For my father, who could not sail the ship, but will greet it on the far shore. For my mother, who is the lighthouse that calls me home. For Rowan, who is the sea, and the sun, and the fairest wind.

THE
SHIPWRIGHT
AND THE
SHROUDWEAVER

RAFAEL TORRUBIA

Expand / collapse Extended Description

A black-and-white illustrated map showing the coastline from The Shipwright and the Shroudweaver. The coast runs from north to south down the length of the page, with various coastal features, like small islands, inlets, and estuaries. The ocean is to the west of the map, and the mainland is to the east, where the landmass is illustrated with swamps, lakes, forests, and mountain ranges.
To the centre-north is the city Thell, located in the centre of a mountain range called The Barrowlands. Directly below this to the southwest is the coastal city Luss. East of Luss, at the far eastern side of the map, is The Burner’s Forest. Directly south of the forest is the city Chek. Directly south of Chek are the lakes, named The Hollows. The swamplands, known as The Midlands, are placed between Chek and the coastal city Rum. The coastal city Hesper is southeast of Rum, directly south of The Midlands. South of Hesper is a line of villages, from east to west they are: Sedge, Fallow, Vantage, and Dryke, which is on the west coast. South of the villages is the city Astic, situated on the coast.
The map features a unique symbol for each city, a stylised compass star in the bottom-left corner, and a barque as a decorative emblem – to indicate the ocean – in the centre-left.

1

first light

dawn

water moving onto water

Shipwright’s hands.

Coarse, heavy things.

Fit for spars and oars and swallowing skies.

Shroudweaver’s hands.

Thin things, light-boned as a bird.

Fit for cerements, the twisting and weaving of linen, brief touches on shoulder blades.

Both bent to their tasks with quiet focus. Each living in the hush of their own heads, the ship pitching and bucking in a ceaseless swell.

The ocean rocks the wet timber like a wolf at the door, seeking gaps and weaknesses. The Shipwright feels it under her as she stands on the deck, feels it run up her legs, a slow rhythmic push in her muscles. A gentle, hungry flexing. The first whispers of a challenge. She drives and hammers pegs, splits wood, retwists twine with raw fingers. She’s quiet as she works, letting the sea fill the spaces in her mind. Above, clouds ravel like skeins of old wool, spitting the first few drops of new rain. She raises her head, sticks out a dry tongue and catches the cool water. The ship rocks, the sea waits, the crew watch, callow and listless. She splits wood, strings sail, slops tar in silence.

The Shroudweaver stands below decks, a slip of a man, his body built from forgotten pieces and then trimmed by a life in lightless places, by years spent in the hollow of other lives, gently shaping and weaving and sending forth. He feels the sea against the hull, sees its slow salting into the barnacle gaps, hears its dripped-out irregular rhythms, feels its predator sway. He works efficiently, binding and parcelling, making swift stitches and careful knots to hold what remains of the spirit within the body under his fingers. Much of it is likely lost already; the man has come to him late in the day. A lesser worker would have given up long ago, but Shroudweaver is practiced and stubborn and knows the ways to carve a god from a man.

Heavy boots sound on the stairs down, the hatch thumps, and Shipwright joins him, broad-shouldered in the drip-down light.

‘This war’s too fucking hungry,’ she says, and the curl in her lip stretches the scars on her face as she glances down at the corpse.

He’s a light thing, slim, roughly hewn. Ribbon threading his fingers, neat red stitching on his eyes and lips strangely out of place on a face that looks fresh off a mason’s block.

‘Did he come in on West Tide?’ she asks.

He doesn’t look like a West Tide boy. Too raw-boned – skin clear of ash – his teeth still straight and proud in his head.

Shroudweaver purses his lips, shakes his head, slowly darns and stitches. ‘I don’t think so. He floated in at dawn with a few others. Kisser’s been hunting again.’

The needle moves, silver swift.

‘Too emptied. I couldn’t do anything for them.’

If there’s a frown there, it fades like breath on a mirror. She claps him on the shoulder. ‘I’m going to take a look topside.’

The deck greets her listlessly. What remains of the crew tend their tasks with quiet persistence. This close to land, even the great ships are vulnerable. She reaches the rail in measured strides and scans the shoreline with a spyglass.

Despite the distance, as the shingle gives way to scree and scrub, she can see that they’ve hung up gallowswatchers – limp-fleshed, their stretched necks craning ceaselessly, the hollows of their sockets filled with a bright hungry light. Dead men dancing a salt-jig, as their eyes comb the coastal paths. No one is making it out of the port of Astic tonight, not without attracting their stares. It’s not worth running the gauntlet to get out to open sea.

The ship is dubious shelter at best, despite her efforts. She shifts her wide hips uneasily, plants her feet more securely against the shuck and roll. She’s done what she can, Shroudweaver too.

The rig spirits are tightened, lashed steadily to spinning copper bearings which whine gently in the stiffening wind. Whether it’ll be enough – that’s another question. This voyage has been long, sucking life from the spinners like meat from a bone.

On the grey coast, the port spits out a flock of questing crows. They wheel drunkenly.

Magic is being worked ashore. She can taste it on her tongue, bitter as burnt sugar. Staying here is a fool’s game.

There’s only one thing for it. Shipwright fills lungs built from bellows-brass and gives the order.

‘Raise sails!’

Shroudweaver hears the shout thunder above decks, watches the corpse’s fingers stiffen. Even in death, a sailor wants to sail. He leans low over the dead man’s cool skull and rubs saltpetre into its temples. A little touch of the soil to soothe the spirit. His long fingers move with exaggerated care, his thin heart flutters like a bird in a paper cage.

The raising of gods is a dicey business. Decades he’s been doing it now, with a catch in his throat every time. He still hears his teacher’s voice in his head. Red thread for binding. Holding the scraps of the soul in the body long enough for him to push them together into something new. Old notes reused for a new song. Stale air slipped into fresh lungs.

Above, the gunshot snap of canvas as the sails unfurl. The cries of the crew given sudden life. More distantly he senses the hot toffee taste of magic, a flash of crow wings, and stifles a frantic fear of being torn asunder.

Shroudweaver finishes his preparations and, inside the body of the dead man, a small god begins to sing. A halting thing, at first, for the god is fragile and unreal. Stitched from scraps of spirit and nested in a dead man’s chest. Yet it sings as it grows, its fledgling body stretching through meat and muscle. Filling dead flesh with golden light.

The song filters up through straining timbers and curls around Shipwright like a cat. The crew’s backs straighten and the sails fill with a wind hung with spices.

The ship is brightest in motion. Shipwright’s face is split by a broad grin and she throws back her whipcord arms to greet the freshening wind. Shroudweaver appears by her shoulder, his thin grey hair spidering in the breeze. She drops the grin on him, broad white teeth and sharp eyes.

‘Nice work,’ she says.

