Chapter 391

The bowl in the side of the world tree, the sun low and gold over the trunk's curve, long shadows lying down the stands. The bare bark floor, ridged like the palm of a vast hand. On its near side, the Great Ring, a loop of a thousand and four knotted ropes, the five and their freed dead inside it in rows, Emma kneeling at the knot. At the centre of the floor, small, a tall stooped man in a long grey coat, and beside him the cathedral of endings, the Arbiter, taller than the walls, leaning away from him like a tree from a cliff edge.

(No balloon. The whole Arena holding its breath.)

The kind, tired, lined face; the short white beard; the reader's grey eyes. His right hand bandaged in a strip of black bar. The left half of him grey, soft and edgeless, cracked down the cheek and neck like old porcelain. And in his chest, where a heart should be, a doorway: a plain grey doorframe set into the man, standing open. Inside the frame, nothing is drawn at all. Not black. Not shadow. The bare white of the page, with no line round it.

at the rope's edge inside the Ring, the grin gone, his fist in his coat pocket closed round a warm ember. A faint knot-mark on his brow. His Compass on its cord, its needle pointing back over his shoulder at the four people behind him.

Vigolas stepping over the rope, out of the Ring, onto the open bark. The calm going off him as his boot comes down outside: the wind back in his hair, his coat-tails lifting. Behind him, one after another, the other four step out too: Kompis with Mingus trotting ahead of him; Rougeina barefoot, hands on her hilts; Smurjan with three shadows that don't match him; Trollmage in his slippers, the crow riding his crooked crown.

The five walking out across the bark toward the centre, not fast, Mingus a few strides ahead with his head low. Behind them the Ring, the rows of freed dead watching them go: the drowned crew in black-sail coats, the Gråtrut's thirty-one, an old bosun with a ring in his ear, a broad weathered woman with two grey braids, arms folded: Hild.

eyes going gold. Lust-sight. All round Jorvand the air is full of threads, the threads of the whole Arena, gold and warm and tangled. And not one goes through the doorway in his chest. They bend round it, the way water bends round a rock. Only one gold thread leaves Jorvand himself: out of his back, thin and bright, running away over the rim of the Arena toward somewhere far off.

The five stopping a few strides from him, spread in a loose half-ring, Mingus in front of Kompis, four legs planted. Jorvand looking at each of them in turn, fondly, the way a teacher looks at a class he has missed.

a small, sad smile.

And out of it, slowly, something coming. Not drawn as a thing. Drawn as the page itself: a tongue of bare white paper sliding out over the doorsill and down his coat and onto the bark, and wherever it lies, the ink of the drawing simply isn't. The grain of the bark runs up to it and stops, with no line at the stopping.

and the blank spreading across it the way a word goes out of your head: not fast, not slow, not like water, not like smoke. A pebble of cork on the floor, there, and then the place where the pebble was not, and then not even a place. Ferdinand's bark doesn't wither or crack. It was never there.

Three grey dead sitting side by side: an old woman with a basket on her knees, a soldier with a cold pipe, a boy in a cap. The first panel shows them. The second, the same seats, empty. The third, the same place in the stands: no seats. Just bark wall, smooth, as if no seats were ever carved there.

A Tidekant fisherman at the rail, holding a gold thread of the binding in his fist, and the thread now running out across the floor to nothing: its far end simply stopping in the air. His weathered face wet.

Each with a small soft-edged inset above them of the thing they are thinking of, and each inset going white:

Rougeina, hands on her hilts, thinking of the order she sharpens her eight blades in every night (the inset: her hands on a whetstone, the first blade, the second, and the rest of the inset blank).

Smurjan, a hand on his chest, reaching for one of the seventeen faces round him (the inset: a fisherman with a pipe, and then the face white, the voice still murmuring where the face was).

Kompis, thinking of the lake below Snöberga (the inset: the jetty, the birches, and the water white, no colour at all).

Trollmage, the last page of a book he loved (the inset: the page, and the last line gone).

Vigolas, humming under his breath the way he does when he's frightened: his mother's four notes.

mid-hum. Three notes drawn as small emerald marks drifting from his mouth. And where the fourth should go, a blank note-shape, empty. He stops. His face changes.

beside him, eyes half shut, slouched, and humming, low and slightly off-key, the fourth note.

the fourth note coming back to him as a faint emerald mark, small and shaky but there. He laughs, short and wet.

Its vast figure of frozen final moments pulling back across the floor like a man backing away from a fire, the whole cathedral grinding, scree-like. Along its foot, where the blank brushed it, a whole hem of its last moments gone white. Its face, the moment just before an ending, flickering faster than anyone has seen, as if it can't find one to show.

(No letters. It writes nothing.)

watching it back away, without malice.

The blank reaching the great black letters that the Arbiter carved into the bark from rim to rim at the start of the match: THE MATCH IS CALLED. NO ONE ENTERS. NO ONE LEAVES. And eating them, word by word, from the centre outward. The black square strokes going, one at a time, the way a sentence goes when you forget it while saying it: NO ONE ENT— and then not even that.

The same letters carved into the rim's bark above the Bridge, NO ONE ENTERS, cracked since the door opened: crumbling, the cracks running together, the letters flaking off like old paint until there is only plain bark. And the black line drawn across the top of the Bridge, gone. The Bridge of Every Ship joined to the Arena again.

The waist-high ridge of bark that rose to seal the floor off from the stands: not there. Not fallen; never raised. Krydog, bandaged fists braced on the rail where the wall used to press against them, pitching forward with nothing to lean on, and catching himself on one boot.

coming down on the bark of the floor, just inside the Ring's gold line, the other boot staying outside it, exactly where he set it the night before the war.

Daniel at the rail, very still, counting under his breath. Beside him Orka, silent since her binding, both hands still held open, shaking now, the gold "&" over the floor flickering.

Ögar, blind, the blindfold hanging round her neck, her face turned straight toward the centre of the floor as if she could see it. Perne beside her, one eye at Fjärran's scope, the other under a patch that no longer switches.

The blank widening across the floor toward the five in their half-ring: an edge without a line, a yard from Vigolas's boots, a foot, closer. Smurjan's three shadows pulling back from it on the bark. Rougeina's toes curling. Trollmage's crow screaming silently at it.

stepping forward past all of them. Not growling now. Ears up. Tail out straight. Walking right up to the blank's edge the way he'd walk up to the edge of the sea on a cold morning, and putting his front paws down at the very edge of it.

The edge reaching the gold fur of his forelegs, and stopping. Not flowing round him: stopping, right at his paws, so that for the first time in the panel the blank has a shape, a dog-shaped bay in it, an edge where it meets the gold. The bark under his paws there, warm, existing.

looking down at the dog. The grey half of his face flinching, very slightly, as if from a lamp.

(Mingus looks up at him. Wags, once. Doesn't move his paws.)

The blank spread across the floor round them now, a wide white lake, the five standing at its edge in a half-ring with the golden dog in front of them, the only place on the whole floor where the white has stopped. Behind them, the Ring. Behind the Ring, the stands, everyone in them on their feet.

stepping up beside the dog, the fear plain on his face and his jaw set anyway, lifting his open right hand at the white. Black-green script crawling across his knuckles, the first of the Black Soul commands rising in his throat.