Chapter 44

Lärka is backing off from the two men who fell out of the sky. Crimson script crawls over Smurjan. Vigolas gets up off the deck, swaying, lightning gone.

(The Hush still holds. Everything is mouthed or written.)

She is outnumbered and doesn't care. She raises her free hand, and the cone of silence widens, swallowing the whole deck, the rigging and the sails.

Vigolas charges her bare-handed. She feels him coming and sidesteps. Kali lashes out of Smurjan's shadow with her one good arm, and Lärka sidesteps that too, without looking.

writing in the air:

SHE FEELS WHAT'S IN FRONT. NOT WHAT'S EXACT.

reading it. His third eye opens wide, rimmed in crimson, and across his skin the Codex script flares.

A single crimson line extends from it into the air, thin as a hair, perfectly straight, like a laser drawn in red ink.

The world is drawn as diagrams, edges and angles. Lärka's cone of silence is visible as a shape: a great grey funnel pointed forward from her chest. Its edges ripple where she feels the world, every edge except one: a single crimson point at the very tip of the cone, where the silence comes out of her, so close to her own body that she can't feel around it.

cracking like ice from that one point.

Sound returns to the Marka. All of it at once:

the ship's bell DONG

the ropes slapping, the wind, the crow KRAA

Rougeina's furious shout, Drekk's curse

Mingus barking, a huge, joyful, thunderous bark

ba-DUM. ba-DUM. ba-DUM. Along the bottom of his panel, the golden pulse line springs back to life, strong and bright.

She has staggered back against the rail with her hand pressed to her own chest. Her eyes are wide. Something is happening to her.

The Sightline cracked her own silence too, the silence she has lived inside since birth, and for the first time in her life she hears.

What she hears is a heartbeat. Her own. ba-dum. ba-dum. Loud, terrible and alive in her ears.

both hands over her ears, terrified, crying. She has never known it was that loud.

The crew closes in:

Rougeina, blades out

Vigolas, fists up

Drekk, axe in hand

Kali, rising out of Smurjan's shadow

getting to his feet with Mingus at his side, the pulse line strong. He doesn't raise a weapon. He doesn't have one any more.

He walks toward her slowly, open-handed.

staring at him through her fingers. She can hear his words now too. She has never heard words.

She tries to speak and has no idea how. A sound comes out of her, small and cracked, the first sound she has ever made on purpose.

Lärka runs. She vaults the rail onto the starlight of the Current and runs across it, hands over her ears, away from the Marka and from all that terrible sound, into the dark between the drifting islands.

Rougeina raises a blade to Swap after her. Vigolas puts a hand on her arm.

Everyone is down, sitting, breathing. Rougeina sits against the mast with her heart still sluggish, rubbing her collarbone. Drekk sits on the deck with his numb arm. Trollmage lies flat with the crow on his chest. Smurjan kneels, the crimson script slowly settling and fading into his skin until only faint scars of writing remain.

looking at Smurjan for a long moment.

surprised, then quietly grateful.

on his knees again, but by choice this time, among the pieces of Ivar scattered across the deck: splintered wood, cracked engraved steel. He gathers them one by one into his hoodie.

crouching beside him, helping, saying nothing.

picking up the last piece: a curved fragment of the old barrel, engraved with a tiny pattern of a bear and, next to it, a little hat.

Kompis holds the fragment up to the starlight. On the far horizon over the Current, very small, a red volcano glows.