He shrugs diffidently. ‘I had good materials.’

The ship kisses the ocean, the tops of the waves a brief press against her surging bow.

‘We couldn’t move like this without you.’

Another shrug. ‘You couldn’t move like this without the god.’

She cuffs him around the head. ‘And who makes the gods?’

This time, with the shrug, a sly smile.

2

the body chases the flame of first creation

the name burns like tinder

the mouth still holds the song

Eventually they stop running, the crows far behind, the last gilded breath fading from the sails. They’ve both left the rail by the time the last swell subsides, sprawled around a bottle of wine in Shipwright’s cabin.

She takes a deep draw of her pipe and speaks through the smoke.

‘How long can we keep this up?’

Shroudweaver waves a hand loose with drink.

‘There’ll be gods as long as there’s corpses.’

Shipwright coughs, spits.

‘We can run a while yet then. Up to Hesper at least.’

She stretches, shoulders popping. ‘We need to do something more than just harry her though. Our luck can’t hold, not with the north locked down.’

Shroudweaver pours, marvels at the steadiness of his hands. Amazing what a drop of something good can do. ‘Locked down? Is that what we’re calling it? Last I talked to Fallon he said they were’ – he sips, adopts an enraged expression – ‘“Pissing over everything between hill and coast”, by which I think he meant, getting a bit more aggressive about their borders.’

‘Hard to tell with Fallon,’ Shipwright says. ‘He’s so understated.’ Shroudweaver raises an eyebrow and clinks her glass. Shipwright leans back, crosses her legs, drinks deep. It is good, this one. Nabbed out the hold of some unlucky merchantman a few days back. A bit opportunistic, perhaps, but if Kisser was sinking ships, there was no reason to let the wine drown as well. She swills it a little as she wriggles her toes to warm them up. ‘I think aggressive is putting it mildly. Some of the caravels that used to run north have given up entirely. Trade routes are all locked down from the coast on in. Heard tell there’s towns burning there that haven’t been touched by Kisser.’

Shroudweaver’s expression is perplexed. ‘Why would they?’

‘Why do people do anything these days? Fear. There are still the remains of temples up there, still pilgrim routes that might pull people north. It’s clear they have no interest in that. Not in money, not in the war. Thell wants one thing, to be left the fuck alone.’

She sips again. ‘I can sympathise’.

After a moment, she takes her glass to the cabin window and looks out across the waves to the shore. She watches distant, small lights bob as patrols of people who want to kill her tread the coastline, waiting for any ship stupid enough to court the rocks.

‘Ah, no peace for us until we finish this.’ She reaches up with a hand, pulls the curtain against the growing chill, turns the lamplight down softer, before she sits back on the bench, arching a spine grown weary from standing.

Shroudweaver’s breath catches in his throat and he rubs his brow with tired fingers.

Shipwright sees the movement and her smile is softer than her face should allow.

‘It’s alright,’ she says. ‘I’m not quite done yet.’

‘We’re getting closer though,’ he says.

Her rough hand is heavy on his knuckles and when she leans in to kiss his forehead she smells of tar, split wood, and sweat.

‘Close isn’t done,’ she says and there’s steel in it.

She pours more wine, raises the glass.

‘Kicking and screaming?’ she says.

Shroudweaver’s smile could light lamps.

3

other temples

whalebone arch

willow bower

lover’s arms

mother

In the city on the shore, the crows return. She waits for them, watches their wings beat over lamp-lit streets, between smoke-stained buildings.

People are avoiding the curfew, she notices, in small defiant clumps. Tiny rebellions. Irritating.

The crows descend, in ones and twos, pressing themselves against her body, clustering on the pale branches of her arms. Their small insistent hearts hammering with secrets.

She opens her mouth and they crawl inside, sharp claws on her lips and tongue, small bones crunching under her teeth.

She swallows feathers and blood, feels them wriggle down her throat and settle in her stomach. Their quiet cawing threads through her muscles. Their knowledge fills her brain.

She swallows the flock piece by piece, as the lamps wink out and the streets are filled by loyal men with sharp blades.

The ship is long gone, sped across the sea, its body mended and its sails filled with a new god. She’d almost had them, Shipwright and Shroudweaver both. That would have been a thing, an end to at least one annoyance. She couldn’t move anything up the coast because of Hesper and the remnants of her bastard fleet; couldn’t move anything overland while the republic in Thell was marking its borders in bronze and blood. So she stayed here – her people stayed here – slowly starving.

She steps to the side of the room, pours a pitcher of water and begins to wash herself. The water darkens with swirls of blood and feather.

It takes some time for her hands to scrub clean. The blood has worked in deep, under the nails, dark against her skin. She works studiously, precisely, like a surgeon, feeling her throat contract as the last scraps of bone and flesh wriggle downwards.

The Crowkisser seems small in this room, as if it were designed for someone larger, bolder. She could get lost in the shadows of the great pillars. Her thin hair could be pulled by the wind that howls through the shattered panes and be lost.

When she straightens and stands her spine is picked out in the moonlight like a half-finished carving. The harshness of her breathing is the only sign that she might be anything less than utterly calm.

Inside her skull, her mind runs like a rat. Testing out theories. Scurrying to conclusions. None of it made sense. She’d won; had won for three years now. Three years where her enemies had refused to die, and where she’d been kept penned in the south by a mountain of fundamentalists, and a handful of ships’ captains.

She swirls water, spits redly. One ship the worst of them, ruddy as the dawn, and pushed along by some foreign magic she barely understood. Sails always bright against the dark rocks of the coast. Every one of its damned voyages heralded by the lighting of the signal beacons. Great piles of bleached wood, coughing flame up into the sky.

The Teeth, the people of this city called them. The people of Astic. Her people, looking up at her over cups or across scattered maps and shaking their heads ruefully.

‘When the Teeth spit fire, the sea burns.’

And wasn’t that the truth? She sits, straightens the coarse line of her skirts, half spattered with blood, feather, other darknesses.

As long as the ship remained on the sea, she would never truly have won. Faster than the rest. Stronger. Worse than that, a symbol.

As long as that pair remained aboard the ship, that symbol actually held meaning. The last Shroudweaver. Perhaps the last Shipwright.

Her fingers run over the map before her, digging in.

Patience. She needs patience. Patience and a drink of water. And him, much though she hates to admit it.

As if the shadows hear her, he approaches from behind. Soft-booted in the half-light, announced only by the faint clink of harness and clasp, he steps lightly over tilted flagstones, strewn with the bones of small creatures and wet with the insistent, driving rain.

She steps quietly backwards into his opening arms and he pulls her towards him until she rests on her heels and can flick her eyes up precariously to meet his.

‘Long night, Crowkisser?’ he says, his lips grazing her neck as his fingers tighten against her ribs.

