She kisses him on the forehead, her lips light on his skull, and holds him there for a second.
‘Die properly, or come back as someone better.’
She pushes slightly, steps away.
Shroudweaver backs to the door, his eyes lingering on the slump of her shoulders, the slight shake in her leg. She doesn’t turn around.
When he steps into the street, the moths have fallen to swarm the lamps. In the flickering light, the birch tree looks like it’s aflame.
42
AMETHYST
CAT BONE
FLINT
—Graffiti found in the Barrow of the Bells [Subsequently backfilled, sealed. By order of the Grey Towers.]
It’s a long walk home. The Grey Towers visible across the whole city, sparking with flame as the great globes of oil and pitch that swing from them are lit in advance of the coming night, stringing those thick grey necks with pearls of fire.
Shroudweaver’s tired feet carrying him through the hollows of Thriftglow. The streets rise and fall unpredictably, built atop the ruins of older roads. When those buried stones foundered, whole districts sagged, their backs bowing like old mules.
A few turns take him past the closing of the Ghostmarket. The stallholders are folding cloths, bundling rarities and garbage together with equal precision. A few tip their heads or touch a finger to their lips, the wrist of their right hand, half greeting, half warding gesture. He would always be known in this city, for better or worse.
Shroudweaver pulls his hood up, wrapping his scarves tighter. His vision narrowing, the cowl’s frayed edges filtering the light. His fingers worrying at the red threads around his hand, his mind worrying at Smokesister’s words.
Would he have done things differently, if he’d known the cost? Probably not.
Smokesister was right, as much as it caught in his throat to admit it. He’d rushed from hell to harrow without stopping tocatch breath. He’d improvised the binding at Thell. He’d improvised most everything since he’d left the Aestering, but what else could he have done?
He remembered the first stories he’d heard of the mountain, of the Empire of the Dead, and its Emperor. It had been in his first few weeks in Hesper, twenty long years ago, as he’d rolled in determined to ferret out the city’s secrets, nose sharp as a bloodhound for the faintest rumour from the north.
There had been rumours aplenty, hanging on the lips of drunkards or purchased for good coin from traders and travellers. Stories sifted from noble parties where the walls shivered with secrets – plenty had heard of the Empire, where it crouched low in the heart of the mountains, quiet and unwelcoming.
Far fewer had heard of its ruler, the Emperor of the Dead. Such a ridiculous title, he’d rolled his eyes at it, the first few times it had caught his attention. Even in the Aestering, when his teachers had warned him with tight-laced hands about the dangers, he’d taken it all with more than a little salt.
That was until he started digging under the skin of the rumours. He’d always been good at piecing together stories, just a different kind of stitching, really. When he’d begun to ask after the Emperor, he’d barely had to work for it at all. The tale had a momentum of its own, something familiar in it that ran like a rat in the back of his mind.
Legend had it that the Emperor had come centuries ago, on the heels of the glacier, as the ice peeled back from the mountains. That he’d slowly brought the people of the Barrowlands into the fold. Whether they were lured or coerced was unclear, for everything Shroudweaver heard had that loose quality of myth.
Some things remained constant, nuggets of truth in that looser soup of muttering. The Emperor was always accompanied by his three lieutenants: the Gem, the Bone, the Stone. That was how one fat old trader had named them, his fingers shaking in the lamplight. They faded in and out of the story like the tides. The closer to the present Shroudweaver got, the more they changed in the telling, becoming symbols, ritual shapes. The Emperor’sage was as fluid as his followers. Was he a mortal man, come on the glacier’s edge? Or something else, there since the very start of the thaw? Perhaps, some suggested, he was the cause of that great sundering, of the ice falling to cold and mud. Whatever his age, his rule seemed to have barely registered for decades, the southlands and Hesper too concerned with their own bustling trade to push north towards the thaw. Until about half a century ago when rumours grew of villages taken, and of men who wouldn’t die whether cut with sword or pierced with bow.
The few emissaries Hesper sent north were received with stern refusal, stolid politesse. No, we have no need for trade. No, we do not wish an alliance.
The south, it seemed, only really took notice when the first caravans were hit, when the northern cities raised a hullabaloo, the heralds flying out of Luss with their long arms trailing gold, and their jewelled mouths flapping. Armies, they cried, ultimatums. Pale faces, and barely veiled blades.
Hesper and the south had not responded. Another northern conflict, wise heads muttered, the ghosts of the bladedrinkers playing on the overactive imaginations of the merchant houses.
Still the heralds had come, with entreaties and boxes of spice and stone. Armies, they had cried, ultimatums.
Treat with them, had been the disparaging response. Shoulders shrugged and turned. Were the northerners not all the same? Cold, stone-gutted men and women. Let them bleed themselves dry, finally enriching that thin and useless soil.
Armies, the heralds had cried, and ultimatums.
And then, nothing.
The silence went unnoticed in the hubbub for a few weeks, until accounts came due, and letters went unanswered. Couriers went out and did not return, save for the odd horse, with ragged bridle and bloodied saddle.
