For a moment, they think the tide has turned. Some stillness swims in the waters of battle. They’ve travelled far though. Much as they’d like to fool themselves, they know the real rhythms ofthe hungry sea – first the calm, then the storm returns in earnest.
As if on cue, Quickfish screams in pain, clutching at his arm, and reels backwards. Nigh wails in shock, and a second later, the mountain is rocked by a shout of rage and horror, an inhuman bellow that roils up through the caverns, vibrating Skinpainter’s spine, their guts, the wet absence under their ribs where scraps of the gift spasm in fear.
They watch Shroudweaver and Shipwright pull towards it like fish on a lure. They don’t need to turn, don’t need to wonder. They recognise that rage, that scream, that boundless madness. The Emperor has finally awoken.
Now he calls out from the spire above the dark lake, a lodestone in the depths. Punishment for Skinpainter’s small mercy all those years ago, for that moment of hesitation. Now, this creature brings a final unravelling of all the patterns they have woven to keep their people safe. For all their work, all their care, they have been too slow, always a few steps behind the turn of the world. Skinpainter laughs under their breath. How depressinglyconsistent.
As if summoned, Shroudweaver reaches Skinpainter’s side in moments, offering a hand. Skinpainter doesn’t meet his eyes. Shroudweaver is the only other person who truly knows what cries out in the mountain’s depths. They’ve been here before, decades ago, on the shore of the lake, as the Emperor was finally sealed in behind black rock, eyes rolling madly. Both of them weak with mercy after the triumph of their rebellion, and sick of killing. Skinpainter can read the recognition in Shroudweaver’s eyes, shock falling into a lined face already worn down with the care.
Shipwright is close behind him, calling over to Steelfinder. Beyond her, Quickfish is on his knees, his lover hunched over him. Skinpainter squints at them, briefly. Rolled eyes, but a steady enough pulse at the throat. He has as good a chance as any of them.
Which is to say, not much. At the very back of the room, the children cluster with their guardians. All of them are doomed to rise ravening if something isn’t done about the Emperor ragingbelow. At the thought, a fury lights in Skinpainter. This timewillbe different. They’re the only one that can fix this. Them, and this southern string-twister they’ve been cursed with for so long. They grip Shroudweaver’s wrist tighter, pulling him close. ‘The lake,’ they whisper. His assent is nothing more than a short, sharp exhalation, but it’s enough. Time for him to make up for what his daughter has done.
The pair leave at speed, aches pushed down into the marrow of their bones. At their back, Shipwright doggedly follows, humming with barely suppressed energy, a brass spinner stuttering to life in her hand. Skinpainter feels it lift them, like the push of a wave moving from fresh to salt water. More use than her paramour by far.
Well, perhaps that’s not entirely fair. Shroudweaver too plies quick and clever craft; saltpetred brows and sulphured fingers, strands of red thrown to catch and bind, defend and destroy, clearing their path through the dead.
Yet all of this is performance. It takes Skinpainter only a moment to realise the reality that moves down here in the dark.
The battle is lost.
The dead crowd the halls, wearing the bodies of friends and allies. Skinpainter watches all they have worked for fail, over and over again. All around them, the last few living defenders fall, squirm, rise and rend.
A great heaviness fills their heart, the sadness like a choking weight. Their home is broken. The Deadsingers missing, Belltoller dead. Kinghammer vanished. Icecaller too. Only they are left from Thell’s old guard, and at their back, only Shipwright and Shroudweaver. What can they possibly hope to save now?
Yet despite the carnage, Shroudweaver walks with purpose, his fingers moving in soft tarantellas as the air fills with blood, and the dead things that move through the blood. The red threads around his wrist are wound tight, sulphur and saltpetre smoking at his temples, his lips set in a thin line. When the dead rush them, the threads loosen, gold light pulses on their brows, and they jerk like string-cut puppets and fall.
Behind Shroudweaver comes Shipwright. Like a wall, like a high-roofed church. When the dead pass him, her hands move. A spinner in the left, slicing the air into strips that she slides between, her right hand balled into a fist that swings slow and easy, to catch throats, shoulders and calves. She kills nothing. She shouts as she fights, in a language Skinpainter has never heard. Something fierce and old in a voice like bellows-brass. It lights their mind on fire.
Always, she holds Shroudweaver, catching him when the dead drive forwards, forging like a prow through screaming waves. Still they come. A voice curdled black with hate howls below, the Emperor calling to his subjects. As the trio plunges downwards, the mountain shakes with the aftershocks of Slickwalker’s work at the gate. The fire of the shivers is likely dead by now, but the vibrations they’ve unleashed wrack ice and stone, great chunks of glacier slip and crash into nothing. Shipwright flinches with each battering impact, but drives them onwards regardless. Skinpainter tries to keep pace, their breath harsher with every step, painfully conscious of every small scrape on their body opening to new life as they hammer into the depths of the Stump. The ink on their skin smoulders with constant fire as they hurtle ever downwards, towards the lake.
Distantly, far above, they sense the people of Astic gain the deeper tunnels beyond the gate. Still, still they’re singing, the light of their voices bright upon the pattern. Skinpainter would curse them, but they haven’t the breath. Some of their own people must still be alive up there, because Skinpainter can sense them striking back, can feel the cut and thrust of their blades, their bodies, their dying.
It doesn’t matter who wins above. The dead rule the depths now. Crowkisser’s army have no idea what they’re cutting their way into.
