Chapter 270
Both crews on the decks of the two moored ships, staring out across the root forest, where the toppled root-tree is going down, branch by branch, into something hidden behind a ridge of roots. The crunching carrying across the water.
on the Marka's rail, small, rigid, her iron-nail necklace trembling against her bark.
Over the ridge of roots, up onto the long root-bridge that arches over the harbour: the Barkstrippers, a hundred of them now, iron hooks and nail-guns and a great two-man iron saw on a chain, the Foreman at their head. And behind them, ducking under the arch, something big.
grinning down at the two ships.
Stepping out onto the root-bridge, 2.9 metres tall. His left half a man: bald, sun-split, a great slab of a shoulder, a stripper's leather apron, a napkin tucked into its neck. His right half oak: grey-brown bark for skin, a deep knot where his right eye should be, twigs sprouting from the right side of his skull, a bark arm thicker than a mast. And his mouth: a jaw that hangs open like a sawmill's, lined with two rows of hammered iron teeth.
GNAG · K-IV SHAPED · Scalelist #1,140 · the Root-Eater (Gluttony X)
licking his iron teeth with a tongue the colour of sap, peering down at the Marka with one human eye and one knot.
every gold glint on the Marka flaring with her fear.
patting the oak half of his chest fondly, and an amber light opening there under the bark like a book: lines of amber script, the Gluttony Codex awake in him.
on the Marka's bow, Greed-sight blazing gold across Gnag, and frowning.
Gnag turning to the end of the root-bridge he's standing on, and biting it: a chunk of living arch the size of a cart, torn off, crunched in four bites, swallowed. And as it goes down, Gnag grows, a hand's breadth taller, broader, and the bark on his right side creeps up over his collarbone toward his neck.
a new ridge of it spreading over the man's skin like frost.
on the Upp Igen's rail, wrapping fresh bandage round his knuckles with his teeth.
The root-harbour at dawn, and everything at once: both crews leaping off their ships onto the root-bridge, a hundred Barkstrippers pouring down to meet them, and in the middle of it all Gnag, enormous, half man and half oak, his sawmill jaw wide, biting whatever wood comes within reach.
He bites the Upp Igen's rail clean off, KRNCH. He bites Roffe's ladle out of Roffe's hand. He bites the wooden sheath off Rougeina's hip as she Swaps past. He bites a mooring post, a root, a stripper's mallet, and with every bite he's bigger.
And under the bridge, in the harbour roots, a hundred gold glints, every one of them pulling away from him.
Krydog first anyway, a Rising Fist into Gnag's oak side, and the oak not even creaking. Gnag backhanding him off the bridge into the harbour. Krydog going under, coming up, ba-dum, ba-DUM, climbing the root again, healed.
Vigolas, an Emerald Knuckle straight at the man half, the gold spot over Gnag's human heart, and Gnag catching the fist in his bark hand, squeezing. Lightning crackling off bark.
Bror raised, firing a wide wall of Bror's shot into Gnag's legs, and Gnag lunging, iron jaw open, for the gun: for its birch grip, for the carved wood in its stock.
wrenching Bror back out of the closing iron teeth by an inch, his eyes blazing gold, furious.
Flisa, out of the wooden haft of a stripper's hook right beside Gnag's head, splinter-teeth bared, and biting him on the man's ear. Gnag roaring. And then, fast as a dog, turning his head and closing his iron jaw on her arm.
Every gold glint in it going out, one after another, like lamps. Dead wood. She tries to step away into the nearest splinter, and can't: the arm won't let go of her, and the arm is dead.
tearing herself free of her own arm at the shoulder, shards breaking off, sap spraying, and dropping back down into the bridge, gone into the wood. Gnag left with her arm in his teeth.
chewing the arm thoughtfully, eyes closed, savouring.
Flisa climbing out of it, small, one-armed, sap pouring from her shoulder. And shards crawling up the root to her from the splinters round about, fitting themselves together into a new arm, and as they do, she shrinks: an inch shorter in a panel.
dropping beside her from the bridge, one black-glass sickle out, breathing hard, looking at Flisa's power with hungry eyes.
inhaling, looking at Flisa, the way she breathes in a sin to borrow it. And nothing coming. Nothing at all.
turning slowly to look up at Gnag, at the amber book glowing in his oak chest. A slow, dangerous smile.
(A seed. Nobody hears it.)
The strippers closing round Flisa at the harbour's edge, nail-guns up, the Foreman shouting, and the iron spikes going in round her: THUNK THUNK THUNK THUNK. Another ring. Every door round her dead.
Gnag stepping over three crew members as if they were puppies, reaching down into the ring, picking Flisa up by her new arm in two bark fingers, and driving an iron ring-spike through the bark of her shoulder, pinning her to the root.
pinned, small, struggling, the iron through her, every glint in that root dark.
Both crews battered, scattered across the root-bridge and the roots: Vigolas climbing out of the water, Krydog on one knee getting up, Smurjan's shadow torn, Svala perched and panting on a root. A hundred strippers forming up round their master.
Gnag turning away from the harbour, bigger than when he came, the bark creeping up his neck, and walking off across the root forest toward the centre of the Splinterlands, his strippers swarming after him with their great iron saw. And ahead of him, over the roots, rising out of the morning mist: the Great Root, a cliff of living cork-oak as wide as a mountain, scarred with ten thousand pale strip-wounds.
half man, half oak, the iron jaw hanging open, sap-coloured drool, looking at the Great Root the way a starving man looks at a feast.