Chapter 135
deep inside the mountain above the fjord. A cavern hall as tall as a cathedral, its pillars carved as sleeping trolls holding up the roof. Light falls from a shaft high above. At the far end there's no throne. There's a bed: a vast slab of stone, pillowed with moss, worn smooth and hollowed in the middle by centuries of sleeping kings. Over it, cut deep into the rock in old troll runes, is the royal motto:
WAKE ME WHEN IT'S TIME.
staring up at the carving.
The laziest troll alive is not lying on the bed. He sits on the floor beside it with his back turned to it, knees up, scarf over his nose, as far from it as he can get without leaving the room.
Vigolas sweeps into the deepest, most ridiculous bow in the history of bowing. A felt slipper hits him in the face, fwap.
perched on a carved troll's shoulder, looking down.
A long pause. His ears don't twitch.
A stone ledge high on a Brygdar mountain in summer. A small half-troll (enormous for six) lies on the warm rock with a book open on his face. Beside him Grandmother Ulla knits, broad and grey and smiling.
crouching in front of him.
Out of Trollmage run thousands of thin threads, very old and never once pulled, through the walls to every troll in the valley.
sitting on the edge of the King's Bed as if it were a kitchen bench, the carved staff across his knees. He runs a thumb down the faces on it.
the smooth, uncarved knob.
Order war-engines in the dark under Codexia, battering at a deep hall. In the hall, kneeling across the passage, a colossus of grey bark takes blow after blow and doesn't fall.
A huge, stooped man in a leather apron walks along the cliffs at night, humming. Out of the air, white-iron collars the size of harbours close around the throats of the stone kings, and their eyes close one by one.
half out of Smurjan's shadow, chin on her one fist.
almost smiling for the first time all day. Then his ears go flat.
A horn from the Pass, but not a troll horn. Brass. Flat and official, like a clerk clearing his throat across a whole valley.
The Brygdar Pass at sunset, red light down the troll-cut gorge, the carved kings watching from both walls. Filling the Pass from wall to wall: Ingrith's army. Rows of Examiners in white, seal-towers rolling on oxen, bronze seals hanging in them like bells. At the front, an old woman with spectacles of polished bone and a ledger chained to her wrist:
CHIEF EXAMINER · K-III TESTED · Scalelist #7,742
On the lead seal-tower stands Ingrith, lifting the bronze stamp from her belt, the First Seal. And out of the red sky, one after another after another, a hundred door-sized bronze seals slam down onto her own soldiers, KLANG KLANG KLANG KLANG, and every plate in the Pass burns new:
RANK PLATE ×100: EXAMINER · K-IV SHAPED (certified · until sunrise)
Sin-marks swell up white arms. Brass rods blaze like lightning held in a fist.
through her sliding lenses, looking up at the wall of the Pass. Trolls and crew stand along the troll-built battlement, and none of them has a face: smooth blanks, with rank plates floating where faces should be. KOMPIS · K-III TESTED · #1,288 · ROUGEINA · K-IV SHAPED · #777 · SMURJAN · K-IV SHAPED · #1,602 · TROLLMAGE · K-II MARKED (assigned) · #120,331. One plate glitches gold and won't hold still: ∞−1. At one man's heel, a dog-shaped blank with no plate at all.
Ingrith's voice booms up the gorge through the bronze bell of her tower.
Examiners hurl their seals, and domes of bronze light come sailing up the wall like thrown bowls:
One drops over Vigolas and slides off him. There's no number to measure.
Three drop at Rougeina, and she's never where they land: Swap, Swap, Swap, a stone, a gull, a banner. An Examiner's lenses spin and spin. "Hold still, girl!" "No."
One drops over Trollmage. Inside it, the Examiner's lenses click, click… and find nothing.
horrified, lenses whirring.
planting his feet on the battlement, third eye opening, a crimson line reaching from it across the gorge toward Ingrith's tower. To walk the Sightline he must first aim it, and to aim it he goes perfectly still.
sliding: click. click. Locked. Her measuring tape whips out across the whole gorge, a line of bronze light, and touches Smurjan's chest.
A bronze seal the size of a door drops out of the sky onto Smurjan, KLANG. His plate burns new:
SMURJAN · K-I UNMARKED (certified · until sunrise)
The crimson script across his skin goes dark, line by line, like lamps put out down a street. His three shadows shrink to one.
on one knee, suddenly small inside his own body.
(Bakasura says nothing at all.)
kneeling by him, eyes gold. The three threads inside Smurjan are still there, but muffled, like voices under a blanket.
hauling Smurjan up by the arm.
Night falls over the Pass. The seal-towers begin to roll.
at the back of the battlement, low voices, the stone kings' glowing eyes behind them.
staring at the army rolling up the Pass in the dark.