Chapter 307
The crack running down through the frozen swirl of grain after the twenty-fourth rune, straight, clean as a knife-cut, three fathoms from top to bottom, and the edges of it opening, slowly, like lips.
His lips closing. Meeting. Smoothing over. In the place where his mouth was a little open there is now a small, closed, finished point, like every other Finished mouth in the galleries. Abbe is done.
And out of it, welling up between the lips of the wood, something pale: not sap, not amber light. Cork. Soft, honeycombed, cream-white, light as foam, rising out of the cut in slow swelling folds and spilling down the face of the Wall, over the black heartwood, past the burning silver of the twenty-fourth rune.
flat on his belly by the fire where he woke, goggles still on his forehead, staring.
(The smell reaching them: rain, and smoke, and something like a cut finger.)
And the floor lurching. Not the slow tide of the tree's heartbeat. A stumble. Then another. The vast amber pulse that has run under everything since they came in tripping over itself.
Vigolas sitting bolt upright from sleep, both hands on his chest, eyes wide.
Kompis, gasping, the golden pulse line along the panel border stuttering, losing its rhythm.
Smurjan: three shadows jerking apart, out of step, the Triple Pulse falling to pieces, Kali and Bakasura's voices both crying out of his mouth at once.
Isa going rigid, a beat late even at this.
Krydog, who had been sitting up awake by the fire, flat on his face, WHUD, then the doubled silver pulse, ba-BUMP · ba-BUMP, and up, white-faced: "…What WAS that?"
Mingus, on his feet, barking, and along the bottom of his panel his gold pulse line steady as a clock. The only one.
Inside Emma's gold chalk circle, Rougeina jerking awake, a hand going to her shoulder for blades that aren't there. Trollmage asleep on the floor beside her, not even stirring. Emma on her feet, staff planted, the gold threads at her wrists blazing, two small gold pulses beating steady in the two chests inside her line.
(A single strand at her temple greying.)
looking down over the terrace's edge toward the grove at the bottom of the bowl, where people she loves are on their knees. Her feet planted inside the line. Her hands open.
dragging once across the chalk. The gold hairline breaking.
(An inset, soft-edged, for one beat: a ten-year-old girl in a chalk circle on an infirmary floor, asking a neighbour's boy to scuff the line with his heel. The same face, older.)
Rougeina's eyes finding the grove floor far below. Blink: she and Emma are gone from the terrace and standing by Roffe's fire, two pebbles of bark clattering on the terrace where they were, two silver-rose afterimages fading. Trollmage left asleep up on the empty terrace, the crow on his chest.
on his knees, eyes gold, nose bleeding freely now, looking not at the people but at the wood: at the floor, the Wall, the rings rising away above them, and the thread of the tree itself, a thread as thick as a river, pulling taut.
and across it, out from the foot of the Wall, a crack of light opening in the wood like a crack over a chest: amber light leaking up through it from somewhere very deep. The SFX from the floor itself, a heart that can't close:
(No DUM. The DUM never comes.)
the ring of red-silver rowan-runes round the grove flickering, guttering like candles in a draught. Outside it, the grey groove pressing against it, harder than before, and the runes where it presses going dim.
In the dark, among the hundreds of grey statues, a sound: creeeeak. A Finished knight's head turning, slowly, toward the bottom of the bowl. Then another. Then a row of them.
on her stool, blind, both great hands out in front of her, feeling for the Wall. Her fingertips finding the cut. The cork welling over them. She knows exactly where it is. She has known every inch of this wood for three hundred years.
her milky eyes turned toward the foot of the Wall, where the boy sits.
The Rune Wall, black and glossy and enormous, its twenty-four runes blazing silver in a long curving line and, at the end of the line, after HOLD, a new mark: a single black vertical cut three fathoms long, clean as a sword-stroke through the oldest wood in the world.
And out of it, Ferdinand bleeding: pale cork welling from the cut in swelling, foaming folds, spilling down the Wall like blood down a body, over the burning runes, pooling across the floor of the grove in a cream-white tide, the light from the twenty-four runes flickering in it.
On the floor, both crews on their knees, hands on their chests, every face stricken. Mingus standing over Kompis, barking at the wound. Roffe frozen with one huge hand out toward the grey boy at the Wall's foot, Finished now, his mouth closed. And Runa, huge on her rowan stool, blind, reaching toward the wound with both scarred hands.
Through the floor, the crack of light, and the heart that can't close.
staring at the boy, at his own hands.
turning her blind face toward his voice.
(Roffe's mouth opening to argue. Closing. He has never in his life argued with someone taking the blame off him so that he could keep cooking.)
on his feet, coat clinking, emerald eyes ringing gold, his right hand coming up with black-green script flickering across the knuckles, a command rising in his throat. Looking at the cut the way he looks at anything that must not exist here.
her great head snapping toward him, faster than she has moved in three hundred years.
(The word hits him like a wall. Not a rune. Just a troll who has had enough.)
the script dying on his knuckles. His fist opening.
his third eye opening, crimson-rimmed. THIRD-EYE POV: the cut on the Wall as grey diagram lines, and over it, faint, the shape of the whole rune, the way it wants to be: a long cut down (carved, black, real) · a short bar across it, near the top (a dotted line, not yet cut) · and below them both, a point (a dotted circle, the size of a fist, not yet cut).
shaking. Sap-falls breaking off their ledges and splashing down ring to ring. Bark Monks running down the ring-stairs with their copy-sheets clutched to their chests. Ribs of grain groaning. Lanterns swinging on both moored ships up on the first ring. And everywhere, through the floor, the stutter.
her voice going out through the wood, not loud, everywhere.
(On every stair the Bark Monks turning at once and filing away down narrow root-stairs into the deep, the youngest one last, looking back.)
The cork welling faster. And the edges of the cut pulling wider, as if something on the other side of the wood were pushing.
floored again by another stumble of the floor, WHUD, the double pulse, up, and swaying. Perne at his elbow, crimson eye blazing.
leaning forward off her rowan stool, a long total movement with a terrible creak in it, as far as her rooted braid will let her, and laying both great scarred palms flat over the cut, pressing it shut the way a field surgeon presses a wound.
The cork welling up through her fingers, cream-white, soft, spilling over her knuckles.
The old black burned-in rune-scars on them opening under the pressure, cracking along their lines, and bleeding: dark troll-blood running out of the scars of the first twenty-four runes and mixing with the cork that runs out of the tree. Runa bleeding with him.
blind, close to the Wall, her forehead almost touching the wood above the wound. Her lips moving. Her sap-amber light trying to come back into her milky eyes, a faint glow behind the white.
Runa's bleeding palms on the cut, the cork pouring through her fingers. And in the air above her hands, outside any balloon, a glyph beginning to burn, stroke by stroke: two uprights and two bars, a door-frame with its hands joined, the twenty-fourth rune, brighter than anything in the grove.