Chapter 406
The empty black balloon in the corner of a blue sky. And at the centre of the floor, the knot of five colours that are one, straining: the Null inside it swelling, pushing at the net from inside like a fist through a sack. Around the knot, the bark going blank in widening patches, the never-there spreading, the first rows of the stands of the dead nearest the centre flickering, never seated.
hauling on it, all five hands in one braid.
steady: THE NULL · COUNTED · Scalelist #0.
eyes gold, seeing every thread in the Arena running into the five, the allies' threads, the crew's, the dead's, all of it feeding the knot.
letting go of the knot with one hand (the knot holding, because four are holding it, and the four are him), stepping forward onto the blanking bark toward the swelling front of the Null. The knot-mark on his brow. The box with two full stops in his sash.
raising his hand, palm out, to a wall of nothing the size of a hill rising off the Null toward the stands.
green lightning crawling up the arm, the ∞−1 in his eyes blinking gold.
The command lands. For the first time in the history of nothing, something the Null is made of obeys: the hill-sized wall of absence folding: corners turning in on themselves, edges meeting, the nothing creasing like paper, folding, folding, smaller, smaller, a hill, a house, a cart, a crate, a fist.
and in it a cube: perfectly black, blacker than the verdict cube, no starlight on it at all, a cube of nothing, heavy as a world. His arm shaking under it.
a dock at dawn, a six-year-old boy with a stolen apple, a broad laughing woman with two grey braids, and behind her, rising over the harbour wall, the sails of a ship. Red sails. And as we watch, the red draining out of them, like dye out of cloth in rain, until they are grey. Just sails. The boy doesn't notice. The woman is still laughing.
(No balloon.)
blinking, the cube in his fist. Something passing over his face, and gone.
bulging. A corner of it pushing out, unfolding, a seam splitting. The Null has more of itself than anything can hold folded.
The Arena floor: the knot of five colours at its centre, the Null swelling inside it, and from every side, the alliance's powers landing on it at once, for the first time, every one of them finding something to hit: Svala's white streak cutting a line through the Null's edge and the line staying cut; Isa at the front holding a whole flank of it at the top of a beat, her hand on her scarred chest; Mörda, who can never sleep again, throwing the white of a sleepless night into it like a lamp; Iskall's lamp-bearers holding up their lamps, and the Null recoiling from the Look; Brygdar trolls hurling finished boulders that land; Njord, silent, deaf, swinging Sill's oar into it and the oar striking; Krydog, half in the Ring, roaring; and at the centre, a pirate with a cube of nothing in his fist, the cube splitting at the seams.
recoiling under a thousand blows, and swelling back: wider, darker, the blank patches racing out across the floor toward the Ring. Every blow landing. None of them enough.
splitting open in his fist. He hurls it back at the Null, into its centre, where it unfolds with a sound like a sail filling and the Null staggers, its own folded front slamming back into it.
at the knot. Grey, swaying, forty banked days spent in one beat on the bind (ch. 400), a man about to crash, refusing to. Looking at the Null with an expression nobody has ever seen on his face: patience, finished.
at his hip, its pages riffling open on their own. Twenty-seven years of inscription. Every nap. Every sunrise he slept through. Every beat he banked by waiting, and every beat his ancestors waited before him on the stone of Brygdar. Glowing.
writing in the air with one finger, the letters hanging, slow, deliberate:
MACRO : MORNING = EVERY ONE I EVER SLEPT THROUGH
on his head, staring at the letters. Then, very solemnly, taking off, and flying away backwards.
The letters igniting.
Inside the Null, at its very centre, where there has never been anything, light: a single point. Then a line along a horizon that isn't there. Then dawn: a sunrise coming up inside the dark, gold and pink and enormous, every morning a troll-mage ever slept through, thousands of them, ten thousand, all at once, rising in the middle of the nothing.
lit from inside like a lantern, the dawn burning through it, gold at every edge, the never-there patches on the floor filling with morning light and turning back to bark. The stands of the dead nearest the centre steadying, seated again.
the Sloth Codex in his hand going blank: page after page wiping clean, white, finished. The long inscription complete and spent. He looks at it. Smiles.
his eyes closing. His knees going. Falling asleep standing up, the way he always has, but heavier than ever, the deepest sleep of his life coming down on him like a curtain.
catching him one-handed before he hits the bark, the other hand still on the knot, and holding him up, a sleeping troll-mage leaning on his shoulder.
at the knot, seeing Trollmage's thread go slow and warm and deep: asleep, not gone.
grinning at the sleeping troll-mage.
sunrise burning inside it, gold at the edges. Smaller. But not small. Still wider than the Arena's floor. And still coming: the dawn inside it guttering, the dark closing over the light again, slowly, like a hand closing over a candle.
at the knot, watching it.
a sleeping troll-mage on one shoulder, the knot in his other hand, looking at the Null coming. And his shadow, at his feet, stirring. Not one shape rising out of it. Two. And inside his chest, seventeen voices, waking, and one old woman's, louder than all of them, beginning, with no words, to hum.
The Null, a sunrise guttering inside it, wider than the floor, rolling toward the knot. And between it and the knot, a quiet man in grey wraps with three shadows at his feet, kneeling slowly onto the bark.
(No balloon.)