The Barrowlands ripple, like a pond awoken, like a pulse under skin. Red threads continue to fall. His hands are steady. Relief is the only emotion in his heart. His lips are dry with the words of unbinding, slipping over his tongue like papery scraps. Twenty years, and undoing it all is the work of moments. He could have done it at any time, if he’d been prepared to pay the price.
Now, here, the dead can do something good with their last bright burst of energy. They can stop his daughter, before she makes an even bigger mistake than her last. He can weave them into a composite. Something with enough raw power to bring everything on this plain to its knees. A new god, that will exist for the briefest moment.
And to fuel it, all he needs are the souls he’s carried like cargo for the last two decades.
They’ll be burnt to nothing. Consumed. The thought gives him a brief ache, although it’s gone in seconds – there is no other option. To release them would be to return them to the Emperor. Still twisting down there, in the depths of the mountain.
He watches Crowkisser’s army charge below him, closer than he’d ever imagined them getting. Thell’s line is retreating, steadily and methodically, but retreating nonetheless.
His errant daughter’s certainly pulled out all the stops. The things she’s done today have left his mind reeling; magic like he’s never seen. And always at her back, the bark of that awful gun.
So much death already. So many souls loose and wandering the plain, tangled with the storm, choking in the mud, strung to the red scraps of their bodies.
His heart aches at it, but clinically, professionally, he sees more fuel for the fire.
Free and ragged, these wandering spirits have little power. They need guidance. They need a weaver. They need him. Hebreathes deep. There’s an order to this. He can’t rush. The red doesn’t work without the silver. Unbinding requires sending. The souls need a focal point.
What he’s attempting is stupid. Impossible. A breaking of the first law. Weaving a composite, raising a new god, with nothing to hold it except the force of his own will. No body to shape its shell. To limit it. But he’s seen what his daughter can do. If they don’t stop her here, now, they never will. And there’s no one to do it but him.
He doesn’t want to kill her. So, this is the alternative.
Looked on long enough, a god swallows the mind. That’s why hosts only took fragments of divinity into themselves, why composites only tolerate human form for the briefest time. The body can’t stand the touch of the gold for long. People aren’t built for it.
He doesn’t want to kill Crowkisser, but he’ll take her mind, if he has to. Hopefully, she’ll surrender before that.
He sees her below at the head of her army, wreathed in flickering darkness. The great gate of the Stump awaits her.
Before that, a brief space of blasted grass and rock. Thell’s soldiers retreating across it, encircling the passage into the mountain. They can’t get caught up in this. He owes Skinpainter that much.
Shroudweaver sights on the empty space in front of his daughter’s running feet, and pushes forth with the silver thread.
A lurch like a high dive, and the coldness that follows.
Binding happens with the body, red and raw, in the world we know.
Sending happens elsewhere, in the world of the dead, or close to it. In the between spaces, that place between breaths, where the mind can slip if it’s left unguarded long enough.
The voice of his old Aestering tutor echoes in Shroudweaver’s head, taking him through the steps, the motions, fluid and precise.
He focuses on the ground in front of his daughter, feels the cold rock under his feet and steps back into the between.
He can still feel his body here, but guiding it is harder. All its pains are multiplied, the harsh rasp of his breath like tin scraps in a can. Light flows down in soft grey ribbons, but the spacearound him is nothing but darkness, lit by the briefest flecks of silver, strung around bodies, living and dead alike. Soul-thread, the weaver’s true material.
He’s left it too long, truth be told. He’s out of practice, getting old. The pain of it is more than he’d ever remembered. His lips are dry and his teeth feel slight in his head.
On the balcony his body is pushed by running soldiers. Shipwright catches him as he staggers, her arms around him, solid and real. If she can hold him there, in the real world, he need only take care of himself while his soul hangs in the between.
The ache of his mind is loud in the between spaces, and along with it all the regrets and fears he’s held tight ’til now. The reek of them is like a beacon to the dead.
A less experienced weaver would be at risk, but he can use this. He grasps the silver threads of their souls. Shivers them with his fear, his worry, his regret, like a spider plucking a web.
The dead of the plain come for him, invisible and thinned by the rain, heedless of storm or sacrifice. They crawl over his skin. He twists, weaves, and negotiates. Their fury is a quiet thing. They have only recently lost their lives, had them torn away by blade or butchery. Life naturally calls back to them. They’re joined by the deeper dead, spirits lurching up from the barrows, casting off the last scraps of burial shroud as they thrill at the memory of old wars, and swim towards his power. They all push against Shroudweaver’s jaw, his sternum, his hips. They want in.
He can’t allow that. He needs them in that bare space before the mountain, waiting to be joined by the souls within his chest.
He keeps them busy, pulls silver thread in intricate dances that maze them, spiralling them deeper into a nexus of twisting anger and loss.
Every movement in the between is mirrored by his body on the battlements as the fighting rages. Shipwright holds him as he shudders and ducks. Her voice is a hymn and a hollow and a safe place. He sets it like an anchor, squares his back to it, and weaves an offer to the newly dead. He delineates, sketches, trades. Hisfingers move with frantic speed. The world spins around him. People die around him. And the storm thunders down.
