Chapter 38
The forty-metre wave breaks over the ship like a falling mountain.
The deck is gone under. Vigolas tumbles in the black water, exactly as on page five of his story: arms out, bubbles streaming, a gold coin drifting past his face.
open underwater. Around him, the dead stand on the underside of the surface, upside down, watching him drown.
He doesn't swim. He just looks at them. Let it happen. I've earned it.
A grey hand closes on his collar and hauls him up.
Smurjan, standing on the water as he did on the fjord, lifts Vigolas out of the sea by the scruff and drops him, coughing, on a floating piece of the wrecked deck.
looking past him at the silent rows of the dead, now standing all around the wreckage.
Out of the front row of the dead, the cabin boy walks forward across the water. He stops a few metres away and looks at Vigolas, saying nothing.
The boy just looks at him.
The waiting has gone on for hours. Rougeina sits on the rail with the panther. Drekk hasn't let go of the wheel. Trollmage lies flat on the deck, eyes open, not resting, watching the sky.
white-knuckled on the wheel.
Smurjan crouches on the wreckage and looks Vigolas in the eye.
Faintly, among the whispering of the consumed, a bigger, warmer voice laughs. It's too faint to make out words. Vigolas looks at the chest, then away.
stamped across the storm clouds above them, impatient:
THE MATCH IS NOT BEING FOUGHT.
The sea heaves. The Arena doesn't like waiting. The water under the wreckage begins to turn, slowly at first, into a whirlpool.
looking up.
The whirlpool tears the wreckage in half. Vigolas on one piece, Smurjan on the other, spinning apart.
Out of the black water rise dozens of black-water arms made of the storm itself, grabbing at both of them, dragging them toward the whirlpool's centre.
The Trinity unfolds. Kali bursts out of Smurjan's shadow, sickle blurring, and carves a circle of severed water-arms around him. Bakasura surges up out of the whirlpool itself, mouth wide, and swallows the whirlpool's centre: water, foam and lightning all pouring into his maw like a drain.
Across the spread, Vigolas, spinning on his half of the wreck, has green lightning crackling all down both arms at last, fighting the storm.
In the rows of the dead, a few heads turn to watch, as if, for the first time, there is something worth watching.
Out over the starlit Current, in the dark between two drifting islands, a figure walks across the starlight toward the ship. A slight woman in grey, with short white hair. She makes no sound at all. No footfalls, no breath, no rustle of clothes.
His ears go flat. He doesn't growl. He can't: his mouth moves and nothing comes out.
on his feet, rifle up. The golden pulse line along the bottom of his panel is beating, thump, thump, and then it slows.
slower, slower, flatter.
His hand is on Mingus's head. The dog is warm and alive under his palm, his heart is still beating, but Kompis can't feel it. Can't hear it.
Vigolas fights his way along a twisting rope of storm-water toward Smurjan, punching through the water-arms.
turning toward him, a slow grin breaking across his grey face.
Vigolas punches Smurjan. A real punch this time: green lightning wrapped around the fist, and it connects. Smurjan skids back across the water three metres, laughing.
THE MATCH BEGINS.
The dead in their rows. As the two men collide in the centre of the storm, the cabin boy from the Starling takes one step back into the front row and keeps watching. His face gives nothing away. But he is watching the fight now, not the man who killed him.
The grey woman stands on the Marka's rail, one hand raised. Around her, a cone of absolute silence spreads across the deck. Ropes slap without sound. The bell swings without ringing. Mingus barks and nothing comes out.
It is flat.
(Nothing happens.)