On the Dancing of Bones
On the Infusion of Smoke into Blood
On the Cost of Negligence
—Chapter headings,Archivist’s Primer, for Transparencies I–III
Hesper, the great city by the sea, offers a whitewashed tower room that smells faintly of gull, and a thin cot with roughened sheets.
To Shroudweaver, it’s paradise. He hasn’t slept much since the war began, especially not aboard ship, where the rocking and stretching of the boat makes him feel like a ratty squirrel clinging to a slim branch over the boundless sea.
Here, the stone is solid, and the covers, though rough, are pleasant. The linen lets in the lamplight, filtering it as he pulls them over his head.
He’s never craved the softer things. Life in the Aestering had been gentle, but it was a simple place, built of simple things. Rough textures and uneven edges suited him fine.
He’s slept enough in sailcloth and sheepcloth, under tarp and straw. This is, if not luxury, something close.
The thin mattress creaks as Shipwright slips in beside him, the weight of her bowing the bed, before the warmth of her stomach lines his back as she slips an arm around his shoulders. She smells of the port, a faint glisten of spice and oil. He kisses her wrist, her forearm, lets his lips linger on the thin white scars of lash lines and splinters that have healed into sailors’ silver.
Every time they climb aboard the ship, she exacts her toll of blood in a thousand small cuts. The ship herself is sleeping in thedeep dock of Hesper, Ropecharmer pacing the deck like a cat, tying off and stowing to.
The docks are far from here. The city spilling from the towers in a ruck of tile, staggering merrily over the grid of canals that pull Hesper’s life through her sluggish body. Arched bridges and low porticos where the bargemen can pull to and trade in all the little scraps of sense-memory that make up this city. Thick-rinded fruit that stains the fingers and mouth, scraps of forgotten songs that have bubbled up over the Halls and been caught in their nets. Lean blades of copper, and fine-worked shawls that have come all the way from the mountains, from Thell.
The docks are far from here, and Thell is further still. Hesper sinks into the night like a bone into broth, and Shroudweaver lets himself sink with it. That thin mattress opens up to the softness of sleep. Shipwright’s breathing at his back stronger than the sea, soft and steady. The push of her stomach, the brush of her thigh as she settles closer.
Her hair falls over his face, and he keeps it like a curtain. The warmth of her skin is held in it, and a lightness from the herbs she washes with. She kisses his neck gently. ‘Stop smelling me.’
‘Can’t help it,’ he murmurs. And even those words come from a long way away, falling through the tiredness that pulls him down to dreaming.
Sleep like weaving, the soul unlatching from the world, and lifting to hover over dreaming bones. Night becoming a nest of breath and pulse. Sleep like the spaces between, where his magic lives. A weaving not his own. The world reaching for him. For the threads that connect him to the rest of the earth.
The docks are far from here. Thell is far from here. Even Crowkisser, dark and feathered, is far from here. There is only the solid wall of the Shipwright, and the halter of her arm.
He can rest. The world is far from here. His world is right here. There are no lines between far and near. He is a weight on the threads of the world, and time and distance fold under him like a sheet. He feels Shipwright’s fingers move through his hair and across his shoulders, and he falls into sleep.
The scholars of the Glass Archive refer to sleep as the dancing of bones. Bodies twitching in dream and nightmare, sketching a map of the roads that their minds run.
Does the world feel the Shroudweaver when he dreams? Does the world recognise the mind that slips into the dark?
Something marks him perhaps. Marks him like the fish feel the shadow of the heron. The dreaming world opens up paths for him. The world opens paths for the Shroudweaver, and he chooses one. As much as we choose anything. Like a deer chooses the forest, or an arrow chooses the heart.
In that small tower room, Shipwright holds him as he shivers and twitches. The man she loves, shaking like a dying leveret, a beached fish. It doesn’t worry her. This is how the evenings go, and have gone, and will go.
The scholars of the Glass Archive will have you believe our bodies are nothing more than the metronome of our souls. Do not confuse the instrument for the song, they will say.
The Shroudweavers knew the truth was more complicated, and the last Shroudweaver is about to find this out.
For he sleeps, and worse he dreams. With all the logic that his mind has left.
And in his dream, the broken earth is singing. Lowing like a calf just born.
And in his dream, he can go to the earth and place his hands upon it. He ties his red right hand to the soil, and digs deep.
And there is sense to this. For this is how he has always been able to work his magic. By the touching and binding of things.
And in this dream, the song of the earth is a chorus. The earth a composite of all the little lives that burrow within it. The lives of worm and beetle. The earth a composite of all the great energies that move above it. The weight of the glaciers, and the immense, heartless whirl of the stars. The earth itself vast, porphyritic. The past embedded within it, and moving through it. Great distant caverns where water falls unseen in the black. Hidden tombs where blind life is born and dies far from the touch of the sun.
The earth’s song is the wind moving through hollows and overhills. It whips him like a bird in a storm. Rips his hands from the skin of the world and hurls him into the air. Still there are threads here. His red right hand trails the red of binding, and his left begins to spark with the silver of sending.
