Chapter 108

The black clouds sink lower, filling the sky over the crack like a lid. The air goes thick. Fires flatten. Every Riser is pressed back down to their knees, even Mor Lyft.

on her hands and knees, looking up at the descending clouds, tears streaming.

still asleep under his tarp, day five of three.

third eye open, measuring.

The crew tries. Vigolas, on one knee, punches green lightning straight up into the clouds. It vanishes into them like a match into a lake. The clouds don't notice.

Smurjan tries the Triple Pulse upward, three strikes at once into the lowest cloud. It dents. It keeps coming.

gasping, ribs bound.

The clouds are thirty metres above the canyon floor. Huts on the rim crumple under the edge of the cloud-mass, crushed flat like paper. The Risers crawl toward the deepest cracks, carrying children.

on his knees in the middle of the canyon floor, arms around Mingus, looking up at the sky coming down on them. Nowhere to run.

He's looking up too. Then he looks at Kompis. At the Riser child crying by the fire. At Mor Lyft on her knees for the second time in forty years. At the crew, every one of them, his people, pressed flat under a falling sky.

Kind. Brown. And at the very edges of his fur, the gold begins to glow.

feeling it through his arms around the dog: the warmth rising, the heartbeat under his palm getting bigger.

Mingus slips gently out of Kompis's arms and walks to the centre of the canyon floor. On Tyngden, where everyone crawls, he walks easily. He weighs exactly what he weighs. He sits down and looks up at the sky.

on her knees, staring up at the golden bear.

who was crying, now laughing, pointing.

crawling across the canyon floor to the bear's enormous hind paw and pressing both hands against the golden fur. Under his palms the heartbeat is like a drum the size of a house. BA-DUM. BA-DUM. Along the bottom of the panel, the golden pulse line roars.

bowed under the weight of the sky, one huge brown eye rolling down to look at Kompis. A low, rumbling whuff. Go.

understanding. He gets up, unsteady, onto his feet, and turns to the crew.

on one knee. He looks up at the golden bear holding the sky, then at the far edge of the canyon, the rim, the plain beyond, and the Leaden Hall, one window lit.

The crew moves out from under the bear's shelter toward the canyon wall. Smurjan, three shadows side by side. Rougeina with a moth in a jar on her belt. Kompis, Lilla Ulv in hand. Drekk, mask on, axe up. Kali, rising out of the shadow. And Trollmage, still asleep, slung over Drekk's shoulder.

adjusting the snoring troll.

The crew climbs: on their knees, then on hands and knees, then, slowly, trembling, bent double like Risers, up the cracked rock toward the rim. Every handhold is a debt. They pay it.

at the bottom, upright again under the bear's shelter, calling up after them.

The crew hauls itself over the edge onto the open plain of Tyngden. Bullet-rain. Crushing sky. In the distance, squat and grey, the Leaden Hall.

at the front, on his knees on the plain, rain hammering his bare shoulders. He looks back once: down in the canyon, a golden bear holding up a black sky, alone.

grim, the grin gone.

Vigolas puts one foot flat on the ground. Then he pushes. Every muscle in his body shakes. The rain hammers his face. He gets to his feet: bent like a Riser, trembling like an old man, coatless, standing.

One man walking, bent, through the bullet-rain toward the Leaden Hall. Behind him, one by one, the crew pushes up onto their feet and follows.

Behind the thick grey glass, Tyngd, broad as a doorway, watches them come. Over the back of his throne hangs a midnight-green coat with thirty-six shards in its lining.