And ghost that he is, it takes him a while to notice the sound in his ears. When it begins, it builds slowly, something barely felt. A whine on the edge of his teeth, a weight behind his eyes. Tiredness, he thought. Exhaustion, or something worse. A hangover from so much death and blood. But nothing quiets the sound. It blossoms into a bone-deep hum. Sharpness oscillating up the octaves, until his head rings like cracked glass, growing louder and louder until he feels it in every inch of his body. He looks around wildly. No one else seems to hear it. No one seems to care. Panic builds in his throat, but even that’s drowned out by the sound.He’s about to call for help when the nerves in his hand light with feverish fire. His fingers dance of their own accord. The pain spreads up his arm in waves. Two bright lances of fire radiate from where the fountain creature’s fangs sank in. He screams out loud. In shock, Nigh echoes him.
From the depths of the mountain, something answers.
Deep-throated, its voice layered and spun with sufferings, echoing back on itself. Furious. Thick with barrows-dust and blood, like a clarion call. A dark beast awakened.
Shroudweaver and Skinpainter’s heads snap towards the sound.
Quickfish sees Roofkeeper run towards him, but his vision is slipping, doubling, he can barely see. He’s not quite here. There’s a city. A square. A cracked fountain. His palm burns.
From far away, he watches Shipwright call to Steelfinder. Hurried, rapid, staccato. Something about the children. Safe. Keeping the children safe. When the words leave Shipwright’s lips, they fall edged with gold. Steelfinder nods curtly in response. At her back, Shroudweaver, Skinpainter and Shipwright leave at speed. In sulphur, in red, in shadow. Quickfish watches them go, his head swimming loose in the pool of their departing voices.
He realises he’s on the ground, and that’s bad.
He’s pulled backwards into a circle of rising blades, Steelfinder and Roofkeeper. A few of the clearer-headed warriors. He should help. The danger’s not over. He staggers to his feet, swaying. He tries to take Nigh’s hand again, but misses and falls, his fingers grinding against stone.
The stone of a cracked fountain. Low in its belly, something golden and broken. Watchers around the rim.
Crowkisser’s to his left. Almost familiar now, pale as ever. Thin black hair spidered across her face. The air shudders and suddenly she’s Shroudweaver. He raises a red-ribboned hand in salute. To his right, stands something else. Huge and hungry. The thing in the mountain depths. The Emperor. Quickfish doesn’t recognise it, but the creature that bit his hand does. The fountain god remembers the Emperor. And now Quickfish does too. He can feel it growing beneath his feet. Stretching up intothe mountain, like blood in the vein. As if it can sense his thoughts, the Emperor turns towards him, its body liquid and changing. Many heads sway on its shoulders. Eyes flick in and out, like lit wicks.
Quickfish scrabbles backwards against the stone, bumping against Steelfinder. She mouths something and he tries to follow the lines of her lips, her furrowed brow. Almost manages it, until another wave of fire from his hand sets his arm alight with pain. He reels against Roofkeeper.
Against Shroudweaver, by the fountain. A red right hand on his neck, steadying him. Fingertips that feel like crow’s claws. To his right, the Emperor howls, and Quickfish hears it in his head and in the mountain. He wants to focus, wants to help, but everything burns. His head swims, and for a moment, he glimpses someone else, a fourth, a stranger standing dark, and quiet. They are robed and hooded, but he glimpses the briefest flash of a neat, grey beard. They hold something out towards him, glinting, across the cracked basin. A box.
Their fingers move around it, shining like blades.
The god in the fountain cries out in rage and fear.
And its voice is Steelfinder’s, dragging him back to reality. To the mountain under stone.
And into the chamber comes Icecaller.
Child of the Kinghammer.
Beloved daughter of Thell.
Her lips red with gore.
And all the mountain’s bloodied, screaming hordes at her back.
74
RISE
It all happens so fast. Icecaller sees Belltoller go down, clipped and eaten by bolts of black fire. Not a heartbeat to draw breath before her skin shivers with an arcane feeling she’s never felt before, like a plunge into an icy stream. The whole battle slips slowly out of sync; the movement of bodies past her stilted as twigs against the sun. Shouts of alarm and horror stretch across the sky, blurring like torn cloth. At the heart of it, Shroudweaver is dancing. At least, she thinks he’s dancing, his feet sketching loose circles across the stone, his shoulders dipping in fluid, brittle jerks, ribcage thrust out, arms pinned back like a bird’s wings. His right hand is sheathed red, and his left shimmers with arctic light, pulling cold out into the world from … somewhere, stretching it over the battle like a shroud. She gets the name now.
Icecaller watches him work, the breath hung in her lungs. Out on the Barrowlands, something is forming. Small at first. A pool of gold light that twitches and sings. She imagines she can see faces inside it, bright eyes and wings. A taste on her lips like honey. Shroudweaver’s fingers lift like rain, and the thing on the Barrowlands rises, sputtering white fire. It stretches ten, twenty storeys high. Almost as tall as the Stump, as tall as the ledge where Icecaller watches wide-eyed, her heart giddy with terror.
The shape of the thing steadies, Shroudweaver’s hands seeming to sculpt its edges. The briefest flicker of red thread catches the corner of her vision, but her eyes are held by the creature growing in front of her, individual faces and features sliding together in a flurry of golden light. The sound that comes from the heart of it is like a song. It turns its face towards Icecaller, and she staggersfrom the force of its gaze. She touches her own wet face, and realises she is weeping.
The creature stretches the height of the mountain, the Barrowlands’ shadows cast into grey whispers by its light, the storm held for a moment behind the clouds.
She lists forwards against the battlements as the army below stops in its tracks. All around her she hears the crash of buckle and steel, as the soldiers surrounding her fall to their knees.
The strain of the summoning is wreaking a toll on Shroudweaver. Icecaller clocks Shipwright stepping up to hold him steady, and shakes her head. It’d be just the thing for that pale little ghost to get himself killed now.
There’s never bad luck thought as doesn’t make it true. She hears the gunshot a moment before she sees it, ripping across the sky like a torn hawk, dripping something thick and black.
She’s moving before she realises how stupid that is, throwing herself over Shroudweaver’s waggling legs and scrawny back and bearing him to the ground, shield raised.
