Chapter 132
bare, rope-callused, blade-scarred, taking Edvar's face. One palm on each cold cheek. He flinches like a man touched by fire.
eyes squeezed shut behind his fogged spectacles.
very close, voice low.
still clutching the sealed slip, trembling. He raises it toward her, toward the collar at her throat.
not stopping him. Not drawing a blade. Just holding his face.
behind fogged lenses, and slowly, slowly, they open.
A face. Close. Real. Not a name. Not a label on a parcel. A woman's face, sharp and fine-boned, a scar through the left eyebrow, cool green eyes, crimson hair cut ragged at the jaw, and behind it, underneath it, the shape of another face: the jaw, the brow, the eyes. Her mother's.
and his breath stops.
pressed against the collar at Rougeina's throat. The red wax won't melt. The ribbon of light doesn't come. The slip just sits there: a piece of paper against a person.
staring at it.
and something breaks in his calm face. Tears, behind the spectacles.
For one long panel she doesn't answer. Then, quietly:
shaking, the cold in him visible now, frost on his eyelashes.
her hands still on his face.
The crew is silent. Freystjarn stands by the desk with his collars piled in front of him. The ghosts of everyone Edvar routed crowd the shelves, faces turned toward him, and for the first time he can see them. All of them.
looking past Rougeina at the faces in the shelves, his whole life, all at once.
turning back to Rougeina, quiet, almost grateful.
She takes one hand from his face. With the other she gently straightens his spectacles.
(We see only Rougeina's shoulders, and a blade's flash in the frosted window.)
And then, across the whole world, Routing breaks.
A vast ribbon-storm of light pours out of the Routing Study: out of the window, through the walls, up into the sky over Glasheim. Thousands of souls in the wrong bodies are released all at once, ribbons of every colour crossing in the air above the Marhold Spine and snapping home: grandmothers back into grandmothers, soldiers back into soldiers, the scholar back in the scholar, the child back in the child. In the market square far below, people stumble, gasp and grab their own hands, themselves again, weeping.
On the study floor a huge troll suddenly sits bolt upright and says, in a sleepy, astonished, unmistakable voice, "…I have HANDS!" And a small black crow on the windowsill shakes itself, looks around, and says: "Kraa."
And through the window, fluttering like a bird, a woven mask of old bell-rope flies home and settles onto Drekk's face.
back in his own body, flexing his big grey-green fingers, delighted.
touching the bell-rope mask on his face, feeling the old knots.
lifting off the back of an empty fingerless glove on the floor, like a leaf off water. It drifts up through the frosted window toward the Council Hall.
The Signet settles on the Seventh Chair and goes dark. Around the ring, seven Architects stare at it. None of them can remember who sat there.
an old man with a long white beard, the First Chair, looking down at his own hands with dawning horror.
Seven ageless faces, for the first time in their endless lives, afraid of dying.
standing alone by the window, unfolding her list. She crosses off EDVAR. Her heart, ba……dum, a little heavier. A new stone. 115: six names, one of them carried by Kvar.
feeling it through their knot, crossing the room, putting a hand on her back without a word. Kvar's not here. The crew is. Six threads, holding her up.
very quietly, to no one, the list in her hand.
coming to stand on her other side.
By the desk, among the piled collars, Freystjarn stands with his eyes closed. He takes a deep breath, the first deep breath in centuries. He opens his mouth and begins to hum. The same lullaby. Backwards. Every note in reverse.
A hairline crack runs across the white iron, from the eye-shaped lock outward, slowly, like ice breaking in spring.