Chapter 140
The crew charges through the Annex door, and they're standing outside the door. They charge again, and they're outside the door. Again. The same moment three times, each with a red line through its motion lines.
Meirwen sits at her desk under the red inscription EVERYTHING IS A DRAFT, hair loose, the box in her lap. She isn't even lifting the pen.
The crew breathes together, tied, and opens their mouths:
Their balloon gets a red line struck right through it and dissolves before it finishes.
outraged, her balloon with a red line through the second half of it.
crouched in the doorway, thinking fast, Greed-sight flickering gold over the room.
eyes narrowing at Meirwen's lap. On the box's worn wooden lid sits one bright drop of red ink, splashed there in the fight.
Everyone attacks at once, from every side, not to win but to make her look: Vigolas's lightning, Smurjan's Sightline, Kali's sickle, Bakasura's maw out of the floor, Ivar and Lilla Ulv together. Meirwen strikes, and strikes, and strikes. Red lines everywhere, the room resetting and resetting. For the first time she's sweating.
A pinpoint of silver-rose in the pupil, locked on one red drop on a wooden lid.
Rougeina is suddenly kneeling at Meirwen's knee, inches away, where a drop of ink just was, and her fingers flick the brass clasp. Click.
Meirwen strikes the Swap, and Rougeina is back at the door. But she struck it a beat late: the lid had already popped, and a folded page had already slid out and fallen. It lies open on the white floor at Meirwen's feet. Meirwen looks down before she can stop herself.
Old and yellowed, folded so many times its creases are soft as cloth. The handwriting on it is not red. It's black ink, in a younger, rounder, careful hand.
utterly still.
She kneels, picks it up, and reads. Her pen hangs forgotten in her other hand. Nothing in the room resets.
drawn as handwriting:
Today I read the seven first books.
They are not sins.
Greed is seeing what matters. Wrath is the one right strike. Lust is reading another soul. Sloth is patience. Pride is putting things where they belong. Envy is becoming what you love. Gluttony is taking the world in.
They are the most beautiful things I have ever read.
The Council has asked me to make them smaller, so that people will be easier to rank.
I said yes.
I am frightened that I said yes.
— M.
reading it, and tears running down through the red ink on her cheek.
The crew in the doorway, silent. Smurjan's crimson script glows faintly across his chest: precision. Kompis, eyes gold: Meirwen's one unstruck thread is blazing.
rising, shaking, toward the panel she's in: toward her own reading. A red line begins to form across it, to un-read it, to put it back in the box.
The crew, tied, feel it at once. One breath, one beat, out loud:
The red line snaps in the air like a thread pulled too tight. The reading stands.
laughing and crying at once, the page against her chest.
She sets the red pen down on the desk. Very carefully, like a woman putting down something hot.
holding the page to her heart, looking past Rougeina at the Library door, at the violet light and the chained books.
where the red letters EVERYTHING IS A DRAFT run above the desk. (We see only Rougeina's shoulders, and a flash of silver-rose blade reflected in a spilled pool of ink.)
Through the Annex door, the whole Library, spiralling up into violet. On every pedestal, on every chained book, the red lines begin to lift: slowly, the way leaves would fall if they fell upward, struck-through lines and margin notes and neat red words peeling off the glowing pages and drifting up through the galleries, ERRATUM, VOID, rage, laziness, arrogance, appetite, excess, rising and fading like sparks. Where each one lifts, the old script shows through, glowing in its true colour, the lines that were struck out shining again. It has only begun: most of the red is still there. But it's moving.
In the root gallery a Corrector holds out his grey palm and catches a falling-upward red word, and it fades to nothing in his hand.
The crew stands round an empty desk with a red pen on it. Kali looks around, confused.
Only Rougeina, by the desk, holding a folded yellow page, doesn't look confused.
A small square seal of white light settles on the Eleventh Chair and goes dark. Around the glass ring, five Architects stare at it. Hjalmar's milk-white eyes turn toward it.
Her heart: ba……… dum. Heavier. Another stone. 114. She sits down hard on the Annex step, one hand pressed flat over it.
already there, kneeling, hand on her back. He felt it through the Knot.
helping her up, grinning, a bit lost.
He drops the tooth. Ears up, hackles up, nose pointed back through the Library, toward the passage to the Ring Halls. He whines, a high, thin sound.
Far away, back through the violet galleries, down the passage and beyond the giant: a troll horn. Short, sharp and wrong. The alarm.
every face turning at once.
(Mingus is already running.)