Chapter 213
The Marka slipping back up the black fjord past the Bastion, where a single lantern burns at the foot of the stair where Aldhrun stood. Half her crew aboard. Above, Glasheim's white towers in the clouds.
at the bow, one hand on her heart. Through the Knot, faintly, she can feel a seated mountain at the far edge of the world, waiting.
at the wheel beside Drekk, no shadow on the moonlit deck, looking up at the mountain with an odd, tired familiarity.
grinning in the dark.
A narrow passage of black stone, cold, damp, the walls grey in streaks where the Null has leaked through over the years. Ysel leading with a lantern, then Vigolas, Rougeina, Öde, Oswin with his star-lantern dimmed, and Drekk at the rear.
running her fingers along the grey streaks on the wall, her face troubled.
Not footsteps. A voice, booming down the stone passages from everywhere at once, so loud the lanterns shake:
Ahead, where the passage opens into a long black corridor: Skrubb, cotton in his ears, a new brass ear-trumpet raised high, and beside him a Cleaner reading aloud from a white page, every word coming out of the trumpet ten times louder, filling the whole mountain. Grey hounds at their feet, the ones that didn't defect.
The letters of the name lifting off it, cutting themselves free: O-S-W-I-N. Drifting through the air like ash, looking for the thing they name.
very calm, very tired, lifting his lantern and plucking one star out of its wheeling map: his own. He sets it somewhere else.
(He's still standing there. Nobody's eyes can find him.)
drifting, circling, searching the corridor, finding nothing. They swirl in confused loops round the spot where he stands, unable to settle, and slowly sift down to the floor as harmless grey dust.
a hand at his temple, swaying.
The corridor.
Vigolas charging the Cleaner with the page, and a grey hound biting at his boots. The stone where its teeth snap goes grey. Vigolas jumps it.
Rougeina Swapping with a drifting flake of ash from the failed writ, landing behind Skrubb, and slicing the ear-trumpet in half.
Drekk knocking two Cleaners flat with the Kettle's old oar, which he's carried for twenty years and never once used as a weapon.
Ysel, rope in hand, the best knots on any boat, hog-tying a grey hound's legs together in three seconds flat.
Öde, Scythe-Sweep, the long even stroke clearing the whole corridor floor of hounds.
holding the two halves of his trumpet, deafer than ever, outraged, bellowing at nobody.
at the end of the corridor, her hand flat on a plain black door with no handle, no lock, no hinges.
hand on the door, looking back at his half-crew.
A square room of black stone, deep in the mountain, plain as a cell. One desk of black stone. A stack of white pages, tall as a child. A pen in an inkwell. And one window, tall and narrow, in the far wall, and through it, not night, not sky: grey. The Null. Flat, soft, endless, the colour of old paper, pressing against the glass from the other side.
At the desk, with her back to them, facing the window: SOLVIG. Tall and straight as a ruled line. Grey all over: hair, skin, lips, as if the colour had been drained out of a painting of her. Robes of black and white like a printed page. A high collar folded like paper. White gloves. She doesn't turn round.
SOLVIG · K-V ARCHITECT · Architect Two, Keeper of the Null Protocol (the name on the plate flickering faintly, as if the plate keeps forgetting it)
still facing the window, her voice dry and even and very, very calm, like a clerk reading a list.
finally turning in her chair. Her grey eyes almost never blink. They rest on Rougeina.
eight blades up, utterly still.
not denying any of it. Almost gentle.
stepping forward, her arms bare, the 110 emerald names and the four place-inks glowing.
resting on the white page on her desk, where one letter is already written in neat grey ink: R.
seeing it, moving: green lightning, a full Emerald Knuckle, straight across the room at the desk.
not looking up, not hurrying. Her pen already moving. O. U. G. In her seat, she doesn't need anyone to read it. In her seat, signing is enough.
ROUGEINA. And under it, a small, neat, final signature.
Vigolas's fist arriving a heartbeat too late, and Solvig simply not being where it lands. She has stepped aside, already standing by the window, the signed page in her gloved hand.
The letters of ROUGEINA lifting off it, cutting themselves free, R, O, U, G, E, I, N, A, drifting into the air like flakes of grey ash.
Eight grey flakes of letters drifting across the black room toward the woman with the crimson hair and the eight blades, and where the first one, the R, touches her shoulder, the crimson of her hair begins, very slowly, to go grey.