Shroudweaver takes Nigh’s hands in his own, begins winding red thread around her right palm. She watches closely, small teeth tight on her lips. He holds Icecaller’s gaze, lets his eyes travel over her face. Bright blue eyes. The same high cheekbones as her sister. Blonde hair shaved close on one side, loose on the other. Marked with geometrics, like the rest of them. Scarred, a little. A pleasant, lazy smile.
Icecaller clicks her fingers in front of his face. ‘Not in front of the children.’ With a toss of her head, she flicks her eyes to Shipwright. ‘What are you? Partner? Lover? Carer?’
‘All of them,’ Shipwright murmurs.
Shroudweaver shoots Icecaller a look. ‘I was just noticing the family resemblance.’ He pauses, sits Nigh into the hollow of his stomach, ties off a knot. Icecaller’s eyebrows are expectant. Hepats Nigh’s wrist, shakes his head at her big sister. ‘I think given the apparent delicacy of the situation, it’s better to wait until we see Kinghammer.’
Icecaller snorts. ‘Not the smartest down south are you?’ She leans into him. ‘I’m his d.a.u.g.h.t.e.r. The one that isn’t perpetually covered in snot. That means, I have the connections.’ She mimes it, grinning. ‘Look, if you level with Skin and me, we can probably speed things along. I don’t really want my dad scared. And if there’s stuff out there that we should be worried about, let’s be prepared for it.’
She leans forwards, shoulders angled. ‘It’s bad enough with Fallon’s kid here mooning about the place. So, lay it on me straight, is your daughter marching to kill us all?’
Shipwright catches her arm. ‘Declan Fallon’s sonishere?’
Icecaller’s eyes flick from Shipwright, to Skinpainter’s aghast face and back again.
‘Yes. Right. He is. You didn’t—? Oh. Bollocks.’
69
The shape of it in the dark, like a bird, like a cat
muscle hunting in the black.
—The Beast Beneath the Barrow,
Pub: Errant, Glissworm & Co.
The army moves below him like smoke, filling the valleys, the gaps between trees. The countryside is noisy with feet, buckle, harness. Slickwalker watches them from high places, his feet light on branches. Crowkisser sways at their head, pale and splintered, a grey horse beneath her, grey men behind. Astic marches. Alongside them, are the people of the Rim villages; hard men from Dryke, the outriders and hawk-holders of Vantage, the herders and drovers of Fallow, all moving with stolid rhythm. Anyone able, anyone angry, anyone with something to fight for.
An army that isn’t really an army. An army that’s fisherman and cartwrights, cooks and potboys. Herbwitches and smoketalkers. Marshwalkers. Hunters, catchers of frog and fowl.
There’s a unity among them that wasn’t there before. She’s stitched them together under her care, binding them with their fears and hopes of a new world. They chat among themselves as they walk, sing sometimes, their arms around each other. Laughing in the cold mornings, as they piss out campfires and cradle cups still warm from the embers.
He watches Crowkisser from high places. She talks to them, walks between them. She brushes hair, rubs ointment into calluses, draws the blood from blisters. She smiles as she works, hands deft, steady.
People touch their fingers to her lips in thanks, offer up darkbread smoked over fires, strips of fish dried and stored, pungent and herbal.
She speaks in the mornings, on the brow of hills, her fingers light on the horizon. When her nails rest on the silhouette of the Stump, her voice rises, her body tenses. The people cheer.
Afterwards, miles fall away under their feet as they march across a wide and emptying landscape, past the ruins of other wars. As they drum steadily through the skeleton of the Midlands its inhabitants close their doors. The Midlands people know how to survive strife, going to ground and touching their hands to the lintels in hope of a swift passing. All that’s left for Crowkisser’s army are the ruins of those villages which were not so lucky, those that fell to the Empire. Or the bladedrinkers. Or the riders of Twicefallow. The whole countryside silted thick with old conflicts. They make the best of it, though. Sometimes they gather around old wells to see if they draw clear, or if they pull only muck and bones.
The younger children swarm the wrecks of these old villages, cock-crowing from high towers, scavenging among sherds for old blades, finding corroded clasps that are used to string blankets into ragged banners and heroes’ capes.
Their parents gather them up. Show them how to fit straps, where to balance the blade. The old stones hear steel again, run with shrieks and laughter.
The mountain grows closer day on day. The last ghost-acres of the Midlands give way to the rolling mounds of the Barrowlands, with their stands of black pine and sudden outcrops of rock long ago discarded by glaciers. Slickwalker watches Thell from these high, lonely places, sighting along the barrel of the gun, letting its muzzle trace the battlements that lean out over the sleeping earth like a widow’s veil. When the land flattens out from rock down to barrows, he climbs the flag poles of cairns, feels them shudder under his touch.
The army’s been left a mile or two behind him. He’s alone in the wide nights of the north, and he revels in it. The barrows take the evening like liquid, shadows falling from a heavy sun to poolamid the humps and hollows of this land of graves. Some nights, he walks new hewn paths into the bellies of burial chambers, lays his head on slabs slanted from time and listens, heart hammering.
His fingers find traces of other explorers. New ones, at first; a discarded adze, a scrap of chew. The dust moved by wary feet, splashes that might be blood, might not.
Beyond these vestiges of the living, the dead lie in hollows, their legs drawn up to their throats, bound at wrist and knee. He smells the magic on them, tastes it sticky on his lips. He runs his fingers over their old teeth, loosens some, keeps them as charms, as gifts for her.
Once, curious, he lets a blade press against the bindings, and feels his arm throb with a strange deep hunger. Something calling out to his blood. He bites down on it, moves on.
Through mildewed chambers, into long passages which connect one mound to another, fallen far from light into blackness. He draws his own shadow to him, pressing forwards. A joy kindling in his heart, finally the adventurer he’d always dreamt of being – shielded by sorcery, forging into the darkest tombs to find out their secrets.
As he pushes deeper into the last barrow, he realises a battle was fought here. Spear hafts snapped, a point lodged deep within the ribs of a skeleton, the tattered shreds of its bindings still loose on its wrists, tall shields sundered. Another body. Old, dry, its legs torn from the torso, its chest and arms marked with heavy geometric patterns, black and red and black again.
