There’s something cold in Shroudweaver’s eyes for a moment; cold or remote. Certain. A ghost of the weavers of old.
Kinghammer’s body batters against the circle again. The dead clustered around it peel themselves off the walls, scraping themselves from the floor as they shudder towards that small cage of hissing sparks, backed against the dark.
‘Please, love,’ Shipwright says. And if she’s not begging, she’s close.
Gently, carefully, Shroudweaver unpicks her fingers from around his wrist.
‘There’s no other option.’ A little steel in his tone still, a vestige of his training.
Shipwright’s shoulders sag even as his hands dance towards Skinpainter.
A quick-closed door?
Skinpainter nods in relief, steps forwards, and embraces him. Their rags flare. The ink beneath their feet fountains in streams, in spikes, pulling Shroudweaver down like a rip-stream tide. Down into the between, and gone.
Shipwright screams in frustration and fear.
Kinghammer’s body flings itself against the circle.
The world shakes, blackens and breaks.
77
The weave first, then the world.
The god in the hand, before the god in the mouth.
The god in the heart, before the god in the hand.
—Aestering Knotsong, No. 1
At first, Shroudweaver feels nothing. The memory of Skinpainter’s breath hot on his face, the sudden twist of pain in their eyes as they tear a way into the between spaces. He hears Shipwright’s fading scream at his back, feels the weight of the Emperor against the sparking wards, the thunder of its fists.
Then the ink reaches his legs, and pulls.
He goes under.
The world shifts, splinters. He lets himself drift loose. It’s easy now, the between space opening up to him like a sinkhole, a cenote of darkness. Skinpainter’s magic blurs the edges between worlds and yanks him from one to the other with a swift, merciless tug. Shroudweaver’s already halfway there from pain and exhaustion. A warhorse stink of gunpowder and saltpetre surrounds him like a corona, and beyond that, the thick taste of rot and the grave. Power lingers in the between like static after rain.
The first thing he sees is his own body, sunk to its knees, head pressed against Skinpainter’s stomach, shoulders held in Shipwright’s broad hands. When she shouts, the air filigrees her lips, coloured by scraps of spinner magic, the last dregs of the composite’s touch. His abandoned body’s no better, enmeshed in the remains of the unbinding. Red threads run from his hands, his hair, his eyes. Smokesister was true to her word though. It’s all falling apart, fraying as he watches. Time is short if he wants to return.Ifhe wants to return. There’s a pull here, a call toquietness. It would be easy, so easy, to slip back into nothing, and leave all this behind.
Except, he’s not alone here. The unbound dead of the Empire shoal in the grey between, freed as they are from the prison of his heart, from the brief hold of the composite he’d called forth, and scattered by his daughter.
Here, in the space between, they crouch like jackals over the fallen. Shroudweaver can see the souls of Thell’s people struggling weakly beneath their touch. Ripped, swallowed, and repurposed piece by piece, ridden like broken horses.
Time is short if he wishes to salvage this, and the dead are not the worst of it.
The Emperor is here, as he had always feared it might be.
Kinghammer’s body is only a rough outline in the between, a husk, a half-burst chrysalis. The Emperor’s true form blossoms in the void, unbounded by broken meat. Not a man anymore. Not even the pretence of a man, but something stranger, protean, and twisted.
It turns its eyes on him, jaw unhinging, teeth shuddering outwards along it. A tongue unfurls in the back of Kinghammer’s torn throat.
‘You.’
The between place has no distance.
The Emperor stutters across the intervening space with the black buzzing of a wakened hive. A few of Shroudweaver’s red threads snag and break loose as he recoils.
