Sivani lifted the newly woven length of bioluminescent cloth, its frantic glow now subdued, the silvery script shimmering faintly within the warp. "Beware the red-eyed parasite." Her voice was flat, level as water in a cistern. Rochus, leaning over her trestle table, peered closer, his usual supercilious arch gone stiff. Grit from pulverized bone still clung to Sivani’s tunic. “A parasite,” Rochus repeated, testing the syllables. He traced the shimmering text with a gloved finger, hovering a millimeter above the weave. “Kormus’s final thought, rendered into a warning. It suggests an intelligence, or at least a directed hunger, behind the Hollow Blight.” Sivani turned the weave, letting its cold gleam skim the shadows under the ceiling rafters. “A devourer of fortune. Nadjia’s suspicion, verified by the dead man's ash.” She tilted her chin toward the drying racks. “The mold consumes, but with purpose. Not a random rot, but a focused extraction.” “Extracting what, precisely?” Rochus asked, his stare fixed on the gleaming strands. “The vitality of the district? The marrow of chance?” “Luck,” Sivani corrected, clipped and exact. “Not marrow, not vitality. The thread carried the imprint. The windfall coin, the narrow misses, the small favors of circumstance. All the small, invisible currents that keep cobbles whole.” She folded the weave carefully, laying it into a cedar box lined with velvet. “The creature is starving our streets.” The latch rattled. Nadjia stood in the doorway, her round cheeks devoid of their usual dimples. She took in the dye vats, the loom benches, and then the pair of them, her posture squared beneath her apron. Hallway gaslight projected her shadow wide across the limestone floor. “Sivani, Rochus,” Nadjia said, dropping her chirping register entirely. “The Mourner’s Guild is sealed under strict quarantine. Iron bars down at the portcullis. Nobody departs until the root of this taint is unearthed and cut.” Rochus drew himself up, chin angled. “Quarantine? By whose order, girl? We have funeral shrouds under contract, deadlines with the high families.” Nadjia stepped across the threshold and untied an iron-rimmed pouch at her hip. She produced a silver disc bearing the acid-etched sigil of a weeping eye split by a stiletto. “By authority of the Inquisitorial Bench, Master Rochus. I hold third-rank clearance. And the Cathedral’s concern is no longer your account books, but whether these foundations stand by dawn.” Sivani only tilted her head. The girl's calloused fingertips, her unerring inventory counts, the way she tracked floorboard tremors—the pieces snapped into neat alignment. “The gray mold under my floorboards, Nadjia. That was the start.” Nadjia met her gaze without flinching. “The first physical trace I could log. A feeder on windfalls, just as Kormus’s thread indicated. The cloister is riddled with it. The outer parishes go next if the center caves.” “And the red-eyed thing?” Rochus asked, his chin dropping an inch as he took in the inquisitorial seal. “The entity anchoring the spread,” Nadjia said. “Our scryers logged the pattern. It does not eat random grief; it gorges on stolen fortune. Windfalls twisted away from their natural owners, leaving gray rot in the marrow of the stones. The divining needle has dragged toward this corridor since the new moon.” Sivani’s knuckles rested against the cedar lid. *Stolen luck.* The phrase aligned with every strange turn across the month: the impossible gossamer spun from a flooded basement drain, the luminescent spool distilled from vats of ruined dye, the spare key left in Rochus’s lock after Jeshka spilled turpentine. Every petty disaster Jeshka orchestrated had inverted, yielding rare materials and high yields. The girl was not merely unlucky; she was drawing down a debt. Her grand project shifted in her thoughts. The Void Shroud, the legendary masterwork intended to seal her claim as Grandmaster, had always been designed around pure human sorrow—a dense hanging woven from the heaviest deathbed regrets in the parish. But that was wrong. Completely, utterly, horrifically wrong. The gray rot was not sorrow. It was predation. An emptiness hollowed out by unpaid debts. To complete the Void Shroud, she could not simply harvest quiet dying breaths. She had to bind the contagion itself, trapping its hunger in the warp and severing the parasite coiled inside the cathedral walls. “The masterwork,” Sivani said softly. “It cannot be woven from regret alone. It requires the absence itself. The rot.” Rochus stepped back, glancing between them with pale lips. “Spinning the contagion? That is suicide, Sivani. The ash crumbles iron.” “Not everything,” Sivani said. “It leaves gray ash. It leaves an imprint on the stone. Everything that exists can be threaded on a loom.” Her fingers twitched against her apron, measuring tensions only she could feel. Nadjia drew a squat brass dial from beneath her smock. A glass dome covered a shard of carved jet that whirled in erratic circles before locking north-northwest. The stone stopped dead, aimed directly through the partition toward Sivani’s inner quarters, where Jeshka kept her trunk and bed. Sivani studied the dial's alignment. The jet needle stayed rigid, fixed upon the wooden paneling. The origin of the siphon. The seat of the debt. Her own cousin. Jeshka. To complete her great shroud, Sivani would have to spin whatever was nested inside her cousin.

The Void Tapestry