‘They let the godsdieboy. Let her tear out our names. You’ve seen what that’s cost us. Cost your family.’
‘I didn’t know you had love for the gods, Cog,’ Ropecharmer murmurs.
Her lip curls. ‘Love? Spit on them. Golden head-fuckers. All their parasite ways. No, we’re well rid of them.’ She pauses, chews her lip. ‘Not like that though, not so brutally. We needed a little skill. A little care. Not a teenage temper tantrum.’
He frowns. ‘So you’re for Crowkisser?’
Coglifter’s fist hits the workbench with a shake. ‘No! She’s the worst of them all. All that power and not a scrap of understanding. A pissy girl with the power to crack the world and not a shred of sense. Wracked because her mother died? Cry me another, Rope. All our mothers die.’
She keeps her back to him for a moment, her shoulder’s shaking. When she turns to face him, her eyes are wet with the light, small bloodshot veins spidering across the white. She’s not been sleeping.
‘We need to get shot of all of them, Rope. It’s the only way we get peace. The only way we make sure something like this neverhappens again. That your parents never happen again. That the south never happens again.’
Tenderly, she folds his fingers over the curve of the bomb. ‘And for that to happen, the ship needs to burn.’
Here, in the dark of the hold, as the ship rocks in the swell, Ropecharmer hears Coglifter’s words in his head again.
The ship needs to burn.
93
last light
dusk
water moving onto water
Three days later, the sea clear under the keel. A fresh wind in the sails, and treachery in the hold. Shipwright at the tiller and Shroudweaver on deck, his face turned into the salt wind whipping from the east. The last refugees tucked into the small island ports that studded the stark outcrops flung out beyond West Tide. A week at most to the Heron Halls. Shroudweaver twists red threads around his fingers and thinks of his daughter.
Below him, Ropecharmer strikes a match with shaking fingers, sets it to the wick of Coglifter’s parcel and mouths something that might be an apology, a prayer or a curse, but ends with, ‘I’m sorry.’
His feet hammer up through the decks, a straight turn to the rail and then over, in an arcing dive that cuts the water like a knife, scattering silver fish.
Shroudweaver turns to call after him, before his voice is lost to fire. The blast rips up from the hold like a rising howl, bowing planks and wood, the sides of the ship glowing like split rock and a scream roiling from her depths like a dying whale.
Shipwright turns as the deck pitches, and she sees only flame – flame in the rigging and in the sail, the spinners atop the mast already shrieking in horror and agony as heat splits their skins and sends shards of metal zipping across the deck.
She sees a sailor struck, staggering backwards into the hold, the hold which now yawns as red as the pit of the earth, which has melted into the belly of the ship, which tears her apart from port to starboard. The last thing she has of home is vanishing under the smoke.
Smoke, great black clouds. And steam as the heat of the ship’s dying hits the ocean. Shipwright lets it boil on her skin, her mind reeling from a betrayal so huge that she can only stand and watch as her home burns.
The crew rushes everywhere with water at first, and then to the boats as they realise how struck she is.
There’s another thunder of fire from below, and the ship gives up the ghost entirely, folding in on herself like a hammered blade, like a crushed flower.
The air fills with screams as the crew disappear into the depths, some afire even as they hit the sea, but still burning on the way down, their bodies plumes of red and orange in the clear water.
Shroudweaver is nowhere to be seen at first, then Shipwright catches sight of him hauling an injured man to one of the boats, half by the scruff of his neck, half by the glowing silver lines that pulse from his hand.
Her heart lurches in terror as she calls his name and his eyes turn to meet hers.
She starts towards him even as the deck under her feet bucks and cants with a third explosion, thick with red flame.
The world spins. Air whipping past her face. The sudden sharpness of the deck under her back.
Shipwright sees the great spar of the mast shear loose above her.
Watches it fall towards her like a lit taper on the wind.
