Chapter 196
The Hall Between exploding: ten thousand shards flying outward, each holding her face; great slabs of the glass floor dropping away into the soundless grey; the crew falling, Öde, Räva, Smurjan with Kali and the cracking Bali tangled in his arms, all of them tumbling toward nothing.
(The grey under them: empty SFX box.)
coming down on the small plinth of black glass sand under the dark mirror: the last real ground in the Hall. Frost spreading from her soles.
ISA · K-IV SHAPED (re-assigned) · Scalelist #1,212
turning her back to the dark mirror and to Rougeina standing in front of it. Facing the explosion instead. Her eyes going clear as lake ice.
One beat late, as always.
Kompis's hand comes down on her left shoulder, Mingus pressed to his leg. Vigolas grabs Kompis's other hand. Trollmage drops sleepily against her back, spine to spine.
Everything stops. Ten thousand shards hanging in the air like a frozen cloudburst, every one with her face in it, every face stopped mid-word. Slabs of floor stopped mid-fall. Öde stopped mid-tumble with her scythe flung wide. Räva stopped upside down, tail streaming. Smurjan, Kali and Bali stopped in a tangle over the grey. A ring of violet frost spreading from Isa's feet across the plinth. Colour drained to blue-white, frost thick on the panel borders.
hair suspended in mid-swing, lips already paling. Her thought balloon, frost-edged and small.
(Thought:) …three hands. a quarter. a quarter of a breath. · …hurry.
Mingus, the one thing in a held world that moves at full speed, trotting off the edge of the plinth onto a frozen shard as if it were a stepping-stone, then the next, tail going, out over the grey toward his people.
1. Mingus coming back across the shards with Öde's hood in his teeth, towing her frozen shape through the air like a kite.
2. At the plinth's edge, Vigolas, at the end of the chain, holding Kompis's hand and leaning out as far as his arm will go, catching her by the belt and throwing her onto the sand (Captain's Pull). Then Räva, by the waistcoat. Mingus is already heading out again.
The tangle of Smurjan, Kali and Bali, too heavy. Mingus hauling on Smurjan's robe with all four paws skidding on the shard, growling round the cloth. Vigolas leaning out at full stretch, Kompis braced with both feet, the chain of hands straining.
(They come in together, all three, onto the plinth.)
Frost on her lashes. Her lips blue. Her heart not beating.
(Thought:) …hurry.
In colour, warm, where time still runs: the dark mirror on its plinth, and Rougeina standing in front of it, barefoot, eight blades sheathed, hands empty. Out of the glass, silver hands reach for her, gentle.
(Rougeina doesn't move.)
stopping an inch from her face, from her shoulders, from her hands. Trembling. They can't move a reflection that isn't moving.
Face the mirror. Rougeina looking at her mother's grey half. Her eyes sliding off it, the way everyone's do. Dragging them back. Sliding off. Back. Her eyes watering from the effort of looking at a thing that doesn't want to be looked at. Back.
very still for the first time in the arc, letting her.
It stops showing her mother. It shows where she stands: Rougeina, everywhere at once, in one glass:
on the Marka's masthead at night
squashed at the galley table between a pirate and a dog-man, laughing with her mouth open
kneeling at the Pillar of Names, bowing to the dead
holding a cold man's face in a book-lined study
seven years old on a black-glass shore, waking beside eight blades
standing here, beside her mother, inside the glass.
All of them her. All of them right.
lifting something up from inside the glass, from somewhere very deep: a book. Silver, with clasps of blue-grey mirror-steel, its cover blank except where it catches the light.
holding it to her chest a moment, the way you'd hold a baby before handing it over.
Against Isa's back, Trollmage asleep, facing the mirror, and on his chest the Gluttony Codex jerking awake, amber cover yawning open like a mouth, lunging toward the silver book.
not waking, slapping one huge grey-green hand flat over the amber cover without opening his eyes.
(The Gluttony Codex settles under his hand, sulking.)
Two halves of one spread.
One side, blue-white and frozen: a small barefoot girl with silver hair suspended in mid-swing, lips blue, perfectly still, her back turned, holding up a frozen sky of ten thousand flying shards. A man's hand on her shoulder, another man holding his, a sleeping half-troll against her spine, a golden dog sitting at her feet, the rescued crew in a heap on the black sand.
The other side, warm and moving, behind her: a crimson-haired woman standing perfectly still before a tall dark mirror, reading. The silver book lies open in her mother's hands on the far side of the glass, its pages turned toward her, the writing visible only in the mirror: backwards, silver, crawling. Silver light pours off the pages up her right arm.
Across the top of the spread, in silver capitals, the book's own title:
PRIDE · VOLUME I · WHERE YOU STAND
And under it, in silver script, the first line Rougeina reads:
The question was never whether you can stand in the right place. It is how many places are right for you.
Silver sentences rising out of the cold silver ring on the inside of her wrist, warm at last, and braiding between the rose script of her Envy, rose and silver twisted like rope, up the forearm, over the shoulder, across the collarbone, and settling over her heart.
flickering. The board tries to move her, ticks, and settles exactly where it was.
ROUGEINA · K-IV SHAPED · Scalelist #777
Echo pushing the closed book through the mirror, and it comes, out of the glass, whole, into Rougeina's hands: the first thing in three hundred years to pass out of her mirror into the world.
holding the book, looking up.
frozen tears on her lashes, blue to the chin, her thought balloon so small it's almost nothing.
(Thought:) …now. · …it has to be now.
feeling her through his hand.
Everything moves at once: ten thousand shards resuming their flight, a storm of glass round the plinth; the rescued crew gasping awake on the black sand; and Isa crumpling forward into the Backlog, ba-dum ba-dum ba-dum, both hands on her heart, tipping off the edge of the plinth straight into the path of a shard with a dozen silver hands reaching out of it.
eyes on Isa, two fingers already raised.
(A beat. The shard closing.)
CROSS-SWAP. Two silver-rose flickers at once: Isa and a loose lump of black glass on the plinth trade places. Isa lands on the sand, safe. The black glass takes the shard full in the face and bursts.
Silver rings of light closing round both ankles, rooting her to the spot. She can't Swap. She can't step. A second shard swings past, and its silver hand rakes her shoulder open. She takes it without moving.
Round the little plinth of black sand, the whole storm of shards wheeling like a murmuration, ten thousand of them, every one holding Echo, every hand reaching. And from all of them at once, one voice, ten thousand times: