Chapter 31

picking up where we left off. Hrafnkell at the fire's edge, Vigolas at the other end, the white fire creeping up the shingle toward the slipway.

Hrafnkell doesn't come for Vigolas. He bolts sideways on all fours, straight up the cliff path, toward the ledge where the trolls set the troll children down.

Vigolas goes after him, taking the cliff path four steps at a time.

at the foot of the slipway now, its iron bow nosing onto the shingle. A long iron gangplank crashes down onto the rocks.

Down it, slowly, walks the broad, hooded figure. His boots have iron soles. He never steps off iron.

A heavy man whose whole body is a crust of white salt, cracked like the bed of a dried-out lake, with white light glowing faintly in the cracks. Bald and crusted. His eyes are red-rimmed and bone-dry, with grains of salt caught in the corners. He wears an oiled sealskin hood and long gloves, and carries a long iron branding iron, its head shaped like a closed gate.

SALTBRAND · K-III TESTED · Scalelist #3,870 · Bastion Five

looking up at the Marka on her slipway. He speaks slowly, dryly, as if words cost him water.

He touches the branding iron to the bottom of the slipway. White fire runs up the greased timbers like a lit fuse, straight for the hull.

The fire reaches the grey-gold bark, and the bark catches.

Where the white flame touches it, the soft gold glow of the tree goes out, like an eye closing. The wood turns white, and then it crumbles into salt and trickles down the hull.

Smurjan, cut off on the shore by the burning shingle, goes up instead: up the cliff face onto a carved troll's stone cheek, along its nose, and off it in one long jump that lands him on the slipway, between Saltbrand and the ship.

Smurjan's three shadows fall across the burning timbers. Saltbrand stands on his iron gangplank and looks him up and down.

Kali bursts out of the shadow, red braid flying, black-glass sickle out.

Behind her, Bakasura's maw heaves up out of the slipway's shadow, amber-lit and enormous, opening wide enough to swallow Saltbrand, gangplank and all.

a hand flung out.

frozen open, a hand's width from the white flames. Slowly, it closes and sinks back.

Smurjan attacks. His fight is all precision: the third eye open, his body sliding through the gaps between the flames. Saltbrand sweeps the branding iron in white arcs, and every arc misses Smurjan by a finger's width.

Smurjan's open palm strikes the cracks in the salt crust: chest, ribs, collarbone. Chunks of white salt fly. There's no blood, because there's nothing inside to bleed.

Kali comes in from the side with the sickle, fast and talking.

Saltbrand catches the black-glass blade in his gloved hand. White fire runs up the sickle like water running uphill, and onto Kali's left hand.

Her hand goes white. Her wrist. Her forearm. The white climbs to her elbow, crusting and crackling, and then the whole forearm crumbles into salt and pours onto the burning slipway.

staggering back, clutching a stump just below the elbow, crusted white. She's still grinning, but the grin shakes.

The thin crimson line across it blazes. Wrath.

One strike, perfectly placed, into the deepest crack in Saltbrand's left shoulder. The whole shoulder of salt shears off and shatters on the iron. Saltbrand staggers back up the gangplank for the first time.

Kali pours back into the shadow, holding her stump.

The fire has climbed the Marka's flank from the keel almost to the rail. Drekk, Kompis and a line of trolls throw buckets of fjord water onto it from the shallows.

Every bucket makes it worse. The white flames leap up, roaring, fed.

on the slipway beside the hull, both hands up and empty. Not a single violet spark.

Vigolas reaches the troll children, a dozen of them huddled against the rock, and plants himself in front of them, fists up. Hrafnkell is crouched on a boulder just above, calmly watching him.

Vigolas's lightning-punch smashes the boulder to gravel. Hrafnkell is already gone: off the cliff edge, down through the steam, back toward the Tally. A troll child tugs Vigolas's coat and points down at the shipyard.

at the foot of the slipway. She bends down, slowly, cups a little water from the shallows where the white fire has already passed over and moved on, and tastes it.

The launching ropes are burning through. The cradle under the keel is burning. The fire is eating up the flank toward the deck.

Ulla drops her staff. It clatters on the stones.

She walks into the white fire on the slipway, slow and heavy, the way trolls walk, and stops against the burning flank of the ship. Then she spreads her great stone arms wide across the hull, presses her whole body against the burning bark, and holds it like a child.

The white flames leave the bark. They crawl, hungry, into her stone. Where they bite her, her grey skin goes white.

The trolls throw their shoulders against the stern: twenty trolls the size of houses, roaring. The last wedges fly out.

running for her, and Rougeina catching him round the waist and hauling him back.

It does burn. White cracks spread across the grey stone like frost across a window.

On the gangplank, Saltbrand, one-shouldered now, raises the branding iron toward Ulla's back.

Smurjan is in front of her. Not touching the fire, never touching it: his third eye reads every flame, and his hands strike only in the spaces between them. He knocks the branding iron aside, again, and again.

The Marka hits the water. A wall of sweet fjord water explodes up over the bow and comes crashing down across the slipway, across the burning flank, across Saltbrand.

The water hits him and his salt hisses and melts. His remaining arm runs like wet sugar. He screams, a dry, cracked scream, and scrambles back up his gangplank onto the Tally's iron plate. His face twists with pain, and his eyes stay bone-dry. Salt flakes from the corners where tears should be.

The white fire on the hull drowns. A long scar of dead, white bark remains, and in the middle of it two patches of living gold glow untouched, in the shape of two great hands and two spread arms.

Ulla is still standing where the ship left her, arms still half-spread around the hull that's gone. Her stone is white all the way through now, cracked everywhere. Trollmage reaches her and takes her hand. It's like holding a hand of chalk.

looking down at him. Slow, deep, the kindness still carved in her face.

He can't speak.

She goes still. A statue of white salt on the slipway, arms open. On the cliffs, in silence, every troll bows to her, and then, one by one, to the half-elf holding her hand.

Vigolas comes down the last of the cliff path at a run, a troll child on his hip, and stops. Too late. He looks at the statue and then at Trollmage, and says nothing. There's nothing to say.

Kali sits half out of Smurjan's shadow at the stern rail, staring at her stump. The salt crust over it is dry. Nothing has changed.

Smurjan's three shadows lie across the planks in the evening light. One of them, Kali's, ends in a stump below the elbow.