All of it is far, far beyond their control. The sheer scale of the disaster fills their thoughts, a swirl of panicked voices in Skinpainter’s head, teetering on the edge of mad, hopeless, laughter. Sweat beads on their skin as their ink flicks out likea whip. They can’t stop. Can’t surrender. This time has to be different.
The dead don’t give two shits for the hopes of an old mountain warlock. They strike in yowling waves, more careful now, perhaps wary of the power the three of them can bring to bear. Perhaps more closely guided by the Emperor’s mind as the fractured parts of his soul slide together amid the growing dead. Still, Skinpainter presses onwards. Shroudweaver and Shipwright follow, uncomplaining, except for the harsh hiss of their breath, shouted warnings and cries of concern. Professionals – that’s what’s needed to salvage this, hard heads in front and the valuable assets far, far away.
Skinpainter needs to find the other lynchpins. They’ve seen Quickfish and Nigh, both secure, or as secure as can be. But where is Icecaller? Where is the blasted Kinghammer? The rest of the mountain can be sacrificed in a pinch, but not them. They are too important to Thell, too dear to their old damn heart.
That same heart lurches like a drunken cart-horse as they rush onwards through tunnels wet with killing. The air is thick with the dead, buzzing in red swarms, barely bound to bodies now and growing stronger with every breath the Emperor takes, spasming with delight as his broken throat coughs out a challenge like a cornered lion. Pulling them downwards to the heart of the mountain, to the black spire, and the lake.
The Emperor’s magic is still not strong enough to touch the three of them. For a moment, Skinpainter feels the years slip away as the adrenaline spike of battle lifts their heart. A brother on their left, a sister on their right, enemies all around – a simple pattern, solvable. They channel that certainty into their magic, painting as they run. The ink is lithe as a cat, stark geometrics flowing from their hands and back to their skin in a push and pull of interlocking power. Where the dead are caught in its lines, they float like bees sung to sleep by smoke. Chances for a little more salvage emerge down here, still pockets of resistance, hale warriors that greet their coming with cries of shock and joy. They paint the survivors, strengthening them against the burrowingdead, the corpse-call in their blood, the avenues opened by nicks and cuts. The Emperor’s legacy.
Shroudweaver guards their back, his threads singed and fraying, bruises blossoming on his arms like puddles after rain.
They’re running out of time. Skinpainter feels hollow inside. There are spaces in them where they’ve forced the ink outwards. It was necessary, but now there are absences. Power has leaked from their body, leaving them bare as the rind on sucked fruit. Worst of all is the bleeding remnant of the gift. An aching space beneath their ribs, scoured empty. As if to mock them, they feel a distant pulse in their veins as Lightmender struggles far above. The first blossoming of the gift as it latches on to its new host. The remnant that clings to Skinpainter spasms in sympathy. Skinpainter bites their dry lips in a strange twist of ecstasy at the unfamiliar sensation, tasting spice and clove.
They have to focus. Down here, Shipwright strides grimly onwards, her hair clotted with sweat and blood, her knuckles split and strapping torn. One hand clumsily works a struggling brass spinner which clunks and stutters. She shoots them a weary smile, blowing a clinging strand of hair clear of her face.
Another brief moment of camaraderie. It’s about all that’s keeping them alive as the dead press in, the three of them driven closer together by swinging arms and snarling teeth, until they are back-to-back, a small flare of defiance against the dark. They’re so close to the Emperor’s prison now that Skinpainter can smell the waters of the lake, the damp stone of the spire.
The dead skirt the edges of their small circle. They fear the gold light, the brass stutter, the red and the black. Distantly, selfishly, a little bit of Skinpainter’s brain rejoices at being in the heart of battle again. The thrill of dancing just the right side of death. The measured push of bodies moving in rhythm. The ebb and swell of power on the edges of their tongue. Brief flares of victory and consternation. All of it a seductive lie that lasts until they get a good look at the faces which plunge howling towards them. Familiar and beloved and broken. They try to strike them on the temples, the shoulders, to deal only gentle destruction.Laying them low until there’s time to pull the dead loose. To yank the infection from their veins. But there is no time. Rescue isn’t coming. Recovery is a joke. Thell’s halls sound to the guttural skirl of a dead man’s vengeance. The Emperor’s voice clearer with every passing moment. It pulls them onwards, a broken dog yelp in the night. Irresistibly drawing their feet down towards the great black lake, the spire that rings with his rage. Thell empties its guts around them, and they bludgeon their way through.
Finally the sloping darkness seeps onto the lakeshore. Their ragged little band spills out on the eastern side of a chamber so large that Skinpainter’s eyes can’t make out the far shore. Miles of black water, smooth and silent. The mountain’s miracle, fed by some unfathomably deep aquifer even further below, and the reason Thell should never have fallen. It’s normally home to nothing but pale, eyeless fish who swim the lake, bats with wings like shredded paper that skirl beneath the spire; normally guarded day and night by a few brave men and women Skinpainter had trusted with this greatest, most awful secret, rotated out every few hours lest the blackness and silence drive them mad.
That silence endures, somehow, despite the furore of the battle above, the whole cavern vast and echoing. Shipwright turns to play rearguard as they pelt toward the lake. She’s not needed. The dead pursuing them mill at the tunnel entrance, seemingly unwilling to touch the black sand of the shore.
