Chapter 130

between Edvar's two gloved fingers. He flicks it across the tea-table at Rougeina's chest, gently, like dealing a card.

Rougeina Swaps with the teapot on the hob.

The slip lands on the teapot, where she was standing. Red wax melts. A ribbon of light. The teapot is delivered: it vanishes from her chair, and somewhere a very old woman in a very old body is suddenly holding a hot teapot.

blinking behind his spectacles.

Edvar writes fast: quill, slip, wax, seal, flick. Rougeina Swaps, and every slip routes what she leaves behind:

A chair she swapped with becomes a dog: a chair's worth of soul delivered into a stray in the lower city, and the dog's soul into the chair, which now barks.

A stack of routing notes she swapped with is delivered into a Courier on the stairs outside, who suddenly speaks in paperwork.

A coat on the hook becomes a Sentinel captain two terraces down, who suddenly feels very wool.

The bundles fall off the shelves, the fire scatters, and the study fills with confused barking furniture.

writing, shivering harder with every slip, frost forming on his spectacles.

The study door bursts open. The crew pours in from the stairs: Vigolas, Smurjan, Kali, Drekk, Kompis with Mingus, the troll-crow, the crow-Trollmage.

Edvar flicks three slips at once at the doorway. Smurjan cuts two with the Sightline. The third hits Drekk's mask, the bell-rope mask, and the mask is delivered: it vanishes off Drekk's face to somewhere far away, leaving him faceless again in the doorway.

eyes gold, looking at Edvar through all the chaos, reading him.

Edvar's threads. Thousands upon thousands of them running out of the slender man in every direction, out of the windows and through the walls to everywhere in the world. And every single one ends not in a person but in a word: a name in neat handwriting floating at the end of a thread like a label on a parcel. Soldier, female, Astralis. Child, male, Gate City. Fisherman, aged. Not one face.

horrified.

pausing mid-quill, faintly offended.

hearing that. Behind a barking armchair, blades out, her heart heavy, five stones (four now, Kvar carries one). Something hard and quiet settles in her face.

She stops Swapping. She walks toward him across the wrecked study, through barking chairs and drifting notes, straight at the desk.

pressed against the frosted window, slips fluttering from his fingers, spectacles fogging.

three steps from him, blades lowering. She doesn't want to stab a man who won't look at her. She wants him to look.

Behind her, from the study doorway, humming: a low, slow, gentle tune, like a lullaby, filling the whole room.

turning, and every one of them suddenly yawns. The fire on the hearth dims to an ember. The barking furniture goes quiet.

A huge, stooped figure fills it, ducking under the lintel. A smith's scarred forearms black with soot, a leather apron over a white robe, collars hanging from his belt like a jailer's keys. Bruise-dark rings under his eyes. He's humming.

FREYSTJARN · K-V ARCHITECT · Architect Nine, Keeper of the Collars

tired, kind, terrible.

He hums a note, and out of the empty air a collar of white iron closes around Rougeina's wrist, snap, with a lock shaped like the eye of the Order.

the silver ring and the rose script under the collar, dimming to an ember. Sleeping.

Another note, and a second collar closes round her throat, snap. She tries to Swap. Nothing. Her Swap is asleep.

sagging against the window in relief, adjusting his scarves with shaking hands.

picking his sealed slip up off the floor, the one with her name and her mother's body on it, and smoothing it out.

Rougeina, collared at wrist and throat, sinless, standing in the middle of the ruined study. Behind her, the crew, every one of them yawning, eyelids drooping, as the huge stooped Architect in the doorway hums them all to sleep.