Chapter 6
The Kettle sails under a sky thick with stars. Everyone sleeps except two: Vigolas at the wheel, and Kompis sitting on a coil of rope, turning his file-shard over and over in his hands. Mingus watches him.
He stands up. Puts the shard in his pocket. Takes a breath like a man stepping off a cliff.
He walks to the wheel and stops behind Vigolas. He opens his mouth.
Vigolas ties the wheel off with a rope and turns around, leaning on it, arms crossed. Waiting.
holding up the shard so Vigolas can read it. KOMPIS · K-II · ASSET OF ARCHITECT THREE.
the hardest line he has ever said.
They are not alone. Marka is sitting up in her blanket. Drekk is standing in the hatch. Rougeina hangs upside down from the yard-arm by her knees. She already knew. Everyone heard.
Waves. The lantern creaks.
He crouches down and scratches Mingus behind the ears.
He laughs, a short broken sound, like something unlocking.
suddenly flat as glass. The waves stop. The wind stops. The sails hang dead.
A man is walking on the water toward the Kettle. He is tall and elegant, in a long coat the grey-white of Trisdel paperwork, wearing fine gloves. Thin golden threads hang from every one of his fingertips, trailing across the water behind him like the reins of a hundred invisible horses.
ORM · K-IV SHAPED · Scalelist #1,204 · the Reassigner
smiling politely, the way a debt collector smiles.
horrified. Orm's golden threads aren't his own. Every one is stolen: tied off from other people, other loyalties, other loves. He is wearing other people's bonds like jewellery. And he has no thread of his own at all.
Orm's gloved hand reaches into the air above the deck and pulls. The golden thread running from Kompis to Vigolas lifts out of nothing and lies across his palm like a harp string.
twisting the thread, untying it and re-knotting it to something else, something white with a Trisdel seal.
His eyes go flat and blank. He raises the rifle and aims it at Vigolas's head.
his finger tightening on it.
The ghost of Ivar rises out of the barrel, both old hands gripping the trigger mechanism from the inside, his moustache bristling.
The trigger won't move.
annoyed, like a clerk with a jammed stamp.
Orm twists another thread. Marka swings her anchor at Drekk's head with her eyes blank. Drekk dives; the anchor smashes the rail into splinters.
Rougeina blinks between them, Swapping with the swinging anchor itself. Marka finds herself holding nothing, and Rougeina has the anchor's weight wrapped around her own arm.
ignoring her completely, his gaze sliding down to the deck, to the golden dog standing between Kompis's legs.
Orm reaches for Mingus's threads, and there are none. His fingers close on empty air. For one heartbeat his polite face goes truly blank.
So he does it the crude way. He bends down and grabs Mingus by the scruff with a gloved hand, lifting him off the deck, away from Kompis.
Along the bottom edge of the panel, the golden pulse line of Mingus's heartbeat stretches thin as Mingus is pulled away, and starts to fray.
Mingus changes.
In Orm's grip, the golden dog blooms into a colossal sabre-toothed lion the size of a cart horse. His coat is the same warm retriever gold, a mane of gold flares like a sunrise, and two fangs like curved ivory scimitars catch the starlight. His eyes are exactly the same: kind, brown, Mingus's eyes.
He stands over Kompis with all four paws planted on the deck around him like the pillars of a temple, and ROARS.
The roar flattens the glassy sea into rings. Orm is hurled backwards across the water like a skipped stone.
The golden pulse line snaps back to full strength with Mingus's heart right above him. His blank eyes clear.
staring up at the golden lion. Drekk's spyglass falls out of his hand.
Orm rises out of the water, dripping, furious, every one of his stolen threads lashing like whips. He throws all of them at once, at every bond on the boat.
one hand flat against the lion's golden leg.
A hundred afterimages of Kompis, shot after shot, attempt after attempt, reading the threads, until he finds it: the one thread Orm is actually holding onto himself, the knot every stolen bond runs through.
One shot. Ivar fires happily. It severs the knot in Orm's fist. Every stolen thread snaps back to its owner at once: Marka's eyes clear, Drekk's clear, the white Trisdel seal-knot shatters, and across the sea, far away, a hundred other strangers' bonds go home.
his gloves smoking and empty, his rank plate flickering.
Vigolas lands on the water beside him (on a floating plank Rougeina Swapped there a heartbeat earlier) and punches him across the jaw with everything he has.
Orm skips across the sea a second time, crawls onto a wave and runs. A K-IV, beaten by a K-II, a K-III and a man the board can't count.
The great golden lion looks down at Kompis, then shrinks, light folding in on itself, back into a golden retriever. Tail wagging. He sneezes. He licks Kompis's whole face.
laughing and crying at once, arms around the dog.
On the deck where Orm stood floats a small communication shard, still glowing white, still connected to someone far away.
picking it up and holding it close to his mouth. His voice is steady.
He crushes the shard in his fist.
The shard on his desk goes dark with a crack. Baldr looks at it for a long moment, a little sad, the way a grandfather looks at a broken cup. Then he picks up his silver pen.
The great Scalelist board. One line climbs, number after number flickering upward, the crowd below turning to watch:
KOMPIS · K-II · Scalelist #48,112 → #9,880