Chapter 20
Every door on the long stepped street opens at once. Bakers in flour, stable-hands, washerwomen, bark-yard porters carrying their hooks, an old man with a cane. All of them walk out into the snow in their nightclothes and turn, together, toward the cistern grate at the bottom of the stair. Their eyes are blank.
The crew climbs out of the grate into the street, and stops.
Every person on the street has had their threads lifted out of them and pulled up the stair, taut, to one point. Mothers no longer tied to their children. Neighbours no longer tied to neighbours. Every thread re-knotted into one white seal-knot in a gloved fist.
Orm stands in the snow in his new silver-stitched gloves. The same polite, debt-collector's smile.
raising both fists. Hundreds of golden threads quiver between his fingers.
The whole crowd raises its tools at once: bread-peels, pitchforks, bark-hooks, a washing paddle, a cane. Two hundred people. They start down the stair toward the crew.
one hand pressed flat against his own shadow, which is bulging.
(A long, wet pause.)
Kompis swings Ivar up at Orm, and twenty blank-eyed people step in front of Orm at once, a wall of bodies. Ivar's ghost grabs the trigger from the inside.
The crowd reaches them.
A ring of pitchforks closes around Drekk. Blink: Rougeina Swaps him with a hay bale. The forks stab hay. Drekk is suddenly on a rooftop, extremely confused.
A baker swings a peel at Vigolas. Blink: Rougeina Swaps Vigolas with a goat. The crowd closes around a very surprised goat.
Silver-rose phantom trails criss-cross the whole street as Rougeina pulls the crew out of the crowd one at a time, faster and faster, sweat running down her face. She can't keep Swapping forever.
at the top of the stair, perfectly relaxed.
Mingus at his feet, rifle down, useless.
Smurjan on the stair, the crowd closing around him.
Kali rises up out of his shadow, black-glass sickles in hand, and looks up the stair at Orm the way a cat looks at a bird.
She looks at the golden threads in Orm's fists and breathes them in. Her eyes flash gold.
The silver stitching goes dark. The threads in his fists go slack, like reins dropped by a driver who has fallen asleep.
She stands in the middle of the Hay Stair with gold eyes, her sickles stuck in the snow, both hands raised, and between her fingers run hundreds of golden threads, which she plays like a harp. One by one they snap home: the baker's back to his wife in the doorway, a stable-hand's back to his old mother at a window, two feuding neighbours back to each other, the old man's back to a frayed dog-collar hanging on his door. Gold arcs over the whole stepped street like the sun coming up sideways.
Up and down the stair, people blink awake in their nightclothes in the snow, holding pitchforks and peels.
The baker turns and hugs his wife without knowing why.
sweating, still playing threads, her gold eyes beginning to flicker.
One stable-hand, the last thread Kali hasn't reached, still blank-eyed, comes up behind Smurjan, who stands perfectly still holding the shadow-tether that keeps Kali out. The man raises a heavy iron bark-hook over the back of Smurjan's head.
on the step below, seeing it. No thought. Just movement.
Drekk throws himself between them and takes the swing on his spyglass, held up like a sword. The brass bends. The lens cracks. He shoves the man down into a snowbank.
dented, with a crack running clean across the lens.
Smurjan turns around. Drekk is breathing hard and glaring at his own hands as if they had betrayed him.
Kali ties the last thread, the stable-hand's, back to wherever it lives, and spins, gold eyes flickering out, sickle swinging, straight up the stair at Orm.
One clean line of black glass across Orm's face, from brow to jaw, drawn as a single line and nothing more. His rank plate flickers.
one hand to his face, eyes wide. The silver stitching on his gloves flares back to life as Kali's minute runs out, but there is nothing left on the street for him to hold.
The crew comes up the stair at him, Vigolas in front.
For the first time, the polite smile is gone.
He flings a fistful of loose threads into the air. They flash like a net of sunlight in everyone's eyes, and when it fades he's gone over the rooftops.
Kali is back in Smurjan's shadow. Only her voice is left.
Drekk, ten steps away, pretends very hard that he hasn't heard.
The baker, still in his nightshirt, comes down the stair holding a fresh loaf and presses it awkwardly into Vigolas's hands.
quietly watching Drekk and Smurjan climb the stair ten steps apart. Between them, for the first time, there is a thread. Grey. Frayed. Thin as a hair. But there.
He doesn't mention it. Mingus's tail thumps once against the step.
looking out over the market square of Glasheim, where the city's colossal Scalelist board towers over the roofs. A bell starts tolling. Then another. Then every bell in the city.
On the board, all of the millions of names wipe away at once, top to bottom, like a hand clearing a fogged window.
A new image fills the blank board: a harbour on black-sand cliffs seen from the sea, and in the middle of it a tavern sign with a drowned book painted on it.