Chapter 229
The endless white library emptying: aisle after aisle of shelves going bare, unsaid things flying up into the white sky like flocks of birds. And the Margin itself, with nothing left in it to keep, thinning: the white floor turning to mist, the shelves fading.
alone in the clearing, the empty chair beside him, the white cube in his fist, the music box in his coat. The grey edge where Jorvand went, very close.
far down the aisle, Ysel still in it, bracing it with both hands, her feet on the threshold. Behind her, the crew crammed into the office.
beside her, rolling up her sleeve.
starting to say the names on her arm, aloud, the Roll-Call, and turning to the crew.
The whole crew in a ring in the lamplit room, saying the name to each other, again and again, quietly, steadily, like a heartbeat: Drekk, Isa, Trollmage, Levla, Hjalmar in the doorway, Ysel at the door. Mingus barking once on every fourth beat.
and in the thinning white, a thread. Gold. The Knot. For the first time since he was pulled in, Vigolas feels his crew: faint, then stronger, a line of gold running from his chest out through the empty white toward a small wooden door.
grinning, crying, turning toward it.
The Margin dissolving round him into white mist, shelves fading to nothing, and a young man in a torn green coat running down the last aisle of an emptying library toward a small open wooden door, following a single gold thread. Through the door, lamplight, an office, and a ring of faces saying his name.
Behind him, the white folding up like a page being crumpled, and at its very edge, the grey, and in the grey, very faint, the outline of a tall stooped man, watching him go.
And at the door, a girl with no shadow holding it open, and a golden retriever leaping through it the wrong way, into the white, to meet him.
Mingus meeting Vigolas halfway, in the dissolving white, the dog circling him once, and then leading: trotting ahead toward the door, the white not taking to his paws, the way it never takes to anything about him.
Through the door. Vigolas and Mingus tumbling out into the office together onto the rug in a heap of dog and coat. Ysel letting go of the door, collapsing against Drekk.
And behind them, the wooden door swinging shut on white, and gone: just the office's far wall again, plain paper, its black bars lying still.
on his back on the rug under a dog, grinning up at a ring of faces.
laughing and crying at once, pulling him into a headbutt.
standing at the edge of the ring with his empty barrow, coat a third gone, fidgeting. Vigolas sitting up and spotting him.
getting up, walking over, and hugging him. Hard. Not saying anything at all.
The crew coming out of the Twelfth's office. Behind them, in the black door's hollow, the shard: black, quiet, cold. Not frosted. Not warm. Just a piece of dark stone.
touching the shard with one fingertip. Nothing. No grey. No voice.
standing before the Twelfth's door, his blind face lifted toward the black bar on the frieze above it, the new crack running through it.
and for the first time in three hundred years, aloud, his friend's whole name and office, in a voice like an old book opening:
(Above him, the black bar on the frieze cracks across and falls away in a shower of black dust. Under it: a carved figure. A tall, stooped man with a kind face, holding an open book.)
pushing the Twelfth's door closed. Slowly. Until it clicks.
beside him, quiet.
Twelve chairs on a glass floor. One lit: Hjalmar's. The Fifth's Signet glowing faint, for a man nobody can find. Ten dark. The Twelfth's Signet, which hung lit at standing height for three hundred years, gone: not dark, not fallen, simply taken with him into the grey.
And through the glass floor, far below, the grey stain on the mountain, creeping.
eyes gold, at a window, looking out at the whole world beyond the Marhold Spine, and his face going grim.
The Current spread out below to every horizon, and every horizon too close. On every side, the starlit sea ending sooner than it should, at a pale smudge of grey. Islands at the edges dimming. Stars going out in patches, one, two, three, while they watch.
at the window, the white cube of the Ledger page in one fist, the grey cube of a thousand decrees in his coat, the music box playing four notes very softly in his pocket. Afraid of the grey, for the first time. Looking straight at it.
The Marka at her mooring, grass on her deck, the Kettle's bell and the CAMILLA THE SERAPHIM plank at her bow, the red pennant of the Kettle under her flag. The crew coming down the long stair from Glasheim, battered and laughing. Mingus first, with a stick.
at the bottom of the stair, stopping, looking at the ship, at the crew piling aboard, at his empty barrow.
a long beat, then shoving the empty barrow into the fjord with his foot and walking up the gangplank, coat flapping.
The Marka sailing out of the fjord under the Marhold Spine, Glasheim's lights behind her, the grey stain on the mountain glimmering faintly in the dark.
at the rail beside Vigolas, the open sea ahead, the edges too close, the stars thinning.
the Compass in his hand, the needle swinging, wavering, and settling, pointing at his crew behind him as it always does now. And grinning.