Chapter 23

A room hung with paper streamers, a cake with eight unlit candles, a long table being quietly cleared by servants. Edda stands at the window in a party dress, her forehead against the glass, watching the snow.

Baldr kneels beside her in his cardigan and winds a knitted scarf around his own neck.

A white-haired old man in a cardigan and scarf walks alone, a small lantern in his hand. No guards. On the rooftops above him, the last faint silver-rose ghosts, almost gone, point the way.

looking up at the ghosts, humming the wolf's tune under his breath. Behind him, in a doorway, the House Steward wrings his white gloves.

The crew, settled in for the night. Vigolas counting shards on a blanket. Rougeina asleep, bandaged, a blade in her hand even in sleep. Smurjan meditating. Drekk trying to straighten his dented spyglass. Kompis cleaning Ivar. Trollmage flat on his back beside his sign: WAITING. DAY 3. DO NOT DISTURB.

Everyone freezes.

opening a slit in the door, knife ready. A kind old face with snow on its eyebrows looks back at him.

BALDR · K-V ARCHITECT · Architect Three, Keeper of the Engagement Protocol

Baldr steps inside and closes the door behind him against the cold, stamping snow off his slippers. On the back of his right hand, a small square seal of white light glows faintly: his Signet.

gone white. He's on his feet before he knows it.

Vigolas steps between them, grinning with all his teeth.

He sits down on a crate as if it were his own armchair and takes out a small pad of paper and an ornate silver pen.

polite and apologetic.

(He nods at Rougeina, asleep in her blankets.)

Neat silver handwriting:

Vigolas: deliver the satchel to me.

A flourish of silver. As the last stroke lands, the Signet on the back of his hand flares.

His right foot steps forward. Then his left. Toward Baldr. He didn't move them.

Smurjan is already moving: Wrath, the one correct blow, two fingers driving for the pen-hand. Kali tears up out of his shadow; Bakasura's maw rises through the floorboards.

Smurjan, all three of you: kneel. Signed.

(a) Smurjan's knees hit the floor mid-lunge, his fingers a hand's width from the pen.

(b) Kali, half out of the shadow, drops to her knees beside him, furious.

(c) Bakasura's colossal maw presses itself flat against the floorboards like a very large, very embarrassed rug.

Rougeina wakes at the noise and a blade flashes up from her bedroll, slow with the wound—

—and she drops back into the blankets mid-draw, asleep, the blade sliding out of her fingers.

Kompis swings Ivar up at Baldr's chest.

Kompis sits down on the floor. Hard.

popping out of the barrel, outraged.

sitting, his hand dropping onto Mingus's head.

The golden pulse line wakes along the panel border.

Kompis lives the moment again and again. In one he lunges. In one he rolls. In one he fires. And in every one, before the movement even begins, his body sits back down. A thousand afterimages of Kompis, every one of them sitting on the floor.

Kompis, still sitting, blood running from his nose, shaking. He has paid for nothing.

one step short of Baldr, frozen mid-stride, half his body leaning forward and half dragging back. His rank glitches above his head: ∞−1 · ∞−1 · ∞−

Baldr leans forward, slips two fingers into the lining of Vigolas's coat and, without searching, draws out one shard. He knows exactly which one.

the white room, the man splitting into three, and in the great mirror the silver figure. Baldr looks at the silver figure a moment longer than he needs to.

all three voices in one roar.

Mingus stands up from beside Kompis. Baldr notices him. He writes The dog: sit. and signs.

The silver ink slides off the paper like water off oiled glass and drips onto the floorboards. The words won't stay.

surprised for the first time.

Mingus walks up to him, calm and unhurried, and bites the pen-hand. Not savage. Firm. The way a good dog stops a hand that is hurting someone.

falling from Baldr's fingers, tumbling end over end toward the floor.

In the half-heartbeat that the pen is in the air, every silver collar on the crew flickers.

One violet eye opens.

He writes in the air: MACRO : UPDRAFT = 1 ROOF

The workshop roof tears off into the night sky, beams, slates and all, sucked upward in a violet whirlwind. Snow and a thousand blank glass tiles spin up into the dark like a blizzard of mirrors. Everyone is knocked flat.

Baldr, thrown off his crate, picks his pen up off the floor with his good hand. Mingus has already trotted back to Kompis's side. On Baldr's other wrist are the neat marks of a dog's teeth. He looks at them almost fondly.

The collars steady again. The crew is still half-held. Baldr walks to the door, rewinds his scarf, and steps out into the snow. Vigolas lunges after him, then realises his legs are lunging for him: the mission is still running, and his legs want to deliver him.

Kompis and Smurjan tackle Vigolas into the snow now drifting through the roofless room before he can walk out the door after Baldr. His legs keep kicking toward the street like a dreaming dog's.

looking back, kind and sad.

He's gone.

The heroes have lost. Smurjan pounds the floor with his fist.

Rougeina sits up, groggy, blade in hand.

Vigolas, pinned under Kompis and Smurjan, his legs still walking.

Drekk ties him to the great iron glass-press. In the corner, Trollmage, his runes dark and spent, props up his sign and crosses out the number: WAITING. DAY 0.

empty and humming. Among the million slates, a new one lights up:

VIGOLAS · ∞−1 · MISSION: DELIVER THE SATCHEL · STATUS: HALF-HELD