Then the spears fly, and the bodies fall. And once a host body dies, the god leaves. And once the gods leave, well, best to make sure of the others. Best to run the blade in twice. Best to set light to the thatch. In case they hid up there, in case they take root somewhere.
Burn it out. Cut it out. Burn it out.
He realises he’s shaking. The edge of the spear-point bites a thin red line across his palm that flows like ruddy gold in the morning light.
‘Tower and turn, Fish. What have you been doing?’ And Roof is there, unclenching his fingers, cleansing, bandaging.
‘Any deeper and you’d need stitches.’
‘Sorry,’ Fish says, and it’s exactly as pathetic as he deserves.
Roof crouches next to him. The bones stretch between them,sun slatting between the ribs, between the temple pillars. ‘Do I need to be worried, Fish?’
Quickfish smiles at him. His hand aches, but the sun is warm on his back. He feels bathed in gold.
‘No, never.’
Roof’s brows furrow.
‘Sure?’
Quickfish straightens and kisses the top of his head. He smells of sand and sun.
‘Sure. Let’s shake a leg.’
They turn and pull northwards again, leaving the skeleton of the town to the sun, to the shadow, to the soft shape of bones.
17
a strand of muscle the texture of salmon skin,
descending from the neck,
the manipulation of which can cause the body to move in strange ways.
—Simple Anatomical Explanations for the Rational Mind, Wicktwister
When Shroudweaver wakes, it’s morning. The light is pale and clean, and the air of Hesper is as dry as he remembers. He inhales the smells of the street, the chatter and the bustle, the hum and the clash of her. Hesper is a corpse, of course, a relic of the older wars, wars that were about smaller, more human things. But, like all the corpses he works with, she has a strange and beautiful life to her.
He swings his feet out from under the covers and presses them flat against the cool stone of the floor. His legs from the knee down are a mess of thin, bright scars. A memento from the south. As he runs his hands over them, he marvels at how thin his skin has become, stretched over the sticks and scaffolds of his fingers like a poorly wrapped gift.
The shroudweaving is taking its toll. He had softened the blow for Declan. It’s not just that souls burn brighter and faster now, like dust before a flame. His own body burns a little, each time. His veins are black with ritual silt, and there’s an ache between his ribs where the cries of dying gods have lodged and crusted.
It was so much easier, once. Before Crowkisser, yes, before the south, but even before that, when he was younger. Before even the war against the Empire and the rising of the Republic. Before he met Shipwright. When he wasyoung.
He could still see the light-woven branches of the Aestering, the Shroudweavers’ place of learning. He could still hear the chatter and murmur of the birch trees as they leant against each other. Not a building in the traditional sense, but a light-filled forest, bent and guided by staves and bindings, by ribbons strung thickly from tree to tree, pulling them into paths and bowers and shaded places over the space of years. The whole college had been shaped as much as the people inside it, as much as they would learn to shape, and bind and connect. He remembered how easy he’d found it all, laughing, giggling with his classmates as they spun the soul of a frog into the blossom of a flower, and they wove the life of the flower into the hairs of a rabbit.
Hearts in mouths, they had egged each other on to greater heights, stranger combinations. How restrictive he’d found it all. All those stern-faced masters; men and women as light and shadowed as the birches around them, moving gloved fingers and hands as they spelled out the rules, the most basic bindings, the never-to-be-broken.
A closed fist. ‘Red for binding.’ An open fist. ‘Silver for sending.’
He’d followed their movements, and the souls had flowed through him like water. Tiny gods of wind and light and earth and worms falling from his fingertips, curling into the waiting bodies of foxes or birds, or babies. Bringing them to life, or making their own lives stronger.
It seemed like every soul had burnt for a long time then, even the smallest. He had held life in his hands, made it, shared it and breathed it out into the world.
Of course, that was before he had questioned what lay beyond the bounds of the Aestering, what lay outwith the rules and beyond the ribbons. Before he had truly understood, before the Aestering had burnt and those silvered trees had wept smoke and ash.
Things are, perhaps unsurprisingly, harder now.
