Chapter 16

The grey is moving again, creeping down from the ridge, eating pines. Sigvat's dry voice rolls across the snow, steady as a clock.

still around the bent anchor in the snow. Nobody has moved yet.

He stands up. His face is wet and his eyes are furious. Green lightning crawls up his arms.

flat in the snow, runes dark, spent.

One rune still glows, faint and violet, a single coal left in the fire.

The crew moves.

Rougeina takes Trollmage by the collar and Swaps, blink, blink, blink, up the slope in leaps of silver-rose light.

Kompis runs with Mingus at his side.

Vigolas sprints straight up the hill into the grey.

The grey hounds pour down to meet them. Kompis drops into Subtick, golden line, thumping heartbeat, and threads shots through the pack, opening a lane.

Vigolas runs through the lane. A hound's grey jaws close on his arm, and his sleeve, his skin and a memory start to drain. He doesn't stop. He punches the hound off with his other fist and keeps climbing, holding his arm.

Smurjan comes up behind them all, walking, not running, through the grey. Where his feet fall, the grey flinches. Kali and Bakasura are inside him and silent. Inside his chest, faintly, a crowd of eighteen voices whispers.

Sigvat stands at the top, so old now he can barely hold the scroll. His arms tremble. The words keep coming.

Rougeina lands beside him with Trollmage dangling from her fist. Trollmage's eyes find the scroll, the endless lines and one word in them: TRINITY.

flaring as he writes in the air:

MACRO : EDIT "TRINITY" = "SIGVAT"

On the parchment, the word TRINITY shimmers violet, and rewrites itself, letter by letter, into SIGVAT.

still reading, his old mouth already shaping the next words:

going wide behind the glassless spectacles. He stops mid-word. His own fingertips have gone grey.

He can't finish the sentence; it would finish him. He can't unsay what he's said either; it's already greying him from the hands up. He stands frozen between two halves of a sentence, an old man on a ridge.

Smurjan arrives at the top of the ridge.

His grey-blue third eye opens. For the first time we see his own sin-mark: a crimson line across the third eye, like a sightline.

SMURJAN · K-IV SHAPED · Scalelist #2,201 · Wrath

in the snow, ancient, looking up at the sky with something like relief.

His eyes close.

all colour, all morning. The troll children run out from behind the sled-wall into green pines and white snow. The smallest girl holds up her scarf: red.

The crew stands around the bent anchor, which someone has set upright in the snow like a grave-marker. Trolls stand in a wide, quiet ring.

Smurjan walks back into the camp. Every head turns toward him.

Drekk steps into his path.

Smurjan doesn't argue. He kneels in the snow in front of Drekk, head bowed. His three shadows lie flat on the ground behind him like three people prostrated.

fists shaking, looking down at the kneeling man. He has a knife, and he looks at the knife.

From inside, louder than any of the seventeen, a warm, impatient, unmistakable voice:

the knife wavering.

The knife drops into the snow. He covers his face with both hands.

walking up and standing beside the kneeling Smurjan. He reaches into his coat and takes out a shard: the white room, the mirror, the silver figure. He holds it out.

looking up at the shard, then at the crew: Kompis with Mingus, Rougeina, Trollmage asleep in the snow, and Drekk with his hands still over his face.

(He doesn't take the shard. Not yet. He stands up and joins the circle.)

Grandmother Ulla leans on her staff beside the bent anchor, looking at the crew. They are one more, one fewer.

a cluster of white towers on a mountain peak, and above them, faint as a reflection in a window, a floating city of glass.