Chapter 24
The roof is a patchwork of stretched canvas and stolen sailcloth, and snow sifts through the gaps. Trollmage's sign: WAITING. DAY 4. DO NOT DISTURB.
Vigolas, asleep, is tied to the great iron glass-press with enough rope to rig a ship. His legs are walking. Steadily. In his sleep. Toward the door. The press scrapes one finger's width across the floor with every step.
waking up and looking down at his own feet with deep betrayal.
Rougeina, bandage off, tests her side with a slow spin on one bare heel. It holds.
Smurjan sits facing the wall, three shadows rigid. He has barely moved in four days.
The crew kneels around a model built from blank glass tiles: a tall stack for the Protocol Tower with the Hall at its top, a ruler for the covered bridge, and, standing in for Baldr's house on its terrace, the melon-sized cube from the market, with twelve tiny Sentinels inside it.
tapping the top of the tile tower.
looking down at his own twitching legs.
Mother Sela on the schoolroom floor among the broken desks, her cracked hands in her lap. "If anybody ever wrote one with his own pen, he'd do it."
Vigolas sorts the crew into two piles with both hands, like a card dealer.
(He looks at Trollmage, flat on his back.)
Vigolas and Kompis sit looking across the city at the glowing tower. Vigolas hums something: a slow sailor's tune.
smiling, reaching for her in his memory. The smile stops.
The dock at dawn. The strong hands braiding rope, the song drifting over them in small musical notes. The panel pans up to the blank where her face should be.
looking at the tower. The grin comes back slowly, smaller and harder than it used to be.
·
(left) The pen team crosses the snowy roofs toward the warm house: Rougeina Swapping icicle to icicle, Smurjan walking up a wall as if it were a floor, Kompis climbing a drainpipe with Mingus in a sling across his chest.
(right) The hall team climbs the outer stair of the Protocol Tower: Drekk with Trollmage on his back, Vigolas striding ahead, his legs delighted.
A wide terrace in front of the great doors of the Protocol Hall, snow-covered, lantern-lit. And across it, a wall of shields.
Twenty heavy guards in slate-blue plate stand shoulder to shoulder, their tower shields locked edge to edge into one wall, spears of light bristling over the top. Each shield bears the crest of a closed gate. At the centre stands a broad captain with a shield like a door.
RANK PLATE ×20: BASTION GUARD · K-II MARKED · Scalelist #70,000–#99,000
BASTION SHIELD-CAPTAIN · K-III TESTED · Scalelist #4,410
cracking his neck.
Vigolas charges, and bounces off the shield wall like a gull off a cliff. The wall doesn't move.
The shields are cheap steel, but the hinges where each one locks to the next glow gold. The weak points. Too many of them, too high, too well guarded.
Drekk, Trollmage on his back, ducks a light-spear and bangs a guard's helmet with a frying pan from his pack.
Vigolas pries at a gold hinge and gets a shield-rim in the face.
The wall takes one step forward. Then another. It is pushing them toward the edge of the terrace and the long drop to the clouds.
Green lightning sparks at his fingertips. He closes his fist on it.
shaking the half-troll on his back.
One violet eye opens.
slow and unhurried. Violet runes light along his fingers one after another, like lamps being lit down a long street. He writes in the air:
MACRO : SNOWFALL = FOUR DAYS
The night sky above the terrace opens, and every flake that would have fallen on Glasheim over four whole days comes down in four seconds: a roaring white avalanche out of nowhere. It buries the Bastion's shield wall to the tops of the helmets, leaving twenty heads and one captain's plume sticking out of a fresh white slope. Across the whole city, every roof, tower and bridge turns white in a single breath. And riding the front of the surge up the last stairs toward the great doors, like riders on a breaking wave, come Vigolas, whooping, and Drekk, with a sleeping half-troll on his back.
Trollmage's runes go dark one after another. He falls asleep on the spot, face-first in the snow on Drekk's shoulder. Drekk staggers.
buried to the chin, plume drooping.
The window unlatches from the inside: Rougeina, already there, eases it open. Smurjan steps in over the sill. Kompis climbs in after him and sets Mingus down out of the sling.
The study: the fire, the wall of birthday cards, the desk, the jar of a hundred identical silver pens. And through the half-open door to the next room, a soft voice singing: Baldr, at his granddaughter's bedside. One door away.
A hundred silver pens. Every one identical.
Kali rises silently out of his shadow, sickles sheathed, and holds out her hand to Kompis.
Her eyes flash gold. On Kompis's wrist, his gold sin-mark goes dark. He blinks. The world has gone flat for him: no threads, no ghosts in the guns, nothing.
Ninety-nine pens in the jar are only pens. One pen pours a million threads out of its nib, straight up through the ceiling toward the tower, like a waterfall running backwards. And one thin thread runs the other way: out of the study, through the half-open door, to the wrist of the man singing next door.
Kali lifts the one pen out of the jar between finger and thumb. The jar rocks. One of the ninety-nine pens tips over with a tiny tink.
Everyone freezes. Next door, the singing stops.
A pause. The singing starts again.
placing the pen in Kompis's palm as her gold eyes fade and his threads come flooding back. He is holding a pen that holds a million people.
Vigolas, knee-deep in snow, puts both hands on the great doors of the Hall and pushes them open. Light pours out over him.
A million glowing slates rise in front of him from floor to ceiling. He sweeps a bow like a man arriving at a party.