Chapter 156
Vigolas walks out of the door into the bright coin-light, slowly, the way a man walks up out of the surf.
saying it again, testing it like a tongue tests a tooth that's come back.
opening around him as the name brings things home with it:
Red sails cracking full in a squall, spray coming over the bow.
A squeaky third step on the ladder down into the hold.
His old crew hauling on a line and singing, the faces he always kept, with a deck under their feet again.
The ship leaning left in a crosswind, always left, like a dog with a favourite side to lie on.
laughing. And then not laughing. His face crumples.
Vigolas sits down on the curb of the high street, on the coins, in the middle of the busiest market in the Current, and cries: loud and open, the way he does everything. Between sobs, the name. Shoppers step round a weeping pirate. A merchant across the street raises a hand to price the moment, looks at it for a while, and slowly lowers his hand.
sitting down on the curb beside him. She says nothing. She puts her shoulder against his and leaves it there.
standing over them, putting one big hand on top of Vigolas's head. Awkward. Gentle.
crouching in front of him, his three shadows folding round them on the coins like a tent.
Vigolas wipes his face on his sleeve and says the name slowly. And the crew says it back to him, one at a time:
From Vigolas, new threads run out to every one of them, thin bright ribbons, and woven into each ribbon, the name. Held in a dozen places at once.
looking past the stalls, past the river of credit, out to the edge of the planet where the starlit Current glows.
the hall dim and empty. Levla alone behind the counter, holding the new jar up to a lamp. Inside it: light lying on water like a road of coins, and a small boy's wonder. In his other hand, the stick.
lit from below by somebody else's first sea. He doesn't open the jar. He only looks.
klak. The Ränta in the doorway, forty of them. The folding stool unfolds in the middle of the aisle. Ölund sits.
turning, the jar still in his hand.
turned round on Ölund's knees so Levla can read it. A page headed LEVLA · DEBT · CHILDHOOD · LATE: ONE BELL, and under it a column of figures beginning to roll and climb, compounding as we watch.
Levla moves first. Ten rings flare. ka-CHING ka-CHING ka-CHING — ten glowing tags fly at the chains as forty of them lunge for him—
—and the chains pass straight through the tags, as if the tags were paper ghosts.
The chains hit the Coin-Coat, and every one of them has to pay to get through, and does: banknotes tear away in strips, coin-mail bursts in a spray of silver, pearl-strings snap and bounce across the floor, the fish-scale money of a whole island flutters down like leaves. The coat shreds, currency by currency. Levla swings a ringed fist at a collector and it costs the collector nothing, because the collector is collecting. A heartbeat flares off his palm, PAID IN FULL, and there's nothing it can settle. The debt is everything.
closing round Levla's left wrist, right over the emerald tag. klak.
with the sea in it, slipping from his other hand, and Levla catching it against his chest as they drag him toward the door, and the stick falling, bouncing once on the floor, rolling away.
The high street. From every counting-house doorway on both sides, ledger-chains: a hundred grey collectors hauling them taut, every chain converging on one young man on his knees in the middle of the coin-paved street. His coat of a hundred currencies hangs off him in rags; banknotes blow down the street like autumn leaves. Chains round his wrists, his ankles, his chest, a great grey web radiating out to every building, as if the whole city has been strung to hold him down.
On the counting-house steps above, on his folding stool, Ölund, ledger open, pen moving.
In the doorways, the merchants of Skatt watch the master of their planet being collected. Nobody moves to help. Nobody owes him that.
And in the foreground, small, on the curb across the street, the crew, turning round.
The stick, rolled out of the Memory Market's doorway, coming to rest against a golden paw. Mingus looks down at it. Then across the street at the man in the chains.
The chains pull his head down. Coin-dust on his cheek. The emerald tag on his wrist glowing under the iron. He lifts his eyes and looks across the street—
where a pirate sits with a name in his mouth and red eyes. Vigolas.
getting slowly to his feet. Wiping his face. Not grinning yet.
Levla, chained by his own collectors, on his knees on his own street, holding a jar with another man's first sea in it against his chest, looking at the man he just sold a name to. Not bored. Not selling.