Chapter 36
The Marka drifts above the place where the Tally sank. The starlight around her has gone grey, and it's still spreading, like ink in water. Fat grey bubbles rise and burst on the surface, puffing out ash.
The crew leans over it, sooty and exhausted: Vigolas with his coat back on, Kompis with Mingus, Rougeina and the panther, Smurjan with Kali half out of his shadow. Behind them Trollmage lies flat by his sign, fast asleep. On the sign, freshly painted: WAITING. DAY 1.
open, grey-blue.
An island surfaces out of the Current, ash pouring off it like water off a whale's back: a flat grey plain of ash, miles wide, under a sky of drifting smoke.
It's littered with the leavings of every battle there has ever been. Rusted helmets of a hundred different shapes. Broken spears standing up like dead reeds. Shields with the paint burned off. Banners in tatters. Old bones half buried. And, lying freshly on top of it all, already going grey, a white flag with a closed-gate crest.
In the middle of the plain burns one small, ordinary campfire. Beside it, on an upturned helmet, sits a man, mending a boot.
The landing party wades through ankle-deep ash: Vigolas in front, Kompis and Mingus, Rougeina barefoot with the panther, Smurjan. Every step puffs up grey. Drekk stays at the Marka's wheel, watching.
picking a slate-blue Bastion helmet out of the ash, its plume half burned. She turns it over.
looking around at a plain of helmets that goes on to the horizon.
The man doesn't look up as they arrive.
He is completely ordinary. Forty, maybe. Unshaven, grey creeping into the stubble. Tired eyes with heavy bags under them. A leather coat, old and good, burned black at the hem and up one sleeve. He's sewing up a hole in the sole of his boot with a bent needle. A dented pot of something is simmering on the fire.
KVAR · RÖNNKVIST-5 · not on any board
The ordinary man by the fire is covered in threads: thousands of them, hanging from his shoulders, his arms, his back, every one of them cut, frayed at the end, trailing off into the ash like a coat made of torn rope.
very quiet.
The ash on the plain begins to stir. All around the campfire, in a great ring, shapes push up out of it: heads, shoulders, spears.
The Last War stands up. Soldiers made of grey ash, hundreds of them, from every army in every age: pikemen and knights, archers and axe-men in horned helms, Trisdel spearmen in faceless helms, and at the front, still smoking, a rank of Bastion guards in plumes of ash. They have no faces, only the shapes of faces. They lower their weapons and march inward on the fire.
glancing up at last, unsurprised.
Rougeina's blades cut an ash-knight in half. The two halves blow apart and pour back together.
Kompis shoots an ash-pikeman through the chest. The hole fills in like sand in an hourglass.
Smurjan strikes the exact centre of an ash-soldier with his palm and it bursts into a cloud, and the cloud stands up again.
Bakasura's maw rises out of the ash and swallows a whole column of ash-soldiers in one gulp.
The column climbs back out of the ash behind him.
Kali spins out of the shadow one-armed, sickle in her right hand, taking heads off ash-soldiers, snarling with every swing. She hasn't said a word. Her stump is pressed tight to her side.
Vigolas's lightning-fists blast a whole rank into drifting smoke. More ranks are already standing up behind it, and more behind those, all the way to the horizon.
still sewing, in the middle of the fight, as if it were rain.
The crew is driven back to the campfire: back to back to back, Mingus barking in the middle, the panther snarling, the grey army closing in on every side, a forest of ash spears leaning toward them.
He ties off the last stitch and bites the thread.
He pulls the boot on. He stamps it once to settle his heel. And he stands up. That's all. He just stands.
The whole army stops. Every spear, every sword, every faceless head, frozen in place.
And then they fall. Rank after rank, outward from the campfire in a widening ring, the ash-soldiers drop back into the ash, like wheat going down before the wind, until the plain is flat and grey and empty again, and only one man is standing on it.
Kvar sits back down on his helmet and stirs the pot.
covered head to toe in ash.
Kvar's tired eyes go to Kali, who stands at the edge of the firelight with her stump still pressed to her side.
The old grin, automatic.
She stops.
He doesn't look away from her. He doesn't make it gentler than it is.
A long beat.
Kali laughs. Halfway through, it stops being a laugh. She sits down hard in the ash with her one hand over her face, and the loudest soul on the ship makes no sound at all.
Smurjan kneels beside her and puts his hand on her shoulder. Behind them, slowly, Bakasura's enormous amber maw rises out of the shadow and curls around the two of them, very carefully, the way a big old dog curls around a pup.
across the fire.
Mingus pads over to Kvar and lies down across his newly mended boot with a contented sigh.
looking down at the golden dog. Something in his tired face loosens. For the first time, very slightly, he smiles, and scratches Mingus behind the ears.
He looks up at the smoke-dark sky, and for a moment he looks very old.
moving from Vigolas to Smurjan and resting there a moment too long.
The Marka sails away under her lanterns, starlight below, drifting islands like lanterns all around. Behind her, the ash-island sinks back into the Current, its one small campfire still burning as it goes under.
mid-argument.
Both of their rank plates flicker red at the same instant, like an alarm. The letters smear.
The rail. Nobody. Vigolas's sleeve still swinging in the air where his arm was. The end of his sentence hangs alone in its balloon, cut off.