She opens her mouth to reply but her first words are feather and gristle. She coughs and wriggles free self-consciously.

‘Yeah, too long,’ she says, and her fingers flick anxiously at the corners of her lips, brushing away the ghosts of birds.

He steps towards her again, and staggers. Beneath his jacket, under the armour, there’s blood, ragged and spreading.

‘You’re hurt,’ she says, and it’s an accusation.

He shrugs apologetically, lopsidedly. ‘They got lucky.’

Crowkisser shakes her head tersely and walks towards him.

‘No,’ she says. ‘I got lucky. Which means you, you get to stay alive. And be safe.’ Each point punctuated by a prodding finger in the middle of his chest.

He winces and nods, slower than she is, less confident.

‘Fine, fine. I hear, I obey. Help me off with this, will you?’

The rifle over his shoulder is almost as tall as he is. She slips behind him and unclasps buckles that retract back into the weapon with a satisfied hiss. He stands clear, and Crowkisser does something quick and clever with her fingers. The rifle clicks, folds, collapses, until it’s no more than a sullen, wrought, jagged spike in her hands, a foot long, if that. It smells acrid and she sucks at her gums subconsciously.

‘Who was aboard?’

Another shrug. The Slickwalker is full of them tonight.

‘More of Fallon’s diehards,’ he mutters. ‘Change is hard for some people.’

Crowkisser purses her lips. ‘They shouldn’t take it out on you.’

For a second, his face flickers into something sharper, more remorseful.

‘They’re paid to. Besides, who else are they going to take it out on?’ He raises his arms in exasperation, ‘We pulled the trigger. We … we set all this in motion.’

His shoulders slump, the anger flows out of him like water. He holds her at arm’s length, runs a finger along the proud, sharp jaw he’s known since they were kids, remembering her jutting defiance at children twice her size, at anyone who said no.

‘We did this, Crowkisser. We can’t step back from that.’

Her eyes flick up to meet his and he flinches back in shock at their flat hardness.

‘We set them free.’ Crowkisser’s voice is the first stones of the landslide. ‘We set them all free.’ She pitches and cracks, boulders crashing in the mountain heights. ‘Every. Single. One. Of. Them.’ Her eyes are black fire and her voice is the roll of distant thunder.

He barely sees the slap coming, but feels the whip-crack sting on his cheek, spits blood into the dust and bones.

‘Every. Single. One.’ She repeats and her voice is hollow as the high valleys.

‘Every one,’ she says, in the husk of a whisper. He pulls her close with aching arms and feels her heart hammer against his chest.

‘Every one,’ and her breath lurches ragged and wet.

‘Oh gods,’ she breathes.

Slickwalker rocks her like a baby.

‘No,’ he says. ‘Not anymore.’

4

on anatomising the hearts

we found them strange

nacreous, rigid,

ringing like a struck bell

—Excursions in the Near Wreck, Wicktwister

Dawn rises shyly off the Hesperian coast, East Tide retreating from the beaches where grey gulls sweep, cackle and war with fat green crabs over the bounty of last night’s swell.

Four or five fresh bodies, bloated and scoured by the sea. Shroudweaver watches them. Shipwright watches Shroudweaver.

Her arms enfold him from behind and she murmurs in his ear.

‘Recognise them?’

Shroudweaver squints and his mind falls into a quieter space, rattles and hums with detail. The weave of cloth, the cut of boots.

‘Wreck of the Volante,’ he says and feels Shipwright’s arms stiffen. His sharp eyes scan cuts, abrasions, peeled-back grimaces, and the crabs squabbling over charred fingertips.

‘She went down to something big and noisy. Maybe guns. Maybe magic. Maybe sabotage.’ He rolls his shoulders. ‘Lots of fire. Not quick. Not pretty.’

Shipwright snarls, ‘Fucking Crowkisser.’ She ruffles Shroudweaver’s thin hair. ‘No offense, but your daughter’s a cunt.’

She turns to the crew.

‘Bring us in.’

A few minutes later and they’re standing knee-deep in the surf, watching the broken boards of the Volante make their way to land for the last time. The crabs have retreated to a safe distance, their slick bodies jostling in oily, boisterous heaps.

The crew fan out, searching for salvage, and more importantly, for bodies. Names and faces to bring home to the widows on shore. Scoured fingers to break fathers’ hearts and salted hair to be clasped in lockets and shaking hands.

Shipwright squats on the tideline, an ache in the small of her back, and a harder ache in her heart. Never too many drowned young faces for the sea. She fishes around, pulls up a shattered plank, its edges burnt and curved smooth as glass. She sniffs it – lemon and grease – and bites her cheek to stop her breakfast from coming up.

‘Slickwalker. He’s getting better.’

Shroudweaver turns. He’s shivering already, the cold of the water stealing up his thin legs.

‘He shouldn’t even be able to get aboard. I thought you fitted the remaining ships with spinners?’

She nods, sloshes towards him to push him gently out of the water and up the beach.

‘That I did. Stay dry.’

He pulls his hood higher, tightens a scarf against the wind. ‘I’ll try.’

His eyes wander up the cliffs, lingering on the distant spike of a gallowswatcher against the skyline. Closer, one of the Teeth smoulders. ‘We shouldn’t hang about. Any clue on the spinners?’

Shipwright rolls her eyes, hikes her trousers and heads back to the swelling scurf of the wreck. She lets her fingers sink into the waves, reading their rhythm, and trying to feel the hum of a spinner somewhere amid it all.

‘Nothing.’

Up the beach, one of the crewmen yelps, trips, flounders in the surf and dark sand. Shipwright glances across, down at his feet and sees it buried, just at toe height. Fairly rough and ready as spinners go, but she’d been working fast, and the smiths in Hesper hadn’t seen one for years.

When she draws closer, the problem is obvious – half the facing torn off, that same lemony stink.

‘The bastard shot them off,’ she calls.

Shroudweaver turns. ‘Shot them. From where?’

She shrugs. ‘The shore, I’d guess. I should have seen that coming.’

Shroudweaver’s eyes scan the distance between shore and deep sea. ‘You have to be kidding me,’ he mutters.

‘What?’ she shouts.

He walks closer. ‘What did she do to him that he can do that?’

She shrugs, pockets the spinner. ‘A mystery for another day.’ Then, rubbing a hand across her brow, asks, ‘Can we go? This is breaking my heart. And Fallon needs to know.’

He nods, places a hand gently in the small of her back.

‘Of course.’

From the gangplank, they look back at the shore as the ship casts off.

Shipwright’s eyes are narrow against the wind, her hair pulled across her face.

‘One of the last,’ she says.

‘Last what?’ he asks

‘Last of the great ships.’ Her hands tighten on the rail. ‘One of the last to sail south with us. One of the last still standing. One of the last with a crew still breathing. I should have seen this coming.’ The tears on her cheek are dragged by the wind. ‘She’ll come for all of them, eventually. Then us.’

