Chapter 314
A wall of bark rising out of black water and going up and up into a dark with no top: Ferdinand, the world tree, seen from the sea, too big to be a tree, too alive to be a cliff. Low on it at the waterline, a door in the bark as tall as a mainmast, closing: amber light narrowing between its folding edges to a line, then a thread. Two ships pulling away from it across black water, wakes silver. The Marka, cork-grey bark hull, the brass bell on her bow, Lumen wicks burning in her rigging. The Upp Igen, five bands of coloured planks, a bandaged fist for a figurehead.
And drifting down past both ships, out of the dark above, turning slowly, one leaf.
Trollmage, wide awake for once, the troll-iron crown slipped over one eye, his crow on his shoulder, holding out a palm. The leaf landing in it. Kompis beside him, Mingus at his heel.
(He tucks the leaf inside his crown.)
Black water to every side with no horizon, the dark simply going on. No stars. Except one: small, white, fixed, steady, low in the sky ahead like a lamp left in a window. And far off to port, walking the dark like slow grey cattle, a line of storms: towering, slow, lightning muttering in their bellies. No wheels in them. No faces.
on the Marka's rail, long coat clinking, watching the storms. Lifting two fingers to his brow, a small salute, not quite a joke.
close enough to throw a rope. At her rail, Krydog, and something is wrong with him: the shadows under his eyes are lighter. His hair has been combed, badly. He is standing very straight and beaming at nothing, the chipped tooth on full display, like a man who has had a bath for the first time in a decade.
on the Upp Igen's rail, deaf since the tree, her balloon drawn hollow, the letters outlined and empty because she can't hear herself, signing with both hands at once as she shouts:
on the Upp Igen's quarterdeck, goggles up, one eye shut, sighting along his captain like a plank.
pausing, then grinning wider.
(There's no night in the Deep, only watches. The lamps say it's night.) Both ships quiet. On the Upp Igen's mast-top, Perne on her Perch, the patch over her left eye today, her brass-barrelled rifle Fjärran across her knees, the crimson ring of script round her open eye glowing. Suddenly sitting forward.
the crimson script blazing, a single crimson tear running out of it. Her Long Look: the dark ahead, and in it, small, many, yellow lamps.
running a thick finger down the Keeper's Log, page after page in Hallbard's huge hand. Every ship the Beam ever lit, every island it ever touched. Nothing.
looking up. His mouth slowly falling open.
The black Deep under its one white star, and drifting in out of the dark from every side, slowly, all together, like seeds on a pond: islands. Dozens of them. Small ones. A hill with one bent tree and three turf houses and a lamp in every window. A skerry with a chapel no bigger than a shed and a bell with no rope. A long low island of heather with goats on it, staring. A rock with a single hut and an old man sitting outside it with a fishing line in the black water. And between them, rafts: whole villages of boats lashed together into floating streets, washing strung between masts, a cooking-fire on a hearth-stone, children asleep in a dinghy like a cradle.
On every shore, people. Holding up lamps. Looking at the two ships the way you'd look at the first ships you've ever seen.
And above their heads, where every head in the world has a rank plate drawn over it: nothing. Not a blank. Not a dash. Nothing. The air over them is just air.
In the middle, very small, the Marka and the Upp Igen, every soul on both crews at the rails.
The nearest raft-village bumping gently against the Upp Igen's hull: twenty boats roped into one, a plank street down the middle, a cold hearth. On its edge, an old woman in a fisher's oilskin and three shawls, small and fierce, a lantern held up in a hand like a root. Behind her, faces: fishermen, a mother with a baby, a boy with a goat on a string. All watching the ships. Not hoping. Bracing.
leaning over his rail, grinning down.
at the Marka's rail, staring at the raft. His eyes filming gold: threads. Hundreds of warm little gold threads running between the people on the raft, mother to baby, boy to goat, old woman to everyone. And then lifting his eyes above them.
Greed-sight ringing gold in his emerald eyes. The raft glowing to him the way people glow, each by what they're worth to someone: warm, bright, every one of them. And over every head, where the board should be: empty air.
squinting up at them both.
looking sideways across the gap at Vigolas. Not teasing. Curious.
turning back to the old woman.
the lantern trembling in her root of a hand.
Both captains, on both rails, at the same instant, the same breath:
(They glare at each other. They meant the same thing. That's worse.)
Ropes and ladders down both hulls. Roffe carrying an old man up the side under one arm like a sack of flour. Svala flying a line across to a drifting rowboat and snapping it taut. Levla, ten rings on empty hands, lifting children over the rail one after another ("I've got nothing to carry. Turns out that's useful."). Smurjan taking a whole family up at once while Bakasura's shadow-jaws, white streak and all, hold the raft steady in their teeth, very gently. A goat being passed hand to hand, outraged.
A girl of about nine with a cropped fringe and a fisher's jersey to her knees, climbing over the rail, one hand gripping it, the other hand gripping a very small boy: four, round-cheeked, a hat with ear-flaps, holding on to her with his whole fist. Mingus trots straight up and licks the small boy's face from chin to ear-flap. The boy shrieks with joy.
very serious, presenting her brother to Kompis like a passport.
(She holds her hands a mitten apart. Vante, inside Mingus's ear, giggles.)
Both decks covered in sleeping refugees under spare sails and coats. Roffe still ladling. On the Upp Igen's rail, Tihi juggling three balls for a cluster of children who've never seen juggling, all of them silent, enormous-eyed; she can't hear their laughter, but she can see it, and she drops a ball on purpose every time. On the Marka, Hedda and Vante asleep against Mingus's side, Vante's fist in his fur.
on the Marka's rail, legs over the dark water, looking out at the islands still drifting in, lamps and all.
his eyes gold, looking at the sleepers on the deck. At the warm threads between them. And then at where those threads go: out over the rail, to the other rafts, to each other, and nowhere else. Not to a single board, office, ledger, list. Nothing outside the little web they make.
the grin gone completely. The way the crew knows it's bad.
(A long beat.)
Ahead, not at the edge, nowhere near the edge, out in the middle of the black water under the white star: a small charted island they've been passing for an hour. A windmill. An orchard of low apple trees. Three houses with their lamps lit. A rowboat moored off its jetty on a long rope.
And across the sky over it, from nowhere, laid as neatly as a ruler on a page, slashed across the panel itself: a black bar. Exactly the width of the island. (No SFX. Only a soft, dry rustle, like a page being turned in another room.)
The grey coming down under the bar like fog settling on a field, from nowhere, from above, and taking Kvarnholm: the windmill, the orchard, the three lit houses, the six souls asleep inside them. Not the water round it. Not the air. Not a yard more. Where the island was, a perfect hole in the dark the exact shape of an island, colourless, soft-edged. Beside it, the little rowboat still bobbing, untouched, its mooring rope running taut across the water into nothing. And on the Marka's binnacle, under Drekk's finger, one line of Hallbard's handwriting going pale, then blank, a white gap between two entries.