‘Nothing outside of blood and bone,’ he murmurs, and touches a hand to his chest. The dead still silted around his heart, still just barely held by Smokesister’s rituals.
‘Well, you fucked that one up,’ Shipwright snorts.
He smiles at her, stifles a laugh. ‘Wait until you hear my next confession.’
She rolls her eyes. ‘When did I get appointed your counsellor?’
He pulls her arm tighter around his shoulders and kisses the tips of her fingers. ‘You’re never supposed to weave a composite alone.’
She stops walking then, turns to face him fully. ‘Oh, another broken rule.’ He tenses for a second, until she laughs, and kisses his cheek. ‘I didn’t realise I was sleeping with arebel.’
He chuckles too, in relief. ‘It’s more complicated than that.’
Shipwright looks at him wryly. ‘Colour me unconvinced.’
They follow the lee of the hill down to where their remaining horse lingers resentfully in the wind. Shroudweaver leans gratefully into its warm flank.
‘Let me try and explain.’
‘One minute,’ Shipwright says, unhitching the horse. ‘I’mgoing to lead him for a bit. He’s had enough for one day.’
He looks at her oddly and she sticks out her tongue. ‘It’s not all about you, love.’
They pick their way between the rising humps of the Barrowlands, many of them untended this far out, fallen to ruin, or half-ruin, the grass high on their crowns and the stones loose over the graves beneath.
Shipwright feeds the horse some fruit, picking the berries slowly out of her hand and offering them to its eager lips. ‘Explain then. We’ve got a while yet to go.’
Shroudweaver tends the horse, keeping it steady on the thin, tumbled roads that wind behind the larger green barrows; a mess of rock chips and old bone, broken grave markers and long-rotted flags.
When he talks across its nose to her, the horse’s ears prick up, and he wonders if it’s learning.
‘OK, so. To understand composites, you have to understand souls, and the gods. We always believed that they were basically the same thing. That gods were just big, old lumps of souls that got clever and sentient a long time ago. Impossibly perfect composites, if you believe what the hosts used to say. My wife used to think so.’ He shoots Shipwright a look, but neither she nor the horse responds.
‘If you follow that logic, souls are like little gods. Or god-fragments. We’re not sure. Pieces of something that could be divine. Shroudweavers, we can take those souls, and use them. If I snare one of those fragments, coax it, let it wick along the outstretched thread of my will, guide it with the red thread and the silver, it’ll spark into something much stronger, for just a little while. A small god.’
‘Lit from somebody’s soul,’ Shipwright replies.
He nods gravely. ‘That’s the cost of it. Weaving destroys the soul. It’s burnt out like a candle flame, like waxed paper.’ His face is wistful. ‘The things we can do, though.’
His hands absently move through the motions. ‘I’ve woven that light into bodies, to make them faster and stronger. I’ve madethe sails of a boat leap and the blade of a sword sing with bright, howling speed. All kinds of tiny ascensions.’
Shipwright scratches the horse’s ear. ‘It sounds like the stuff of stories. By which I mean, horseshit.’
Shroudweaver smiles shyly. ‘It’s incredibly powerful. And utterly unsustainable. Every one of those little stabs at godhood – the sheer fire of them burns up their source, a person’s soul.’
He lifts a leg carefully over a tilted stone. ‘At the Aestering, we were raised as caretakers. We’re supposed to protect people, protect their souls. We only weave like this in the most desperate circumstances.’
‘You weave like that a lot,’ Shipwright says, and her tone is wary.
‘The last twenty years have been one big desperate circumstance,’ he replies. ‘Besides, it gets easier.’
They crest another small rise, and Shipwright clucks gently at the horse, who’s getting skittish in the gathering dusk. ‘I’m not sure that’s a good thing.’
Shroudweaver follows, a pale ghost against the setting sun. ‘Neither am I. That’s why I prefer composites. The effort they take. The skill. It’s not something you do lightly.’
She hums thoughtfully. ‘So why not just use them all the time?’
His voice comes down from the slope of a barrow. ‘Because we’re building gods, basically. Clumsy, malformed gods. But gods nonetheless. If souls are just fragments of gods, and composites are woven from souls, then what else do you call the end result?’
