Chapter 59
Everyone has frozen. Vigolas with a cup halfway to his mouth. Trollmage mid-yawn. Kompis on his feet. Smurjan half-risen, his third eye already opening.
at the top of the gangplank: arms wide, laughing, exactly her. The coat, the salt in the braids, the chipped front tooth, the anchor.
"MARKA": Well? Nobody's going to hug me? I came all the way back from the dead, you rude little—
He's let go of the wheel. He takes one step toward her. Then another. His hands are shaking.
third eye fully open, crimson. He sees it.
In grey diagram lines: the shape of Marka, huge and broad, drawn perfectly. But behind her eyes, where the lines should go back into a skull, there are two amber points of light, laughing. And behind her broad back, faint in the diagram, a fox's tail.
at Drekk's shoulder, very quietly, so only Drekk can hear.
He doesn't look away from "Marka". His jaw is tight. His eyes are wet.
A long moment. Inside him, among eighteen voices, one is very, very silent. He lowers his eye.
looking from Drekk to Smurjan to "Marka", understanding all of it. He puts his cup down.
in its iron brazier. "Marka" sits on a barrel, huge and laughing, a bowl of stew in her lap. The crew sits around her: Vigolas laughing too loudly, Kompis watchful, Trollmage confused, Rougeina faceless and absolutely rigid, a blade half-drawn in her lap. Smurjan sits very still. Drekk sits right beside "Marka".
telling a story with her hands.
"MARKA": —so Drekk says, "It's a perfectly good boat," and I say, "Drekk, it's a door. You've nailed a mast to a door." And he sails it anyway—
staring at her face in the firelight. He isn't laughing. He's just looking, memorising.
"MARKA": It floated for twenty minutes!
using his Lust-sight, seeing threads. From "Marka" there are no threads to anyone on the ship. Just a thin sad thread to Drekk, a borrowed one, not her own. And one thin thread from Drekk back to her: real, desperate.
leaning in to Drekk, gentle.
"MARKA": You know what I always said about you, crab.
very still.
grinning the big chipped-tooth grin.
"MARKA": "That man couldn't find the sea if you dropped him in it."
And it breaks out of him. A laugh, a real one, through tears, the first time he has laughed since he watched her hold the jaws open. Ugly and helpless and full of grief. He covers his face with both hands, laughing and sobbing at once.
lowering slowly from his face.
Smooth. Blank. Like an egg. Gone.
Her grin is gone. For one moment, in Marka's face, she looks almost sorry.
"MARKA" (softly, Marka's voice, not laughing): …Sorry, sailor.
The crew explodes off their seats: Rougeina first, faceless, blades out, Vigolas with lightning in both fists, Smurjan's script blazing crimson.
Rougeina Swaps behind "Marka" and her blades cut… Rougeina. Räva has switched faces: crimson hair, Rougeina's own green eyes. Rougeina's blades stop an inch from her own throat. She can't cut her own face.
Vigolas swings at her, and she switches to Drekk's face, freshly stolen. Vigolas pulls the punch. Can't hit Drekk.
Smurjan walks the Sightline, and she switches back to Marka. He freezes. Inside him, one voice of eighteen screams.
flickering face to face to face (Marka / Rougeina / Drekk / Marka), laughing in three voices at once.
Trollmage, who loves nobody whose face she's wearing, hits her full in the back with a stored spell. MACRO : SNEEZE = 12. Räva sneezes twelve times in a row and drops the anchor.
Mingus bites the seat of her trousers and hangs on. Räva yelps in four voices.
Behind the Marka, the starlight sea heaves. Something rises out of the Current, huge, streaming light like water off a whale's back: a planet, small, round and rust-red, its whole surface a maze. Walls of red stone, hedges of copper-coloured thorns, corridors spiralling into corridors, all of it lit by fox-fire lanterns, rising out of the sea beside them like a moon coming up.
On the Marka's rail, Räva, wearing Marka's face with Mingus still hanging off her trousers, tears free (leaving a strip of cloth in the dog's mouth), salutes the crew with two fingers, Marka's salute, and leaps across the gap onto the maze-planet's outermost wall.
She vanishes into the maze. The planet hangs in the sky beside the Marka, slowly rotating, enormous.
sitting proudly on the deck with a strip of trouser in his mouth, tail wagging.
Silence. Two faceless crew members now: Rougeina and Drekk. Drekk stands at the brazier, swaying, hands at his smooth face.
beside him, his voice wrecked.
DREKK can't answer. He has no mouth. He just puts one hand on Smurjan's shoulder, heavily, once. Not your fault. The first time Drekk has ever touched him.
Drekk walks to the wheel. Takes it in both hands. Faceless, he turns his head toward the maze-planet hanging in the sky.
With the toe of his boot, in the soot from the brazier, he writes two words.
FOLLOW HER.