Chapter 10

Six CLEANERS in robes of printed black-and-white stand in a line. At their centre, the reader: a thin, prim man with ink-stained fingers, spectacles with no glass in them, and a face that looks seventy on a body that moves like thirty.

SIGVAT · K-IV SHAPED · Scalelist #1,877 · the Cleaner

sealed at the bottom with a black wax seal shaped like a closed eye.

With every word, something goes grey. "Dwellings": the longhouses fade like ink in water. "Hearths": the fires go colourless and cold mid-flame. "Paths": the stone steps between the houses dissolve under fleeing feet.

Trolls, enormous, moss-backed and gentle, run with children in their arms. One old troll stops and looks back at his house. It is already just a grey outline. Then it isn't even that.

staring at her own hands. Her red scarf has gone grey.

The crew watches from the crack in the cliff. Vigolas is already climbing out.

hesitating. Then Mingus runs past him out of the cave, uphill toward the screaming. Kompis swears and follows.

The crew crashes into the edge of the fading village.

Marka lifts a grey-flickering cart off a troll's leg.

Rougeina Swaps a child out of a dissolving doorway, blink, and is holding her on solid ground.

Drekk drags an old troll by the arm.

reaching for a troll caught in the grey. The grey touches his hand, and for a moment his fingers go colourless, the same way they did with the black shard. He yanks the troll out anyway.

He sees the threads between the trolls snapping one by one as their houses vanish, the bonds of a whole village being uncounted. He shoots at the grey, and it does nothing.

being carried by the crow. Not really: the crow is pulling his collar while he walks. He watches Sigvat's lips moving up on the ridge, very carefully.

Sigvat stops reading and looks down at the small, fast figures running into his decree.

rolling the scroll up. His knuckles are spotted with age that wasn't there this morning; a few more hairs drift from his head onto the scroll. He brushes them off without looking, like a man who has stopped counting.

The Cleaners file away along the ridge toward the next valley. Behind them, Fjellheim is gone. Where it stood is a flat grey field, shaped like nothing, the snow around it untouched, as if a village had never been there.

standing at the edge of the grey field. A troll mother holds the girl with the grey scarf. Nobody says anything.

A huge fire. Dozens of refugee trolls sit along the walls, wrapped in moss-blankets. The crew sits on one side of the fire.

And on the other side of the fire sits Smurjan, alone, his three shadows thrown up the cave wall like three people.

hand on a knife.

An ancient troll woman shuffles out of the dark, wrapped in a shawl of woven roots, her face like a cliff with kindness carved into it. She stops in front of Trollmage, who is lying by the fire, and looks at him for a long time.

Grandmother Ulla bows: a deep, slow troll bow, the kind that takes a while. Every troll in the cave bows too, all of them, toward the lazy half-elf by the fire.

staring at Trollmage.

turning to the whole fire.

He reaches into his coat slowly and draws out one shard. It shows a white room, a man screaming, and his shadow tearing into three shapes. He holds it up to the firelight.

For the first time, all three voices are silent. His third eye opens, void-black, staring at the shard.

We can't see a face. Just silver, and a head tilted, almost tenderly, toward the screaming man.

across the fire. She has gone very still, staring at the silver figure. Her hand has drifted to one of her eight blades: the one that, in this firelight, has exactly the same silver shine.

Vigolas lowers the shard. Smurjan's third eye is still open. Out in the night, far away, a dry voice drones across the snow: another valley, another decree.