powder for burning.
Two sifts of fine powder for incision.
One man with a hand steady as an oarsman’s drum.
—On the Preparation of Necessary Flames,
Chapter 6: Burners and Concussives
The gun fits together seamlessly, the pieces interlocking like snakes. Slickwalker lets his hands fall on the clasps and triggers, runs them over the buckles, the stock, the long smooth barrel which rests across his legs. He traces its lines, lets his fingers linger on the curves, the angles. It hums faintly beneath his gloves.
Astic is quiet in the morning light. He leans back in his chair, lets the smell of the city fill his ribs. Fish oil and wet wool, tallow and beer.
It’s getting colder. The warm ghost of summer still clings to the roof tiles, chased by cats who coil through chimney smoke and washing lines. But it’s getting colder.
He can see it in the sea, the green of the coast falling to black. In the lines of the fishermen, woven tighter, weighted heavier, plumbing the depths to bring up the thick, grey octopuses that come to feed on boat scraps. Pots to catch crabs shelled with barnacles, the wood soured and twisted by fast, harsh currents.
A good season for hunting, on the edge of autumn, the air clear and cold. Everything that moves pulsing against the landscape, the hills filled with heartbeats.
He pulls a rag from his pockets, oils it, rubs it over the gun. It smoulders gently, thin threads eaten by movement, by metal.
He hasn’t seen Crowkisser in two days. She’s up in the hollow of the temple, he suspects, on her knees in the ruins, siftingthe rags the long men have brought in and stringing them into prophecy. She’ll be cold and hungry, her fingers scraped raw, her nails chipped.
She’ll have fallen, and her skull will have hit the slabs wetly. Her eyes will have turned inwards and she’ll have thrashed, white and bloody and crying.
The crows will have come to cover her. Soon, he’ll go and minister to their marks. The sharp cuts left by their feet. He’ll rub the bare spots where they’ve taken her hair. He’ll hold her as she coughs up meat.
She’ll be scared. The patterns are filthy, complicated. She can’t look too long at them. Makes her feel sick. Makes her scratch at her pale skin. Makes her chew her lips ragged. Makes her hold onto him like a drowner.
He knows she’ll pull through, fight through the twisting. She’ll pick rope, and rot and blood. She’ll swallow it down and cough the world back up to find the patterns they need to succeed. Nothing stays hidden. It’ll fill her. Prophecy from bone to tail, until she can flit under the gaze of the eye in the south, like a shadow, like a slip, feet in a stairwell, the click of a door just closed.
Beautiful. Subtle. Unstoppable.
It’ll fill her. The hot weight of seeing. She’ll come to him later, lambent eyed, black and glowing. Ravenous for skin. Kissing like a cannibal. Arching her back. A priestess of cats, of corners, of secrets.
And he’ll hold her. He always holds her. She’ll fit against him, all her secret angles that only he knows. His hands against her sides, chasing away the knots and the cold. Dry lips against temples where her pulse runs thready.
