Chapter 157
on his feet on the curb, wiping his nose on his coat sleeve.
a half-smile, Ivar already coming off his shoulder.
on the counting-house steps, not looking up from the ledger.
Emerald Knuckle: a column of green fire as thick as a tree trunk tears through the chain-web over the street. Three collectors go flying. Over the street, the brass fee-board: ka-CHING ka-CHING ka-CHING. THE MARKA · + INTEREST · + INTEREST · + INTEREST. Vigolas doesn't even look at it.
The whole crew hits the street at once, and every panel ends in a ka-CHING:
Kompis, the Four-Gun Volley: Ivar, Lilla Ulv, Fru Gnista and Tyst all at once, each on its own Subtick line, four chains snapping in four places. IVAR: "BILL ME, YOU GREY VULTURES!"
Kali, sickle swinging: "If we're PAYING for it, make it COUNT!" Two chains through.
Drekk brings his axe down on a chain anchored to a doorframe: the doorframe goes too.
Rougeina, the Eight-Blade Dance, Swapping up the web from chain to chain, silver-rose trails strung across the street like bunting.
The black panther drags a collector off the steps by his coat-tail.
standing in the middle of it all, perfectly still, third eye open. POV: the web as grey diagram lines, a hundred chains crossing and recrossing, and one crimson point where they all knot together over Levla's back.
Smurjan walks the Sightline, up the slope of the chains, step by perfect step, as if climbing a stair only he can see, and strikes the knot with an open palm. The whole web unties at once. A hundred chains go slack together and fall round Levla in rings of grey iron on the coins. KLANNNNG.
on his knees, hands free, the jar with the sea in it still held to his chest. Chains lying in loose coils all round him. He looks at them. Then his rings begin to glow.
ka-CHING ×10. Ten tags snap onto ten coils of chain. The collectors grab for them, and their grey gloves stop an inch away.
The chainless Ränta fall back into the Memory Market for their spare chains and nets, and the crew charges in after them, and Levla goes too, in the rags of his coat. A running fight between the towering shelves.
Ränta hurl weighted nets. The nets snag the high shelves. A shelf tips—
—and a hundred glass jars are in the air at once, tags fluttering on their strings: A WEDDING DANCE · A FIRST WORD · A LOST DOG'S NAME · THE SMELL OF BREAD IN A HOUSE THAT BURNED—
Shelf after shelf goes over like dominoes, and thousands of jars burst at once. Out of every one flies a memory, a small living light, and they stream up through the great hall and out through the green-glass roof over Skatt like a flock of birds let out of a cage, scattering over the whole city.
And all across Skatt, down in the coin-paved streets, strangers stop dead as their memories come home to them:
An old man in a doorway suddenly dancing, slow, arms round no one, remembering his wedding.
The girl who sold her laugh in ch. 151, laughing out loud in the middle of the square, both hands over her mouth.
A woman in the street calling a name, again and again, and three streets away a grey-muzzled dog lifting its head.
A baker sitting down hard on his own step, crying, with the smell of a house that burned down forty years ago.
In the middle of the hall, in a blizzard of light and glass, the crew fights the Ränta.
A shelf comes down on the collector carrying the Ränta's collection sack. It bursts. Out tumble: a brass spyglass, a plain wooden bowl, an iron spool wound with glowing violet thread.
Kali dives, sickle in her teeth, and catches the bowl out of the air with her one hand.
The spyglass bounces off Drekk's bell-rope mask. bonk. He catches it on the rebound.
The spool of nap unravels as it falls, and the violet thread zips across the hall like a fishing line reeling in, straight into Trollmage's forehead. fwip. Trollmage falls asleep instantly, standing up, mid-sentence.
The crew fighting in a ring round a snoring troll.
One heartbeat later, Trollmage's eyes snap open, blazing violet, four days banked again. He writes in the air:
MACRO : NAP = 4 DAYS
Every Ränta collector in the hall drops where they stand, fast asleep: forty grey coats in heaps among the broken glass, masks puffing in and out with their snores. zzz. zzz. zzz.
empty again, crown slipping off one ear, toppling slowly backwards into Drekk's arms like a felled tree.
a single panel nobody else sees: a ragged girl of about ten, quick as a sparrow, darting between the sleeping collectors, scooping up the few jars that didn't break, stuffing them inside her coat, and running out the door to press them into strangers' hands. Gone in the next panel. Only Kompis glances that way.
looking toward the back of the hall. Behind its curtain, Vigolas's stall stands untouched in all the wreckage: every jar still on its shelf, every jar still tagged and glowing.
The hall a ruin of glass and snoring collectors. The last few memories drift out through the broken roof like sparks from a bonfire. Levla sits on the broken end of his own counter, coat in rags, a good third of the currencies gone, ten rings, the sea-jar in his lap. He watches most of his stock fly away over the city.
Mingus trots in through the broken doorway with the stick in his mouth, Kompis right behind him. He drops it at Levla's feet. Again. Sits. Tail going.
looking down at the stick. Then up at Kompis.
standing up off the counter, stick in hand, completely unsure: the richest man in the Current about to do something for the first time in his life. The tags in his eyes spin and spin, looking for something to price. They find nothing.
Levla throws. Badly. Terribly. The stick goes about six feet, sideways, end over end, and bonks Drekk on the bell-rope mask.
Mingus bounds after it, ears flying, scoops it up, gallops back through the glass and the snoring collectors, and drops it at Levla's feet. His tail is wagging so hard his whole back end wags with it.
A sound comes out of him: short, cracked, surprised. A laugh. He puts his fingers to his own mouth like a man who's found a coin in a coat he didn't know he owned.
Levla picks the stick up. Throws again. Still bad. A little less bad. Mingus is overjoyed anyway. Kali, sitting on a broken shelf with her bowl in her lap, keeps score out loud: "Two! Terrible! Do it again!"
Ölund, the only one of the Ränta still awake (he was on the steps, not in the hall), folds his stool and tucks the ledger under his arm. Then he opens it once more and, carefully, tears out a single page.
The page held up in long grey fingers toward the laughing man in the ruined hall: