Chapter 11
Trolls asleep in heaps like boulders with blankets. The fire is down to coals. Bakasura has emerged from Smurjan's shadow and lies across the cave floor like a beached whale made of teeth, eyes half-lidded, sniffing.
each as big as a doorway, flaring as he sniffs along the sleeping crew.
He sniffs Marka. "Strong." He sniffs Drekk. "Salty." He sniffs Trollmage. "…Lazy. Delicious." Trollmage, eyes closed, flaps a hand at him: "Go away."
He reaches Vigolas, asleep with both arms around his coat, and stops, nostrils frozen mid-sniff.
He moves on to Kompis. Stops again. Longer this time.
waking up nose-to-nose with a mouth the size of a barn door.
troubled, a giant creature with a small, honest confusion.
completely lost.
Bakasura turns and finds Mingus sitting right in front of him: a golden retriever, tail sweeping the floor, looking up at the jaws of the world with total calm.
Bakasura opens his maw over the dog, slowly, more to test than to bite. Mingus doesn't move. He sneezes.
the jaws stopping and hanging open in the air, his small eyes blinking.
He closes his mouth and lies down beside the dog, very carefully, like a mountain trying not to squash a pebble.
Kali slides out of Smurjan's shadow and sits down across from her uninvited, spinning a black-glass sickle on one fingertip.
Two killers, measuring each other.
looking at Rougeina's blades, at the silver one specifically.
Grandmother Ulla leads the crew and the refugee trolls through the troll tunnels: vast carved halls with pillars like tree trunks, troll faces carved into every wall, glowing moss for light.
at the back of the group, glancing behind him into the dark.
Far down a side tunnel, a faint voice drifts in the dark, dry and precise.
At the end of the side tunnel, the stone greys. The carved troll faces on the walls fade one after another, mid-expression.
Black-and-white Cleaners pour out of the grey: six of them, each with a short scroll, reading fragments aloud as they run. Wherever they point and read, a pillar, a stair or a lantern greys and goes.
RANK PLATE ×6: CLEANER · K-II MARKED · Scalelist #160,000–#199,000
Rougeina Swaps behind a Cleaner and claps a hand over his mouth. His half-read word dies unheard, and nothing greys.
Marka swings her anchor into a Cleaner's scroll and tears it in half mid-word.
Kompis shoots a scroll out of a Cleaner's hands: Ivar, two shots.
Kali rides Bakasura's head like a war-elephant through a line of Cleaners, laughing.
But there are more voices coming from every side tunnel, a chorus of dry drones reading the mountain away. The grey creeps in from three directions. The ceiling over the trolls starts to fade.
grabbing Trollmage, who is being carried on Marka's back again, by the collar.
lifting. Violet runes ignite one after another along his fingers, more than at the Pass, fewer than he'd like.
written in the air:
MACRO : COLLAPSE TUNNEL = 40
Forty tunnels collapse at once. Across a cross-section of the mountain, like an ant-farm diagram, forty side passages slam shut in a thunder of falling rock, one after another, boom-boom-boom-boom, sealing every grey voice behind a wall of stone. In the one tunnel left open, the crew, the trolls and the Trinity run, with Bakasura bringing up the rear, his huge body holding back the dust.
Silence. Dust settling. Trolls coughing, counting each other, everyone accounted for.
flat on his back on the floor, runes dark, completely spent.
pressing her huge hand flat against the cave wall, listening.
On the mountainside above, Sigvat stands in the snow with a very long scroll unrolled down the slope like a carpet. He's reading. He looks older than he did yesterday.
Inside, on the tunnel wall beside Grandmother Ulla's hand, a thin grey line appears in the rock and starts, slowly, to spread.