Chapter 191
The whole Current flat as black glass, every star doubled. Under the Marka, upside down, the woman: thousands of her, to the horizon, all looking up. Her voice comes from the whole sea at once, warm, hushed, a lullaby voice.
at the rail, leaning out, very far. Kompis's fist closing on the back of her harness.
face tipped up, one green eye shining.
Silver hands rising out of the sea along the whole length of the hull: dozens, slender, wet and gentle. They reach over the rail and lift Rougeina, carefully, under the arms and the knees, the way a mother lifts a child who fell asleep in the wrong place. Her eyes half-closing. She is letting them.
Among the silver hands, other hands. Not silver. Grey, the shape of hands but hard to look at, like smudges where a drawing was rubbed out. They come from the missing half of every reflection. Where they grip the Marka's rail, the wood greys: colour going first, then the grain, then the edge.
(Empty SFX box.)
where Drekk scratched his tally-marks, four months of them, waiting at Stilla's rim. A grey hand lies across them. The marks fade. Not scraped away. Gone, as if nobody had ever counted anything there.
(Nobody can answer him.)
Grey fingers creeping along the soil toward the barley. The outermost stalks going grey from the tips down.
ears flat, standing in front of Kompis. A silver hand rises out of the sea beside the hull, reaches over the rail and closes gently round the golden dog, to lift him away from his person. Its fingers slide off the fur. Close again. Slide off.
Rougeina, lifted chest-high over the rail, opens her eyes and sees the grey on the deck, the barley, Drekk's empty rail. Her blade comes up by pure reflex at the grey hand on her ankle, and passes through it. Nothing. No cut. No resistance. Like slashing at a hole.
(Empty SFX box.)
Her backhand catches the silver hand on her other ankle, and that one cuts. A thin line opens across the silver wrist, and it bleeds light. Across the whole sea, ten thousand women flinch and cry out at once.
Her clear half staring past her own cut wrist at her own grey hands, spread over the rail, the barley, the tally-marks, as if seeing them for the first time.
But there are more hands. Grey and silver, dozens rising, more every heartbeat, along the hull, up the anchor-chain, over the bow. At the stern, Bali, counting under his breath; beside him Isa, lying flat with her ear to the deck the way she listens to whales.
and in every reflection at once a silver crack opening over her heart, a hairline, and through it, light, leaking like water through a split board.
He has watched the grey cross the rail of his ship, onto his crew's barley, round his people. Tail still. Ears flat. And gold coming up behind his brown eyes like a sunrise.
The Marka on a black glass sea under a sky of stars, and over her deck, from rail to rail, from bow to stern, wings. Wide, gold-feathered wings, spread like a roof, blotting out every star above the ship so that not one inch of deck, not one pane, not one patch of water against the hull shines. Under them, darkness and gold.
On the ridge of the cabin roof crouches the Manticore: a golden lion's body, a blaze of mane, the long scorpion tail of amber glass curled high over the mainmast, catching the starlight like honey. Gold from nose to tail. Only the eyes are the same: warm, brown, a dog's.
And everywhere his shadow falls, the hands, silver and grey, let go, sinking back into a sea that has nothing left to reflect. Rougeina dropping out of their grip into Vigolas's arms.
Black and still. No shine on the brass, no glint on the blades. Nothing for her to come through.
on his feet, the violet already in his eyes, pointing past the wing-tips at the glass-flat sea beyond the shade, still full of her.
MACRO : WIND = ONE NIGHT
The wind comes back, all of it, a whole night's wind in one breath, roaring over the Current from every direction at once. The black glass shatters into waves, whitecaps, spray. Ten thousand women break into ten thousand ripples and are gone. Among the whitecaps, flat grey patches of sea that won't shine any more drift away astern like oil.
Kompis, Bror levelled at the sea off the bow, where one glassy patch still holds.
BRA-DOOM. A ring of warm gold force hits the water, and waves race outward in a perfect circle, breaking every last mirror on the surface.
One small calm patch left, in the lee of the Manticore's wing-tip, no bigger than a doorway. In it, one woman, kneeling, one hand pressed over the crack in her chest. It is closing, slowly, the light thinning to a thread, and she is shaking.
leaning over the rail above her, wet-eyed, furious, frightened.
the crack closed to a silver scar now. Looking up at her daughter.
(A gust ruffles the patch. She's gone.)
The gold wings folding in, shrinking, the amber tail curling down, until a golden retriever pads down off the cabin roof and walks straight to Rougeina, sitting on the deck, and licks her face, thoroughly, ear to chin.
(Behind them, on the rail by the wheel, a strip of grey wood a hand wide, and nothing on it.)
running his hand slowly along the grey strip of rail.
flat on his back on the deck, the crow sitting on his chest, already asleep, snoring.
Öde and Rougeina sitting against it. Three stalks of barley at the edge, grey from the tips down. Öde touching one gently, the way you'd touch a bruise.
the emerald names on her arms catching the lantern light.
Vigolas sitting with his back to the Kettle's bell. Rougeina comes and sits beside him without asking.
his emerald eyes ringed thin with gold, remembering.
(Rougeina turns her face away to the sea. He doesn't look at her.)
Astralis ahead: a black sky that stays black at sunrise, crowded with stars that hang too close, like lanterns. Floating above the sea in their thousands, tower-sized standing mirrors, angled every which way so the sky is reflected in the sky. Black panthers moving along a shore of black glass sand.
On the black glass, a woman standing with her back to the sea, arms crossed, refusing to look at the water lapping her boots. Loose red hair, a shade more orange than crimson. A patched waistcoat with thirty pockets. And behind her a big bushy fox's tail, twitching.