Chapter 13
A big camp: the troll refugees, the crew, and a fire built so large it lights the snow gold for fifty metres. Stars thick as frost overhead.
Trolls sharing out dried fish. Grandmother Ulla telling a story to a ring of sleepy troll children, her hands making mountain-shapes in the firelight.
Marka stands in the snow with five troll children, each of them already as tall as a grown man, showing them how to throw an anchor. She spins it round her head on its chain, whoosh whoosh whoosh, and lets it fly into a snowbank. A blizzard of snow erupts. The children shriek with delight.
The smallest troll girl, the one whose scarf went grey in Fjellheim, tries. The anchor goes straight up, comes straight down, and buries itself in the snow one centimetre from Drekk's boot.
staring at the anchor at his feet. Then, for the first time since the Kettle sank, he laughs: a short, surprised bark of a laugh, the kind that hurts.
watching Drekk laugh, smiling a quiet, private smile.
Smurjan sits a little apart, as he always does. Bakasura is curled behind him like a black hill, and Kali sharpens a sickle. Marka drops down beside him with two bowls of stew and hands him one without asking.
Smurjan looks at the bowl like no one has ever handed him one. He eats.
lying in the snow at the camp's edge, looking up at the stars. Mingus is stretched between them.
quiet.
His head comes up. His ears go flat. He stares into the dark pines beyond the firelight, and growls.
At the edge of the light, faces in the dark: black-and-white robes, glassless spectacles. A dozen of them. They are all reading quietly at once.
The grey pours in from every side at once. A tent fades. A sled fades. The great fire goes grey and cold mid-flame, its warmth gone in a heartbeat. Trolls scream and gather their children.
The crew is on their feet.
Rougeina is already gone into the dark.
Kompis raises Ivar.
Marka grabs her anchor.
Kali and Bakasura rise out of Smurjan's shadow on either side of him.
The grey is reaching for the circle of wounded trolls and children at the centre of the camp, where Grandmother Ulla is shielding them with her arms.
Mingus is standing in front of them, and Mingus changes.
In a flare of gold he rises into a colossal golden MANTICORE: a lion's body the colour of firelight, a mane like a sunrise, and great wings of gold feathers spread wide over the children like a roof. Curled high over his back is a scorpion's tail of amber glass, glowing from within like honey held up to a lamp. His eyes are exactly the same: kind, brown, Mingus.
He beats his wings once, and the grey creeping toward the children blows back like smoke in a gale.
under the golden wings, looking up at the creature over them with absolute wonder.
jaw dropped, rifle half-raised.
The manticore holds the centre and guards; the crew does the fighting.
Marka swings her anchor through three Cleaners' scrolls in a single arc of torn paper.
Kali, laughing, spins through the dark slashing scrolls in half.
Bakasura simply eats a Cleaner's scroll right out of his hands, then looks at the Cleaner thoughtfully. The Cleaner runs.
Kompis fires with the golden pulse line thrumming strong along the panel's bottom edge: shot, shot, shot, three scrolls ripped from three hands.
Vigolas, unarmed, tackles a Cleaner into the snow mid-sentence and stuffs a fistful of snow into the man's mouth.
In the pines, a Cleaner raises his scroll toward the children, the last one still reading. Behind him, out of nothing, Rougeina.
through the Cleaner's printed robes.
(a) The Cleaner falls.
(b) He fades like breath on glass. His scroll drops into the snow, blank.
(c) Across the camp, every troll who saw him blinks, confused. What was I running from?
staring at the empty pines, then at Rougeina, who stands alone among the trees with her blade lowered. The old troll's face is wise enough to understand that she has forgotten something.
The Cleaners retreat into the dark, those who are left. The grey stops spreading. The camp is half gone. Tents, sleds and the great fire are blank grey ghosts in the snow, but every child is alive.
The golden manticore folds its wings around the children one last time, then shrinks in a fold of light, gold into gold, back into a golden retriever, who trots straight to the smallest troll girl and licks her grey scarf.
The crew gathers in the wreckage. Breathing hard. Alive.
(Nobody argues.)
watching the troll children stroke Mingus. His grey-blue third eye is soft.
Pale against the stars stands a thin figure, older again tonight, leaning on a staff now. Sigvat. His voice carries down the cold valley, dry and patient.
unrolling a scroll longer than any before: long enough to pool in the snow at his feet. The black eye-seal at the bottom glistens.
the words running down it in endless lines.
The camp, the trolls, the crew, the pines, the river and the mountain. All of it shelters the Trinity.
On the eastern horizon, the very first thread of grey dawn-light.