Chapter 190
Grey stains on the deck where the puddles dried, flat dull patches that don't shine even in the sunrise. The crew round the mainmast, nobody sitting. Smurjan standing in the middle with the fracture-record shard held out on his open palm.
in the morning light. The silver silhouette inside it has turned back to face the frozen split, as it has for three hundred years, as if nothing happened. Only the crimson of its hair is new.
Quiet. Exact. Which is how the crew knows how angry he is.
facing him, arms folded tight.
looking down at the grey stain where the bucket spilled.
A long beat. His three shadows on the deck, settling.
(In his shadow, Bakasura's small sad eyes, looking from one of them to the other.)
at the bow, polished to a shine through four months of Drekk's waiting. Its brass ripples, slowly, gently, the way water ripples when someone steps in trying not to wake anyone.
He steps out of the bell onto the bowsprit: Kali's height and Kali's grin turned soft, a long black braid, red markings on the other cheek, skin with a sheen like polished metal, eyes you see yourself in, and the long coat of mirror-steel scales. And cracks: hairline silver fractures across one cheek and down the back of one hand, more than there were in Saga III.
BALI · K-IV SHAPED · Scalelist: — (no reflection to count)
across the deck.
turning to Rougeina and bowing, low and formal, the way you'd bow to family you've only seen through spoons.
outraged and counting on her one hand.
stepping forward, the third eye open, crimson-rimmed.
the cracks on his cheek catching the light. Soft, and absolutely sure.
buckling her harness, eight blades.
The scales of Bali's coat lift, every one of them, like a shoal of silver fish turning in sunlight, and pour off him into the morning air, a glittering stream that swirls across the Marka's deck, and as each fish lands it unfolds into a soldier: grey-cloaked, gauntleted, a silver baton in hand, and where its face should be, a smooth silver mirror-mask. Twenty of them, in a ring round the mast. In every mask, the same faint reflection looking out: a woman with long crimson hair.
Bali in the middle, his coat suddenly thin and bare, looking away.
RANK PLATE ×20: MIRROR-WARD · K-II MARKED · Architect Six's attendants (chair dark)
speaking all together, one flat voice from twenty masks.
Rougeina Swaps toward the nearest Ward, and arrives exactly where she left, Swapped back, staggering. Her own silver-rose trail bouncing off a mask like light off a pond.
Things, not powers:
Drekk swinging the empty bucket by its rope like a flail, BONK, a mask spinning off its hinges.
Öde, a long farm-strong sweep of the scythe, all wood and steel and no magic, taking two Wards' legs out from under them into the grass on the deck.
Vigolas, no lightning, just knuckles, laughing: "No lightning? Fine. FISTS!", KRAK, a mask crazing.
Kompis, Ivar to his shoulder, a plain shot that doesn't bounce. IVAR: "A bullet's a bullet, boy! Nothing fancy about LEAD!"
Smurjan, an open palm, no Sightline, straight into a mirror-mask: it shatters.
Out of Smurjan's shadow rises Bakasura, black and amber, and takes a whole Ward's mask in his jaws.
high above the teeth, going still. Chewing slowly. Something in the taste.
waking in his coil of rope, the crow screaming on his crown, his crooked troll-iron crown slipping over one eye. He squints at twenty silver masks and yawns.
He writes in the air in glowing violet letters: MACRO : FOG = 1 DECK
Thick violet fog pours across the Marka from stem to stern, and twenty mirror-masks turn this way and that and see nothing: a mirror can't reflect what isn't aimed at it. The crew moving through the fog by sound and by each other, the Knot humming between them. Masks crack. Batons clatter.
And by the bow, in the fog, Bali, not fighting, standing by the bell, with Kali beside him, her sickle lowered.
the fog thinning. The Wards still standing fold back into silver fish and stream back into Bali's coat, scale by scale, until he glitters again. The broken masks left on the planks are flat and grey.
toppling slowly sideways into his rope coil, already half asleep.
Lamplight. The crew squeezed round the long table, bread, a pot of fish soup. Kali, in her own shape beside Smurjan, sets out the bowls with her one hand: one, two, three, and a fourth, on purpose, the way she has since Saga III. And at the fourth place, for the first time, someone sits: Bali.
looking down into the soup. In the surface: the lamp, the beam above, the steam. No Bali. Just an empty place in the reflection where he's sitting.
(A beat. Bali lifts the spoon. Pretends. Something like a smile.)
(Across the table, Smurjan, without a word, slides the bread toward him.)
Rougeina and Bali side by side, the black sea behind the ship. She doesn't look at him; he doesn't look at her. Two people watched over by the same mirror all their lives, each without knowing the other existed.
his cracked hand on the rail, his voice dropping.
The wind dies. All at once, as if someone shut a door. The sails go slack. The pennant drops. And the sea flattens, out and out to the horizon, until there isn't a ripple anywhere, and the whole Current is a single sheet of black glass with every star in the sky lying in it. The Marka floats in the middle of two skies.
Under the Marka, upside down in the mirror-flat sea, reaching to the horizon in every direction: thousands of the same woman. Long crimson hair drifting. One green eye each. All of them looking up.