Chapter 113
The plain grey bullet comes at Kompis's heart. Subtick: the world grey, a thousand versions, and in all of them he's too slow, because he's looking at her.
Mingus slams into Kompis's legs and knocks him flat. The bullet tears through his hood instead of his chest and grazes his shoulder. Blood on the black sand.
on the ground, clutching his shoulder, staring up at the black pistol in Slagg's hand.
high up the mountain in the forge-fire, bouncing furiously, too far away to do anything.
The crew closes on Slagg: Vigolas, Smurjan, Rougeina, Drekk, Kali, Malm. Slagg doesn't move. He looks at them the way a man looks at weather.
lightning coiling.
Vigolas comes in with an Emerald Knuckle. Slagg doesn't dodge; he takes it full in the face. His head snaps back, his nose breaks, and his expression doesn't change.
Smurjan, the Triple Pulse, three strikes in one beat. Slagg takes all three, staggers, and walks forward again. Nothing.
Rougeina drops from a spark and her blade bites his shoulder. He doesn't flinch; he raises the black pistol and fires point-blank, and she Swaps away a hair's breadth ahead of the shot.
bleeding from three places, calm.
Slagg fires Lilla Ulv again and again: grey bullets, no bounce, no wolf, perfect aim. Every shot lands exactly where he means it to. Drekk's axe-haft splinters. Kali's wired sickle snaps. Bakasura's maw takes a shot in the tongue and recoils.
on his knees, watching his own gun used with no joy at all.
stepping in front of the crew, coal-eye blazing.
Malm hits him: one bare-fisted blow from a smith's arm. Slagg is thrown backwards twenty metres into the black sand. He gets up. Wipes his face. Walks back.
The lava-fields at dusk, red rivers of molten rock under a smoking sky. The crew is spread across the black sand, bruised, bleeding, weapons broken. In the middle, Slagg, bloodied from a dozen wounds, coat in tatters, face perfectly calm, walking forward at the same steady pace he started with. In one oil-black gauntlet, the silent black pistol. Behind him the Melters pour off their ships, a black tide with cauldrons smoking.
Every blow the crew has landed is visible on him, and none of them matter.
panting, to the others.
The crew retreats up the switchback path, carrying Kompis, the Melters advancing behind. Malm brings up the rear, punching cauldrons off the path into the lava.
The crew collapses around the great anvil. The forge-fire burns beside it, and Ivar's spark bounces in its heart, furious. Glöd bandages Kompis's shoulder with clumsy, gentle hands, whistling nervously.
eyes gold, staring down the mountain at the Melter camp. He can see her thread down there: thin, faint, covered.
sitting heavily on the bucket.
quiet.
slowly turning his head toward the forge-fire. Toward the gold spark bouncing in it.
going very still in the coals.
flaring bright, furious, loud.
wide-eyed, whispering to Mingus.
standing up from the bucket and rolling up his sleeves. Forearms like anvils. He takes a pair of long tongs from the wall and opens the forge-fire wide, so it roars up white.
white-hot, Ivar's spark rising out of the coals toward the tongs, the wooden box of pieces open on the anvil, and Kompis standing up with a smith's hammer in his good hand.