Chapter 127
Stair-streets climbing the Marhold Spine toward the white towers, terraced, steep, snowy. Since the Gate Yard fell there are no gates, so everyone climbs.
climbing a stair, Rougeina in front. The troll-with-a-crow-inside hops behind them, cawing at pigeons. The crow-with-a-Trollmage-inside rides Kompis's shoulder, sulking.
Something is wrong with everyone. An old grandmother stands in a Sentinel's posture, barking orders in a soldier's voice. A big soldier sits on a step weeping, rocking, hands folded like an old woman's. A child speaks in a scholar's careful voice; a scholar giggles.
eyes gold, and the square is a tangle of threads: every person's thread runs not into their own body but across the square into someone else's.
peering.
quiet, looking at the weeping soldier who is someone's grandmother.
looking up at Kompis with an old woman's frightened eyes.
kneeling, gold script glowing down his arms.
Kompis takes the thread running out of the soldier's chest toward the grandmother-in-the-Sentinel-pose across the square, and ties a knot in it, tight, glowing.
Across the square, the barking "grandmother" stops. She turns. She feels the soldier, a pull across the square, and walks straight to him without knowing why.
nose bleeding a little. Both ends of that knot are in him: an old woman's fear, a soldier's confusion.
who has stolen a bright brass button off a merchant's coat and is hiding it in Trollmage's robe pocket with deep satisfaction.
Silence spreads across the square as everyone stops. Up the stair-street: grey coats, satchels, calm faces. Couriers, a dozen of them, descending.
opening his satchel. Red wax gleaming.
Slips fly. Vigolas punches them out of the air; one lands on a pigeon, which suddenly walks like a duchess.
Smurjan's Triple Pulse: three Couriers down in one beat, satchels spilling slips down the stairs.
Rougeina Swaps with falling slips, staying where nothing can touch her.
Kompis fires Tyst, silent, snipping satchel-straps.
The crow-Trollmage dives at a Courier's spectacles. "I CAN'T CAST BUT I CAN PECK!"
The troll-crow, delighted, chases the shiny wax seals down the stairs like marbles.
The fight sweeps up the stair-streets, terrace to terrace, through markets full of the wrong-bodied, Couriers throwing slips that swap bystanders as they go. Chaos.
hitting Drekk's axe-haft, and missing him, barely.
Kali, out of Smurjan's shadow, borrows Rougeina's Swap for sixty seconds. "Lending!" Rougeina calls, and it's shared, no darkness. Two Swappers clear a whole terrace of Couriers.
The whole flank of the Marhold Spine, terraces stacked to the sky, and the crew fighting up it in a long running battle: lightning, crimson lines, silver-rose afterimages, a crow dive-bombing, a troll juggling wax seals, red slips spinning in the snowy air like autumn leaves. Every terrace below them is full of people stumbling into each other's arms in the wrong bodies, finding each other, tied by little gold knots glowing across the city.
Above it all, near the top of the Spine, one small window glows warm.
The Couriers retreat up the stairs into the white towers. The crew stands panting on a high terrace, snow falling.
ahead of everyone, staring up at the warm window.
taking a step toward the next stair, and her hand goes to her chest. A tiny frown.
A heartbeat, drawn as a pulse line under the panel: ba-dum… ba……dum…
feeling it through the knot between them, turning sharply.
ba……… ……dum…… ba………
Rougeina's knees fold. She drops on the snowy stairs, blades clattering, a hand clawing at her chest, gasping.
The crew running to her on the high terrace, Vigolas first, Kompis white-faced, the crow screaming. Rougeina on her back in the snow, looking up at the warm window of the Routing Study, her heart stuttering.