Chapter 33
The Marka sails the Shallows between drifting islands. Behind her, a bank of glittering fog sits on the starlight like a cloud lying down.
The starlight tide is full of loose threads: golden strands drifting on the current like seaweed, tangled together, running out of nowhere and into nowhere.
frowning.
An island drifts out of the glitter: a long pale beach, and behind it a clutter of houses that don't match: a stone tower, a thatched cottage, a white Trisdel townhouse, a fisherman's shed on stilts, all jammed together as if they'd been tipped out of a sack.
The beach, close up. Hundreds of people sit or stand or lie in the starlight surf, the way the drowned wash up, but they're alive, and all of them are wrong.
A girl of about eight with pigtails sits on a rock, hunched like an old man, sucking on a pipe that isn't there. A soft, round, floury baker in an apron stands rigidly at attention, saluting. A tall knight in armour sits cradling the armour's helmet and weeping like a little boy. A grandmother hops through a hopscotch grid drawn in the sand, perfectly, laughing a child's laugh. A young mother keeps trying to pick up a baby who isn't hers; her hands don't know how.
Behind them the mismatched houses. Above them the realms hanging in the sky.
No one has come for any of them.
The Marka's boat grinds onto the sand. The crew climbs out: Vigolas first, Kompis and Mingus, Rougeina and the panther, Smurjan with Kali half out of his shadow. Drekk stays with the ship. Trollmage stays lying on the deck by his sign: WAITING. DAY 3.
The pigtailed girl on the rock looks up at them with deeply unimpressed eyes. When she speaks, it's the voice of a cross old man.
patting her pockets.
marching up to them, still saluting with a soft floury hand.
Out of the baker's chest runs one thread, his own, and it doesn't stop on the island. It runs into the surf, across the Current, east, a long, long way, toward a realm hanging in the sky.
The girl's thread doesn't go out to sea. It runs straight across the beach, through the crowd, to an old, old man sitting alone at the edge of the water, rocking, arms wrapped around his knees, crying in great gulping sobs like a little child.
following the thread with his eyes, understanding.
Kompis leads Old Bengt across the sand by her small hand, Mingus trotting alongside.
They stop in front of the crying old man. He looks up with red eyes. He looks at the girl. His face goes very still.
The old man reaches out a shaking, knotted hand and touches the girl's cheek. When he speaks, it's a little girl's voice.
The two of them hold hands. Where their threads cross, they glow, warm gold, like a knot pulled tight.
Kompis walking the beach with his eyes half-closed, reading threads, pairing people off: a woman to a man, a boy to a grandmother. Each pair, when they find each other, holds on.
Mingus taking people gently by the sleeve and leading them where Kompis points, tail wagging.
Smurjan carrying three exhausted people at once up the beach. Kali, one-armed, sits beside a crying knight and, for once, says nothing at all.
Rougeina stops. In front of her, an old woman stands in the surf with her back straight and her shoulders square, the stance of a soldier on parade. The body is far too old for it, and it shakes.
kneeling, taking the old woman's arm, steadying her.
sitting on her rock.
Something lands in his face.
very quiet.
The whole beach: hundreds of people in the wrong skins, holding hands with strangers who are wearing their faces.
He stands up.
looking at him.
barking. A lot of barking.
RRRUFF — RUFF — ARRRRF
Out of the drift-bank fog, a long bark longboat from the Tally slides onto the far end of the beach. Out of it pour Bastion handlers in slate-blue, and a pack of Registry hounds: lean grey tracking dogs with numbers inked on their flanks and collars that glow with pale ledger-light. The handlers carry armfuls of open iron collars. Each one is stamped MISFILED.
unrolling a scroll.
The handlers wade into the crowd and snap a collar around Ragn's soft neck. Another reaches for Lova.
Vigolas punches the collar off Ragn's neck. It shatters into light.
Rougeina Swaps behind three handlers at once (blink) and they all fall over, their belts cut.
Smurjan catches a handler's club in two fingers and gently takes it away from him.
Kali, one-armed, sickle in her right hand, hooks a handler's ankle and drops him on his face.
as the pack charges.
Twenty grey hounds race up the beach straight at the children and the old ones, snarling.
Mingus plants himself in front of them all, in front of Old Bengt and Lova and a cluster of small, frightened people, all four paws in the sand, hackles up, and barks. Once. Huge.
The lead hound skids to a stop, nose to nose with Mingus. It sniffs him. No ink. No number. Nothing it has ever been trained to hunt. Its ears go back. Its tail, slowly, uncertainly, starts to wag.
rifle up, one hand reaching out to touch Mingus's back.
Hundreds of afterimages of Kompis, every one taking a different shot. The golden pulse line beats under it all. He's not aiming at the dogs. He's aiming at the collars.
One shot. It ricochets from collar to collar, down the whole pack, and twenty collars of ledger-light pop open and fall in the sand.
The pack, suddenly free, mobs Mingus, piling around him, sniffing, licking, tails going like windmills. Mingus sits in the middle of it, delighted.
The handlers scramble back into the longboat, collarless and dogless. One of them lifts a horn and blows it, long and high, out into the fog.
Drekk has come ashore with a slate and a stub of chalk.
Long grey grass, bending in the wind off the Current. The wind blows from the beach, up the ridge.
Lying flat in the grass on the ridge, perfectly still, downwind of everything, the way he's been lying since before the longboat landed: Hrafnkell. Chin on his folded hands. Smiling.
flaring, and his eyes closing in pleasure.