Chapter 134

The floor of glass with clouds drifting beneath it; the ring of twelve chairs under the carved frieze with its black bar. Six chairs are dark, each with a dark Signet on its seat: the Third, Sixth, Seventh, Eighth, Ninth and Twelfth, where a lit Signet hangs in the air at a standing man's height. Six Architects sit.

Six small squares of white light glow on it, one for each hand. The seventh place stays dark. The glass waits, and nothing happens.

A woman lounging sideways in it as if it were a reading chair: long dark hair in a knot with a red pen pushed through it, red-stained fingertips, reading glasses on a chain, a parchment-coloured robe embroidered with neat red margin notes. She looks bored.

MEIRWEN · K-V ARCHITECT · Architect Eleven, Keeper of the Codex Editorial

Brisk, compact, middle-aged, sitting bolt upright. Bronze-rimmed spectacles with sliding lenses, a measuring tape worn like a stole, hair pinned up with brass rulers, ink on her cuffs, and a bronze stamp on a chain at her belt.

INGRITH · K-V ARCHITECT · Architect Four, Keeper of Rank Certification

Ingrith unrolls a map on her knees: black fjords, carved gorges, a single word in her neat hand. BRYGDAR.

A tiny, ancient man, beard tucked into his belt, fingers black with ink to the second knuckle, eyes milk-white. His voice is very quiet.

HJALMAR · K-V ARCHITECT · Architect One, Keeper of the First Ledger

at the root of Glasheim, where the Marhold Spine turns inside out. A long reading room of white stone, lamps, desks and inkwells. It has two doors: one, at the near end, opens on Glasheim's snowy foundations; the far one opens on violet light and the faint gold glow of shelves. A line of Correctors in parchment-grey, red quills behind their ears, files silently through the far door.

A long column marches north: Examiners in white robes with bronze seals on chains, brass rods crackling with script, and behind them, drawn by oxen, seal-towers, siege towers with a giant bronze seal hung in each like a bell. At the head, on foot, Ingrith, checking her measuring tape.

A troll-cut gorge, its walls carved with giant troll faces in rows. Around every stone throat lies a cracked ring of white iron, broken at the seam. At an Examiner checkpoint a man in prison grey, a raw collar-scar at his throat, runs for the gorge, newly woken Wrath crackling crimson along both arms.

RANK PLATE ×6: EXAMINER · K-II MARKED · Rank Certification

A dome of bronze light slams down over the man and he freezes mid-stride. The Examiner's sliding lenses click and focus. Then a bronze seal the size of a door drops out of empty air onto him, KLANG, and his plate burns new: K-I UNMARKED. The crimson on his arms shrinks to a dot on one wrist.

The Marka under full sail toward a coast of black cliffs split by deep fjords, snow on every ridge.

Trollmage is standing, wrapped in Ulla's scarf, with dark rings under his violet eyes. The crow sits on his head, also wide awake. Kompis and Vigolas watch from the mast.

Two carved troll-kings, one on each cliff, nose to nose across the fjord mouth, stone lips pressed shut. Their stone eyes are open and glowing a deep moss-gold. Around each colossal throat lies a ring of white iron the size of a harbour, cracked through at the seam, half fallen into the sea.

in the water, white iron, an eye-shaped lock on it as big as a door.

Nobody touches the chains. The stone lips grind apart on their own with a sound like an avalanche breathing out, and the sea-gate opens. Above the Marka, both pairs of giant eyes turn. They follow neither the ship nor the captain. They follow Trollmage.

pulling his scarf up over his nose. The crow burrows into his hair.

the same slipways where the Marka was built. Smoke rises from the huts. Over every slipway sits a bronze dome of light like an upturned bowl, and inside them house-sized trolls stand frozen and slow, mallets and wedges in their huge hands. Examiners in white stand guard around them, seals raised.

A huge troll shipwright strains to lift an ordinary mallet and can't. Sweat runs down his stone-grey face. His plate: K-I UNMARKED.

The grin is gone.

The Marka comes in at full speed and runs straight up the nearest slipway like a sledge, bark hull screaming on stone, scattering Examiners like white birds.

Vigolas walks straight into a seal-dome. The bronze light slides off him like rain off a coat; there's no number to measure. He takes the seal out of the Examiner's hands. "Measure this." (lightning knuckle, KRAK)

Rougeina Swaps from seal-chain to seal-chain, never still. An Examiner's sliding lenses spin and spin and can't lock on. "You'll have to be quicker than that. Nobody is."

Kompis, Mingus planted at his heel: Lilla Ulv's wolf-cub bullet ricochets dome to dome, bonk bonk bonk, snapping the chains of six seals. LILLA ULV: "wheee!"

Smurjan walks the Sightline to the seam of a dome and opens it with one open palm, like a man opening a door for someone.

Bakasura rises out of the fjord under the slipway and eats a bronze seal whole, chain and Examiner's glove and all. BAKASURA: "…Tastes like paperwork."

The domes shatter like bells dropped on stone. Trolls straighten, huge and slow, plates flickering back to what they were, and the first thing the shipwright does is pick up his mallet and look at it as if it were a miracle.

scrambling into a skiff at the end of the quay.

An enormous grey hand rests on it. It gives the skiff one slow, polite push out into the fjord, and the captain sails off backwards, open-mouthed.

An immensely old troll, bent like a tree in wind: a beard like a waterfall of grey moss down to his knees, small bright eyes under brows like roots, one tusk broken. A shipwright's leather apron over a robe of patched sailcloth. In his hand, a tall staff of dark wood carved all over with faces, troll faces wearing crowns, one above another, right up to a smooth uncarved knob at the top.

Drekk, faceless in his bell-rope mask, throws both arms round the troll's knee, which is as high as he reaches.

bowing, holding out his scarred palms, the ones he burned saving the Marka's bow. Stav takes both of them in one hand, the way a man holds two eggs.

Threads around Stav: hundreds of them, warm, running to every troll in the yard and to the Marka's keel. And one, the oldest, as thick as a mooring line, runs off into nothing, out of the panel, still warm.

turning to Trollmage. Very gentle.

Twitch.

From high on the mountain above the fjord, the horn: deep, ancient, like stone breathing in. Up the mountainside the doors of the troll halls swing open one after another, and trolls come out, hundreds of them, then thousands.