Chapter 144
A violet sky over a spiral mountain turned inside out: the Marhold Spine's mirror-twin, its interior opening outward like a flower of stone. Inside it, galleries spiral down and down into violet light. The Library.
moored on a jetty of stone at the Library's lip. The crew on deck, war-weary from Brygdar, bandaged. Trollmage at the bow wearing a crown of troll-iron that is clearly too heavy, slightly crooked, and hated.
staring down into the spiral, his heavy-lidded violet eyes wide awake for once. Not sleepy. Hungry.
from Smurjan's shadow.
spiralling down. Shelves upon shelves, mostly empty, and on seventy pedestals in seventy alcoves, seventy books, thick, old, chained shut, each glowing faintly with a sin's colour: emerald, crimson, gold, violet, silver, rose, amber.
A crimson book. Its chain is trembling.
hand on his own Codex (Sloth, inscribed) chained at his belt, and beside it in his bag, the other one, the incomplete Gluttony Codex, amber, which has been restless since Brygdar.
eyes gold, looking down the spiral. Seventy threads run out of the seventy books, out through the Library walls in every direction, to people. Seventy strangers.
Boots. Chains. Snarling. Down the spiral galleries pour raiders: leather coats sewn with stolen pages, wolf-pelt hoods, crowbars and book-chains, nets of iron. They tear at the pedestals.
RANK PLATE ×25: SHELF-WOLF · K-II MARKED · Codex-hunters for hire
a woman with an eyepatch made of a book-clasp, prising at a crimson book's chain.
The crew dives into the spiral:
Vigolas swings down the galleries on a book-chain, lightning on one fist.
Smurjan walks the Sightline across an empty shelf to a Wolf prising a pedestal.
Rougeina Moth-Swaps with drifting paper scraps, dropping on Wolves from above.
Kompis fires Tyst silently, snapping the Wolves' crowbars mid-swing.
Drekk swings his axe through a book-net; Kali borrows a Wolf's Greed and steals his crowbar with it.
Stacks collapse: a whole gallery of empty shelves topples down the spiral like dominoes, and Wolves and crew ride the avalanche of wood and paper.
standing in the middle of the falling stacks, not fighting, not moving, eyes closed, listening.
It snaps on its own.
Seventy books wake at once.
Their chains snap across the whole spiral of the Library like a hundred harp strings breaking. Seventy Codices lift off their pedestals into the air, pages fluttering open like wings, glowing in their sins' colours: emerald, crimson, gold, violet, silver, rose and amber. They rise up through the spiral in a great storm of light and paper, and burst out of the Library into the violet sky like a flock of birds, scattering in every direction, to every realm and every island, each one trailing its colour behind it like a comet.
In the centre of the spiral, standing still while it all rushes past him, a half-troll in a crooked crown, his face lit by seventy lights, tears on his cheeks.
Seventy bare pedestals. Snapped chains swinging. Paper drifting down like snow. The Shelf-Wolves stand among the empty alcoves, clutching nothing.
a slow, ugly smile.
The Wolves scatter up the spiral and out of the Library, after the books, a pack heading off in seventy directions.
landing beside Trollmage in the paper-snow.
Four Architects in a ring of twelve chairs on a floor of glass, eight seats dark. They feel it, a tremor through the Ledger, every board in the world shuddering.
A girl of eleven mending a net, suddenly stops. A crimson book drops out of the violet sky into her lap, thump. It opens itself. Crimson script crawls up her arm.
Kompis sits on an empty pedestal, the gold-bound Lust Codex in his lap, gold script glowing up his arms. Beside him on the step, Trollmage's bag.
Something inside it shifts. The amber-glowing Gluttony Codex pushes its way out of the bag on its own, slowly, like an animal waking up.
suddenly very still.
on the step, amber light pulsing. Its spine turns, slowly and deliberately, toward the gold-bound book in Kompis's lap.
The Gluttony Codex's pages part, just a crack, like a mouth opening, hungry, aimed at the Lust Codex. Amber light drips from it like saliva.