Chapter 159
The Marka at her berth, sails loosed and filling. No grey coats on the quay. The market waking behind her: awnings going up, the first bottles of years clinking onto stalls.
Kali sets the fourth wooden bowl back in its place, carefully, with her one hand. Four bowls in a row again. She taps the fourth one with a fingertip.
at the wheel, his spyglass back on his belt, bell-rope mask turned toward the harbour mouth. Behind him Trollmage sleeps in a coil of rope, empty and banking again, the crow on his crown.
on his knees on the deck with a plank of pale Ferdinand bark (an offcut from the Marka's own hull), a pot of paint and a brush in his teeth. Tongue poking out of the corner of his mouth, he paints the letters. Seen over his shoulder: Camilla the Seraphim.
Vigolas nails the plank to the Marka's bow rail, right beside the Kettle's bell. BANG. BANG. BANG.
The bell, and next to it the fresh plank, wet paint shining: Camilla the Seraphim. The old ship's name, carried by the new one. Vigolas lays one hand on the bell and one on the plank.
Levla comes down the dock alone. His coat is a jacket now, a third of it gone, the currencies that are left mismatched and patched. Ten rings still. In his hand: the stick.
Mingus trots down the gangplank to meet him, tail going, and Kompis follows him down, as he always does.
crouching, holding the stick out to the dog.
Mingus sniffs the stick, then pushes it back into Levla's hand with his nose. Sits. Wags.
kneeling beside them.
Levla hung with his hundreds of receipt-threads, every one edged in gold, every one tagged PAID. And among them, new, thin as a hair: one plain thread. No gold border. No tag. It runs from the hand holding the stick down to a golden dog.
leaning over the rail above.
The Marka casts off and slides away from the berth down the river of liquid credit toward the harbour mouth. On the quay, Levla waves the stick, badly, the way he throws.
at the stern, front paws up on the rail, Kompis beside him.
A grinding so deep the river shivers. At the harbour mouth, under the arch of EVERYTHING HAS A PRICE, rising out of the liquid credit and dripping gold: a colossal chain of coin-iron, every link as big as a rowboat, strung across the harbour from tower to tower. Bells ring all along it. On the tower, a brass board flips: UNPAID DEPARTURE · LEAVING COSTS.
at the bow, beside his new plank, cracking his knuckles.
The crew moves as one. They're tied; they feel each other.
Smurjan, third eye open: the great chain as grey diagram lines, and one crimson point on one link. "That one."
Kompis at the stern, Mingus pressed against his leg, the golden pulse line along the border: Subtick. He finds the one version where a swell lifts the Marka's bow exactly as that link gives. Nose bleeding. Shared Beat to Drekk, who spins the wheel on Kompis's line.
Rougeina Swaps up onto the chain with a gull perched on it, drives two of her blades into the seam of the crimson link, and Swaps back with the gull, silver-rose trail hanging in the air.
Kali in the rigging, yelling: "Swell! SWELL! Hold ON to something, lazy one!" Trollmage snores.
climbing out onto the bowsprit as the swell lifts it. GREED-SIGHT: the whole chain glows dull gold, and the brightest gold point on it sits exactly on Smurjan's crimson line. Two kinds of seeing, one spot.
The Marka bursts through Skatt's Exit Chain at full sail on the crest of a golden swell. On the bowsprit, Vigolas, his fist driven through the shattered link in a column of green fire as thick as a tree trunk. The coin-iron link explodes outward, and a fountain of gold coins rains over the whole harbour like sea-spray. Rougeina's two blades spin out of the broken seam, and she catches them without looking.
On deck: Drekk hauling the wheel; Kompis at the stern with blood on his lip and Mingus barking at the sky; Kali whooping in the rigging; Smurjan's three shadows braced against the mast; Trollmage asleep through all of it.
And at the bow rail, beside the Kettle's bell, the fresh plank, wet paint catching the light: Camilla the Seraphim.
Behind them, the market-world glitters like a dropped purse. Ahead, the open starlit Current.
flipping: THE MARKA · OWES · ONE CHAIN (+ INTEREST).
Levla, reading the board, coin spinning above one hand, stick in the other. He catches the coin. Looks at it.
The Marka out on the open Current, Skatt shrinking behind her into a single glittering coin on the dark.
at the bow, the Compass in his hand. The needle, which has pointed out at Skatt for days, swings round and points back along the deck at the crew. Steady. Not trembling.
looking out at the water. Just the sea: light lying on it the way it always has.
perched on the bowsprit above them, reading the plank upside down. She says the name under her breath, once, so it's been heard.
The Current going pale ahead of them. The stars thinning. Colour draining out of the water, like a painting left too long in the sun.
raised to the bell-rope mask. SPYGLASS VIEW: grey, grey, grey, and then, in the middle of all that grey, a speck of gold.
On the grey sea, floating alone in the thinning starlight like a raft: one field of golden barley, ripe, swaying in a wind that isn't there. A small stone farmhouse with a thatched roof. A scarecrow in an old man's hat. A dog-kennel. And all round the field's edges, the grey creeping in, like frost spreading across a window, closer every moment.
In the barley, walking slowly along a furrow: a girl with a straw-coloured braid as thick as a rope and a scythe over her shoulder. Up both her bare forearms, names glow in emerald script like barley stalks, lighting one by one as she speaks them. She is talking to the empty air, steadily, as if she has done it every day for a long time.