The dead follow his hands, shoal-like fish in front of his daughter’s running feet. He has moments, bare moments. In the between spaces though, a moment hangs like a blade of wet glass, held and stretched in the dark. The weaver’s secret.
With his right hand he sketches a quick loop of red around the swirling battlefield dead. They complain, distantly, but they are lulled as summer bees, ready to join the throng that swells inside him, that crushes his lungs from within.
His breathing is harsh as a muzzled dog, air vanishing with every twist of his fingers.
As his vison closes in, the gathered dead hang at the end of his gaze. He feels the souls in his chest press forwards, expectant, like calling to like; droplets of rain forming into puddles, pools, rivers, oceans.
All it would take is a word to set them free. They’re hungry for it, starving. If Shroudweaver loses his concentration for a second, they’ll tear their way out. With Smokesister’s wards gone, the only thing holding them back is his patience, his precision. And the powders, the age-old trappings of weaving. So reflexive, he forgets they’re there most of the time. Now, as the Empire’s restless dead push towards his veins, they butt against the stink of saltpetre and sulphur. It holds them back, just barely, like two fingers on the throat of a hunting dog.
He can’t delay any longer. He mustn’t.
All it takes is the final unbinding. He mutters a quick blessing and spits the taste of oil from his tongue, pressing his right hand tight against his breastbone. He digs in with his nails, just enough to break the skin and let the red of the bindings touch the red of his blood.
The dead in his heart burst forth like an undammed river – every soul the Emperor had marshalled against them; everyone Shroudweaver has stolen, rescued and kept imprisoned for the past twenty years flows out into the between.
Shroudweaver leashes them with silver, trains their course likewillow in a salmon run. Freedom-mad, they rush towards the brightest, nearest thing; that swirling nexus of the battlefield’s slain lingering in front of his daughter’s charging feet. The dead flow from him like water, down the channels he has carved.
The endless souls of the Empire meet the dead of the battle in a thunderous roiling wave. Their combined energy burns like a silent star. He’s in awe. Terrified. The sheer power of the thing he’s created already starting to burn the between places, scorching its way into the world.
He closes his eyes, bites his lips, and weaves a red binding, fast and furious, dancing around the hollow of his knuckles, the chipped beds of his nails, around that ache in his wrist that comes with every cold morning.
The dead are pulled together, herded like deer before the beaters, crushed and fused, woven and bound. It is almost a composite. A thing hung with a thousand voices, hopes and fears. Not quite a composite, though. Not yet.
Now comes the hardest part. He has to make it manifest without breaking the binding. A single snag or tear, and all that energy gets unleashed on the edge of the world. He’ll make Crowkisser look like a saint.
He weaves, one hand in the between, strung with silver, the other reaching redly out to the real world, inexorably drawing the two together, like guiding a blossom through the eye of a storm. He weaves. Every binding filament is precise, hung with his held breath. Until suddenly, the pattern is complete. The living and the dead are separate no more. The thin skin between places comes down with a whisper. On the plain below, the people of Astic are suddenly no longer alone. The air is thick with forgotten names, and a growing space amid them that hums with golden light.
Shroudweaver feels the heart of a new god start to beat in his hands and his own heart leaps with joy. Then, a gunshot. Screaming down from the high places like a piece of the night aflame. He feels it kiss his head with feral grace. Hears Shipwright’s scream. Smells himself burning even as he’s pushed sideways, Icecaller barrelling into both of them. She straddles him lithely, smiling.Her shield is a smoking ruin where the shot’s caromed off. With a wink, she levers herself up and takes position in front of him.
He doesn’t have the tongue or teeth to thank her. His body is still hung amid the unbinding, outwith his control. At his back, he feels Shipwright’s hands lift him. Her mouth making urgent shapes. He nods but it’s heavy. He’s not here. He’s down on the Barrowland. His hands are the god’s hands, his lips, its lips. He’s thirty foot high and made of love and rage and fire. He can feel it pulling at the edges of his mind.
If he doesn’t finish the weaving, the god will eat him, brain and soul. He leans back into Shipwright’s chest, hears the steady hammer of her heart, and looks up into her eyes. She reads the panic on his face like a storm-broken sea, smiles down, and kisses him. ‘I trust you.’
It’s barely a murmur, beneath the squall of blood and battle. But he hears her somewhere deeper and his mind clears, the god’s song lessening for the briefest spell.
In that respite, Shroudweaver reaches his hands forwards and finishes the binding. The composite, the new god, solidifies into itself, its form shuddering within each twist of red thread.
For the first time since the world drew breath, a god is strung together from nothing but will. Shroudweaver stitches that god, tethers it. He fetters its form and binds the thousands of souls that fill it into a single thing with a single purpose. With each twist of his wrists the composite brightens and flares until it towers over both armies, lighting the rock and ice of the mountain. Its edges are gold and its eyes infinite. It is full and blossoming with limbs and voices, fire and honey. It is beautiful. Shroudweaver feels its pull, like a velvet rope around his neck. They all do.
The people of Astic fall to their shattered knees, in the blood and mud and the roiling storm. The composite god stretches its arms wide to them, radiant. Terrible. Perfect.
And yet at its feet, Crowkisser keeps running. She is silhouetted against the bright bulk of the god for a second. Slight, windblown.
His daughter flowing out of the storm on a thousand wings.Her skin wreathed in blackness that shudders and burns in the golden fire of the new god’s radiance.
She does not bow.
The composite watches her. The entire field watches her. Shroudweaver’s heart aching for her, at how much it must be costing her to even move in the face of this thing’s glory. His lips move, wordless, begging her to give up, to bend the knee.
She does not bend.
The composite is radiant, terrible, beautiful. A patchwork of a thousand, thousand souls fused into a single being that shifts like morning. It is the sun, and the end of things. It is love and dying, spice and mourning, loss and life.
She does not bow.
Stark in the burning light, Crowkisser raises her ragged right hand, clenched tight into a fist, a scrap of the Emperor within. Its voice in her head, triumphant, confident, insistent.
‘Now.’
