Chapter 205
The wall of light across the jetty. On the inside: the crew, the guards, Aldhrun kneeling with his hand on the stone. On the outside, in the white: Ysel, alone, the red pennant lowered now, her shadow a second behind her.
walking down the jetty toward the wall. Slowly. No mask. Vigolas falls in a step behind him, and Drekk raises one hand without looking back. Stay. Vigolas stays.
face to face through the shimmer of the wall. Close enough to touch, if the wall weren't there. Drekk, grey-bearded and bare-faced. Ysel, half pale and half grey, small, holding the pennant.
her pale eye on him, her grey eye on nothing.
a long beat. The smallest crack in her flat voice.
a little way up the jetty, eyes gold, going very still.
beside him.
lifting her grey hand slowly to the grey half of her face, touching it like a bruise.
and her voice going softer, almost dreamy, as if repeating something she's told herself a thousand times.
behind Drekk, very quiet, recognising something horrible: his own dream, turned inside out.
his hands on the wall of light, pressing, unable to pass.
opening her coat and taking out a folded page. Old, but not paper: something greyer, softer, that the eye slides off, like trying to look at a word just at the edge of your vision.
Ysel unfolding the page against the wall of light, and the wall itself flickering where it touches. On the page, grey ink that won't stay still, letters sliding as you look at them, and only one line that holds long enough to read, printed huge across the spread:
BEFORE THE FIRST BEAT THERE WAS NO ONE TO COUNT. AFTER THE LAST THERE WILL BE NO ONE TO MIND.
Around it, the faces of everyone on the jetty, pale and staring. Trollmage at the back, his hand flying to his chest.
Under his shirt, the Gluttony Codex, asleep on him since the Library, wakes: amber light blazing through the cloth, the book bucking against him like a starving animal smelling meat.
The Codex tears itself out of his shirt, flies open in mid-air, its pages flapping like jaws, and lunges for the wall, for the page, for the seventy-eighth codex.
Trollmage, diving, catching his own book by its spine in both hands, dragging it back, the amber pages snapping at the air. He wraps himself round it on the stone.
in his arms, straining, straining, then, slowly, Sloth winning, going still. Closing. Its amber light dimming to a sullen glow.
kneeling beside Trollmage, a beat late, very serious.
through the wall, looking at Trollmage's book, then at the page in her own hand, and doubt crossing her pale half-face for the first time.
both hands pressed flat on the wall of light, his face close to hers.
wavering. Her pale hand loosening on the page. Her lips parting.
standing a second behind her on the white. It moves first. It reaches past her, a flat, girl-shaped dark with no face, and closes its hand on the page.
turning, startled.
The shadow tears the page out of her fingers and runs: flat, fast, skimming over the white like a cloud's shadow over a field, back out into the Tideline.
reaching after it, and as the shadow goes, as it gets further from her, she frays: her grey half going dotted at the edges, her outline softening, as if her shadow had been the thing holding the half of her in place.
out in the white, turning his drowned face after the fleeing shadow, water gushing from his mouth.
slamming both fists on the wall of light.
Ysel on the white side of the wall, alone, stumbling after her shadow into the blank, the red pennant falling from her hand onto the white. She's going dotted. Fading. And behind her, far out in the Tideline, rising like a slow white wave, the next surge coming in.
lying on the white where she dropped it, and slowly, slowly, starting to lose its colour.
(Empty SFX box.)