Chapter 209
The crew sitting round a lantern with Oswin, his wheeling star-map turning slowly over the stones, the hull of the Marka, their faces. The satchel open between them. Eleven shards of glass in straw, glowing faintly.
lifting one shard out with long careful fingers and holding it up to the lantern.
against the light. Inside it, tiny, crowded as a city seen from a mountain: faces. Thousands. Old, young, soldiers, children, a troll with a pipe, a woman with a basket. All grey. All looking out.
very quietly, looking at one face in the shard: a troll child with a carved toy.
taking a shard from Oswin without asking, turning it in the light. Thousands of grey faces. She's very still.
her other hand going to her heart. Her own dead (eight names, all of them now remembered by Kompis too) have company.
holding up the eleventh shard, darker than the others. Inside it, not faces: a room. Black stone. One desk. And one window, and through the window, grey. In front of the window, a tall straight figure in black and white. And on the other side of the glass, faint, a second figure, grey, faceless, one hand raised as if in greeting.
staring at the faceless grey figure in the shard. The same shape he's seen at the edge of the world.
Hounds. Baying, down the Bastion's long stair from the open gate above. Then boots. Many.
Pouring down it: Cleaners, a squad in severe black-and-white uniforms printed like the columns of a page, white gloves, and at their heels grey hounds, lean and colourless, eyes blank. At their head, a broad man with cotton stuffed in both ears and a brass ear-trumpet hanging from his belt.
RANK PLATE ×20: CLEANER · K-III TESTED · the Null Protocol
SKRUBB · K-IV SHAPED · Scalelist #1,450 · Chief Cleaner
shouting, much too loud, the way the deaf do.
hand on Bror.
The Cleaners on the jetty.
The grey hounds lunge, and where they bite the jetty stones, the stone greys: little erasures in their teeth. Mingus meets them head-on, and the grey hounds stop, sniff, and start wagging. He's the first dog they've met that they can't grey.
Bror's shove, BRA-DOOM, sweeps a line of Cleaners back up the stair, unhurt and furious.
Smurjan's Triple Pulse knocks three hounds' muzzles shut at once.
Ysel, who was on the Kettle's crew and knows how Cleaners move, trips two of them with a rope she's knotted to the bollards. Best knots on any boat.
Skrubb, standing on the stair, raises his brass ear-trumpet, not to his ear, but pointed at the fight. And every sound on the jetty, every footstep, every shout, every clank of a blade, comes out of it ten times louder: a wall of noise that slams the crew to their knees, hands over their ears.
smiling, serene, because he hears nothing at all.
on her knees, both hands over her ears, the noise hammering, and through it planting her feet.
…ba—
(In her sight, everything stops, and stopped things make no sound. The wall of noise cuts off.)
The Bastion jetty frozen blue-white in Isa's hold, frost at the borders: Cleaners mid-lunge, grey hounds mid-leap, Skrubb on the stair with his ear-trumpet raised, and every SFX on the spread frozen in mid-air as solid letters, huge, hanging, silent. Through the frozen noise, hands on Isa's shoulders, the crew walking calmly: Vigolas plucking the ear-trumpet out of Skrubb's hand, Rougeina disarming Cleaners, Kompis knotting a hound's leash round a bollard, Mingus trotting among the frozen grey dogs, sniffing them one by one.
Release, —DUM: Skrubb finds his trumpet gone and his squad disarmed, and the grey hounds lying down round Mingus with their tails thumping.
The Cleaners retreating up the stair, dragging Skrubb, who is still shouting. The grey hounds stay behind, lying in a pile round Mingus.
Not a battle sound. The soft chk of a spade going into earth. On the jetty's far end, where the stones meet the fjord, there is suddenly ground that wasn't there: a flat grey island of ash, rising out of the water, smoke drifting over it.
On the ash plain, a lone man in a long coat patched from a hundred armies, a scarf of regimental scarves wound three times round his neck, digging with a short spade. Round his feet, laid out neatly: the rings, lockets and folded letters the Unwritten left in the shallows.
KVAR · RÖNNKVIST-5 · not on any board (the ink fading as we watch)
not looking up from his digging.
sitting down on the ash next to the man who carries Stillmark for her, and who once carried her.
coming out onto the ash, looking at the lockets and rings laid in rows, then at the grey faces in the shard Rougeina still holds.
finally looking up at the farm girl with names on her arms. A long, tired, kind look.
taking Öde's, raising it, turning her toward the crew on the jetty.
where Aldhrun stood. A faint warmth in the air. Lärka, on the stair, with her hand over her heart.
sitting on a bollard with the eleventh shard in his lap, the star-map wheeling over him, very tired.
looking up at Vigolas through three pairs of spectacles.