Its face presses against his, a chewed ruin pocked with teeth-marks. A stench like a dug-up dog. Its cheeks are torn with half-healed scabs, matted blood. Kinghammer’s bones grind when it speaks. ‘You let them.You let them. You. Let. Them.’ Beneath its skin, the pulsing dead of the Empire stretch out in rage, hands, skulls and teeth reaching for Shroudweaver.
The Emperor throws its head back, unleashing a scream that cuts the air like clotted glass. Shroudweaver feels his skin shudder, saltpetre and sulphur blown back into his lungs. There’s a terror in his stomach like he’s never known. The touch of somethingutterly alien against his soul. Yet still, distant, he can feel the warmth of Shipwright’s hands against his spine, slowing his hammering heart. Time is short, but he allows himself a few panicked breaths. It’s all that’s needed before his training comes back to him with the speed of long practice. There is a way out of this. The Emperor must be bound, again.
He reaches for a needle, stitches, darns. Threads regathered and woven around the Emperor’s grasping limbs. Not the red of the body, but the silver of the soul.
Its eyes lock onto his dancing fingers. ‘You dare?’
Shroudweaver ignores it, focuses on his work. Darns, tightens, mends, holding his body tight in the stillness of the between, keeping half an eye on the dead, half an eye on Shipwright, as she dodges and weaves on the black sand of the beach. She reels as Kinghammer swings at Skinpainter’s wards. The Emperor has taken the weapon that gave Kinghammer his name and turned it to destroying Skinpainter’s work. The great black hammer drips screaming red sparks, smokes, and ricochets off the barrier which flares with every strike. Skinpainter’s face twists in a defiant scream, their legs hammering down into ink pooled around their ankles. The wards tighten.
Shroudweaver’s mind splits between worlds, half an eye on Shipwright, half an eye on the thing in front of him, the Emperor – or the thing the Emperor has become, riding Kinghammer’s body like a sway-backed nag. Here, in the between, Shroudweaver can see its true form, paying only the barest adherence to the outline of the man Shroudweaver had chained over twenty years ago. Its shape is fluid now, roiling with the stress of pulling in the souls of the dead, sprouting eyes, teeth and tongues. Kinghammer’s shape shimmers distantly beneath, like fish under water.
Overlaid on his bones, is the Emperor of the Mountain, the Dreamer of the High Ice. He is not doing well, lips blackened and torn from decades chewing weakly in the dark. Skin scarred with a thousand bites, marked by the memory of pain. Shroudweaver imagines he can see the toothmarks of every revolutionary scored deep, down to the bone. Kinghammer. The Deadsingers.Belltoller. They’d welcomed in their new world with a feast. They’d waited until he’d left to do it.
Not left, but turned his back, Smokesister’s voice admonishes in his head. The fire of her broken binding snakes through his chest like lit wire.
There’s the briefest flicker in the silver threads as his conviction wavers. Unacceptable. He catches hold of the thought and crushes it. He is not solely to blame for this. Guilt is an indulgence he doesn’t have time for.
A binding weave is needed. That and nothing more. His tutors’ voices surface like the rill of a river, steady beneath the howling dead, the flash of magic.
The weave first, then the world.
As if his hands remember the lesson, they follow old patterns through the air with speed. Silver thread gathers around him as he moves his body into the first form, darns, stitches, and binds. Spider’s web, bat’s wing, the very smallest knots at first; a cast net, seeking connections with the soul of Emperor. The hooks are easy to find – memory, hate, the shared experience of pain. Shroudweaver gathers them all in, the smallest fragments of silver at first, teased from the very edges of its shape, then lashed to the mountain. Bound to the air, to the stones, to each other. They are so fragile, a broad mesh, vulnerable to a single tear, but there’s nothing else to work with down here. Well, that’s not strictly true. Shroudweaver’s eyes flash to the struggling souls of Thell’s dead, to the bright lights of Skinpainter, and Shipwright. There are stronger materials here, if he’s willing to take them. He’s pulled up short again by the voice of his tutor.
The weave holds. It takes only as a last resort.
Shroudweaver shakes his head, shifts his feet into the second form. Flowing grass. River top. Wave curl. No, nothing else to work with, just himself and his skill alone. He sews, he stitches, he binds. He’ll make it enough.
