Declan lets his shoulders slump, feels the pressure on his neck slacken ever so slightly.
He can hear his wife’s breath sliding in and out, hear the slow wicking of the lamp as it fills the room with light. Between the breaths, in the light, there is space.
His arm moves with the inhalation. When his fingers grab the gun barrel it burns, but he’s expecting that. He pulls before the next exhalation and feels Slickwalker stagger forwards, stumbling over her body as his knees hit the edge of the bed.
The gun goes off with a noise like a cat burning. Declan feels the heat of the bullet pass along his palm as he pulls and lifts. Slickwalker isn’t stupid. He lets go, but the momentum is enough. Declan spins, and the stock of the gun hits the reeling man across the temple with enough force to knock him to the floor. His blood scatters across the shadowed walls.
Declan lets the gun fall from his blistering fingers and steps backwards. The arms that enfold him are barely there, thin things of shadow and blood. And in his ear, Slickwalker hisses. ‘Never fast enough.’
Declan feels the air driven out of his lungs. The world darkens with shocking speed and there’s a red thunder in his head, like an insistent tide, a thick, fading drumbeat.
He struggles, but the arms around him are strong as steel. As the darkness wraps itself around him, he looks across at his dreaming wife, and for the briefest of seconds, he feels nothing but relief.
The last thing he experiences before he loses consciousness is a wash of golden light, a wind hung with spices and a voice like bellows-brass.
19
other halos
the barley crown
dawn across the sea
the hills before rain
the light that comes after
Shipwright takes the stairs three at a time. Her hair is pale gold, electric, haloed around the shout on her face. A few steps behind, Shroudweaver watches in delight. His lips move rapidly and quietly, his fingers flying in front of him, laced with silver thread, spinning a cat’s cradle of incredible complexity. His heart is thick with elation, the thrill of real magic, strong magic.
A true weaving, the first he’s done in years.
In the streets of Hesper, the dead bodies of the canals burst from the thick water and hang in confusion as their scoured limbs are wrapped in threads of golden light. Giving up the last dregs of their sodden souls, lending them to Shroudweaver. They blaze as they are harvested. Bone, weed, barnacle and tooth consumed as they’re rendered down into the light that moved them. The hastier the binding, the hotter it burns.
The Grey Towers of Hesper are suffused in gold, a sunrise of dead men.
Shroudweaver had felt Slickwalker arrive like a knife pressing on the inside of his tongue, all his old bruises aching as the blood in them fought to escape. Arrogant boy. Stupid boy. Did Slickwalker really think he could hound them for near on a year and they would never learn to look for him?
He knew his daughter, knew what she might teach a lover, or a stupid, heart-struck acolyte. A hundred ways of moving swiftly, beyond lock and bar.
He feels another shudder of activity from somewhere near Arissa’s rooms, exploding like rotten fruit on his tongue. He spits, wrenches, the red-wrapped fingers of his right hand closing into a fist, falling into the silvered threads of his open left palm. Shreds of souls gathered, then reflowed into a single stream, aimed upwards at Shipwright’s heart. Old corpses were the trickiest, barely offering a scrap of energy. Hesper burnt most of its dead. The only recourse was the canals – the lost, the drowned, the unmourned. He is scavenging the dregs, bottom-feeding.
It’s tempting to take too much. Hesper is a hungry city and her disregarded dead are legion. Their bodies spin slowly above choked, reed-thick waterways, bleached white from lack of light, hung with leeches.
And they glow. How they glow. He pulls the light from them with studied care, piece by piece, their bodies falling to ash and ruin as the brightness leaves them.
Even these discarded shells have a kick. He’s lifted by it, almost physically. There’s a lightness in his bones, like they were taken from a bird. Later there will be pain, the slow crusting of residue around his ribs, dull as old heartache. For now, high over the loops of the city, the light of the weaving scorches the shadows into sharpness. The streets slow to a crawl as drunkards, dockers and soldiers stop and gaze open-mouthed. The skies of Hesper are birthing gods. Pulses of new, pure, thundering energy that run silver lines of light and loss straight to the tower, to the steps, into the body of the Shipwright.
The stolen light hammers into her with increasing speed, a crescendo of brightness and beauty. And vengeance.
Raising a god in a living body is a dangerous thing. Worse still if that god was stitched together from the scavenged shards of a thousand souls, a swill of barely formed memories and lives jockeying for existence, a tattered sack of power slammed into a host body, for a few brief moments. Gods lingered, though. Fragments were always left in the muscle, the bone, like hedgerow burrs waiting to blossom.
Still, needs must.
Shroudweaver opens his left hand, and pushes outwards.
Above, Shipwright keeps climbing. She’s not sure how she got here or when she started, but she knows that Fallon’s in danger. Shroudweaver’s magic is like a fish lure in her lip, pulling her upwards.
Stranger things there with it, hammering into her back, her shoulders, a series of soft concussions. Each one like a shot of strong spirit. Her legs are lit with cold fire and her lips are sticky with remembered sweetness, teeth sharp.
