Chapter 18
Ancient troll tunnels wide enough for giants, with white Trisdel brick and brass pipes bolted over the old stone like bandages. Steam. Dripping. The sledge and the goats are hidden in a dry cistern behind them, and the crew goes on foot. Kompis leads without a lantern.
Trollmage rides piggyback on Smurjan, asleep, his crow perched on Smurjan's braid. Drekk glares at the arrangement.
An iron door in the tunnel wall, three times a man's height, with a much smaller door cut into it at the height of a child. Brass letters above it, green with age: THE NURSERY.
It isn't locked. It never was.
A small boy of about eight stands in the rain in clothes too thin for it, clutching a cloth-wrapped bundle to his chest. Beside him sits a golden dog with a soft coat and kind brown eyes. It is exactly the dog at Kompis's feet today, not a day younger.
A tall woman in a grey coat with a high collar bends down to him. She is in her thirties, hair pulled into a tight bun, a long pointer-stick under one arm, faint rose-coloured script on the backs of her hands.
(The boy says nothing.)
taking the cloth bundle out of his, gently and firmly. The small hilt of a knife shows through the cloth. The boy's fingers stay curled around the empty air where it was.
A clerk with a clipboard points at the dog.
Rows of small desks, forty children in grey, all of them silent. At the front, a chalkboard, and across it in neat capitals:
A GOOD TOOL DOES NOT ASK WHOSE HAND HOLDS IT.
The woman taps the board with her pointer.
the golden dog lying under it. He raises his hand.
The other children laugh. The boy doesn't.
The woman in grey at a high window with the children lined up behind her, all looking across a gulf of air at a long gallery that glows from inside.
Dust on everything. The small desks are still in their rows. The chalk words are still faintly on the board. Kompis runs a finger along one desk, where a little dog is scratched into the wood.
She's watching Mingus.
Kompis opens a narrow door behind the teacher's desk: a dark stair going up, and at the top of it light. A lot of light.
The Protocol Hall, seen from a high gallery rail. A hall as long as a street and as tall as a cathedral, and every surface from floor to vaulted ceiling is a honeycomb of glowing glass slates, a million of them, each the size of a book, each carrying a name and a single line of writing, all humming softly like a field of crickets on a summer night. Far below, at the very centre of the floor, stands one white lectern. The crew are small dark shapes on the rail, their faces lit from below.
INGA ÅSK · K-I · FISHWIFE, GATE CITY · LISTEN AT THE HARBOUR · ACTIVE
BJORN HALLE · K-II · BAKER, HAY STAIR · WATCH THE NEIGHBOURS · ACTIVE
PIM · K-I · AGE NINE · TRAIN · ACTIVE
touching a slate that is dark: no name, no light, one blank pane in the honeycomb.
Kompis walks along the rail reading names, faster and faster, the way you look for your own name on a list. He stops.
It glows a steady, angry red:
KOMPIS · K-II · ASSET (LAPSED) · STATUS: RECALL — TERMINATE IF RESISTING
His face doesn't move. His hand rises toward the slate on its own.
The writing changes.
Every one of the million slates in the hall turns red at once, a wave of red rolling out from his slate to the far end of the gallery like a field of poppies opening.
snatching his hand back.
Doors open along the hall floor below. Figures in grey pour out, silent and fast, every face hidden behind a smooth grey mask with no features at all.
RANK PLATE ×12: GREY MASK · K-II MARKED · Scalelist #64,000–#139,000
The crew runs down a spiral stair into the agent archives: endless aisles of wooden drawers, every drawer a life, card-files and dossiers spilling out behind them as they run. The Grey Masks come over the tops of the shelves like water.
A Grey Mask feints left and strikes right with a wire-blade. Kompis is already blocking right.
Every Grey Mask has the same single thing running out of the back of the neck: one taut silver-grey thread, climbing up through the ceiling toward the hall. No other threads. No friends. No families. Only the leash.
Rougeina dances down an aisle, Swapping with falling drawers, silver-rose ghosts flickering between the shelves.
Smurjan, Trollmage still asleep on his back, drops three Masks with three precise taps.
Vigolas uses a drawer as a shield, then as a hammer, then quietly pockets something out of it.
Drekk reads the aisles like a coastline: "LEFT! The archive turns left!"
tucking a little index card into his coat.
A dead end of drawers. More Masks closing from both ends. Kompis looks at their threads, then at the crew.
Kompis fires one shot into a steam pipe, and a white burst fills the aisle. When it clears, the crew is running one way and Kompis and Mingus the other, and every Grey Mask is following Kompis.
Kompis and Mingus run through the steam with Masks behind them. He takes every turn without looking. He shoulders open a panel that looks like plain wall, and the two of them tumble through it.
They are back in the schoolroom. Kompis pushes the panel shut. Outside, the Masks run past. Silence. Chalk dust hangs in the lamplight.
ears up, staring at the front of the room.
Someone is sitting at the teacher's desk: a woman in grey, older now, iron-grey hair pinned in a tight bun, a long pointer-stick across her knees. Rose-coloured script crawls up both her forearms and spreads past the wrists like ivy.
MOTHER SELA · K-III TESTED · Scalelist #5,503
warm and terrible.