The Emperor is taken in at first. The slow, silverfish movements of weaving run through Shroudweaver’s fingers, a lullaby of hands calling to the monster in front of him. He watches itseyes turn to follow the silver, the gestures, the line of his bones. His right hand unspools red even as his left stitches silver. As he makes the first knot of binding and ties off, the Emperor lurches, the spell broken. Its legs stagger and every one of its eyes snaps to his wary face. ‘NO.’
The shout shudders through Shroudweaver’s bones. He feels them break inside him. Little shards of white floating into the red.
‘NO,’ and the Emperor’s hand plunges deep into the meat of his shoulder. He feels nails brush against his veins. Feels them. Even here, in the between, where nothing should be felt.
‘NO,’ another hand strikes on the right, and, impossibly, hefeelsit severing muscle, burrowing deep. He screams as he’s pulled forwards.
‘NO,’ the mouths of the Emperor say, lunging for him, and Shroudweaver’s scream is cut off by a foreign tongue, foreign teeth that bite down on his own.
The form of the Emperor is distorting terribly now. The torrent of souls distending the last vestiges of a human shape. Shroudweaver can hear the pop of cartilage, the wet stretch of bone as it struggles to hold. He can feel the hunger of a thousand souls as they clamp down on his jaw.
Another set of limbs tear themselves loose from the roiling mass, plunge in below his ribs, seeking liver, kidneys, finding organs and slicing tendons. Red threads loosen and drift away. He can feel himself dying – all the rules he knows are broken, and he is dying.
‘No,’ the Emperor says, its mouth full of his, and Shroudweaver feels the word in the heart of him. Beyond the shadow, blood and bones of the between spaces, he sees Kinghammer shatter Skinpainter’s wards. His hammer arcs towards their upraised face, and they look, for a second, relieved.
Shroudweaver can do nothing, he’s held in the between, pinned like a butterfly as the life drains out of him.
Then, impossibly, a blur of motion, and Shipwright catches the hammer flat in her fist. Brass stutters and whines. The spinner isfailing, but something beyond it is giving her strength. Her shout is golden in the heart of the mountain, in the face of the end, the ghosts of new gods lining her tongue.
The hammer holds. And it’s then Skinpainter strikes, hitting Kinghammer open-palmed above the heart. Ink spatters, takes hold, lodges deep, as it smokes and burrows against the skin. Kinghammer staggers, and for a second his connection with the Emperor is broken. Shipwright presses her advantage, stepping out of the wards, and swinging a right hook that blurs with a wasp-brass sting. It catches Kinghammer on the side of the jaw, pitching him sideways. Skinpainter’s ink flares like a struck match on his chest.
Hung in the between, Shroudweaver watches them fight, his body held in the rot of the Emperor’s grasp, his lungs full with the breath of a half-eaten man.
He watches them fight, and he watches Shipwright win. A wild swing from Kinghammer, that she ducks under like a passing breeze. A weave to the left, to the right, and she’s inside his reach, a wild grin on her face, teeth bared and flecked with blood. Kinghammer roars with rage, the Emperor’s voice hard on his tongue. Shipwright laughs. In the face of it all, in the depths of the mountain, she laughs, then swings her head forwards with brutal intent. Kinghammer’s nose collapses with a crunch. He reels backwards, mired in the swarming dead. He tries to raise the hammer, but Shipwright’s already there; Skinpainter’s ink lashing out to clear her a path that she traces like lightning to grab the hammer’s shaft. For a moment, the pair are locked, muscles straining. A hum in the between places, and Shroudweaver sees Shipwright suddenly haloed in gold. There’s a sweet taste on his tongue, an explosion of honey and spice, god-magic blazing forth as she leans in, and wrenches. The haft of the hammer twists, screams like a wounded animal and breaks. Kinghammer lurches backward. Shipwright stands there, golden and steadfast, hair a mess, breath heavy, and Shroudweaver’s heart sings for her.
As Kinghammer staggers, the Emperor hisses in pain. There’sthe briefest loosening of control, and Shroudweaver feels a pin drop in the back his mind.
Now.Saltpetre and sulphur flares, the powders on his skin burning bright into nothing. A brief actinic punch, a last line of defence against the vengeful dead, so simple he’d learnt it as a child. It’ll buy him seconds at most, and after this, he’s left wide open.
It works though. The Emperor recoils, and as its talons slide loose Shroudweaver raises his red right hand.
