She pauses for the barest moment, then throws.
The smallest scrap of a dead man. A tiny, black speck, against the vastness of a sun, disappearing like a pebble in a pond.
One small, broken finger, kept by Skinpainter all these years. Now lost to gold fire as the composite swallows it.
Crowkisser lowers her hand. There’s laughter in her head; the Emperor’s voice harsh and delighted: ‘Finally.’
A sudden surge of fear spikes her heart. She takes a step back. Turns. Runs.
Shroudweaver watches in horror as the composite shudders and pulls in on itself, the souls inside twisting and distorting, fleeing every which way in panic, like birds in a cage. Something is terribly wrong. There’s something new in the threads. Something new but horribly familiar. The caress of a mind he thought sealed into darkness, the touch of the Emperor of the Dead on the back of his neck. Frantic, Shroudweaver tries to pull the composite souls tight, but even as he tugs, he feels something familiar haul from the other side, with strength and conviction. The silver threads burn, lit like flares. His fingers cannot hold them. And inhis mind, the Emperor’s voice murmurs. ‘Hello, Weaver.’
Panic coils cold against his heart. Shroudweaver wrenches, pulling silver fire over his skin. He feels his powders burn away, evaporating in flashes of light and smoke. He saws harder, threads cutting through the meat of his fingers, down to the bone.
He digs his heels in and wrenches again. The silver threads holding the souls to him shimmer, stretch, and snap. Like a cut hawser, the red bindings lash loose and fall away into the mud. Shroudweaver is yanked forwards, staggers to his knees with a crack, teeth punching through his lip. Blood in his mouth, and a hum in the blood as the dead start to hunger. On the plain, the composite shudders, boils and screams. Purest pain, threaded through a thousand throats. And then within the pain, laughter. Deep, delighted and familiar. He last heard that voice in the heart of the mountain, maddened by darkness and torture – the Emperor of the Dead. Loosed, somehow.
What has his daughter done? What has she done?
The composite sways like a drunkard, reaches deep into itself and tears, ribbons of light falling from it like a sputtering lamp. The laughter louder, shriller. Anguished. Spiralling up by octaves.
As the composite crumples, Crowkisser’s army seizes its chance. All along the Astic line hands go up, voices holler, and they charge.
They’ve watched all the old gods die, and now they’ve watched her kill this new one in front of them.
At the composite’s sundering back, the remainder of Thell’s line edges towards the safety of the gates. The ravaged god in front of them roils and explodes, the dead inside boiling loose into the air. Crowkisser’s army gives chase, a howl of vengeance rising from their grey ranks.
Thell’s lines fall back in front of them.
It’s then that Slickwalker fires one last shot.
Shroudweaver watches it travel with a sick inevitability. Above the gate, the first shiver ignites with a crack like split ice, spreading into a hissing halo of bright fire that carves into the mountain rock for a second, two, then detonates with a roar that drownsout even the dying god, the mad Emperor writhing inside its splintering form.
The side of the mountain blossoms, black and acrid.
And the gates of Thell fall open.
Slabs of rock slide in great, groaning chunks. Dust billows in clouds. Thell’s retreating soldiers scream, lost in fire and ash as the mountain falls above them, all order gone. Those that survive flee over broken rock into the belly of the Stump.
And at their back, over the heads of Crowkisser’s running army, between the falling steel and the shouts of dismay from above, the hungry and unchained dead of the Empire pour into the depths of Thell.
73
the black heart
the blood song
the world’s only beat
the ceaseless hammer
red rhythm red rhythm red rhythm
—Inscription on the interior of the Gull Barrow
[Subsequently backfilled, sealed.
By order of the Grey Towers.]
Quickfish’s ears are ringing. His hands slick with someone else’s blood. Belltoller, her face sheared off, chest gone, the black filth of Slickwalker’s gun still smoking on her bones. He wants to be sick, but he can’t afford to stop moving. As they flee the battlements, Shipwright charges onwards and downwards with furious, unstoppable force, Roofkeeper dragged in her wake, Quickfish following him. Her face is set, one broad arm cradled around Belltoller’s shoulders, her left hand working something brass which spins and clicks and chitters. With every twist of her fingers, they seem to move faster, their feet lifting across the smooth rock that slopes down into the Stump.
