Chapter 136
Stars, snow, the black fjord. Down in the Pass, hundreds of bronze domes glow like lanterns, and the white rods of K-IV Examiners blaze like a river of lightning climbing the switchback road toward the great doors of the troll halls. The seal-towers grind up behind them. On every cliff the stone kings watch with open, glowing eyes, and can't move.
A ram engine, a trunk of iron with a bronze head shaped like a seal, swings into the mountain doors. BOOMMM. Dust falls from a hall roof a hundred metres high.
Trolls the size of houses brace the doors with their backs. The doors split, and night-certified Examiners pour through the gap, fast, sin-marks swollen bright up their white sleeves. Seal-domes drop over the trolls one by one, and the trolls freeze, slow, paperwork.
A pillar carved as a sleeping troll cracks under a ram's second blow. The roof of the outer hall sags, and stone rains down in slabs.
dancing through the Examiners, never in one place for two heartbeats: Swap, a falling stone; Swap, a dropped seal; Swap, an Examiner's own shadowed lantern. One K-IV is fast: his rod scorches the air where her neck just was. Then, close: one of her eight blades cuts the chain of a bronze seal, and the dome it was holding flickers out. A troll inside straightens.
holding the broken doorway alone, green lightning crawling up the fern-scar on his arm. Domes keep dropping on him and sliding off like rain. He punches three K-IV Examiners back out through the doors in one swing. Then, wide: behind those three, three hundred more are coming up the road.
Smurjan, a K-I tonight: one shadow, no script, no Sightline. But he moves through the falling stone like a man reading a page he knows by heart, stepping exactly where the next slab isn't, pulling a slow, frozen troll out from under a seal-dome by the hand. A K-IV Examiner swings at him. Smurjan taps the brass rod with two fingers at one point, and it snaps in half.
flailing like a muffled person under a blanket.
Order barges slide in through the open sea-gate, each carrying a seal-tower, their bronze bells catching the starlight. The Marka lies dark at her slipway, every lantern out. At her wheel, a man with a mask of woven bell-rope for a face. Two troll shipwrights crouch at the oars.
The Marka comes out of the black like a thrown knife and rams the lead barge amidships by feel. Its seal-tower topples sideways into the fjord with a bell-note that rings off every cliff, GONNNG.
Quiet, the siege a far rumble through the rock. Trollmage lies in the King's Bed, flat on his back, hands folded on his belly, eyes wide open, staring at the carved motto above him. At the doors, Stav and six huge troll guards. Stav leans on the king-staff.
ears drooping, more awake than anyone has ever seen him.
Kompis skids in through a side door, Mingus at his heel, Lilla Ulv smoking in his hand.
A warm, round hall where troll children sleep in great stone cradles, wool blankets and wooden toys everywhere. The far wall bursts open under a ram. Dust, torchlight, and K-IV Examiners step through the hole with seals raised. Troll mothers lunge to the cradles, and seal-domes drop on them mid-stride; they freeze. A dozen small, frightened troll children are left in the open, each the size of a grown man.
raising a bronze seal over a troll child clutching a wooden boat.
stopped dead in the doorway. Hackles up. He looks at the children, then at the mothers frozen under the domes, then up at Kompis. The children's hall is a home, and it is being broken into.
Kind and brown. Then gold, from the inside, like a lamp turned up.
He steps between the seal and the child. A growl so low it shakes dust from the cradles. The bronze seal comes down on him and slides off like rain off a window, because there is nothing there to measure. The golden light pours out of his coat.
The Cradle Hall, filled from wall to wall with gold. Where a dog stood, a golden Manticore: a lion's body as big as a cottage, the same warm retriever-gold coat, and wide gold-feathered wings spread over every cradle in the room like a roof. A scorpion tail of amber glass arches high over his back, glowing. Under the wings, a dozen small trolls stare up at the feathers with their mouths open. And in the middle of all that terrible gold, the same kind brown eyes, looking straight at the Examiners. The ram engine in the broken wall, the bronze seals in their hands, the domes over the mothers: all of it is very, very small.
Kompis vaults onto the Manticore's back between the wings, one hand buried in the gold fur over the great heart. Along the bottom border of the panel, the golden pulse line blazes: BA-DUM. BA-DUM.
The world freezes grey. Kompis lives the next moment again and again and again: the counter in the corner of the panel spins past a thousand, five thousand, ten. Every seal-tower's bronze bell, every Examiner's seal-chain, every angle, until he finds one line for each gun. Colour snaps back.
Four shots, four lines, one heartbeat:
Ivar booms through the broken wall and splits the ram engine's bronze head. IVAR: "THAT'S MY BOY!"
Lilla Ulv's wolf-cub ricochets around the hall, bonk bonk bonk bonk, snapping every seal-chain in reach. LILLA ULV: "got 'em got 'em got 'em!"
Fru Gnista bursts into a crackling crown of fireworks that blinds every lens in the room. FRU GNISTA: "Oh, splendid!"
Tyst makes no sound at all, and the lead seal-tower's great bronze bell, far down in the Pass, cracks clean in two.
The Manticore's amber tail swings, KRRSSH, and the ram engine folds in half and is pushed back out through the hole it made. The seal-domes over the troll mothers crack like eggshells, and the mothers run to the cradles, under the golden wings.
sliding down the Manticore's flank, nose pouring blood, knees shaking, grinning.
A troll child (still bigger than Kompis) crawls out from under a golden wing and reaches up a stubby grey hand to pat an enormous gold nose. Then the gold folds in: wings, tail and size, back down into eighty pounds of retriever, who licks the child's whole face, tail going.
Mingus turns and trots, not toward the fight but out through the side door, down the passage, deeper into the mountain, nose low, like a dog who knows exactly where he's needed. Kompis staggers after him.
Mingus trots in past Stav and the guards, crosses the whole hall, and climbs onto the King's Bed, which no dog has done in the history of Brygdar. He turns round three times and flops down against Trollmage's side with an enormous contented sigh.
resting on Mingus's warm gold side. Along the panel border the golden pulse line beats slowly: ba-dum. ba-dum.
His eyes, wide open all night, start to droop.
And he's asleep. Under the moss of the King's Bed, deep in the stone, a faint violet glow begins, like a lamp lit far down a mine.
turning to the six guards, lowering the king-staff like a pike across the doorway.
The doors of the King's Hall crack inward, and bronze light floods through the gap. Ingrith steps in, the First Seal swinging from its chain, the Chief Examiner at her shoulder with her ledger and her blazing rod. Ingrith's lenses slide over the sleeping figure on the bed.