Chapter 15
raised against the sunrise. Violet runes blaze along every finger, his whole arm, his throat and his face. A whole night of waiting is burning in him at once.
written across the morning sky, small and simple:
MACRO : SILENCE = DAWN
A ripple of violet light rolls outward from Trollmage across the snow, up the slopes and over the ridge. As it passes, every sound in the valley stops.
on the ridge. His lips are still moving. Nothing comes out. He stops, touches his own throat, and reads again, harder. Silence.
fifty metres from the camp. It stops. The grey stops spreading the instant the words stop being heard. A pine at its edge is caught half grey and half green.
Marka's mouth opens in a huge, soundless whoop. Drekk punches the air. Kompis hugs Mingus. Vigolas laughs silently at the sky. Trollmage, spent, flops back into the snow.
(The last sound in the chapter for ten pages is the stopped tide. From here, silence.)
(No balloons. No SFX. Only images. Every panel here is drawn as if the world has been muted.)
He has stopped celebrating. He is hunched, shaking, his small eyes rolling. Grey stains spread around his jaws and down his throat: two dozen Null-hounds eaten in one night, grey inside him, a hunger made of nothing.
It opens slowly, by itself. Grey drool. His eyes are not his eyes.
behind him, suddenly afraid. His hand reaches for his own shadow, where Bakasura is anchored, and pulls. The shadow stretches like a rope. Come back.
Bakasura lunges. Not at the crew. Not at Sigvat. At the sled-wall, where the troll children huddle with Grandmother Ulla, and where Drekk stands in front of them with nothing but a knife.
looking up into a mouth as wide as a barn door, coming down. He doesn't run. He spreads his arms in front of the children.
Marka.
She comes out of nowhere at a dead sprint across the snow, the anchor's chain whipping behind her. She leaps.
She jams the anchor into Bakasura's jaws, crosswise, a bar between his teeth. The jaws slam down on it.
The anchor holds, for a heartbeat.
bending. Iron groaning without a sound.
Marka gets under the upper jaw, her back against the roof of the world's mouth, her bare arms braced against the teeth, and pushes. Every muscle in her body stands out like rope. Her boots sink into the snow.
between the teeth, straining, grinning. Of course she's grinning.
A huge, laughing woman stands braced inside a mouth as wide as a house. The bent anchor is jammed between the teeth, and her bare arms hold up the upper jaw like a pillar holding up a temple. Behind her, in the silent dawn, the crew is moving:
Rougeina Swaps children out of the sled-wall, blink, blink, blink, silver-rose ghosts everywhere.
Kompis drags Grandmother Ulla by the arm.
Mingus, just a dog, hauls the smallest troll girl backward by her grey scarf in his teeth.
Vigolas grabs Drekk by the collar and throws him clear.
Smurjan, on his knees in the snow, pulls at his own shadow with both hands, his face twisted, trying to drag his own hunger back.
Marka turns her head toward Drekk, the last one still inside the reach of the jaws, and mouths one word, huge and clear, with no sound at all:
GO.
being dragged backward by Vigolas, reaching for her, his mouth open in a scream we can't hear.
looking past him at the children, all of them out, safe behind the crew. She nods once, satisfied. Job done.
still wrapped twice round her fist. One link cracks.
Marka looks at Drekk one last time and winks.
snapping.
The jaws close.
Snow. A bent anchor lying in it. Bakasura stands motionless, his jaws shut, the grey draining out of his eyes now that he is full, and his own eyes coming back. He looks down at the anchor. He understands what he has done.
filling with something enormous and terrible. A tear the size of a fist rolls down his black hide into the snow.
on his knees beside the anchor. His hand on it.
on his knees. His three shadows are all reaching toward the place she stood.
The sun clears the mountains. Dawn ends. The violet macro ripples away, and sound comes back to the world all at once. The first sound is—
head thrown back, screaming in three voices at once, the calm one, the sharp one and the hungry one, all of them breaking:
Kompis on his knees, holding Mingus, who is whining. Rougeina standing apart, face turned away. Trollmage sitting up in the snow, staring at the sky he silenced. Vigolas standing very still, fists shaking.
The scream ends. In the quiet after it he is breathing raggedly, hands pressed over his chest. His grey-blue third eye is wide open, because he hears something.
Under his voice, among the faint whispering crowd of the seventeen, there is a new voice: a loud, warm, laughing one, a little confused.
his face crumpling.
Sound is back in the world. Sigvat, ancient now, white hair blowing, lifts the scroll again. His dry voice carries down the valley.
The grey starts to move again.