Chapter 304
the same moment. Krydog over the sleeping statue. The grey balloon by his ear. Emma a few steps behind, both hands white on her staff.
A very long beat. Then the grin coming back, slowly, the chipped tooth showing, as if he has to fetch it from a long way off.
(Behind him, Emma doesn't move for a long time.)
The sap-light filling the bowl again. Trollmage sitting up on the floor by Runa's stool, yawning hugely, the crow on his head. At his hip, the Codex on its brass chain, thick and warm, twitching. On his left forearm, beside the violet Sloth script, the ragged amber patch of the Gluttony Codex writhing, changing shape like a flame.
straining at the end of its chain like a dog that has smelled meat, pulling toward the Bark Monks' long table of copied bark-sheets, toward the walls, toward the floor. Where its corner touches the wood, the wood goes pale: a patch of the grove floor turning dull and grey, drained, like a page with the ink sucked out of it.
The chain yanking: Trollmage dragged on his backside across the grove floor behind his own book, slippers flapping, the crow taking off in a fury of feathers, Bark Monks leaping out of the way with their copy-sheets.
as the Codex swings past the Up-Again crew at the grove's edge: for a heartbeat it lunges toward Krydog, toward his right forearm, where under the bandage a thin line of silver glows, a sentence of light crawling an inch nearer his elbow. Krydog clamps his left hand over the bandage. The book swings on past.
(Nobody says anything. Trollmage's violet eyes flick to the bandage, and away.)
The Codex fetching up against the floor near the stool and biting: the pale patch spreading across the grove floor in a ring, the warm grain going grey and lifeless, a whole band of wood fading as if a year were being read off it and swallowed. Three Bark Monks staring, hands over their mouths, silent.
turning on her stool with a long creak, her great face toward the pale spreading ring.
closing round the straining Codex as if it were a kitten, and holding it still. Her other hand reaching for Trollmage's.
Trollmage on his knees at the foot of the rowan stool. Runa leaning down off it, one slow total movement with a creak in it, and laying the Codex open on the floor of the grove, on the oldest wood of all, and his hand flat on its pages, and hers flat over his: a troll's huge scarred palm over a big soft grey-green hand.
the sap-amber light in them brightening, brightening, like a lamp turned all the way up. She is reading. With him.
The art goes simple and old, like a woodcut coloured with light:
A bare hill under a grey sky. The world's first rain.
Black earth. In it, one acorn, ridged and corky.
Dark. Nothing but dark, and the sound of rain on top of it.
A crack in the acorn's shell.
One pale root, feeling its way down.
eyes squeezed shut, and from the Codex under his hand, amber tendrils of light reaching up out of the pages toward the picture, toward the root, wanting it, the edges of the woodcut-memory starting to blur, as if something were biting the corner of a page.
her eyes blazing, her voice the quietest it has been.
(Trollmage's free hand cupping, without his deciding to. And the memory, the little root in the dark, pooling in his cupped palm like light, not draining away. Staying.)
A sprout breaking black earth.
A first leaf unfolding, pale green, the size of a child's thumbnail.
Sun on the hill for the first time.
And under the hill, inside the little stem, something starting: drawn as a single amber pulse, very small.
tears running down into the stone freckles on his cheeks, his eyes still shut.
(Under his hand, the Codex's pages turning by themselves, faster and faster, fluttering, amber.)
The grove at the heart of the world-tree, and in the middle of it a huge seated troll woman leaning down to a kneeling one, her scarred hand over his on an open book, both of them lit from below by its pages.
And all round them, filling the grove, rising up past the Rune Wall and the rowan into the bowl of rings, the tree's first spring, in light: a single sapling on a bare hill under the first rain, as enormous in the picture as the tree it would become, its first leaf held up like a hand, and at its core a small amber heart, beating.
Up Trollmage's left arm, the ragged amber patch of the Gluttony Codex is no longer ragged: it is pouring up toward his shoulder as sentences, line after line of amber script crawling up his arm and across his collarbone toward his heart, settling there.
The light gone back into the book. The Codex lying open and quiet on the floor, not twitching. Trollmage sitting back on his heels, breathing. And the pale ring the book had bitten into the floor filling back in with colour, warm grain returning to it plank by plank, as if it had never been eaten. It hadn't.
looking at his own cupped hand. Empty. And not empty: an amber warmth in the palm, like a coal you can hold.
sitting back up on her stool with a creak. Her eyes milky white, the sap-light gone out of them like a lamp put out. She blinks, slowly. Doesn't seem surprised.
finding his face in the dark, reading it with her fingertips the way she reads wood: the brow, the stone freckles, the small tusks, the long drooping ears, the crown slipping down.
The crews gathered at the edge of the grove, having watched it all. Over Trollmage's head his rank plate flickers into the air, the board trying to update, the numbers spinning, everyone leaning in… and settling, unchanged: still K-II, still the same long number.
blind, turning her face toward Kali's voice.
Kali, out of Smurjan's shadow to the waist: "Fire!" A small burning silver glyph writes itself off her lips and flies at Trollmage. He just opens his hand. The flame goes into his palm and stays there, held, amber-gold, whole, a flame in a cupped hand that doesn't burn it.
lifting lazily, one finger writing in the air in glowing violet letters:
MACRO : FIRE = 1 NAP
In every ring-gallery, on every Bark Monk's long table, at every ring-stair landing, all the way up to the first ring and the two moored ships: every lamp in the tree lighting at once, ring after ring after ring, a thousand small flames blooming up the terraces like a field of flowers opening.
the flame gone from his hand, the violet light of the spent MACRO fading off his fingers. He's thinking, which shows, because his ears go straight up.
a yawn so big the crow falls off.
(He lies down on the floor beside her stool, cheek on the grain, and is asleep before he finishes lying down.)
The sap-light ebbing. The thousand lamps going out one by one. The crews asleep round Roffe's fire inside the Rowan Ward. And Runa, blind, alone on her stool, leaning slowly sideways until her cheek rests against the Rune Wall, the way she does every night, to listen to his heart.
Her milky eyes opening wide in the dark. She hears it: a sliding in the grain. Soft. Patient. Close.
from just outside the Rowan Ward. The grey groove of nothing coming up through the floor of the outer rings, sliding through the grain toward the grove, reaching the Ward, and pressing against the ring of red-silver rowan-runes like a tongue against teeth: the runes flaring red where it touches, the groove bending, sliding sideways along the ring, pressing again, always toward the same place: the end of the Wall, the twenty-fourth rune, and the blank space after it. As if it wants to add itself to the end of the list.
Runa, blind, her cheek on the Wall, very still.
(At the foot of the Wall, beside the blank swirl in the grain, the grey boy sits in the dark, his mouth a little open.)