Chapter 393

face to face at the edge of the white, Vigolas's hand on Kompis's shoulder. Mingus between their legs, facing the blank. Vigolas's voice level, slow, every word placed like a plank on a deck.

A thread of emerald light going from Vigolas's chest into Kompis's, and as it lands, behind Kompis, faint as breath on glass, a line of figures: a father, a grandmother, a great-grandfather, rows of them going back into the haze, each one with a single heartbeat drawn as a small gold pulse over their heart, and all of those heartbeats landing in Kompis at once.

eyes wide and wet, every heartbeat of his line in him for one beat, turning to the tall grey man beside him. His hand on Smurjan's arm.

A gold thread into his chest, and behind him not one line of figures but three, braided round each other, and among them seventeen faint faces turning, and one big laughing woman with an anchor on a chain, there and gone. Smurjan's three shadows going still on the bark.

turning to Rougeina. Speaking with all three voices at once for the whole sentence: his own, Kali's sharp one, Bakasura's slow deep one, the balloon drawn with its triple outline.

A crimson thread into her chest. Behind her, a line of soldier-women and star-placers going back into the haze, and nearest of all, a tall woman with long crimson hair and one green eye, whole, both halves of her face, smiling: there for a heartbeat. Rougeina's breath catching. She doesn't turn round. She knows she'd see nothing.

turning to the huge slouched troll-mage beside her. Reaching up and taking his long elf's ear, gently, the way you'd wake a sleeper.

his heavy eyes open, fully, for once. A silver-rose thread into his chest. Behind him trolls and elves in a long line, and a very old woman with a braid grown down into a wooden floor, and a broad troll grandmother in a knitted scarf: Ulla. His ears drooping. Then lifting.

turning to Vigolas to close the round. Opening his mouth. And stopping. His face doing something no one on either ship has ever seen it do.

his voice catching, the balloon breaking at the line, as if the words had suddenly turned out to be true in some way he can't see. Tears on his grey-green face. He doesn't know why.

A violet-and-amber thread into his chest. And behind him, where everyone else has a line of ancestors, seven figures: an Arena champion lying in the sand, a shipwright with a woman's hands, a lighthouse keeper, a thief with a satchel, a cook, a laughing beggar child, a ferrywoman. His seven lives, all at once, each with a heartbeat. And behind them, further back, the haze where the other four lines go.

The five in a half-ring at the white's edge, five threads of light rising from their five chests into the air above them: emerald, gold, crimson, silver-rose, violet-and-amber. And behind each of them, fanning out across the floor like the tails of five comets, their lines of the dead, going back into the haze. And in the haze, far back, at the edge of the panel, the five lines bending toward each other. The panel ends before they meet.

eyes gold, Lust-sight, watching the five threads rise. And the threads finding each other in the air above their heads: not tangling, fitting, twisting together the way strands twist in a rope, each one turning into the groove of the next as if it had been shaped for it. As if it had been one rope once, and somebody unpicked it a long time ago.

tightening. Five threads becoming a rope. The rope becoming a cord, as thick as a ship's hawser, glowing five colours that keep turning into one colour and back again, humming. Hanging in the air over the five like a halo made of rope.

at the centre of the white, looking up at the cord. His kind face very still. Something in the person half of it giving way, very slightly.

the frame of it juddering, as if something enormous on the other side has put its whole weight against it. The old man rocking on his feet.

The five walking forward, step by step, behind the cord. The cord pushing the white back across the floor toward the door it came from. And everywhere the white is pushed off the floor, new bark creeping in over the place where nothing was: raw, pale, cream-coloured wood, grain knitting in from the edges like skin over a graze. The world tree, refusing to have a hole in it.

The five at the centre now, standing in a ring round Jorvand, each on their own patch of new pale bark, the cord over the old man's head in a glowing loop, and inside the loop, held, the core of the white, a churning blank the size of a cart, pressing up against the cord and going nowhere. The door in Jorvand's chest choked down to a trickle.

feeling the pull of his thread in his chest, testing it: half a step back, and the crimson strand in the cord fraying, a hiss of light. He steps back into place. It knits.

standing in his place, and not still: rocking on his heels, shifting from one boot to the other, a little hop, a shuffle, like a man on a cold dock.

eyes gold, looking at Jorvand inside the ring of five. At the one gold thread still running from the old man's back, out of the loop, over the rim, away.

The trickle from his door not going up into the loop. Going down. Running off the old man's shoes into the floor, and under it: the bark at his feet whole on top, and beneath its surface, the grain going white, the way ink spreads under paper. Spreading outward, under the five's feet, under the new pale bark, away in every direction.

All across the Arena, beyond the ring of five, the white welling up through the bark in patches: a hole of nothing opening by the Ring's far edge, another under the stands of the dead, another along the foot of the stands of the living, another, another. The floor turning into a broken map of bark islands and blank lakes. The core held at the centre. The tail everywhere else.

The white coming up through the stone-hard bark of the steps, and the lowest rows of the blank half, seats drawn only in outline, un-carving themselves, row by row. And higher up, in the middle rows of the dead, a block of grey soldiers in birch-bark armour: a sergeant, a big man, a boy of sixteen with a drum. Getting to their feet. Watching the white climb.

one boot inside the gold line, the other out, watching the white come up through the floor between the Ring and the five. His grin gone. His jaw set.

Every ally on their feet. And with no wall to stop them now, coming down, rail after rail, onto the floor: Brygdar trolls with axes, Tidekant fishers with gaffs, lamp-bearer children with lamps, the Up-Again crew in a knot round their captain, Drekk with his spyglass, Öde with grass springing up wherever she lands, Svala dropping off the top rail onto the steps.

the cord humming over Jorvand's head, the old man inside the loop, very calm. Looking past them, past the white patches, up at the stands. At the faces coming down the steps. Trolls who carried a mile of rope up a mile of bridge. Fishers who haven't slept since the Gate. A lamp-bearer girl, eight years old, dragging her lamp because her arms are too tired to lift it.

closing his eyes. The grey half of his face quite still. The person half full of pity.

The long gold light failing across the bowl. The five round the old man in their loop of light. The white welling up through the floor in patches. The allies streaming down the steps toward it.

and his voice coming out of it not as a balloon but as faint grey script, drifting, spreading out across the whole Arena on the dusk wind, arriving soft and close at every ear in the stands and on the floor, as if he were standing beside each of them: