Chapter 413
Sun on the raft-city. The little chalk berth by the mainmast, snoring. Vigolas on his bucket in its doorway with a blanket round his shoulders. And at the Marka's rail, a queue: captains from every ship of the alliance, one after another, each with a plank on his shoulder. A Brygdar troll with a slab of black oak. A Tidekant fishwife with a strip of salt-white pine. A lamp-bearer child dragging a little painted board twice her size. A plateless refugee with a plank from a raft. Laying them down in a growing pile by the berth.
at a sawhorse beside the pile, his hands steady again, goggles down, a hand-plane in his fist, truing the black oak plank by hand, long curls of shaving falling round his boots.
(He doesn't say what for. Nobody on either crew needs him to.)
nailed to the Marka's foremast in Flexsnus's neat merchant's chalk:
WHEN DOES HE WAKE?
DAY 10 · 20–1 · DAY 11 MORNING · 3–1 · DAY 11 NOON · 5–1 · DAY 12 · 8–1
DAY 11 · AN AFTERNOON · JEPPSON
Tihi's face squashed against one side of the round window, Iskall sitting on the sill inside with her lamp.
Mingus hopping down out of the sagging hammock. Trotting out of the berth past Vigolas, who leans aside without a word. Across the deck to Öde's little ship's garden of barley in tubs, sniffing, lifting a leg.
trotting back in past Vigolas, climbing into the hammock with a groan, turning twice, and settling back across the captain's chest. Krydog's bandaged hand finding the dog's back in his sleep.
at the door with two bowls of stew, steam rising, holding one out to Vigolas and setting the other on the threshold for the captain. Vigolas eating his. Then, without looking, picking up the captain's and eating that too.
Hunters over the rails, more than the first night. And two women with silver-rose in their eyes: Rougeina, and a one-armed woman with a red braid, no longer hollow, blinking hunters off the deck in pairs, one after the other, phantom trails crossing like stitching.
in the door, unshaven now, eyes red-rimmed. Turning a dented bottle cap over in his fingers. Calling over his shoulder without turning round.
Kompis kneeling beside the bucket, the Lust Codex's gold script blazing up both his arms like rigging, taking his brother's wrist in one hand and reaching out with the other, across the raft-city, across the sea, across the curve of the world, a single gold thread drawn out of his fingers and away into the sky. His nose starting to bleed.
A well of pages spiralling down into the heart of a mountain, every wall a shelf of glowing unopened books. At the very bottom, at a desk of the mountain's own stone, under a book as big as a bed: a tiny ancient man, a long white beard tucked into his belt, fingers black with ink to the second knuckle flat on the page. Hjalmar. And at his wrist, from nowhere, a fine gold thread, tightening. His blind milk-white face lifting.
On the left, Vigolas in the chalk doorway, the gold thread at his wrist. On the right, the old man under the great book, the same thread at his. A whole world between them, and one thread.
choosing his words, which he never does.
quieter.
under the great book, the small creased face doing what it has done once before in three hundred years: crumpling. The inked fingers going still on the page for the first time in the panel. Tears running out of blind white eyes into a white beard.
(No balloon.)
holding the Knot, feeling both ends of it, his own face wet now too, blood on his lip. And seeing, through the thread, the old man's other threads: and one of them, gold, running out of the tiny chest at the bottom of the well and away, down, down through the roots of the world into the dark, toward a far-off line of indigo light a hand's width wide. Not grey. Not cut. Warm.
A wheel of days and nights drawn like the face of a clock, and at its centre, unmoving, a pirate on a dented bucket in the doorway of a little chalk cabin, an emerald ring round his boots. Round the rim, turning: days, gold and busy: captains queueing with planks, Jeppson's shavings piling up round his sawhorse, Flexsnus chalking odds, Tihi's face at the port, Roffe with two bowls, Mingus trotting to the barley and back, Iskall on the sill with a fresh emerald freckle on her cheek every dawn; and nights, black and lamplit, each one fuller than the last: grey hunters coming over the rails, five, ten, then dozens on every side; Rougeina and Kali blinking in pairs; Isa holding short and dropping to one knee; Svala's white streak; trolls prying grey shapes off the hull with oars; Smurjan's three shadows; Daniel standing over Tihi; Roffe's cauldron; Drekk's bucket swinging. And round the outermost edge of the wheel, chalked on the berth wall in Jeppson's hand, the tally growing, one stroke a dawn, nobody knowing where it stops:
|| · ||| · |||| · ||||/ · ||||/ | · ||||/ || · ||||/ ||| · ||||/ ||||
And in the middle, the pirate getting thinner, scruffier, redder-eyed, grinning, and never once off the bucket.
Hjalmar at his desk, an inked hand on the page, his blind face lifted to nothing, saying what he has said every morning for three hundred years, in case it helps.
(A long beat. His face, in the lamp-light, changing.)
A lull in the fighting. Öde sitting on the deck beside the bucket, her scythe across her knees, her sleeves rolled, the emerald names glowing up her palms and forearms like barley stalks. Reading them aloud, one by one, the way she does every morning, except it's the middle of the night.
saying them with her, without looking at her arms. He learned them off her skin a long time ago, so there would always be someone left who remembered.
her thumb on one name near her wrist, older ink than the rest. SIGRUN.
Rougeina dropping off the berth roof to sit on the deck on the other side of the bucket from Kompis. The three of them shoulder to shoulder in the dark, the lamp in the port behind them.
saying them together, low, the way they've said them every night since the floor of the Arena: eight names, lettered small, too small to read. And then a ninth thing, which isn't a name.
(Vigolas listens. He doesn't know the eight. He listens anyway, so somebody else has heard them.)
Everyone asleep on the deck round him, Kompis against the wall, Rougeina sitting up with a blade across her knees, Öde curled round her scythe. Vigolas awake on his bucket, leaning his head back against the doorframe, talking quietly over his shoulder into the dark of the berth.
a long silence. Then:
The worst yet. Hunters over every rail of the Marka at once, over the Bridge's foot, over the hulls on every side, grey shapes in the rigging, on the berth roof, at the port. Rougeina's trails crossing the deck like a net. Kali dropping to one knee as a borrow runs out. Isa holding, short, and Emma hauling her down by the collar before the hold gets long. Svala streaking and crashing, panting, streaking again. Trolls from three ships throwing ballast stones.
in the doorway, palms on his shoulders, on his arms, faint grey DONE DONE DONE over his head like frost on a window. Iskall's lamp turning on his face from the port, again, again, a new freckle lighting on her cheek each time. And Kompis, beside him, holding the thread from his brother to the sleeping man taut in his fist, tying it back as fast as they finish it.
The deck strewn with finished things. The crews flat on their backs where they fell, asleep in heaps. The last hunter sinking into the gold water. And on the berth wall, in Jeppson's steady hand, the tally:
||||/ ||||
Perne in her hooded grey-green coat, her eye-patch over the left eye that's gone for good, raising Fjärran's brass-barrelled telescope to the only eye she has left. Hesitating.
(She looks anyway.)
one crimson tear running from her open eye as it looks past the edge of the world, her face going grey, the colour draining out of the panel round her as the look takes it.
(She lowers the rifle. Her eye is dark. She doesn't need it to know.)
The sea round the foot of the world tree in the last red light, a thousand lashed ships with their lanterns coming on. And all round them, from horizon to horizon, the water breaking: a ring of grey heads rising out of the sea, rank behind rank, smooth and faceless, palms lifting, a grey shoreline where there was no shore, closing in on one little chalk cabin with one lit window and one open door.
(No balloon.)