Chapter 170
The Marka at the edge of the circle, sails slack. Ahead, the still sea: miles of waves frozen mid-crash, glassy and white-capped, spray hanging in arcs like thrown lace, a gull pinned in the sky with its wings spread. In the centre, the small white island. Silence. Not quiet: silence.
in the bow, sneezing. The sneeze hangs in the air in front of his nose, a tiny white puff. He snaps at it. It doesn't move.
lowering a bucket over the side on a rope. It hits the water with a tok, like wood on stone. He hauls it up. In the bucket, instead of water: a solid curl of clear glass, a tiny frozen wave, exactly the shape the sea was in when the bucket struck it.
at the rail beside him, grass sprouting from the deck under her boots.
eyes gold, frowning.
doing the maths on his fingers, losing count, giving up, grinning.
Then they see it: at the rim of the circle, a little way round, a fleet of six tall ships with brass-sheathed hulls. Their sails are painted with a great clock-face on which every hour has been struck through in red except one, marked NOW. On long chains over their bows hang iron braziers, roaring, held down against the still sea, melting a channel into it. Behind them, freed waves crash and slosh, loud and wrong in the silence.
along the rails: men and women in long, brass-buttoned coats, Timekeepers' coats with the old Urverket gear-badge cut off. Round every neck, a small brass bell that ticks. In their hands, heat-lances: long brass poles with glowing red tips.
RANK PLATE ×40: THAW-BROTHER · K-II MARKED · ex-Timekeeper
recognising the coats, darkening.
through a brass speaking-trumpet, toward the white island.
her jaw setting.
Vigolas leaps off the bowsprit onto the nearest frozen wave, and lands on it: solid, slippery, curved like a glass roof. He skids, windmills his arms, and doesn't fall. Behind him the crew jumps after him one by one.
A battle across the crests.
The crew running over the frozen sea toward the Cult's channel, leaping from crest to crest, spray hanging round them like glass beads. Their breath leaves a trail of white clouds hanging in the air behind them.
Thaw-Brothers vault off their decks onto the waves to meet them, heat-lances glowing.
Kompis fires Ivar, and the shot flies normally: his, not Stilla's. A brazier-chain snaps.
Rougeina Moth-Swaps with a Thaw-Brother's ticking bell, slicing heat-lances in half with eight silver-rose blades.
Öde, Scythe-Sweep, mows three Thaw-Brothers off a crest with Grass-Step keeping her feet on the glass.
Smurjan lands on a crest just as a Thaw-Brother touches it with his heat-lance. The wave unfreezes, a thousand years late, and CRASHES, taking Smurjan down into the sea with it.
Smurjan in the slow, heavy sea, which moves like honey: the thawed water stiff and thick, half-still. Bakasura's shadow opens its jaws beneath him and pushes him back up.
hauling himself out onto a still crest, coughing, dripping honey-slow water.
The frozen sea from above: miles of glassy, motionless waves, spray hanging in the air like strings of pearls, a gull pinned in the sky. Cutting into it from the rim, the Thaw Cult's channel, a raw wound of loud, moving, crashing water with the brass-hulled ships pushing into it, braziers roaring on their chains.
And across the crests, running, leaping, the crew in full battle with forty Thaw-Brothers, white breath-clouds hanging behind every one of them like trails of footsteps.
At the very centre, small and white, the island.
Vigolas leaps the channel and lands on the lead ship's bow, both fists crackling green. He punches the brazier off its chain, and it falls into the thawed channel with a hiss of steam.
unafraid, tapping the brass bell at his throat.
Kompis and Öde fight back to back on a crest, breath hanging round them in a ring of white clouds. Drekk, left at the Marka's rail, throws a rope to Smurjan.
looking out over the frozen sea, his hands white on the rope, muttering.
The Cult falls back to its ships, which drag their remaining braziers back out of the channel. Behind them, thawed water crashes and churns. Ahead of them, the still sea, untouched.
landing beside Vigolas on a crest, both panting. Their breath hangs between them.
looking at the white island, then back at the Marka, then at his crew.
The crew setting off across the frozen waves toward the white island, small figures on a glass sea, leaving a long trail of hanging breath behind them. Mingus bounding ahead from crest to crest, delighted.
The waves here are perfectly still. Not even the spray glints. The island is snow-white, low and quiet, with a small town of whalebone houses on a hill, and a frozen lake at its heart.
And on the beach, in front of the crew, something is wrong: a whole volley of fire-arrows, forty or fifty, Cult arrows fired from somewhere out on the sea, hanging in the air, their flames frozen like flames in a painting.
stopping dead.
Just beyond the hanging arrows, standing on the shore: a tiny figure. A girl, barefoot on the ice, in a long white-blue hooded mantle stiff with icicles. Perfectly upright. Not breathing. Her long silver-white hair is hanging in mid-swing, frozen like a waterfall in winter, as if she'd just turned her head.
Small, heart-shaped, lips faintly blue. Her eyes are clear as lake ice, with a tiny violet pinpoint at their centre. On her lashes, frozen tears. She's looking straight at the arrows.
And she's holding them.