Above him, the thing that was the Emperor has no birds, no light. Its new eye roves ceaselessly as the mouth underneath it gibbers and curses. The fear Shroudweaver felt fades and a wave of pity crashes over him. The eye is a horror; formless and alien, but the Emperor was a person once, and Shroudweaver knows how to bind a person. He moves towards it slowly, precisely, like a surgeon, like an undertaker; like a Shroudweaver.
He pulls the bright silver light of the mountain’s souls into himself, and sends it out again down the threads, attenuated at first, then fiercer, wrapping around the Emperor’s rolling shoulders, its broken fingers, and wailing mouth. Quieting, mending, deceiving. It’s still too strong. He can feel it bucking against the weave. Whatever shred of a man once filled this body is lost, Shroudweaver far too slow to save him. Too slow by decades, by centuries maybe. He can’t stop what’s already happened so instead, he does his job.
The shroud he weaves is thin at first, a few scant strands pulled together, but it thickens like lake ice. The Emperor struggles at its touch, but then quietens, until only its eye is left roving and roiling. Eventually, Shroudweaver covers that too, stitching it closed, letting it rest, blinding it for a moment.
Left alone, the fragments of what was the Emperor hang in darkness, the silvered shape of a man, held together and woven into silence as best he can. With a red hand and a heavy heart, Shroudweaver reaches forwards and pushes it into the void, his last kindness to this monster. Let it have a little sense of self, a little piece of commemoration, before the eye devours it whole. Perhaps something will escape.
Even as he humours the thought, there’s a flare in the far darkness, as if a smith’s hand had struck metal. A feeling of rage and hunger washes over him, and the last silver light from the Emperor’s soul goes out. A dull gong of dread hammers in his heart.
There is a moment where the blackness hangs empty in front of his eyes, a moment before the velvet of the between spaces shudders, and a rent splits the dark, before everything he can see becomes the opening of that terrible, merciless eye.
Shroudweaver has to get out, before the thing that devoured the south takes him too. He can already feel the weight of it on him, like a fathomless ocean. With shaking hands, he reaches for the silver threads holding him apart from the world, and tears them loose. In an instant, the between spaces pop like a soap bubble. His body hammers down onto ink-stained sand and he feels a crack as his knees strike rock.
He retches, spitting up silver threads, blood, little black lumps. Shipwright’s arms are around him, her hands soft and strong against his spine, rubbing away the convulsions.
‘You bastard,’ she says, her voice wet with relief. ‘You utter bastard.’
Skinpainter reaches around his waist and pulls him up, moving him gently back from the broken circle, the softly twitching body of Kinghammer, the dazed and confused dead, suddenly slumped like puppets with their strings cut.
‘I didn’t think you’d do it,’ Skinpainter murmurs, their voice warm and wry. ‘Always got to surprise me.’
Shroudweaver fumbles for a moment, claws at his lips, cleaning the stench of sugar off his tongue. He forces words out through the sweetness. ‘It’s not gone. Just weakened. Plan’s changed. We need to get out of here.’
As if to drive the point home, the dead begin to stir again, slowly reeling to their feet, their eyes lighting as the Emperor’s infection once again takes hold.
Shroudweaver grabs Skinpainter’s wrist. ‘I felt it in Icecaller. We have to get back to them. Now.’
Skinpainter’s face folds with sadness. ‘Ah. Of course.’ They rubtheir cheek with a broad hand, and glance at Shipwright. ‘Need some help with this idiot?’
She grins, kisses the top of Shroudweaver’s head. ‘Every day of my life.’
And so the pair take him in strong arms, on thin legs, back down into the deep mountain, a hundred new little birds nesting in the hedgerows of his heart.
78
AS CROWN OF GLORY
AS POLISHED STONE
AS HOLLOW BONE
A thousand heartbeats earlier, Crowkisser pulls her arm back and throws. She can feel the composite in her bones, in her brain. It throbs in her veins like a fever. The scale of her father’s work chokes her, thousands of spirits, caged into this monstrous thing. She hasn’t seen a god since the south, since she watched them tear themselves limb from limb. She had forgotten how beautiful they are, how all-consuming. She wants to fall into its arms, fall to her knees, have it carry her away from here.
The stolen scrap of the Emperor’s bone seems to hang in the air for a second, between the lightning. It tugs at her. The rest of her arm wants to follow it, to burrow into the golden skin of the god.
Her skin is wet from the driving rain. She can taste charcoal on her lips. At her back, her people waver. She sees Sandsinger smile like a child, curl up in the drowsy mud like a baby.
The composite regards her with her father’s eyes, massive, burnished, beautiful. She hesitates for the briefest moment, as the fingerbone lingers at the top of its arc. Remembers Crabflick’s severed hand. Then she turns and runs. The explosion rips the sound from the air. The pressure wave catches her back, lifts her, and for a moment she feels as if she’s flying.
She could shift shape now if she wanted. She feels wings at the edges of her skin. Instead, she lets the ground rise, hit her. Her shoulder takes the impact, pounding up and through her bones. She rolls with the pain, sprawling on her back. A spear splits theearth next to her head. She watches it distractedly. A ringing in her ears tolls her skull like a wet bell, her fingers pushed into the soil.
She can feel the ground crawling beneath her. Deep under the mud and bone, and the bits of her friends. The dead, stirred to sudden life.
Lightning thunders down, smokes the ripped earth into stinking craters.
She pulls herself to her knees, spits soil and blood.
There’s laughter in the ruins of the god, something mad and wild twitching in the remains of its form, pulling the scraps of spirits to it. Shroudweaver’s creation is turning on itself, driving deep into the composite’s guts with golden hands, unleashing all the briefly bound dead, and laughing as it tears. Something familiar in that laughter; from the gallows on a salt-lashed road, from a corpse on a temple slab – the Emperor. She has been betrayed.
