Chapter 12
The crew and the trolls spill out of a crack in the mountain onto a narrow ledge above a vast gorge. Behind them, inside the tunnel, the grey line keeps spreading through the rock.
Across the gorge, two hundred metres away, is the far cliff and safety. The only way over is a troll rope-ferry: a huge wooden platform hanging from ropes as thick as tree trunks, pulled hand over hand.
Forty trolls on the platform; Marka and three trolls haul the rope. The platform swings out over a drop so deep that clouds drift through it beneath their feet.
looking down, then quickly not looking down.
Two figures step out from behind a rock as the platform reaches the halfway point. They are identical: two thin clerks in black-and-white robes, the same face, the same glassless spectacles, each holding one half of a torn scroll.
RANK PLATE ×2: TWIN CLERK · K-III TESTED · Scalelist #4,411 / #4,412
reading, each starting where the other stops, the same sentence in two voices.
The great ropes grey from the far end, fading toward the platform. Forty trolls, Marka, and the children on it.
on the near ledge, eyes on the twins.
She looks at a rock beside Clerk A, blink, and her hand is over his mouth. Clerk B keeps reading alone. The grey slows to half speed, but it doesn't stop.
reading faster, sweating.
Kompis aims across the gorge. Two hundred metres, in wind, at a mouth. Ivar's ghost holds its breath.
A fan of afterimages of Kompis's rifle, hundreds of tries, every bullet path through the wind, until one threads it and clips Clerk B's half-scroll out of his hands. It spins over the edge of the gorge.
Clerk B, scroll gone, keeps reading from memory, and the grey keeps creeping, slower, but still coming.
The grey is ten metres from the platform. The platform jerks. The trolls scream.
on the near ledge. He looks at the grey rope and at the children on the platform. His third eye opens.
Smurjan leaps off the ledge. He runs along the greying rope itself, across the open sky, toward the far cliff, toward Clerk B. Everywhere his feet touch the rope, the rope holds a moment longer.
He reaches the far cliff at a dead sprint. Clerk B sees him coming, turns and reads at him, every word aimed at his chest.
Where the words hit, the grey blooms through his robes, over his heart.
He doesn't stop. With the last of his colour he puts one hand over Clerk B's mouth, and with the other drives the twin into the rock.
The reading stops. The ropes stop greying. On the platform, forty trolls are safe.
standing over the unconscious twin. His skin is grey from the heart outward. He looks back across the gorge at the crew, at the trolls, and he almost smiles.
He falls. He drops off the edge of the cliff into the clouds beneath the gorge, without a sound.
on the near ledge, reaching out, too far away.
Everyone is across. The twins are tied up with ferry rope, gagged with moss. The trolls stand at the gorge's edge in silence. Kompis looks down into the clouds. Drekk stands with his hat off. Kali and Bakasura are nowhere; when their host fell, they fell too.
ears up, looking down into the gorge. His tail starts, slowly, to wag.
Out of the clouds below, a figure climbs back up the sheer cliff face: slow, hand over hand, white braid swinging. It's Smurjan. Alive. His robes are torn and his skin is slate-grey again.
He hauls himself over the edge and lies on his back in the snow, breathing. Everyone stares.
His third eye is open, and it is no longer void-black. It is grey-blue now, the colour of the gorge's clouds.
looking up at the sky. White flakes are drifting down onto his face. He frowns at them, puzzled.
The crew exchanges looks.
The memory he came back with. As Smurjan closes his eyes in the falling snow, the spread fills with what dying shook loose. It is the flashback (five panels inside the splash, the only flashback this chapter):
(a) A young man with slate-grey skin and one shadow, laughing in a sunlit field. Before.
(b) A white room. Chains. Trisdel robes. A great mirror on the far wall.
(c) Inside the mirror, the silver figure, raising one hand.
(d) The scream: one shadow tearing into three, the calm one, the sharp one and the hungry one.
(e) The silver figure's hand closing, taking something small and bright out of the screaming man, and keeping it.
Kali and Bakasura seep back out of his shadow, Kali sullen, Bakasura heavy-eyed. They sit on either side of him in the snow like two siblings at a hospital bed.
looking at him differently now.
glancing at Bakasura, the colossal maw breathing slow clouds of steam into the cold.
His grey-blue third eye shines faintly.
Faint, layered, behind his voice, like a crowd in a far-off room, many voices whisper at once.