Chapter 138
cut down through the heart of the mountain: torches, steps worn into bowls by a thousand years of troll feet. The crew descends. Behind them six troll guards carry the sleeping king on a great round shield like a litter, crown crooked, snoring, the crow asleep on his chest. At the front, Old Stav, with the king-staff in one hand and a basket of bread on his back.
low and black and sweating. A drop falls on Kali's nose.
The stair opens into the Ring Halls: a vast vaulted corridor, its walls covered floor to ceiling with rubbings of growth rings, thousands of them in grey chalk on grey stone, glowing faintly green like moonlight on water.
Across the corridor, kneeling, fills the whole hall: a colossus of grey bark, six metres tall on his knees. The stone floor is cracked and heaved up around his knees like ice around a pier. Ferns grow along his head, and mice run along paths through them. His face is bark, with a split for a mouth, a moss beard, and two old axe-wounds healed into eye-shapes, a grey-green light deep inside each. On his chest the bark is sheared away in a great cross-section: thousands of growth rings, most glowing faint green, some black. Bristling along his back like a fence: nine axes, a sword, a spear, and a huge yellowed tooth, all grown over by bark at the edges.
And on ladders against his sides, little grey clerks turn brass cranks, drilling hollow brass tubes into him and drawing out long grey cores of wood.
EKEN · FERDINAND-2 · unranked (Order threat class K-IV: "do not engage") · not on any board
on a ladder, peering down through round spectacles, a brass core-tube under his arm.
RANK PLATE ×8: SHELVER · K-I · Archive Indexing
Stav, for the first time anyone has seen, is angry. He slams the king-staff on the floor, and the hall rings.
ACTION, same panel, a strip of beats. Kali bursts out of Smurjan's shadow right under a ladder: "BOO!" Bakasura rises out of the floor and eats a whole drilling rig, crank and all: "…Tastes like… old." The Shelvers flee up a side passage like startled pigeons, dropping brass tubes that roll clattering across the floor.
The light in the axe-wound eyes brightens. The bark mouth opens slowly, like a door that hasn't been opened in years. His balloon is thick-bordered, wood-grained, with wide gaps between the words.
hands up, friendly.
Rougeina marks a pebble lying on the floor beyond the giant and Swaps with it, and lands exactly where she started. The pebble is back on the far side. She tries again. Same.
glaring up at the bark face. Her hand drifts to a blade and stops, because drawing it would mean hitting him.
third eye open, a crimson Sightline running to the great cross-section on Eken's chest. Inset in the panel, glimpses of what the rings hold: an army of spears in the dark; a giant with a club; a war-engine with a bronze head swinging out of torchlight; a knight weeping as he swings an axe.
Almost no threads at all around the giant: a few to the mice, and one, thick and warm and slightly crusty, running back to Stav's basket of bread.
rising hopefully beside Smurjan, small sad eyes high above the teeth.
Eken's right arm moves. Just the shoulder, at first: bark creaking, dust pouring off it like sand off a lifted plank.
The arm swings out, wide and enormous and unhurried, like a tree falling sideways in a gale.
BARK-HAND. A giant palm three centuries heavy lands full on Vigolas's chest. WHUDDD.
Vigolas flies the whole length of the hall, coat flaring, shards clinking, and smashes into a wall of rubbings, which comes down on top of him in a heap.
Silence. Then a sound comes out of it: laughter. Vigolas climbs out, bleeding from the nose, dust in his hair, laughing so hard he has to hold his ribs.
He walks back up the hall, all the way, stops at the giant's knee, and looks up. His fists stay open.
A long pause, three panels long: the same bark face, the light in the eyes slowly changing.
Mingus trots round behind the giant, sniffs along the bark, picks out the huge yellow tooth sticking out of his back between the axes, takes it in his mouth, plants his paws, and tugs.
Pok. It comes free. Mingus prances away across the hall with a tooth half as long as he is clamped in his jaws, tail going like a flag.
setting his basket of bread down at Eken's knee, the way he has done every week of his life.
A grey, ink-stained mouse scurries down the giant's arm with a crumpled scrap of paper and holds it up. On it, in tiny letters: EKEN. And under that, in newer, smaller ink: BREAD-MAN.
looking down at the sleeping troll on the shield, the crooked crown, the long ears.
Eken lifts his left arm like a drawbridge, rubble and moss pouring off it, until a passage opens beneath it, tall enough for a troll.
The six guards set the shield with the sleeping king down at the giant's knee, beside the bread. Stav sits down next to it with the staff across his lap.
Kompis crouches by him for a moment.
at the passage under the giant's arm, looking back.
The crew passes under Eken's arm and down a short passage that glows violet at the far end.
Violet light, a spiral of galleries rising out of sight, pedestals in alcoves, and on each pedestal a thick old book, chained shut, glowing faintly in its sin's colour. Over every one of them, grey Correctors bend with red quills. Red ink runs across the glowing pages like cuts. At the far end, in the open door of a white reading room, a woman sits at a lectern, not looking up.