Chapter 238
The tower door, the first steps, and then black: every stair-lamp eaten, a spiral of darkness climbing up and up. Somewhere at the very top, faint, the great lens still turning.
at the door, bloodied from the duel, already running in. Krydog at his shoulder, swaying, raw-eyed.
Both crews splitting: Smurjan, Roffe, Öde, Drekk, Ysel, Jeppson staying to fight the Wreckers holding the jetty, the cottage, the rocks. Vigolas, Krydog, Kompis, Perne, Rougeina, Isa, Emma, Tihi going up the stair.
at the cottage door with three Wreckers and oil-jars, and Ysel stepping out of a shadow she doesn't have, between them and the door.
Kompis first, eyes gold, seeing by threads, calling every step: "Left wall. Step's broken. Up."
Perne behind him, colour still gone from her right eye, the left still blind; she can't see far up here and doesn't try. She listens. "Someone's three turns above us."
Wreckers waiting in the dark on the turns, and Vigolas and Krydog going through them shoulder to shoulder, "Race you up?" "Always."
Emma chalking a circle on a landing for Tihi and the wounded to stop in, then running on.
Isa, unable to hold anything she can't see, in total dark, gripping Rougeina's sleeve.
one of Hallbard's pale moths, fluttering down the black stair, a scrap of Beam glowing in its wings, lighting a few steps.
seeing it, the only light in the dark, and Swapping with it: suddenly ten turns higher, where the moth was, her blades out.
(A frozen moth: a lamp that stays. Then another. The crews climbing past a trail of held lights.)
scrambling up behind them, staring at the frozen moths, clapping a hand over her mouth before she can giggle and break Isa's hold. Muffled:
The lantern room's light spilling down the last turns. And on the step just below it, her back to them: the thin woman in black sailcloth, licking the last stair-lamp's light off her fingers.
The top of Fyren's stair, the lantern room's great gold glow flooding down over the last steps, and silhouetted in the doorway against it: NATTA. Tall and starved-thin, in ragged black sailcloth stitched from a dozen wrecked ships' sails. Long black hair hanging lank. Skin pale as a fish's belly, and under it, faintly, glowing: the light she's eaten, dozens of lamps' worth, moving under her skin like embers in ash. Her eyes have no light in them at all, only a hollow glow, like two windows onto an empty room. Round her neck on a string, an old brass lantern-hook.
Below her on the stair, coming up out of the dark: two captains, a sniper, an assassin, a man with five guns, a woman with a staff, two girls.
NATTA · K-IV SHAPED · Scalelist #1,777 · the Lamp-Eater (Gluttony VIII)
turning her head toward them, and not looking: sniffing. Her eyes don't track. She can't see by light any more.
eyes gold, seeing her threads: dozens of thin lines running from her into the dark, every one ending in a lamp she's eaten, every one cut.
at the front.
the hollow glow in her eyes wavering.
swaying on the step, raw-eyed, quietly.
in the lantern room behind her, enormous against the lens, hands on its brass handles, eyes narrowed to slits on the thin woman in his doorway.
Hallbard, desperate, turning the lamp on her: LAMP-GLARE, the full blinding column of white-gold light slammed straight into her.
in the full blast of the Glare, opening her mouth. And drinking it. The whole column of light pouring into her, glowing down her throat, lighting her up from inside like a paper lantern, her thin body swelling with light.
horror, wrenching the lens back.
brighter now, faster, stronger, the light under her skin blazing like a furnace through rags.
Vigolas charges, and Natta eats the green lightning off his fists before the punch lands, gulping it down. His fists go dull. "HEY!"
Kompis fires Fru Gnista, a burst of gold fireworks, and she swallows the fireworks out of the air like sweets.
Perne's shot, by sound alone, clips her shoulder, and she doesn't even notice.
Rougeina goes for her by Moth-Swap, and Natta eats the moth an instant before Rougeina can Swap with it. Rougeina tumbles back down three steps.
Krydog grabs her round the waist, and she eats the silver light off the Pride script on his knuckles. He doesn't go down, but his grip slips.
picking himself up, wild-eyed.
standing at the great lens, its gold light pouring over her, one thin hand reaching into the flame at its heart.
closing on the edge of the Beam where it leaves the lens: biting a piece out of a hundred-league blade of light, the way you'd bite a slice of bread.
The whole dark sea, the too-close horizons, and all across it, hundreds of tiny ships, each with a thin silver thread running from its bow toward where it's going. And as the Beam stutters, every one of them going out: one by one, then all at once, a whole sea of silver lines snuffed, ships turning, drifting, lost in the dark.
at his gutted lamp, its beam ragged and failing, his narrowed eyes wide open for the first time in four hundred years, staring out at the dark where ten thousand ships just lost their way.