Chapter 405
on Roffe's shoulders, both small hands under Daniel's grey fingers, her face a foot from his. His face set like plaster, grey to the collar, his eyes still open, still holding the sky up. The silence everywhere. The last page about to turn.
crumpling. Her chin going. Her eyes filling. No giggle anywhere in her. The bells in her hair not making a sound.
Everyone in every stand, the five at the knot, the crew in their tower of hands, the dead in their grey rows: all wearing the same face. The face at the end of a story. Sad. Sure. Waiting for the last page.
THE END. beginning to drop again, an inch, another, as Daniel's grey hand starts to sag in his crew's hands. The Arbiter's letters on the bark, slow, sure:
ON THE NEXT BEAT.
staring at Daniel's grey face. And something in her face deciding. The way it decided on a dock at nine years old, when she couldn't read and could count.
trembling. Pulling, by force, by choice, up at one corner. A sob and a giggle coming out together, a horrible wet little sound.
the giggle taking: real now, because she's making it real, laughing at a grey man holding up a sky, laughing at the sadness, tears running down her face and her mouth wide open, the bells in her hair suddenly ringing.
at the knot of the Ring, hearing it start, knowing what's coming, her voice cracking across the Ring like a bosun's:
(All through the Ring, hands slapping Jeppson's cork earplugs into ears.)
A girl with bells in her braids on the shoulders of a cook as big as a door, her head thrown back, her arms flung wide, laughing at the end of the world, tears flying off her face, and shouting at the sky with every scrap of breath she has, the way a child shouts when the story's over and the book is closing:
And the laugh going out from her like a ring in water, over the tower of hands, over the Ring, over the floor, over the stands of the living and the stands of the dead, a hundred worlds' worth of faces in the Arbiter's silence and, one after another, catching it: a troll's mouth twitching, a lamp-bearer child snorting, Krydog flat on his back roaring with laughter, Vigolas at the knot doubled over, Smurjan's three voices laughing in three different keys, Rougeina's shoulders shaking with her hand over her mouth, Trollmage's crow cackling, Kompis laughing so hard he falls off his knee. In the stands of the dead, grey faces, smiling.
And above it all, THE END., dropping toward the beat it was timed on.
a run of small faces, each one un-held: the moment-just-before falling off them like a mask slipping, colour coming back, people moving.
Drawn the way the Hiccup is always drawn: a row of heartbeat-marks across the panel, ba-DUM · ba-DUM · ba-DUM, and one of them, the next one, the one ON THE NEXT BEAT was waiting for, missing. A gap in the row. A beat that doesn't count.
THE END. coming down on the beat it was timed on, and the beat not there, and the two great words missing: falling straight through the place where the beat should have been, through nothing, landing on no moment at all. Breaking apart in the air into black letters. T. H. E. E. N. D. Tumbling, slow, harmless, like black snow.
the last mark of THE END., falling on its own, separate from the letters, a black dot the size of a cartwheel, spinning down toward the knot. And Vigolas, one hand on the cord, reaching up with the other and catching it.
the full stop in it: and his lips moving. "Compact." The dot folding into the verdict cube Daniel tosses back to him. Two full stops in one black box now, starlight crawling over it.
on the line, in the tower of hands, the grey cracking off him: off his collar, his chest, his waist, falling away in flakes like old plaster. His face moving again. And his mouth, which has argued in every court in Scalelist, which has said "Objection" ten thousand times and never once laughed, opening:
on Roffe's shoulders, staring at him, still laughing, tears everywhere, completely astonished.
the Arbiter's letters coming, slower than they have ever come, in a hand that has never before had to write this:
APPEAL UPHELD.
flickering into being over his head for the first time since the founding day, the field that has pulsed UNDER REVIEW since the founding day changing:
DANIEL · UNASSIGNED · Scalelist: HEARD
as his crew lower it at last, one hand after another. The grey gone from all of him except here: his right hand grey to the wrist, smooth, cold, the colour of the Arbiter's endings. He turns it over, looking at it.
the one the first walking ending touched in ch. 404: grey, set, finished. And the grey draining off him, like water off a stone. He blinks. Looks at his hands.
All across it, the walking endings, the frozen last moments, stopping. Not finished. Released. A swordsman's locked swing completing, slowly, gently, and him lowering his sword and looking at it as if he'd forgotten he was holding one. A sailor closing his mouth on the sea and breathing. A woman letting go of a door. A boy catching his cup. Each one turning, quietly, and walking away across the bark, toward a small old woman by a stump with a book open.
the endings filing past her, one by one, each one stopping at the book. And her writing them down: each one witnessed. Each one finished properly, at last, the way endings are supposed to finish: heard.
(No balloon. Mingus at her feet, sniffing each one as it passes.)
at the floor's edge, emptying: its cathedral of last moments coming apart stone by stone as the endings leave it, its walls thinning, its spires falling in, light coming through it.
laid bare now as its walls fall: the empty-chair shape Perne saw, and inside it two small figures still moving, mid-blow: a hooded boy and a crimson-haired woman, blades and threads, the match it could never decide, still going, after all this time.
at the knot, the real ones, side by side, watching the two small figures fight inside the falling cathedral.
inside the hollow: and stopping. The hooded boy's thread going slack. The woman's blade lowering. The two of them, for the first time since the Arena first Called them, looking at each other. And then, very small, very far away, the boy putting out a hand and the woman taking it.
The whole cathedral of endings, with nothing left at its heart to decide, coming down: not crashing, settling, like a great tent with its pole taken out, folding down onto the bark, its last stones turning to grey dust, the dust blowing away across the floor in the wind off the open sky.
where it stood. Bare bark. Regrowing.
clear, blue, morning. And there, small, in the very corner of it, as if someone were reading over our shoulder: a black square balloon. Empty. Its oldest form. The way it first appeared, before it ever wrote a word.
(No balloon. Just that one.)
one last line writing itself, very small, very plain, square letters that have lost all their weight:
EVERY VERDICT CARRIES ITS OWN APPEAL.
(The Free Arena.)
The knot of five colours that are one, the five still holding it, still laughing a little, wiping their eyes. And inside the knot, the Null: swelling. Pushing at the net. The plate over it flickering, THE NULL · COUN—, and in Jorvand's chest, the door widening, more of the dark pouring through. With the Arbiter gone, there is no ending anywhere in the world that will ever end it now.