Chapter 342

The twelfth road: a hedge of grey thorns taller than a mast, every spine as long as a finger and grey as old iron, piled over a road whose light went out long ago. The rotted stump of a signpost at its mouth. The two crews in front of it with axes, hooks, blades and a ladle the size of an oar.

Kali, out of Smurjan's shadow with her black-glass sickle in her one hand, hacking a path into the hedge, thorns flying, talking the whole time.

The path she just cut closing: grey thorns uncurling out of the stumps, crawling back across the gap, thicker than before, krrrrk.

Smurjan, third eye open, crimson-rimmed: the Sightline finds the hedge's thinnest point; one cut, exact; it grows back thicker.

Bakasura rising out of the shadow, enormous jaws taking a whole bite of hedge. Chewing. "…Bitter." Behind his teeth, the bite growing back.

Svala, a Flight-Line straight down the road: she cuts the first thorn in her path and can't stop, KRRSSH, straight into the next, and hangs there, scarf snagged, upside down. "…It's very pointy in here."

black-green script flickering across his knuckles, his palm out at the hedge.

A hundred yards of thorns wiped from where they stand: a clean gap, the dead road showing bare and grey for one beat. Then from both edges of the gap, thorns crawling back in, meeting in the middle, thicker, taller.

sitting on a bollard with his crow on his shoulder, watching, unhurried.

sitting in the dust at the foot of the rotted signpost, the horn trembling across her knees. Her dawn-gold eyes on the dead road. ROAD-READING: the road under the thorns drawn as a page of faint print, and one line of footprints on it, very old, very faint, huge, bare.

looking at the horn in her lap. At the fine crack the Answer left in it.

holding a big bandaged hand down to her.

GATE-KNOCK. Torva swinging the horn off her shoulder and knocking its great mouth against the rotted signpost, once.

(The crack in the horn running a hand's length further down the bark. The whole hedge shivering.)

planting her boots, the whole body bending like a bow. The gold script down her throat flaring back to life, spreading across her collarbones like sunrise. Her chest filling, and a wheeze in the middle of it, a catch, and she fills it anyway.

the first note leaving it. Not down every road at once this time: rings of gold sound going out along one road only, into the thorns, and away.

as the first ring passes through them: going white. Brittle. Frost on every spine. And under them, in the dead road, a thread of silver light waking.

the horn at her lips, her eyes squeezed shut, the words coming out of the horn in huge hard capitals that run off the edges of the panel:

her breath gone, the last of it out of her, her lips leaving the mouthpiece. And her eyes snapping open. Because the horn is still sounding. By itself. A second line coming out of it that she never put there.

Gate City: under the board, a small girl tugging her mother's sleeve: "Anyone? Even us?"

On a nameless black-and-silver ship, far off, rows of grey faceless figures turning their heads, all at once, toward the road.

At the rim of the world, in the Silence, nothing arrives: no sound. But a thread of silver light comes up across the Current to the sand-gold lip of stone, silently, and a hooded mountain on a bench turns his hood toward it.

in Torva's hands as the sound dies. And a sharp, dry sound, the loudest small sound in the chapter: the crack running all the way down it, mouthpiece to bell, splitting the bark along its whole length.

sitting down hard in the dust, the split horn in her lap, laughing, wheezing, crying, all of it at once.

already on his knees beside her, goggles down, peering along the split with a shipwright's squint.

nosing into the hedge. The white thorns breaking against the cork bark like sugar, like frost off a window, falling into the silver road in glittering pieces.

The allied flock, on every road round the island, turning: the troll longships, Tidekant's boats, the lamp-boats, the black barge, all swinging their bows toward the twelfth road. Hassel on the quay with the thirty refugees, waving his arms, relaying for a Herald who can't shout.

being half-carried up the Marka's side by Rougeina and Vigolas, the split horn hugged to her chest, her legs not working.

later. She's sitting on a coil of rope beside the wheel, the horn across her knees, reading the road ahead with her gold eyes. He's reading the water.

(Torva laughs, once, and has to stop because it hurts.)

The two ships running down the twelfth road, a straight silver line ruled across the Current to the horizon, white thorns breaking off their bows like frost. Behind them, ship after ship of the flock filing onto the road, a long glittering column. On the Upp Igen's bow, Krydog with one hand on the new fist.

The eleven refugees hauling a line under Drekk's glare, a grandmother among them hauling harder than anyone. Roffe going down the line handing out bread. Mingus trotting along it, checking every one of them.

on the Upp Igen's Perch, switching her patch from her left eye to her right, lifting Fjärran, putting her open eye to the brass telescope fused into its barrel. Crimson script ringing that eye.

The silver road running all the way to the edge of the world: a long, low lip of sand-gold stone where the Current simply ends. And beyond and below the lip, a vast barked wall, grey and furrowed, falling away into a deep, clean, endless dark. And on that bark, tiny, moving slowly down it, a long line of white specks, one after another, evenly spaced, like stitches.

lowering the rifle, a crimson tear on her cheek, her right eye already going milky, blind for two days.

at the Marka's bow with Mingus at his heel, his eyes gold, looking down the long silver road toward the edge of the world, Torva's split horn glinting behind him.