He turns her face towards his. ‘We won’t let that happen.’

‘They took me in,’ she says.

He frowns, ‘Who?’

‘The Volante’s crew, when I first got here. Not a damn crew would turn their head. Afraid of me, afraid of the ship.’ She smiles wistfully. ‘Not the Volante though. It was two minutes of bristling then days of drinking something red and foul.’

‘Buckwater,’ Shroudweaver mutters, and grimaces.

She nods. ‘That was it. Tasted like burning goat’s piss.’ Her face softens. ‘They didn’t care that I wasn’t from here; that they’d never seen a ship like mine.’ She snorts. ‘I mean, they offered to sell their captain to me in trade for it, but I don’t think they were serious.’

Her face clouds again. ‘Wish I could remember his name. Poor sod never lived long enough to take a new one. I suppose he’s just blowing ash somewhere in the south now.’ She shakes her head. ‘Last of the great ships.’

Shroudweaver taps her arm, ‘Wait here.’

The shore pulls up to the horizon before he returns with two leather cups and a bladder that reeks like a drunkard’s nightmare.

She stares at him.

‘That isn’t?’

He grins, ‘I got the taste for it a while back, on the voyage down.’

He leans on the rail and pours, passes her a cup. Turns to the sea, and raises it.

‘To the Volante.’

She mirrors him, ‘The Volante. Those shabby bastards. The sea’s too good for them.’

5

every map different

every river returning to

the same source

A few hours later and the Volante’s unlucky crew are just more bodies in their wake. Shroudweaver sucks on hard tack and looks at Shipwright with narrowed eyes as she buffs the scratches out of her thick deck-boots. Her broad lips curl as she spits and polishes, and he falls in love again. Almost twenty years now. Always the same motions when she’s worried. Boots polished and socks darned. Small repairs. Always the same motions. Probably the same boots, come to think of it.

He waves the biscuit pointedly. ‘Old habits, huh?’

She nods, tongue on teeth.

He grins. ‘So, what’s the plan?’

There’s barely a beat before she replies. ‘Two more days up the coast to Hesper. We see what’s left of their fleet, we talk to Fallon and we take on who we can. Get the civilians up the coast some before Crowkisser comes to stir up trouble. She’ll head for Hesper next.’

Shroudweaver frowns, tips his head. ‘And then?’

Shipwright snorts, slips thick grey socks on her broad feet and buckles up. ‘Then we find out if anyone else is as pissed off as we are, and we start to dream up some really inventive ways to fuck her shit up.’ When Shroudweaver laughs it’s dry as sand swilling around a glass.

‘Poetry,’ he says. ‘Pure poetry. Maybe just a hair short on ideas though.’

She sets the boot down, fixes him with a look. ‘We have thirteen fresh bodies in the hold. I’m a little light on ideas.’

He picks sand out from between his toes. ‘Me too. Well, I have one or two, but it depends on Fallon. And I don’t know if he can be depended on.’

She watches him. ‘That’s a little … off-putting.’

He flicks with a nail. ‘Sorry. Sandals.’

She shakes her head despairingly. ‘It’s just as well you’re cute. Do you think Fallon’ll be happy to see us?’

Shroudweaver shrugs and looks out to the coast. ‘I think so. We’re all he has left at this point, since the north shut its gates. Since Riss, and then Quickfish.’

She follows his gaze to where white-bellied birds wheel around the headland. ‘Time was we would have run north first. We had that heroic glow about us. A bit of cred to lean on.’

He snorts, but she continues. ‘Now, I wouldn’t set foot up there without someone watching my back. Too much god-stink clinging to our boots. Then after the fleet burnt, after we lost the ships, after the south …’

‘Hard to hold your head high’, he finishes

‘Hard to hold your head high.’

She moves closer to him, undoes a strap, starts rubbing the blood back into his feet.

‘I really thought it would work, you know? Time was, I thought there was nothing the three of us couldn’t achieve.’

He sighs, half relief, half regret. ‘We’re bad losers, that’s our problem.’

She tries to hold back a smile, fails. ‘Among other things, maybe.’

He wriggles his toes. ‘Can you do the other one?’

She taps her thigh. ‘Yes. Bring me your manky feet. Something I can actually handle.’

Her tone’s light enough, but he’d have to be an idiot to miss the edge on her words. Eighteen months of skirmishing and running fraying at the edge of her smile. Crowkisser hadn’t sat meekly in Astic while they starved her out.

‘I think,’ he says, ‘that it’s partly our fault.’

She rolls her eyes. ‘Thanks for that. Very uplifting.’

Above them, a spinner whines like a wet cat. A wave breaks over the side of the ship, salt water sliding down the curve of the spinner’s vibrations, leaving the deck untouched.

He smiles. ‘You know what I mean. We were cocky. We’d won one war already. Liberated Thell. Founded the Republic. Defeated a monster.’

She dries off his foot, slips the sandal back on. ‘Do you ever think we were a bit rusty? Decades between saving the Republic and sailing south.’ A bitter laugh. ‘I remember sitting with Declan and his wife. Before’ – she waves a hand – ‘all of it. And we were laughing.’

She puts her head in her hands. ‘I remember her saying to me … she was holding that battered sword of his, and she turned and she said to me, “how much damage can one girl do?”’ She winces again as the spinners whine, and the whole ship bucks. ‘I guess we all found out the answer to that.’

Shroudweaver says nothing, re-straps his sandals quietly. The ship cants again, and she sways. ‘I guess we’re still finding out.’

She reaches into a pouch, digs out some shards of metal and starts whittling, bending them gently with her hands. ‘Gods. What were we thinking?’

He watches her hands move over the brass. ‘That we had an alliance of the biggest cities on this side of the world? That we, somehow, had Hesper and the whole of the Republic at our back. That we’d had more than fifteen years of peace. Tenuous peace, but real peace. Growing peace, farming peace.’ Her fingers tighten. Metal snaps and she curses. ‘Didn’t save us.’

He takes her hands, checks them for cuts. ‘What are you working on?’

She gestures up at the spinner. ‘That one’s off by a tone. Ten, twenty more big waves and we’re getting wet.’

He follows her finger up to the tiny brass sphere strung impossibly high above. ‘They still amaze me.’

She clenches her jaw. ‘They didn’t save us either. We all sailed down there. That big beautiful fleet. All those people.’ She breathes deep. ‘They didn’t save us either.’

Shroudweaver brushes faint flecks of metal from Shipwright’s hands, takes her face and pulls it down to his shoulder. ‘You know why though, love?’

She settles into the curve of his neck. ‘No. Hair, please.’

He starts moving his fingers through it, teasing out the burrs and snags, and wishes he could hold the world there for a while, with just her slowly relaxing breath, and the rock of the ship under them. The world had never seemed interested in waiting for them.

