Chapter 37
Starlight below, drifting islands like lanterns. Behind the ship, the ash-island where Kvar sat sinks back into the Current.
mid-argument.
Both of their rank plates flicker red at the same instant, like an alarm, and the letters smear.
They are gone. Mid-sentence, mid-gesture. Vigolas's coat sleeve is still swinging in the air where his arm was, and then that's gone too.
frozen.
Two threads that ran from him to the two men now run out over the rail, into nothing, and stop, as if the world simply ends a metre past the ship.
A square balloon, hard-edged and white-on-black, like text carved into stone:
THE CALL IS ANSWERED.
Vigolas slams onto a ship's deck, hard, on his back, in driving rain. Lightning. A black sea heaving all around. The storm. The same storm from page one of his story.
on the wet deck, eyes going wide with recognition.
Black sails, lanterns swinging, rigging screaming in the wind. His ship, exactly as she was the night she went down.
Where her name should be painted, there is a carved nameboard with gilt edges, ornate, beautiful, and blank. Smooth wood. Nothing written there at all.
staring at it. Rain running down his face.
Smurjan lands on the deck in a crouch at the far end of the ship. His three shadows writhe in the lightning.
floating in the storm-sky like a stamp on the clouds:
THE FIELD IS THE CALLED ONE'S WORST MEMORY.
Trollmage is sitting up. For once he's fully awake.
shaking his head.
THE MATCH DECIDES.
The ship heaves. The wave is out there in the dark: a wall of black water, forty metres high, rising beyond the bow, exactly as it rose that night, and coming.
looking at it. His hand shakes, just slightly.
watching him. His grey-blue third eye opens.
He drops into a stance on the heaving deck. Kali and Bakasura stir in his shadow but don't step out.
The crew sits waiting. Rougeina paces. Drekk grips the wheel. Kompis sits against the mast with Mingus, who stares out over the rail at the place where the threads end, ears up, whining softly.
scratching Mingus's ears.
They fight. Vigolas comes in with fists and green lightning crackling on his knuckles. Smurjan blocks with open hands, deflecting, precise. The deck tilts sixty degrees and both of them skid, grab rigging and keep fighting sideways.
Vigolas's lightning misses, precisely misses, because Smurjan steps half an inch to one side. Wrath is precision.
Smurjan's palm catches Vigolas square in the chest and sends him crashing back against the mainmast.
sliding down the mast, coughing rain. Over Smurjan's shoulder he can see the wave getting closer.
The lightning strikes, and in its long white flash the sea around the ship is full of people.
They stand on the water in silent rows, all the way to the horizon: sailors and captains and ship's boys, merchant crews and navy crews, men in the clothes of seventeen different ships, soaked and grey and dead, every one of them looking at Vigolas.
Above them, carved into the storm in hard square letters:
THE AUDIENCE IS THE CALLED ONE'S DEAD.
on his knees against the mast, staring at the faces in the front row. A boy, maybe fourteen, in a cabin-boy's cap. An old cook with a ladle still in his belt.
looking from the dead to Vigolas, understanding.
The dead don't move. They don't shout. They just watch: thousands of silent faces in the rain, while the forty-metre wave rises behind them, taller and taller, blotting out the lightning.
He gets up, slowly, one hand on the mast. Not toward Smurjan. He's looking at the boy in the cabin-boy's cap.
He says nothing. He just keeps watching, the way the dead do.
And behind him, the wave begins to fall.