Chapter 345
The row of kneeling Menders staring at their fists: in each one, the stub of a needle, its other half gone. Up and down both lips, white faces turning, all together, down into the wound. Up on the ledge, the crews turning too, mid-fight, Krydog with a Mender under each arm.
The indigo light filling it like water fills a well. Halfway down the inner wall, on a ledge of hardened scar: a small figure, standing very still, the way a child stands in a shop when it's been told not to touch anything.
A child, 1.25 m, all ribs and elbows. Grey bark-skin, smooth as peeled wood. Hair black and hacked short, unevenly, as if he cuts it himself with the only tool he has. Wrapped like a mummy from ankle to chin in strips of grey-brown, rustling, scab-coloured, thousands of them. And down his chest, left bare, a long wound from shoulder to hip that doesn't bleed: inside it, faint indigo light. His right arm ends at the elbow in a blade of black obsidian, long, thin, glassy, its edge faintly indigo, held out away from his body.
DOLK · FERDINAND-4 · unranked (Order threat class: SEALED SUBJECT, do not approach) · not on any board
A child's face, grey-pale, small-chinned, eyes enormous and dark with indigo at the rims. Looking up at the hundreds of white figures on the lips above him.
at the lip, her hand at her heart.
(Behind her, down the inner walls of the wound, on threads of white light let out from their needles like spider-silk, the Menders descending: dozens, gently, robes stirring in the indigo updraft.)
lifting the blade a finger's width. Saying it the way you'd say excuse me in a crowd.
Dolk on his ledge. The descending Menders. Nothing moving at all.
(No balloon.)
(Running across the whole page, through both panel borders, ruler-straight: a hairline of indigo light.) And on the walls of the wound, a dozen descending Menders' needles falling apart in their fists, each in two clean pieces; their light-threads parting; the Menders floating down the last few feet onto the scar-ledges, gently, unhurt, needleless. Not a sound.
landing on a ledge across from him, looking at the stub in her sewn fist. And the light in the stub growing back: a new needle unfurling out of it like a candle relit.
a hairline of light running across both his pupils like a blade's reflection. Lifting the obsidian arm at the whole white crowd. SEVER: the bond that holds an army together, the oath that bound them here.
(A hairline across the panel. And nothing comes apart. The Menders still there, still together, still smiling.)
gently.
BLANK. A hairline through the plate hanging over a big Mender's head: MENDER · K-II MARKED · needle-bearers of the quiet sect, and the middle of it gone: a clean, empty line where the rank was. And over Dolk's own head, for one panel, his slashed plate flickering: DOLK · K-II MARKED · …
THE SKIPPED BEAT. A whole line of Menders coming at him along the ledge, and each of their hearts drawn small in their chests: ba-dum. ba- and then nothing, a gap, the second beat not coming. Every one of them staggering, a beat late, as if they'd missed a stair. And Dolk already through them, past them, needles falling apart behind him.
at the lip, eyes gold. LUST-SIGHT on the child: he isn't wrapped in strips. He's wrapped in threads: thousands upon thousands of cut threads, every one severed, every loose end hanging off him, a mummy made of endings. And not one thread going from him to anyone. Not one.
(Kompis opens his mouth. Nothing comes out.)
seeing the crews starting down the inner wall toward him: Vigolas sliding on his coat-tails, Krydog climbing, Mingus picking his way. Backing up along his ledge, blade held far out from his body.
On every wall of the wound, the Menders' needles grown back, hundreds of them, lifting together, all pointing at the wound's lips. Läka, at the top, nodding to them. Kind.
The inside of the Cut, from below: indigo light rising, the grey scar-walls going up on either side like canyon cliffs, and on them, everywhere, hundreds of Menders with needles of light raised. And on a ledge in the middle of it all, small, alone, wrapped in strips, the obsidian blade held out from his body: a child, saying one word.
And across both pages, corner to corner, through the gutter, through the panel's own border: a single hairline of indigo light. On either side of it, every needle in the wound coming apart at once, hundreds of white lights broken in two and drifting down into the indigo like snow.
(No SFX.)
after. And round him, out of nowhere, strips arriving: hundreds of them, white this time, white as bandages, winding themselves round his arms, his ribs, his throat, settling over the grey-brown ones. Warm. They flutter faintly, like something that wanted to help.
all over the walls: the needles growing back. All of them. Again.
Dolk cutting again, and again, hairline after hairline, and every cut a new white strip winding onto him: up his neck, over his chin, over his mouth. OVERWRAPPED. Strips to his eyes. His huge eyes over a mouth he can't open. His chest heaving under them. Still holding the blade out from his body.
landing on the ledge beside him in a clinking skid, Aska's ember still in his fist.
Vigolas grabbing a fistful of the strips over Dolk's mouth to tear them off, and the child flinching away, and the strips flaring out round him like a ribbon-shield: STRIP-GUARD. Vigolas's hands full of fluttering endings. His face going blank.
hands full of strips, looking at them. Completely lost.
(He pulls. The strips come away from the child's mouth. Dolk gasps air like a swimmer.)
breathing, staring at Vigolas: the first person in a thousand years who's stood that close to him on purpose. Backing up. The blade trembling at arm's length.
looking down at the blade at the end of his arm. The way you'd look at something that was done to you.
down the wall now, crouching on the ledge an arm's length off, Mingus at his heel. Gentle.
quietly.
The Menders massing on the walls again, needles grown back, hundreds, closing in from every side, and the crews spreading out along the ledges to meet them: Krydog, Roffe, Smurjan, Rougeina Swapping down the wall, Emma drawing a ring on a wide ledge. Dolk in the middle, cutting, cutting, a white strip with every cut.
slashing a hairline at a needle coming in from the front, all his attention on it, the strips climbing his throat again. Behind him, on the ledge, unseen, small and slow and patient: Läka, who climbed down while everyone was watching the front.
the yellowed needle in it, sliding into the top of his wound, at the shoulder, from behind. Gentle as tucking in a child. One stitch. Drawn closed. And the indigo light at that end of the wound going out: a hand's width of the wound simply shut, smooth grey bark, no scar.
his blade still raised at the needle in front of him, not cutting it. Not cutting the one behind him either. His enormous eyes going wide, and wet. His voice smaller than it has ever been.