He kisses the top of her head. ‘Nothing would have saved us. We sailed down looking to win a war. Instead, we got the end of the world.’

Her voice is sleepy with the rhythm of the sea, the rhythm of his fingers. Her hand snakes around his ribs. ‘Not yet.’

He brushes the salt from her hair. ‘What, love?’

‘Not the end of the world yet.’

6

What does the sea take

But everything

But everything

But everything?

Everything

but light.

—Burial litany, Heron Halls

The ship takes on water at night, and they bail during the day. Salt moves into the skin, and into the blood. Shipwright feels herself aching with every swing of the bucket, a tiredness burning deeper than muscle.

It’s dark down in the bilges. What little sun there is has been snagged in the rigging and spilt over the deck boards, as the ship noses her way up the coast.

Hesper waits. Distant, still, but sat in her mind like a toad in a well. A great, grey body hauled atop the stark cliffs by pure pride, a city with money in its bones. Once fat on trade from the South, now wasting away, as this war that is not a war drags out, year on year. The city hollowing out, building by building; any life that’s left sparkling like fever in the eyes of a corpse.

She stoops, scoops, tosses.

In Hesper, the Fallons are the only named lords left: Declan and his wife. And beneath them, a guddle of guildmasters and ships’ captains; the dark jars of the Glass Archive and the hammering fire of the forges. Hesper was a body built from smaller bodies, guilds and captaincies, fraternities and consanguinities.

She stoops, scoops. The water is black in the bucket, shot with small, silvered fish dancing within, barely fry. Little scraps of flesh and electric movement, swept up by the waves and driven here. What must it be like for them? The world so dark, huge and irresistible.

She dips her fingers in the bucket and lets them nibble at her skin, feeling the tingle of their energy against her palm. As if their bodies had tiny spinners nestled amid their soft bones, their thrumming hearts.

Unexpectedly, she feels like weeping. Instead, she murmurs a small blessing and tips them over the side into the wider, drowning dark of the sea.

Her fingers are numbing, but she persists. Stoops, scoops.

Hesper was a body built from smaller bodies, and stitched together with lies. The reason the Fallons stayed on top of the pile was that they knew who was lying, and why.

‘Nothing wrong with it,’ Fallon had said, before they last sailed out. ‘Human nature.’ This as he pored over charts and ledgers of debts owed, every inch the responsible businessman.

He had to be responsible. With Arissa gone, Hesper scented weakness like sharks chased blood, and for a while, after the South fell, Shipwright had felt a stirring of something dangerous; rats looking to climb to the top of the pile. Fallon had responded as he always had, by looking at those with debts due; by finding the strings wound tight around half the city’s worthies, and then yanking them until they choked.

Fallon was many things, but he was not shy to wield the knife. The days were long gone when he had needed to do it personally, although Shipwright had seen what that could do.

She stooped again, letting her hands sit in the black water, feeling the salt pick at the cuts in her palms. No, these days, she was the knife.

She had brought it on herself, of course. She had come here, and she had made herself useful. Young enough to view the whole coast as a basket of opportunities ripe for the plucking, with a heart full of hot blood and ambition, and a love for that wild, howling sea. The trouble was, the sea was attached to the land and she’d quickly realised that what this country needed wasn’t a shipwright, but a surgeon.

Even before the South burnt, a host of petty rivalries and ancient grudges boiled up and down the continent, and she had followed like a good dog, year falling on year as plagues raged, and cities fell.

She’d done a lot of good, she knew it – even if you were a knife, you could choose how to strike. Amid it all, somehow, she’d made friends. Some of them on the crew, others stowed inland, tucked away in the Burners’ forest and along the trade roads wending through the Green.

Easy to make friends, and easier still to stay with the friends that had found you. It had been painless working for the Fallons after the war for the Republic. Hard to imagine it any other way, in fact. How could you leave the side of someone who had walked through fire with you? And after Arissa was lost, how could she have left Declan to pick up the pieces by himself?

She scoops again. Bangs her knuckles on the edge of the bucket. Curses.

That was the rub of it, really. Too many years piled on top of each other, and too many people who it would hurt to leave. So she stayed as Fallon’s knife; against the Herons when they tried to lock down Serpent. When the plague hit Errant. When Crowkisser burnt the South.

And that last one was killing them all. Nothing to fight. Nothing to save. A nightmare so vast she still struggled to comprehend it. A disaster that had split the seams between Hesper and Thell wide open. That purple sky stooped over the South as a reminder that the wound wasn’t healed, but growing, festering into new and dangerous shapes. It wouldn’t close until Crowkisser was done. And she wouldn’t be done without the application of a little corrective force.

Shipwright was trying to stitch the world, and Crowkisser was a half-step behind, ripping at the seams. Sometimes it felt like crafting a spinner. You made something you hoped would work, and when it began to spin erratically, you hammered it back to true. So, she did what she could, harried supply lines and chased down spies. Always Fallon’s first choice because her ship was bigger, faster. Because she made people afraid.

Again, she feels like weeping. Something filling up her chest, salt water in the hold of her heart.

She could let it go. She could begin to do the work. She knows what drowns inside her ribs. Another life, where she was not a knife. Where she moved by her own tides. She’d like to see it, some day.

Not now though. Not with the wolf at the door. She hears her father’s voice, down here, rocked by the creak and swill of the ship, ‘Try to drink the sea all at once, and you’ll choke.’

So, drop by drop, she bends her aching back, swallows the salt inside her, and bails.

7

some rivers open wide

deer step in them

some rivers, you can see clear to the bottom

still drown in them

—Proverbs of the Burning Forest, Heartshamer

Three days and a stiff salt wind later, and the Grey Towers of Hesper are visible on the horizon, cut against the coast like an old scar.

Hesper is barely changed from the first time Shipwright sailed into port with a heart full of hope and a hold full of spice, her hands jittery on the ship’s wheel. Then, the city had welcomed her like a surly lover, the massive barques of the other captains sliding past her as their crews alternately jeered, catcalled or cheered. The savviest waiting in silence, eyes wide at the sight of a ship from the East in all its long-beamed glory. Requests for boarding hollered and signalled. Ratlines helpfully tossed. Clods of shit. Bottles of rum. Arcs of piss. A mixed welcome.

Nudging into the lowest loop at the bottom of the cliffs, where the city finally dared to let her toes touch the sea. Above, the switchbacks and twists that brought up the smaller ships into the belly of the port, through the canals and straight to where the money was.

No room for her ship, even in those massive engineered channels, she needed more depth. Besides, Shipwright had thought, it was good to make an entrance. A few quick twists to the mechanisms at the base of the main masts, and the spinners atop roared to life, bigger than anything else she’d ever worked with, the size of a small globe, or a man’s skull. A little cocky, a little dangerous; a little exciting.

