‘I left you,’ he says. ‘Because some things have to be left behind.’ His fist falls and opens at the last moment to spider red threads in a binding web. They knit fast across a screaming jaw, punch their own ways in, lace tight. ‘I left you because youbroughtthis on yourself.’ A left-handed strike, and the Emperor’s side flares in silver. Lancing the wound. Pulling souls loose. As he weaves, its shape shrinks, eyes wink out. Jaws slide together into a single screaming mouth.
Shroudweaver takes its head in his hands. ‘I left youbecause you gave me no choice. I would have saved you, if you’d only let me.’
The Emperor watches him with wide eyes, as the red continues to weave up its struggling face.
‘I would have saved you, but you chose this, long ago.’ A third strike, open palmed, to the forehead.
The Emperor of the Dead falls to its knees, its form shivering and constricting, dwindling towards something more human. It looks up at him, and the writhing threads can’t hide the words. ‘Please. Don’t let them do this to me.’ An old echo, twenty years gone.
Shroudweaver kneels next to it. ‘They already did. I’m so sorry.’
And he speaks the Emperor’s name. He holds its hands. Sends it on.
For a moment, the Emperor’s soul slips away, like a lizard under a rock, into the between spaces, almost free, almost gone.
Until Shroudweaver feels something catch it. Something alien and cold.
The Emperor raises its head, slowly, so slowly. The threadsfall from its lips. Something black and acrid eating them into nothing. Its face in shadow. And the Emperor says. ‘I’m so sorry, Weaver. I was down here so long. In pieces, so long.’ There’s a pause, as the battle and the world spins around them. ‘I made some promises, down in the dark.’
Its face shudders, rips and melds, until it looks at Shroudweaver with a single, unblinking eye. Here, hundreds of miles from the ruin of the south, the eye that tore the world looks down on him again.
A surge of black-ice terror pierces his heart, before he’s pushed with the force of a fallen star. He tumbles through the between spaces as dwindling threads slip through his fingers. Shroudweaver grabs frantically at them, feels them slide over his desperate palms but there’s hardly any left. The force of the eye is upon him again, and the weight of what lies behind the eye. Power like nothing he’s ever felt, shredding the remnants of his control, devouring the weave. So few threads left, and beyond, only the endless static of the between.
But within this mountain, he remains the Shroudweaver. Within this mountain, somewhere, there is his daughter, and though his bones are tired and hollow, there’s a space in them where she lives, where he remembers her first words, her stumbling steps, her mother’s fingers on her brow, a silver brush in thin black hair. Laughter, singing, soft sleeps, deep dreams in twined arms and years later, the face of a bold young woman, bloodied, blackened and beautiful. He can’t watch his daughter die. He doesn’t have the strength left to stem this tide, but he can buy her time. He can buy them all time. He just needs to borrow a little power.
As Shroudweaver falls into the between, he feels emptiness try to claim him, sliding along the edges of his arms, his mind. So he weaves with the only material he has left – hope, memory, soul.
It’s hard to tease out at first. Thin, bright threads, barely glimpsed in the growing darkness, the drowning weight of the eye on him. A crushing, deep push, remorseless, heartless and familiar. He can barely see the threads in its darkness; onlywhen he turns and twists and they catch the light for the briefest moment, thin and slight, deceptively strong.
The first strand lodges around Shipwright’s wrist as she raises it above Kinghammer. Another thread twines around Skinpainter’s waist as they scramble upwards from the black sand, blood on their lips and a curse on their tongue. Shroudweaver feels himself wreathed in their souls, as the silver pulls flecks of their essence into his own. Shipwright is a memory of sea salt and cold heather, woodsmoke and wool. Skinpainter is cider, and nutmeg, worn leather and old medicine. Their essences burn in the heart of him, spreading a fire through the places in his bones where those memories all live, in hollows, pockets and fragments. Shroudweaver takes them all, kindling collated lives and loves, each one gathered to him like birds in a hedgerow, held against his heart; treasured.
He lights them all, and lets them go.
The first time he kissed Shipwright, on the deck of the ship, rocking on a slow swell, the southern sun hot as a hammer, her lips rough and salted, her hand on his back pulling him close and the tightening of her body in response. Lit and gone.
The time he saw her, feet thundering the earth, riding the shouts of their victorious army outside Luss. Lit and gone.
Further back, the sound of his daughter’s cries in the cradle, the way they shuffled down the registers into quiet contentment, all of her held against his shoulder, milk-breathed and drowsy. Lit and gone.
Standing at the edge of a cliff, watching her mother’s ashes sift down into the water below, a brief dark swirl in the waves, that faded as salt and spume moved onwards, onwards. Pottery shards and smudged hands. Lit and gone.
His dead wife’s spine in the moonlight, the curve of her, dark hair between his fingers and wine on her lips. Lit and gone.
Further back. The day he left the Aestering with a fresh spool of red thread and a thumping headache. Saltpetre and sulphur choking his lungs with strangeness. His shoulders still heavy from embraces, laughter, goodbyes. Lit and gone.
The day she took his hand, fingertips brushing with a passed note. Insects under the night sky, teeth against the light and drink from a jar that burnt like varnished fire. Lit and gone.
Further back. The day he arrived at the Aestering, rubbing sleep from his eyes. Fumbling with clasps and catches, straightening a robe over skinny legs. Lit and gone.
The day he awoke, drowsy by the fountain. Low winter sun on the water and golden light swimming lazily in its depths. Spiced pastries and slow songs that spun him to sleep.
The days he’s forgotten, of fires and softness and cool water, of strong hands and rocking that ran with the rhythm of a loving heart. Fragments of moon and sun, breath and dreaming. All of them, lit and gone.
Shroudweaver lets all his memories fly free, like little birds out against the darkness, clutching silver threads stitched in their beaks. As they fly, the mountain opens up before him, and he sees all the lives within it, thousands of souls, each cradling countless tiny birds to their breasts, bones and hearts, yearning, dying, fighting. He ties himself to them all, and borrows the smallest fragment of power from each, bright droplets flowing into him as he hangs in the between.
The light that fills him is slow and soft, filled with the lives and deaths of strangers. It lines his bones, his breath, pushes into the between spaces until the darkness fades, and the weight of the eye lifts. Shroudweaver’s body floats in silver, buoyed by the wings of a thousand small, shining birds. The whole mountain is spread before him, the struggling lives of its inhabitants flickering in a spiralling weave as the red rage of the Emperor spreads through their souls. Thousands of panicked lives flare in hope, terror and triumph. Shroudweaver gathers fragments of their souls to him along glimmering lines, and then delves deeper, his attention drawn to a ragged, confused thing driving down through the mountain. It takes him a moment to recognise the thrum of Icecaller’s hammering heart, to pick out the sound of her soul beneath the fever which roils in her veins. The Emperor’s touch has claimed her.
Distantly, abstractly, he watches the red hunger seething in her flesh pull her ever closer to a knot of fears and hopes, to lights he recognises as Quickfish, Roofkeeper, the little girl, Nigh. That last with a few bright birds clutched to her chest, held so tightly their fluttering feathers can barely move. The only way he can help any of them is to borrow a little light from each. To cut the infection off at its source, for a few scant moments. If he can bind the Emperor, even briefly, he can slow the dead.
