Chapter 28

Cliffs carved with giant troll faces, eyes closed, look down on a stone slipway. On it lies a long keel of grey-gold Ferdinand bark. Trolls the size of houses carry planks like twigs. Grandmother Ulla sits on a rock, directing with her staff. The bark glows faintly in the cold sun, as if it remembers the tree.

Trollmage lies flat on a plank with his sign propped up beside him: WAITING. DAY 3. DO NOT DISTURB. A troll child is drawing a moustache on the sign.

(a) Snow on the slipway; ribs of bark rising from the keel like the bones of a whale.

(b) Rain; trolls steaming bark planks and bending them around the ribs with enormous gentle hands. Vigolas carries a plank and talks the entire time. Kompis and Mingus sleep in the curve of the hull.

(c) Thaw; the hull closed in; Drekk on the scaffold with his cracked spyglass, sighting down the line of the deck, perfectly happy. Rougeina sits barefoot at the top of the newly raised mast with the panther.

On a rock apart from all of it sits Smurjan, watching. The trolls give him a wide berth. He opens his mouth to say something about what's rising on the slipway, and closes it again. He doesn't have the word.

Mist on the fjord. A troll on watch on the cliff lifts its huge head.

Out on the water: three long boats rowing hard and quiet, full of white armour. Every Sentinel holds a fire-lance, its tip glowing like a coal. In the lead boat stands a heavy man with a scarred face and a crossbow of red light: the Sentinel Captain.

Fire-lances arc through the dark onto the slipway. The scaffold at the bow catches.

The crew tumbles out of the hull and the troll huts, half dressed.

watching the flames climb toward the bow.

(He stops himself, white.)

Bakasura rises out of the slipway's shadow and swallows the whole burning tip of a fire-lance.

Rougeina Swaps with a burning lance in mid-air and hurls it into the fjord, where it hisses out.

Trollmage, without opening his eyes, writes: MACRO : LEAK = 3 BOATS. Three neat holes open in three hulls. Three boats begin, very slowly, to sink.

Kali runs the length of the slipway cutting fire-lances in half.

Smurjan is at the bow before anyone else, beating out the flames on the bark with his bare hands, with his robes, with his own body, until they're dead. His hands smoke. He doesn't step back.

seeing it.

The Captain fires his red crossbow at Kompis. Kompis, Mingus at his feet, doesn't even reach for Subtick. He leans one inch, plucks the bolt out of the air with one hand, and fires Ivar once. The crossbow comes apart in three pieces.

The Captain, crossbowless, wades up onto the slipway with a fire-lance and swings it at Vigolas. Vigolas raises an open hand. Green lightning sparks. The Captain flinches, waiting for the cube.

looking at his own sparking hand. Then he closes it.

He picks up a broken oar from the shipyard's scrap pile, the same kind of oar he swung on the black sand the morning he woke. Greed-sight: the Captain's collar seam glows gold.

The collar shatters. The Captain drops.

Two trolls lift the Captain off the slipway, very gently, between finger and thumb, and toss him in a long, soft arc out into the fjord after his sinking boats.

The bow is scorched but whole. The bark held. Smurjan sits on his rock again, his burned hands wrapped in moss bandages by a troll child who is very proud of the knots.

Drekk sits not far from Smurjan's rock, polishing the Kettle's dented brass bell in his lap and pretending Smurjan isn't there. Smurjan pretends the same. Above them both rises the finished hull.

looking up at the hull, trying again.

He stops, frustrated. The word isn't there.

Another voice comes out of it: warm, laughing, a big woman's voice, in a balloon with a rougher, different border.

The polishing cloth has stopped. The bell sits still in his hands.

touching his own lips.

The two of them, ten steps apart, the bell between them on Drekk's knees.

Drekk stands up. He climbs the scaffold to the bow with the bell over his shoulder and hangs it from a bracket of bark at the very front of the ship. It hangs there, dented and ugly and gleaming.

He rings it once.

Drekk turns and looks down at Smurjan. He speaks to him directly, for the first time.

standing, bandaged hands at his sides.

Drekk climbs down and walks past him without another word. But he walks past him, close. Not around.

at the foot of the slipway. Smurjan holds out the fracture-record shard.

Drekk raises his cracked spyglass and points it across the fjord at the Trisdel border town on the far shore, where a Scalelist board glows above the rooftops.

One line climbs, the numbers flickering upward:

KOMPIS · K-II · Scalelist #9,880 → #3,107

Another line, unmoved:

ROUGEINA · K-III · Scalelist #777

At the very top of the board, where it always sits, the line that started everything: ∞−1. It used to blink red. Now it blinks gold.

Among the thirty-six shards, the black shard frosts over, cold and grey, for one heartbeat. A thin rime of grey creeps across the lining. Then it's gone.

shivering for no reason. He pulls his coat tighter and grins at his crew.

Leafless pale trees. Footprints pressing into the moss with nobody making them. On her stump sits FENNA, the book of worth open across her knees.

VIGOLAS. In the rank column, the ink that never settles: ∞−1. In the margin beside it, a small tally in her own hand: edited · 7. As we watch, the seven shivers, and becomes an eight.

Her expression changes, very slightly.

She turns her head toward the edge of the panel, toward someone the reader cannot see. In the moss beside her stump, a fresh pair of footprints that are not hers.

looking at whoever is there.