Their hum spread down the spars, shivering the whole ship and Shipwright along with it. Spinner magic disregarding the boundaries between bone and board, threading her muscles until she thrummed like a barely chained dog, wild with energy.

Out across the water, the ship began to sing. The sound flattened the tops of the waves, and lifted her bow. The speed with which she moved cut the rim of the ocean, sending waves of spume over the howling crews of the barques, spinning the latch boats and tugs that had come to greet her.

Her crew crowded the rails, shinned up the masts and opened their mouths to the song of the spinners, an old eastern shanty, one Shipwright had only heard in quiet whispers around the deck fires and mess tables before. Here, held in harmony by thirty voices, it sounded entirely different, the burr of the spinners a ceaseless bass. Beyond that copper twang, the cries of the sailors hit the water with force, the shout at the end of each verse almost a physical thing.

She felt the eyes of Hesper’s captains on her, and beyond that, attention from the shore. It didn’t take her long to find the source.

A busy port, Hesper, labourers and merchants and counters and cutters, hand over fist. All of them curious, some panicked at the speed of the approaching ship. A scurry of tar-boys with lines and no plan. A docksman shouting at them to get their worthless arses back.

At the heart of them all stood a great grey charger, motionless as stone. Atop it, back straight as a spear, a woman who put all the ships’ figureheads to shame. Tall as a tree, slender as a mountain ash, her back straightened by armour of sculpted steel. A grey cape settled across her shoulders like a cormorant’s wing, a sword at her hip. Lady Arissa Fallon, Lady of the Grey Towers.

Shipwright should have been humble – she knew nobility when she saw it. But she was the best captain on this sea, and she helmed the best ship. Humble could wait.

She wrenched the wheel and kicked the spinners into a flying hold. The ship turned, skewed broadside and kept thundering towards the docks, the wave building before it now like the skirts of a sea god, thrashed with kelp and fish and flotsam.

She watched the onlookers flinch back. All but Arissa. Thousands of tonnes of roiling, singing wood and water, and all she did was sit up a little straighter yet, something in her eyes, perhaps the shadow of a smile on her face.

Shipwright left it to the last moment, the docks reaching out for her like the mouth of a startled drunk. All that ship under her hands and only the faintest movement from her fingers to swing the spinners into a ghost hang. Two feet from the docks, from the yelling traders and scrambling guards, the ship simply stopped.

She felt the stress of the spinners in the back of her skull as they took all that forward weight and stored it. The faintest pine in their pitch, and then, still. She dropped them to silence with a gesture.

For the first time in months, the docks of Hesper hung quiet.

Held it for a second, two, and then erupted into cheers, hollering from the cobbles and the flung-wide windows; salt-wives corpsing into their baskets and old sailors pushing up from their lobsterpot perches.

A whip-thin gangplank out, and the crowd swarmed forwards. Shipwright set foot on the rail and waited a moment, watching the faces in front of her, the whitewashed stretch of the city above, its reddened roofs, its arches. Above it all, the bulk of those great grey towers.

The air split with sound as either side of that massive horse, soldiers pealed out on silvered trumpets. The crowd melting grudgingly from the foot of the gangplank, encouraged on by the hafts of pikes across thighs and backs.

The horse and its rider approached, hooves striking echoes from the wet stone.

Closer up, the Lady of the Grey Towers was still dignified, but more human, her cloak spattered with the spray. A wariness in her eyes, and something else; a lick of humour that Shipwright could stand to see more of.

She tilted down the plank, jumped the last few feet.

Down on the cobbles, Arissa Fallon seemed less approachable. The horse holding her up against the sky, and the cut of her shoulders framed against the scudding clouds. The wind pulling at her cloak, at her hair in its severe ponytail. Beautiful. Shipwright felt a brief twitch in her stomach, tried to stay professional.

The cobbles slicked with fish guts and bird shit. It wasn’t easy.

‘Lady, I am …’

‘Shipwright. I know.’ Her voice was filed glass. Dark and crisp. ‘I’ve heard of you. You ran the blockade at Serpent. That was brave. And you were the first ship into Errant during the plague. That was … interesting. No profit in that one.’

‘Last one out,’ Shipwright muttered.

‘What?’

She crossed her arms. ‘I was the last one out. Of Errant. With half her people.’

Arissa unknotted her dark hair, letting it fall down her back before it was caught by the wind.

‘From what I heard, half her people was all she had left.’

‘That’s true, Lady.’

‘So why risk it? I can’t imagine they had coin. The plague hit the guildhalls first, as I heard.’

‘No coin, Lady.’

She dismounted in one fluid step, ‘Why then?’

‘No one deserves that death, Lady. Not just because they’re too poor to run.’

Arissa watched her, her eyes the blued grey of the clouds.

‘Interesting. My cousin married a fisherman in Errant. Family hated him, but she loved that man. Do you know what she told me about you?’

Shipwright shook her head.

‘No, Lady. I couldn’t put names to all the faces, I’m afraid.’

Arissa waved a gloved hand, ‘She said you didn’t sleep for the whole four days it took to get them into safe harbour.’

‘True, Lady.’

‘Said you sailed that ship alone some nights, so your crew wouldn’t have to go near the sick.’

‘True, Lady.’

‘Said you gave near half your cargo when you pulled into Visage, to get cure to them all.’

‘Also true.’

Arissa stepped forwards, until she was barely an inch or two away from Shipwright’s face.

‘Interesting.’

Her breath was sweet. Like flowers. Or aniseed.

‘My cousin said, Shipwright, that you never sickened, nor tired.’ A faint smile, the briefest line of teeth, ‘Also true?’

‘Yes, Lady.’

A gloved hand settled on Shipwright’s shoulder, another, startlingly, snaked around her waist. A shiver ran down her spine from the suddenness of the touch.

‘I think I can use you, Shipwright. I think this city can use you.’

‘I hope so, Lady.’ She caught herself. This was hardly driving a bargain. Her cheeks were too hot. She couldn’t focus.

‘Why did you come here, Shipwright?’

Did the fingers around her waist tighten, for just a moment?

‘I wanted to help people. Talk on deck is that you do right by your own.’

Arissa pulled her in close, her lips the barest brush against her ear. Not a hope of hiding the slyness in her voice.

‘Also true. Welcome to Hesper, Shipwright.’

Shipwright rolls her shoulders, shakes herself back to the present. Over her head gulls scream, and the ship rocks on the cusp of a wave.

Arissa was long gone. Pulled down into nothing by Crowkisser. Defiant, sly, caring to the last. Her best friend. Almost … almost her lover. Her breath still catches at the thought.

With Arissa’s fall, Hesper had stumbled too. Her husband, never the most sociable of rulers, grew suddenly reclusive beyond reason. Apparently, he’d thrown himself into his work, because the wheels kept turning, but the towers grew as quiet as they could.

