Chapter 27

A round hall whose floor is one great sheet of glass, with clouds drifting far below it. Twelve tall chairs stand in a ring under a carved frieze of twelve figures, the last of which is only a black bar. One chair has stood empty longer than anyone remembers: the Twelfth. Above its seat, at the height of a standing man, a small square Signet hangs in the air, faintly lit, as if someone were still wearing it. In ten of the other chairs sit figures in shadow, each with a Signet glowing white on the back of one hand. The third chair is empty. They are waiting for it.

drumming its fingers on a chair arm. Then stopping.

A ripple passes through all ten figures at once, like a draught through candle flames.

Silence.

A small square Signet drifts down out of the dark like a leaf and settles on the seat, dark. The brass nameplate above it is blank.

ten lit Signets, two dark chairs.

Nobody answers.

broad and grey-bearded, a fresh scar across his face, a tower-shield taller than a man leaning against his chair with the crest of a closed gate on it, staring down through the glass floor at the gap in the sky where a tower stood.

A crossroads island adrift in the Current, the sea of moving starlight between the realms. Roads from every gate in every realm run onto it and cross. Signposts crowd the junction, pointing every way at once. A lone woman walks one of the roads in dusty boots and a long road-coat, a great curved horn of pale, cork-ridged bark slung across her back.

TORVA · RÖNNKVIST-9 · not ranked by any board she bothers to read

It trembles on its strap, all by itself.

unslinging it, one eyebrow raised.

She blows. The sound goes out along every road at once, in every direction, into every realm.

the embers of the burned city still glowing on the cliffs. People are walking out of the surf, the newly reborn, the way they do every night. Tonight there are hundreds, and every one of them is wrong: an old woman in a young soldier's body, a little boy in the body of a grey-bearded giant, a sailor in a girl's, a scholar in a fisherman's broad frame. They look at their hands. They look at each other.

A Trisdel clerk with a clipboard runs up and down the line of surf, flipping pages that don't match anything.

a child's body in a child's coat, and on it an old man's frightened eyes, crying. Behind him, the same wrongness repeats by the hundreds all down the beach.

The crew stands in the snow staring up at a board that went dark for one heartbeat and has just come back on. Bells everywhere. Rougeina comes out of the house's front door.

Rougeina holds out a shard to Smurjan: the white room, the mirror, the silver figure.

cracked spyglass to his eye, looking down at the lowest terrace.

Long sheds and great stacks of grey-gold Ferdinand bark, the only wood that floats on the Current. The yard wall has a crater blown clean through it, and in the crater, half-buried in snow, sits the house-sized cube, humming, a million tiny slates glinting inside it like stars in ice.

The crew runs into the yard with the troll sledge and the two shaggy goats, fetched from the cistern, and takes two of the yard's own long bark-sledges. Along the yard wall, freed Grey Masks stand holding their masks in their hands, watching. Doing nothing.

Then the snow by the yard gate heaves and splits, and out of it, plume bent, his slate-blue armour furred with frost, climbs the Bastion Shield-Captain with eight of his guards behind him. They have dug themselves out.

He plants his door-sized shield in the snow. A long spear of light locks into a groove on its face like the bolt of a siege-bow.

Bakasura rises out of the snow and lifts a whole stack of bark onto a sledge in his jaws.

Kali, out of the shadow, cuts three guards' spears off at the haft.

Rougeina Swaps a guard into a bark-stack and back out again, very dizzy.

Kompis shoots out two lanterns, and the yard drops into snow-dark.

Vigolas, green sparks at his fingertips, looks at the Shield-Captain, and closes his fist.

He picks up a length of bark the size of an oar instead, and swings it.

The Shield-Captain levels his siege-spear. Not at Vigolas. At the lead sledge, at the man on the driver's bench: Drekk.

The spear of light fires.

Smurjan steps in front of the sledge. He doesn't dodge. He could have.

The spear of light passes through Smurjan's chest, drawn as a bar of white light and nothing more. Kali and Bakasura snap back into his shadow like cut ropes. He falls backward onto the bark, onto the sledge, at Drekk's feet.

staring down at him.

Vigolas reaches the Shield-Captain. The bark-oar comes down on the gold hinge of his great shield, and the shield splits, and the next swing lays the Captain flat in the snow.

Three sledges thunder out through the cube's crater and onto the ancient troll road: a long tunnel that drops down the inside of the Marhold Spine like a slide. The goats lean back on their haunches. The sledges go faster and faster, bark stacked high, the crew clinging on. Behind them, the house-sized cube sits in its crater as Trisdel lanterns begin to gather around it.

its lantern swinging. Smurjan lies on the bark, still. Drekk drives. He doesn't look down at him, and he doesn't look away.

The sledges burst out of the troll road into troll country, the snowfields gold in the sunrise.

A warm bedroom with a moon-lamp. A little girl wakes under a patchwork quilt, holding a birthday card. A young woman, her mother, sits down on the bed beside her, smiling.

Smurjan sits up on the bark, gasping, all three shadows jerking back into place around him. The crew turns. Drekk turns away at once.

Smurjan looks at the sledges, the bark, and the margin of Drekk's map, where Drekk has been sketching a hull in charcoal: a keel, ribs, a mast.

turning around now.

Drekk stares at him.

a fire, the sledges of bark drawn up around it. Rougeina unwraps something long from a cloth: the plank with her kill list, carried with her since the loft. She props it against a rock in the firelight. KATRIEL · WENDLAN · INGRITH · MEIRWEN · … And above them all, at the very top, a red circle drawn three times around…

…around nothing. A blank line of bare wood, circled three times in red.

the tip of her silver blade against the wood. She scratches one long line straight through the top name.

Kompis's hand goes to his pocket, to a silver pen he can't explain.

A hooded figure stands in the snow, watching the little fire far below. She turns and walks away along the ridge, and her shadow on the moonlit snow follows her one full second late.