Chapter 45
The Marka drifts toward a small island floating in the starlight: a market town built on a turtle-backed rock, stalls of patched canvas, lanterns, and a battered Scalelist board on a pole in the square.
bruised and exhausted. Kompis holds a wooden box tied with string: Ivar's pieces. Rougeina's arm is in a sling. Trollmage, asleep, is being carried in Drekk's arms like a sack of flour.
(Everyone looks at him.)
The crew walks in. Heads turn.
In the square, the board: dozens of names. And there, near the top section, two lines everyone in the market is staring at:
SMURJAN · K-IV · #1,602
VIGOLAS · ∞−1 · 1 defeat (HADOM)
looking from the board to Vigolas.
A dozen bounty hunters rise from tables around the square: chains, nets, harpoons. Cheap sin-marks glow on wrists and necks.
RANK PLATE ×12: BOUNTY HUNTER · K-II MARKED · Scalelist #90,000–#300,000
deadpan, to Drekk.
Rougeina, one-handed, Swaps a harpoon out of a hunter's hands and into a barrel.
Drekk, still holding the sleeping Trollmage like a sack, kicks a man into a fruit stall without putting the mage down.
Kali, one-armed too, sits on top of a hunter and eats his apple.
Bakasura swallows a net whole and burps out the knots.
Mingus has a hunter's boot in his teeth and is tugging, tail wagging, delighted.
At the centre, Smurjan stands in front of Vigolas, between the captain and three hunters with chains, his third eye open and the faint scars of crimson script on his skin glowing:
The hunters scatter. Silence in the square. Merchants peek out from behind their stalls.
behind Smurjan, scratching his head.
The crew at a long table, eating like starving wolves. Bakasura's head pokes through the window, chewing an entire roast pig.
eyeing the board through the window.
swallowing, honest.
Starlight below. Vigolas sits alone at the bow beside the Kettle's bell, humming softly, the same three notes over and over, and then stopping.
frustrated, head against the bell.
Kompis sits down next to him with the wooden box in his lap. Mingus flops between them.
He thinks for a moment, then starts to hum. It's a different tune: slow, simple, a little off-key, a lullaby from somewhere cold.
listening.
After a beat, he starts humming it too, badly, a half-step behind.
humming a stranger's lullaby off-key under the stars, the dog asleep between them, the ship rocking. Behind them, at the mast, Smurjan has his eyes closed. Inside his chest, faintly, among the eighteen voices, one hums along.
looking down at the wooden box. His thumb strokes the string.
grinning, the old grin, the first time since the Arena.
laughing despite himself.
from the deck. On the battered board in the square, lit by one lantern, the names glow. A few drunk hunters still stand under it, pointing up at the strange line, ∞−1, 1 defeat, arguing.
As they watch, the little cold tag beside Vigolas's name flickers. Then, in small hard square letters that look exactly like the Arena's hand, a second line appears beneath it:
squinting at it.
small and dark on the starlit sea, with two men humming at its bow.