Gradually, Hesper’s trade dwindled. The bold, brutal captains were gone, deceived into thinking that joining the great fleet sailing south would crown their careers and send their barques and bosuns home covered in glory and gold. Packed off and provisioned by the guild heads, who had slid into their still-warm bunks and cradled their coffers with startling speed.

Almost all those great ships were sunk now, sundered at the bottom of the sea, along with their crews, their captains, their cheers and their piss. When you sailed into Hesper now, the silence created itself.

Shipwright wanted to mourn it all, or cut loose of it all, but she couldn’t. High in those grey towers, her best friend still lay. Heart still beating. Lungs still breathing. Nothing to shake her out of it, for all she had tried.

Oh, how she’d tried. The last of her gold, the most precious pieces of her cargo that she’d squirreled away over the years had bought her nothing but disappointment. Arissa was gone. Only her body remained. That smile, that wit, that fierce kindness, had fled to somewhere no ships sailed.

Shipwright could leave Hesper, could go if she wanted, but the city remained just like Arissa, a whisper of what it had been, a shadow on her heart with just enough of the shape of something she loved to keep her coming home.

8

Hey now mill wheel,

hey now furrow,

hey now the high ice,

hey the sleeping barrow

—Harvest song, Millet

The hill held the tomb and the shadow of the tomb held the town. That’s how the story went. The people of Millet drawn by the gentle curve of the river and the rolling fields of dark earth that spilt out on either side like a dowager’s skirts, brought their rickety wagons from Hesper’s walls and made a little town in the crook of the water, got fat on fish and grain.

Quickfish could hear his mother’s voice telling the story, could see the silhouette of her body framed against the lamplight. His childhood bedroom, a world and twenty years ago. The lines of her hands miming fish and grain. The flicker of the flame. He is seven, maybe eight. Enough of a boy to crave the terror of the outside; enough of a child to want to hear about it in bed, at home. The grey walls of his tower bedroom cradle him, the sheets white canvas for the tale, as Arissa spins it onwards.

The shadow of the tomb held the town. Night would fall, and the lights of Millet would cluster in the dark of the hill, against the kiss of the wind.

The people of Millet were simple people, good people, as much as all people are good. They locked their doors, and stoked their fires, and slept in each other’s arms.

And if the wind ran strangely over the hill, they marked it not. And if the mouth of the tomb whispered, they marked it not.

And this was their undoing. For although the good people of Millet had built well above the ground, in the crook of the river, they had forgotten to fear what slept below the earth.

Arissa’s hands slipping under the covers. Hunching into fearsome shapes that crept towards her boy. He’d wriggled higher, pressed against the headboard. Chest fluttering with excitement as he watched those hands move, and imagined what crawled beneath his very feet.

Worms, yes, and other animals. But what else? Bones? Bodies? Magic?

The next bit of the story had been his favourite, his mother pulling the lantern close against her chest, so flame licked her throat and the stark planes of her face. Her eyes black hollows against the softness of the light. Enunciating every word, playing with the sounds of the tale. Shooting a sly smile over her shoulder at his Da who watched by the door.

The hill held the tomb. And the shadow of the tomb held the town. But the tomb had been here long before the town. For the people of Millet were not the first to feel the call of that dark soil and the bright curve of the river.

Long ago, the mountains had coughed forth warriors. Bold warriors, sharp-toothed and bronze-bladed. Conquerors, pouring from a city that lived in the stone, like a maggot lived in the wound, or a worm slept in the soil.

Thell. And her voice dipped and rumbled enough, that for a second, he wondered if that really was his mother sat at the foot of the bed, this black-eyed shade licked by light.

Warriors of an empire which slept in the shadow of glaciers. Followers of an Emperor who craved blood. Times past, they had pushed far south from the mountain, almost to the gates of Hesper itself.

She creeps up the bed as she says this, the lamplight swaying, just enough of a smile on her face that he doesn’t scream. His Da’s muffled laughter fluttering round the side of a whisky glass.

And as Thell’s warrior had conquered, they’d died. And they had built homes for their dead. Great tombs beneath the earth. But those dead slept lightly, for their Emperor lived in their blood and always called them, called them, called them back to war.

And here was Millet, sleeping in the shadow of one such tomb. And when the good people of Millet slept, and dreamt, the old ghosts of those warriors crept down the hill on the night wind, soft as wending. Skulked through alleys and rapped on windows. Waited for the one house with an unlatched door, the one window without a light to guard it.

And when the lock was loose and the light was dimmed, they would strike. Dragging a child from its bed and back up the dark hill on the cusp of the wind. Stifling its screams and pulling it down into the black below until they could slit its throat, slake their thirst and finally, sleep again. Red with blood, quiet as the grave.

Quickfish had barely moved. Pressed back against the wood, breath stilled in his chest as he imagined dead fingers on his throat, dead mouths drinking hot blood. And of course, his mother had pounced, pulling him tight against her breast. Soft cloth and strong bone. The warmth of her like nothing else. The smell of her; herbs and cooking oil, perfume and steel.

And she’d reassured him that the warriors were long gone and the Emperor dead. And he knew it was true, because his own mum and dad had done it. She had shown him the sword she swung, and the armour she wore.

There were no monsters anymore, because his mother had killed them all. She had repeated this as she kissed his cheeks and tucked him back in. Tight as a shroud, she’d said. Ruffled his hair, kissed his forehead again, held on it. Said his name, which does not exist anymore. Which slips through the memory like an oiled absence, and vanishes.

Quickfish remembers the touch of her lips though, and the feel of her hands. The callus where the sword grip had rested. The way the killing she had done to keep him safe had marked her body. The way her smile lingered in lamplight as she kissed him. The way she shrank back into the dark bulk of his Da’s body, tipping her head for a different kiss. The pair of them against the light. Solid as shadow. Fading as his memory slips back to the present.

To the curve of a river, to the hill above a town. To a tomb upon the hill. Millet had survived the stories, but there was enough truth to them that he had been pulled out of Hesper to chase the shape of the tale. Roofkeeper dutifully plodding ahead of him, broad shoulders set against a fine rain, axe swinging loose at his side.

The tomb on the hill was real. And Thell was real. The Empire had been real. And perhaps their magic had been real. That magic that called the dead back simply for the memory of blood. The hunger for life.

Quickfish had read about it in the tower’s small library, and when that was exhausted and insufficient, taken himself to the street of small saints, and when that had given only rumours, he’d visited the Glass Archive, and paid the price for some real knowledge.

And what they had told him was simple: that Thell was an empire which had defeated death. Until it was itself defeated. His mum and dad had killed the monsters he now needed to find, and put the Republic in their place.

The connection was clearest in what the sources didn’t say, be they book or back alley or archive. The Republic was not so distant from the Empire it had overthrown. Something of that Empire still lived on in Thell. Which meant that magic might still sleep there. Like a maggot in the wound, like a worm in the soil.

