Chapter 199
The Marka under full sail on the open Current. Grass on her deck, barley in the planter box, the Kettle's bell gleaming at the bow, the ship's-name plank beside it. Everything as it should be. Except the horizon: it's too close. The edge of the sea sits nearer than it should, like a painted backdrop pushed in.
at the wheel, frowning, squinting at it. Beside him Isa, lying flat on the deck with her ear to the planks.
sitting up, pointing at the dawn sky, where the last stars are fading. In one patch, holes: places where stars should be and aren't, not darker than the sky round them but less.
eyes gold, at the rail. His face tight.
A small fishing boat, sail patched, beating hard south, away from the north. A family aboard, a goat, everything they own. As the Marka passes, the old man at the tiller shouts across the water.
at the bow, watching them go, then turning north.
suddenly going still, a hand to his chest. One of his threads, a thin, quiet one he hasn't felt in a long time, is pulled taut, far off to the north. On the thread, carried on it like a sound on a wire, one word, so faint it barely reaches him:
The crew gathered, arguing.
listening to all of it, then shrugging.
glaring, then sighing, buckling her blades.
The Marka entering a long, narrow fjord between the black cliffs of the Marhold Spine, mountains rising sheer on both sides, snow on their tops, and somewhere far up ahead, a glimmer of white towers: Glasheim.
on the bow, eyes narrowing.
On the cliff-ledges above the fjord, bounty crews: thirty, forty hunters from a dozen different ships, harpoons and nets and crossbows, and in the middle of them a banner with a crude painting of a chair. Below them, chains stretched across the fjord to catch the Marka like a fish.
RANK PLATE ×40: CHAIR-HUNTER · K-III TESTED · bounty crews
a tall woman with a harpoon, grinning down.
already lifting Bror.
The fjord ambush.
Harpoons and nets rain down. Isa plants her feet on the bow, …ba—, and every harpoon in her sight hangs in the air. Trollmage, leaning against her back, yawns.
Rougeina Swaps with a hanging harpoon, up to the cliff, and comes down through the hunters like a silver-rose storm.
Kompis, Bror: BRA-DOOM, a warm gold shove that sweeps a whole cliff-ledge of hunters back off their feet into the snow.
Smurjan, the Triple Pulse, three chains across the fjord snapped in one beat.
Öde, Scythe-Sweep, grass springing over the wet deck as hunters swing aboard on ropes.
Vigolas, leaping from the bowsprit to the cliff, punching the hunters' chair-banner in half with an Emerald Knuckle.
on her back in the snow, Vigolas crouching over her.
The hunters scrambling back to their ships, the chains broken, the Marka sailing on up the fjord. And at the fjord's mouth behind her, unnoticed by anyone on the Marka, a battered carrack glides past the bounty fleet without joining it: five bands of differently coloured planks down her hull, a raised bandaged fist for a figurehead, the same fist on her black flag. At her rail, a big man in a long coat of sewn-on patches, grinning with a chipped tooth, both fists bandaged, calling across to the hunters' banner:
(The carrack sails on, out of the fjord, the other way.)
The Marka sailing up the fjord between the black walls of the Marhold Spine. Far ahead, high on the mountain, the white towers of Glasheim, and below them, built into the cliffs at the fjord's head, a vast grey fortress-wing of walls, checkpoints and gates: the Bastion. And between the ship and the Bastion, the water ends. Not at a shore. The fjord simply turns white: blank, colourless, flat as unprinted paper, eating the black cliffs at its edges, lapping at the Bastion's lowest gate.
Above it all, a sky with holes in it.
at the bow, her hand going to her arm, the names on it flickering.
in the bow, ears flat, staring at a point in the air where nothing is. Then he trots down the deck and stands in front of Kompis.
at the wheel, his hands slowing the ship, his voice gone strange.
The Marka slowing at the edge of the white, gently, as if afraid to touch it. On the Bastion's walls ahead, tiny figures fighting. Smoke. The flash of a shield.
eyes gold, looking at the white water ahead. And under its surface, faintly, shapes moving: walking, upright, wading out of the blank sea toward the Bastion.
very awake, very pale.
And out of the white, wading, rising from it as calm as people walking out of a bath: grey figures. Dozens. Human-shaped, robed in grey, their faces smooth and blank and soft, like rubbed-out drawings. Where their rank plates should flicker over their heads, there is nothing.
One of them turning its blank face toward the Marka. Over its head, where a plate belongs, a plate trying to form and failing:
— · UNWRITTEN · —
(The SFX box under it: empty.)