Chapter 21
bright under the white towers. Thousands of people have stopped mid-errand to look up at the colossal board. On it, a moving image: Gate City harbour at dusk, seen from the sea. The black-sand cliffs, the city climbing the rock, and its own great board rising from the centre.
Vigolas still holding the baker's loaf.
Across the bottom of the image, Trisdel lettering in white:
GATE CITY HARBOURED THE UNNUMBERED.
Beneath it, a small, neat signature in silver ink.
going pale.
A line of white lanterns and torches winds down the cliff streets of Gate City. At its head walks a heavy figure in Sentinel armour, his helmet split open over a scarred face, a crossbow of red light in his hand.
SENTINEL CAPTAIN · K-III TESTED · Scalelist #9,330
Torches thrown. The fish-market wall where Kompis once leaned, waiting for a job. The narrow street where the crew once ran. And then the tavern: THE DROWNED LEDGER, its painted sign of a drowned book catching fire.
mouth open.
The harbour at night now, every street on fire. Down on the black sand, the thing that happens there every night: people walking out of the surf, newly reborn, soaked and confused. Tonight they walk out of the sea into a burning city.
He isn't moving.
The colossal board, taller than a cathedral, the very first thing Vigolas saw when he woke on that beach, burns through at its base and topples over the harbour. Millions of names, panes of burning glass, rain down into the sea like a galaxy falling. On the black sand hundreds of small figures stand and watch: the people who used to laugh at a pirate shouting his dream, and the newly reborn, dripping, looking up at the end of the world they have only just arrived in.
The crowd reacts. Some cheer: "Pirate harbour! Good riddance!" Some are silent. A woman cries into her shawl.
The image fades. One line burns across the board in the place where Gate City's tower stood:
∞−1 · THE PRICE OF HARBOURING
very quiet. No grin.
Across the square, a squad of Sentinel hunters moves through the crowd with seeker-lanterns, pulling back hoods and turning faces up to the board.
RANK PLATE ×12: SENTINEL · K-II MARKED · Scalelist #211,904
Its light falls on one familiar emerald eye.
Vigolas puts the baker's loaf into Kompis's hands. Then he walks the other way. Toward them.
No grin. No jokes. Vigolas knocks the first seeker-lantern out of a Sentinel's hand and headbutts him through a fruit stall.
A spear-butt cracks across his ribs and he doesn't even turn toward it. He just hits the next one. And the next.
The collar seams glow gold, as always, but Vigolas isn't aiming for them. He hits whatever is closest. The edges of his sight are red.
More Sentinels pour in from three streets. Chains of light lash around his arms and throat and drag him down onto one knee in the trampled snow and spilled fruit, exactly as they did on the black sand the morning he woke.
on one knee, chained. Green lightning wakes in his eye. He doesn't hesitate this time. He doesn't count.
Green lightning tears outward. All twelve Sentinels, their chains, a fruit stall, a handcart and the water in the square's fountain crush inward from every side into one humming cube the size of a melon, which drops onto the stones.
Silence in the market. Thousands of people backing away from one man in a green coat.
He doesn't turn it in the light. He doesn't admire it. He shoves it into his coat like a stone.
The crew grabs him and drags him into the alleys. Rougeina Swaps them through a gap in the crowd, the panther clears the way, and Drekk leads.
where the glass panes for Scalelist boards were once cut. Racks of blank glass number-tiles, glass dust on the floor, a great iron glass-press in the middle. Vigolas sits on a crate. Kompis wipes blood from Vigolas's eyebrow.
He thinks about it, like a man patting his pockets.
He smiles, satisfied.
A dock at dawn. A woman's strong, weathered hands braiding rope, fast and sure. The panel pans up. Where her face should be there is nothing: smooth and blank, like fog on a pane of glass.
still smiling at the memory, untroubled.
looking at him a moment too long. Through his soul-sight, a thread runs from Vigolas's chest out into the distance toward someone long gone, and the far end of it looks… frayed.
He says nothing else.
Mingus walks over and puts his chin on Vigolas's knee. Vigolas scratches his ears without looking. Then he sets the melon-sized cube on a rack of blank glass tiles.
It sounds less like a joke than it used to.
Rougeina stands at it, looking up at the white towers. One is taller than the rest, its summit glowing. From it a covered bridge runs to a warm house on a terrace, with one lit window.
She checks her blades one by one, all eight. She slides the last one home: the one that shines silver in the lamplight.
The crew asleep among the glass racks. Drekk snoring with his cracked spyglass on his chest. Trollmage's sign by his head: WAITING. DAY 2. DO NOT DISTURB. Smurjan meditating, his three shadows motionless on the wall.
Rougeina's place beside it is empty, her blanket folded. The panther is gone too. On the sill, a faint silver-rose silhouette of her hangs in the air, fading.
awake on watch with Mingus's head in his lap, looking out. Across the snowy roofs, a line of silver-rose ghosts leads away one after another, climbing toward the towers.