And if there was any hope of bringing his mother back into the light, Quickfish would take it. Even if it meant stepping into the place of his childhood nightmares.

Ahead, Roofkeeper has stopped to chat with a miller working by the lock, with two children who are very hale, and not at all starved of blood. He looks back and beckons.

‘Got a bed for the night, and some food too if we don’t mind bending our backs to the wheel.’

Quickfish smiles at this man who has left house and home with him. Because of love. Because of hope that something can still be saved.

And maybe Quickfish had stopped believing that, at points. And maybe he needed to see that face, with its honest brow and firm bones. He catches up with Roofkeeper and kisses him on the forehead. Lingers on it for a second. Smiles at the kids as they go to chase ducks down the eddies.

‘Time to earn your supper, your majesty,’ Roof mutters, and Quickfish kicks him.

‘Time to mind your tongue.’

Roof holds his eye as he hefts a sack of flour. ‘I thought that was your job.’

And Quickfish doesn’t mean to blush, but the blood is in his cheeks before he knows it. Roof’s laughter cutting the rill of the mill water.

‘Come on, come on. Town’s not so bad after all, is it?’

Quickfish hefts a second sack, and looks at Millet as it shelters in the river’s bend. At his back, the Grey Towers of Hesper still limn the sky. In the tallest tower, his mother, and all the stories she ever told. If he’s going to get her back, he’s going to need to go Thell.

Perhaps it’s like Roofkeeper says. Perhaps the stories are just stories. Perhaps there is only enough magic left to fix the world, not break it again.

Shoulders set and cheeks aglow, Quickfish steps into the town, into the shadow of the hill, and the shadow of that tomb.

9

These berks are so superstitious

they shit into their own shadows.

—Caskheart, first mate of the Pride of the Forests

The docks of Hesper embrace the water in long, lazy loops, switchbacks of solid stone, creating a series of calmer pools, a brief breathing space between the city’s ships and the ceaseless pull of East Tide.

A trade city from the very shape of it. Smaller ships and boats could make their way up the canals that climbed the cliffside, levered up on lock and muscle, and follow the waterways right out to the whitewashed merchant houses, with their low loading docks and broad, beautiful doors which opened with slowness, stillness, onto the sluggish waters. Shipwright could still remember the merchants carefully stepping down slick canal steps, lifting the trimmed hems of their gowns and robes free of the algae, running broad, confident fingers over wares which came from all corners of the world. Fruits shelled in hard black spikes, silks and linens and perfume. The bigger barges bringing the real trade; iron and brass and powder.

She could still remember the thrill of the mornings, floating markets flung wide, their owners crying out their newly arrived wares in a looping, liquid shout that was part song, part prayer, part auctioneer’s block. Browsing wares and delicacies in those low-arched salerooms, their roofs crisscrossed with geometric patterns that seemed to reflect and refract the water lapping inches from her feet.

Each shop had its own smell, a mix of the produce and incense, the sweat of the sellers and the pomade in their dark hair. She missed their confident, soft hands, offering up treats with a glint, a soft word, taking her money with twice the speed.

A good hustle, with everyone in on the con. And then breakfast on the canal’s edge, feet dangling above the water, stripping rind and spitting pips at the mouthy barge boys below. Behind her, that half-song, half-sale, growing and ebbing in the morning light. It almost felt like being home.

The ship’s sails snap uncertainly in the seaport’s breeze, jerking her loose from the soft grip of memory. Their sail-god is dying, a guttering pulse of buttery light in the struggling canvas.

Below decks, Shroudweaver holds the body of a dead man and weeps as he feels him buck and writhe. The last shreds of his existence burnt and cindered to feed the god that got them here. Shipwright wants to join him down there, but there’s no time. There hasn’t been time for months.

Above the looped entrails of her port, the Free City of Hesper squats like a vulture on a fresh kill. The talons of her grey towers spear into the twitching body of the city, their massive flanks writhing with rope and men. Once upon a time whitewashed and beautiful, perhaps; now stained by the smoke from a million foundries. The whole city stinking with the filth of war.

Shipwright watches her crew unload; barrels and bales, oilcloth swaddled blades bobbing and weaving their way down ropes and hawsers into the guts of the city. After that, thirteen long boxes, each bound with red ribbon by Shroudweaver. Proof against any final indignities for the crew of the Volante. The men and women were mostly quiet as they worked, focused on the task beyond what was necessary.

There had been precious little chat since the fall of Astic. The last of the border towns swallowed up by the grey tide of Crowkisser’s army. A few ragged survivors arriving in Hesper with tales that were too bloody familiar. Wild-eyed dissenters with their names peeled loose, fraying like chewed skin. Mad within a week, dead within two. And they were the lucky ones. Many of them hadn’t run fast enough. The sea and shore between Astic and Hesper were studded with bodies reeking of lemon and rot. Slickwalker ranging ahead of Crowkisser’s armies, burning through shadow and twilight to keep the exodus slim. How he did it, she didn’t know, but it chilled her blood. Almost as much as the other tales. Not spoken as loudly, no froth of ale or madman’s roil to muddy them. The tales that Fallon’s scouts told, that Astic had welcomed Crowkisser in. That even now, warm lights burnt in that little fisher town, and its people gave themselves over to the new regime, so long as the boats still sailed, and their nets still pulled fish. Shipwright hadn’t mentioned that to Shroud, not yet. Scared to, if truth be told. Could be that’s how this war would be won. Folk got tired of fighting.

She looked at her crew, and marked the strain of it on them, the shadowed eyes and shaking hands. Too much time taken up with running and hiding, even if they called it raiding. Crowkisser hunted the ship like a coursing dog, and her crew were run ragged. Almost all of them new fish, brought aboard after the last disastrous sally towards the south. Shipwright barely knew their faces, much less their names.

She cracks her knuckles methodically. Ah, well. Time enough for that if they survive.

As the last barrel bellies off into the depths of the city, Shipwright beckons her first mate towards her. Sandy haired, wide-faced and blue-eyed, scarred along the collarbone where something hot and hungry has tried to put an end to him. Slickwalker’s blasted gun, most likely. Makes him distinctive though. Let’s her hang onto his name.

He dips his head respectfully. She smiles.

‘Ropecharmer. All swinging steady?’

‘Yes, ma’am,’ he says, ‘Smooth and easy.’

Gods, she thinks, he’s fucking enjoying himself. Maybe it was easier, when you were young. She stifles a twinge of envy and steadies a hand on his shoulder. ‘OK, Rope. Take the rest ashore. Get them fed, get them laid, get them drunk. I don’t care but get them out from under my feet. I need you back by first swell, but no sooner.’

Her eyes slide up to the city’s writhing talons.

‘Shroud and I have to go see the boss.’