Chapter 318
Krydog rising from the twentieth fall. Still one arc, still no hands. But it takes the whole panel, like a tide coming in up a long beach. Silver leaking through the script on his knuckles. Standing. Swaying.
face to face with Vigolas, both of them breathing like bellows. Hearing what the pirate said. Not grinning. Honest.
·
one eye swollen shut, the other ringing gold.
at his tally stone, not looking up, chalk still in his fingers.
Greed-sight on Krydog's chest: the big scarred ribs, the heart behind them, and stacked on it like coins on a counting-table, twenty small silver discs, glowing. Twenty borrowed beats. Twenty nights. Every one with a little fist-shaped dent in it, where they were knocked loose.
the grin gone. Not moving.
Krydog's anchor-punch. Vigolas down on the stones. Up. And Vigolas finding the twenty-first way out of nowhere: a short chopping right to the side of the head, the way you'd knock a stuck bolt loose. Krydog down. WHUD.
And the doubled silver pulse, ba-BUMP · ba-BUMP, and Krydog rising, and Vigolas's left, already thrown, already coming, landing on the rise.
both eyes bare, crimson script blazing round the open one.
Vigolas wrenching the left fist aside at the very last instant, his whole body twisting after it, and driving it into the grey shingle beside Krydog's boot instead. KRAK. Stones flying. His knuckles splitting open on the rock.
upright, untouched, furious.
quieter, and that's worse. Shaking.
taking it like a slap. Her hand closing round the stick of chalk she's been holding the whole fight and never used.
The fight going on, and going wrong. Both men past the end of themselves: Krydog's rises slower and slower, heavy arcs off the stones; Vigolas's blows slower and slower, thrown from the hip like a man throwing sacks. Along the bottom border of the panel, drawn the way Kompis sees them: two gold pulse lines, one for each heart, and the falls and the swings riding them. Drifting. Drawing closer.
Krydog's anchor-punch missing for the first time in twenty years, the big man overbalancing past Vigolas's shoulder. And Vigolas's tired right landing on the back of his head as he goes by. Krydog down.
ba-BUMP—
And Vigolas's left already in the air. Thrown with the last of everything he has. Committed. Too heavy to stop. Coming down inside the same beat.
mid-rise, and a hairline crack of silver light opening across it over his heart, light starting to pour out like water through a split dam. A third beat that can't be counted, beginning.
(Round the edges of the panel, everybody a fraction too late: Kompis reaching out a gold thread, mouth open on "Borrow mi—"; Isa planting her bare feet, going still, a beat late, as always; Emma's chalk hitting the stones, the first line of a ring that won't close in time; Mingus tearing out of Kompis's grip.)
FULL BURN. The world stopping round one heartbeat, drawn as a single held frame, the dust hanging, the silver light from Krydog's chest hanging in the air like poured water. And out of Vigolas, afterimages: a dozen of him in the same instant, each one doing something different with the same beat. One pulling the fist back. One throwing himself under it. One catching Krydog by the collar. One shoving him clear. One taking it on his own skull. Every possible action. All but one.
And the real one, in the middle, his emerald eyes wide, hearing the oldest rule of his greed: to take everything, you choose what to leave.
The grey shingle under the gate of the dead, in the frozen beat. Black-green script flickering across Vigolas's knuckles as his left fist lands on Krydog's rising jaw. And landing like a hand on a shoulder: the whole weight of the blow arriving and going nowhere, running off Krydog like rain off a roof, the stones under his boots refusing to let him go down. Krydog rocked, eyes wide, standing. The crack of silver over his heart closing, the poured light running back into his chest like a tide reversed. No second fall. No third beat.
Round them, the dozen afterimages of Vigolas folding back into the one. Both crews frozen at the ring's edge, Kompis with his thread out, Isa still as ice, Emma on her knees with the chalk, Mingus in mid-leap.
And in Vigolas's own chest, drawn through the sea-shirt, his heart, stopped: the price, one beat.
across the page. An empty SFX box in the middle of it, where a heartbeat should be.
the world moving again, staggering one step, a hand going flat to his chest.
a hand flat on his own chest where the crack was. Staring at the pirate.
outraged.
working it through, slowly, his lips moving, like a man doing sums in a language he doesn't like.
his voice going rough.
(A long, slow grin coming back over Krydog's face, chipped tooth and all.)
The last part of the fight, and the strangest.
Krydog's anchor-punch. Vigolas down. Daniel's count glitching gold. Vigolas up.
Vigolas's fist landing square on Krydog's jaw. Krydog rocked. Standing.
Anchor-punch. Down. Up.
A fist to the ribs. Rocked. Standing.
Down. Up. Rocked. Standing.
The punches getting heavier and slower. Arms like wet rope. Punches turning into shoves. Shoves into pushes. Pushes into leaning.
silent now. Nobody cheering. Tihi on Svala's shoulders with her hands over her mouth. Roffe with his hands down from his eyes at last. Flexsnus with his button bet in his fist, not looking at it. Old Stina at the Upp Igen's rail, very still, the lantern down by her knee.
in the middle of the ring, forehead to forehead. Arms hanging at their sides like dropped rope. Each holding the other up by leaning, the way two oars stand up in a corner, together, and only together. Blood, sweat, dead-river water. Breathing in turns.
(Neither can.)
an inch apart.
(A wheezing sound out of both of them at once, that turns out to be laughing.)
Daniel walking into the ring, slowly, one hand raised, palm out, the way he raises it to stop the world.
still leaning, Krydog's chin on Vigolas's shoulder now, his voice muffled in the pirate's shirt.
Jeppson on his knees on the Marka's deck at her starboard rail, goggles down, the violet grid in his eyes, chalk flying, the two ships hauled in hull to hull by both crews on the lines. Drawing the join: four beams across from the Marka's rail to the Upp Igen's, a short deck between them, every bolt-head numbered, all in long single strokes. The snap of the chalk line. TOK. VRRMMP. Chalkwork rising pale as bone, violet ticks along every edge. On the Marka's side, it doesn't sigh. It keeps.
and both captains being laid down on it side by side by Roffe and Smurjan like two sacks of meal. Jeppson sitting back on his heels, his hands already trembling (a day of steady hands, paid tomorrow).
(Vigolas, beside him, getting one hand to work, tearing a strip off the hem of his own sea-shirt, holding it out across the chalk boards.)
(Roffe, kneeling, already threading a needle.)
The two ships lashed into one: the Marka on the left, cork-grey, leaning left in the crosswind the way Camilla did; the Upp Igen on the right, five bands, bandaged fist; a pale chalk join between them with Mingus's bed set down in the middle of it and Mingus asleep on it, chin on his paws. Gliding in under the arch of the river-gate, the open air between the trunks drawing them through like a breath drawn in. Thirty-one feet of arch, thirty feet and a hair of ship. A hand's width to spare on either side. Above them the black bar and the old law: ONE AT A TIME. Forty-one faces at the rails. And ahead, the pale trunks of the Witness Wood closing over the river like the ribs of something enormous and asleep.
Two captains on their backs on the chalk boards, side by side, arms flung out, faces up to the leafless branches sliding overhead, a strip of linen already half-stitched onto the shoulder of the patchwork coat.