Chapter 343
The silver road running out across the Current to a long, low lip of sand-gold stone where the starlit sea simply ends, and there turning, running on along the lip toward a vast grey shape on the far horizon. Beyond the lip: a deep, clean, endless dark, quiet as the inside of a held breath. Behind the two ships, the flock strung out for miles on the road, lantern after lantern.
nosing up to a bollard of sand-gold stone on the road's edge. Drekk at the wheel, Torva on her coil of rope with the split horn across her knees, Perne on the Upp Igen's Perch with a patch over her blind right eye.
The crews walking along the sand-gold ledge toward a line of grey-robed, braid-haired figures waiting where the stone turns paler. The Sign-speakers. At their head, an old woman with a face like a walnut and quick bright eyes: Sister Tecken, signing a greeting with both hands.
stepping past her into the Silence, opening his mouth to say something cheerful. Empty outline. He sighs, without a sound. Behind him, Isa stepping in too, eyes closing, a small smile on her face, signing slowly:
At the far end, on a bench carved from the stone: a seated mountain in a hood, two grey hands as big as plough blades resting on his knees. Beside the bench, the ring of ten slots carved in the rock, every one of them dark, a thousand years spent in a single sentence. And near the bench, where the rim's lip dips: a notch in the stone, and going down over the edge into the dark, hollows worn in the barked wall below, each the size of a rowing boat, one under the next, like footprints. A stair.
Kneeling at it, a dozen figures in white: linen robes like an infirmary's, sleeves rolled to the elbow, cropped hair, tired kind faces. Thimbles on their left fingers. And in each right hand, held like a quill, a needle of light as long as a forearm, its eye a tiny bright square, trailing a thread of white light. Each right hand closed round its needle, with white stitches across the knuckles.
RANK PLATE ×12: MENDER · K-II MARKED · needle-bearers of the quiet sect
kneeling at the first giant footprint, passing her needle through the bark at its edge and drawing the thread tight. And the hollow closing, like a mouth, the bark sliding together until there's nothing there but smooth grey cork. No seam. No scar. As if it had never been walked.
eyes gold. LUST-SIGHT on the Menders: threads. Ordinary, warm, gold threads running from every one of them, out over the rim and away: to children, to husbands, to graves. Not the threadless grey of the hunters. People. He takes Tecken's slate and chalks fast:
signing the one battle-sign he knows, a fist slammed into a palm: [Punch?] And Kompis catching his wrist, shaking his head.
an old man with a kind, exhausted face, looking up from the stair-head at the crew. Smiling. Lifting a finger to his lips, though no sound could possibly exist here.
Smurjan striding to the stair-head to haul the Menders off it, and a Mender's needle flicking out, not at him, at the gap between his feet and his shadows on the stone, and drawing tight. His three shadows sewn to the rock like a coat nailed to a door. He stops dead, mid-stride, unable to lift a foot. Kali bursting half out of his shadow, mouth wide open, yelling something enormous. Empty outline.
Rougeina, eyes on Smurjan and on a loose rim-stone the size of a man: CROSS-SWAP. Smurjan is suddenly a step away, free. The rim-stone stands where he was, its own shadow sewn to the rock. Rougeina rooted where she stands for one heartbeat, the price, and then moving.
Kali, sickle swinging at the thread of white light running from a needle to the bark: the black glass passing through it like a hand through a sunbeam. Nothing cut. Kali staring at her sickle, then at the thread, her mouth working furiously round an empty outline.
Krydog, scooping two Menders up under his arms like sacks of flour and carrying them away from the stair-head. They don't struggle. One pats his arm kindly. The other, upside down under his elbow, passes her needle through a tear in his patchwork coat, and the tear is gone, smooth cloth where there was a hole. Krydog stopping. Looking at it. Appalled. (That's where the next patch was going.)
The top twenty hollows gone, smooth bark, and the stair simply ending at the lip of the rim, a drop of a hundred feet to the next hollow down. The Menders rising from their knees, brushing off their robes, finished.
at the lip, goggles down, chalk in his fist. Measuring the drop with his thumb against the dark. Then drawing, fast, a stair, flight after flight, over the edge, on nothing: BLUEPRINT. Draw it dry, build it wet. And the chalk standing: white steps hanging down the barked wall into the dark. He holds up the slate.
The edge of the world. A long, low lip of sand-gold stone, the starlit Current lapping against it and ending, and beyond it, the clean endless dark of the Second Void. Below the lip, falling away into that dark, a barked wall too vast to see the bottom of: grey cork furrowed into canyons, the great stalk from which a ninth realm hangs, unseen, somewhere far below. Down it, the giant's footprint-stair; over its sewn-shut top, Jeppson's white chalk stair hanging into the dark. Far below, on the bark, a long white line of Menders filing downward along the furrows, like stitches.
On the rim, the crews standing in absolute silence, empty balloons over every head. And at the rim's end, a hooded mountain on a stone bench, two enormous grey hands raised in mid-sign, the ring of ten dark slots beside him.
The Menders on the rim stepping aside. Not fighting. Bowing politely to the crew, smiling, and walking away along the lip to a place where the bark's furrows go down like paths, and descending them one after another, white robes going down into the dark.
turning to Vigolas. One sign. Tecken's caption under it:
(Vigolas, delighted, gives him a thumbs-up.)
turning to the whole crew. Slow. Clear. Tecken translating.
writing fast on the slate, holding it up.
sitting down against Vider's knee the way he did once before, without asking. And Vider's hands, slower now, so slow Tecken has time to see what they're going to say before they say it.
(Tecken's caption stops. She looks up at the hood. The hands go on without her. Trollmage reads them himself.)
her hand at her mouth. Signing to him, small:
at the lip, looking down the chalk stair into the dark. The grin gone. His hand shaking. (He's afraid of the dark. He goes toward it anyway.) He reaches into his coat and closes his fist on something: a small warm ember, glowing red through his fingers.
on Vigolas's shoulder. Vigolas doesn't look round. He chalks two words on the slate and drops it at Tecken's feet, and steps onto the stair.
The crews going down Jeppson's chalk stair into the dark, single file, then off its last step onto the furrows of the bark: canyons of cork, ridges like cliff-paths. Ysel at the front, her strange eyes seeing the one way down, pointing: this way, always this way. Öde behind her, grass growing under her bare feet on the bark so she never slips. Emma with her staff. Mingus picking his way from ridge to ridge. Krydog at the back, looking at the hole in his coat that isn't there.
below the lip, faint as a soap-film, where the Silence ends. Ysel stepping through it first.
stepping through the film after her. Opening his mouth. And the first sound in two pages, enormous:
(He looks delighted with himself. He does it again, just to hear it.)
bursting through after him, mid-sentence, as if she never stopped:
Across the vast grey stalk below them: a wound. A long dark gash running diagonally across the bark like a river seen from a mountain, its lips grey and hardened, and inside it, light: deep, clean indigo, glowing up out of the bark like moonlight through ice. From every furrow on every side, white lines of Menders converging on it.
Standing in the indigo light, very small, very still: a child-shaped figure. One arm held out away from its body, ending in something long and black and thin. Ribbons trailing from it in the updraft, hundreds of them.