Chapter 63
The red corridors open into a round hollow at the planet's core, a great domed chamber of rust-red stone. No fox-fire lanterns; one shaft of starlight falls from a hole high above. And it is silent. No wind, no grinding walls. Nothing here moves.
regrouped: Vigolas in front, Kompis with Lilla Ulv at his hip and Mingus at his heel, little Ekorre leading the way, her ladle on her shoulder. Behind them, Smurjan, Trollmage, and the two faceless ones, Rougeina and Drekk, side by side.
looking up at the walls. His face goes slack.
From floor to dome, covering every inch of red stone like masks in a theatre, hang faces. Thousands of them. Real faces, soft and living, eyes closed. And every one of them is frozen in the middle of a laugh: mouths open, eyes crinkled, cheeks lifted. A thousand laughs, hanging in total silence.
an old fisherman roaring at some joke; a little girl with a gap in her teeth, giggling; a Trisdel Sentinel without his helmet, helplessly snorting. Each one taken at the exact moment it laughed.
very quiet.
Greed-sight flickers on by itself, and the whole wall blazes gold. Every face glows. It's the most valuable room he has ever stood in.
ROUGEINA (faceless, she can't speak, but she elbows him hard in the ribs)
Drekk walks forward, slowly, toward the far wall, the place of honour, where one face hangs alone in the shaft of starlight, larger than the rest. A big, weather-beaten woman's face, a chipped front tooth, salt in the braids that frame it, frozen in the biggest laugh on the whole wall.
faceless, stopped dead before it. His hand rises toward it, shaking.
an inch from Marka's laughing face.
from above, light and amused:
On a ledge halfway up the dome, sitting cross-legged among the faces with her bushy fox tail curled around her, is Räva, in her own body for once. Red hair, a fox's grin, laughing amber eyes. But the face she's wearing is Drekk's: weather-beaten, grumpy, a nose broken twice. It looks wrong on her and she knows it.
DREKK · K-I UNMARKED
in Drekk's face, gentle.
looking at Marka's face in the starlight.
His hand trembles in front of Marka's face. If he takes it down, it's gone. If he leaves it, a thief keeps it.
lowering. Slowly. He can't. He picks up a stone and scratches on the floor, hard, the letters jagged:
GIVE ME MINE BACK. KEEP HERS SAFE.
reading it. Something flickers across Drekk's borrowed face that isn't Drekk's expression at all.
stepping up, cracking his knuckles, grinning.
Räva drops from the ledge, tail streaming. She lands among them, and as she lands her face changes: Drekk's, then a laughing child's, then a Sentinel's, flick-flick-flick.
Räva fights like a fox in a henhouse.
Smurjan's palm comes at her, and she flicks into a little girl's face. He stops dead, an inch away.
Kompis raises Lilla Ulv, and she's wearing an old fisherman's face, the one with the crinkled eyes. He hesitates.
Rougeina Swaps behind her, and she's Rougeina's own face again, taken from the wall where she hung it. The faceless assassin freezes.
Each time, Räva laughs and slips away, tail flicking across their eyes.
mid-spin, delighted.
facing her, and he laughs: not a fake one, a real one, a huge bark of delight at being outfought.
eyes lighting up. A laugh. Her hand flashes out toward his face.
Vigolas's face goes smooth. Räva's face becomes his: the windswept hair, the emerald eyes, the chipped canine grin.
snapping over Räva's head as it always does:
VIGOLAS · ∞−1 · OFF THE LIST
The numerals glitch. Then they blink gold. Then they start to burn.
Räva, wearing Vigolas's face, screams. The ∞−1 plate is burning over her head like a brand. White-gold fire pours down from it over the borrowed face, over her red hair, crackling, because the board was never built to hold that number on anyone, and on someone who isn't him it burns. The faces on the walls around the den seem to flinch. Räva claws at her own cheeks.
She tears the face off and flings it. It hangs in the air for a beat, then flies home and settles back onto Vigolas, who stands there blinking, his face again, slightly singed at the eyebrows.
on her knees, her own fox face back (and for a moment we see it clearly: sharp, young, frightened), smoking slightly, panting.
rubbing his eyebrow.
stepping between them with his Codex raised, very serious.
staring at this enormous yawning troll in slippers, and despite everything a smile tugs at her mouth.
ears up, nose in the air, growling at the tunnel mouths around the den.
From the corridors leading into the silent hollow, smoke is pouring in, black and oily, and with it the glow of fire. The faces on the walls nearest the tunnels begin to curl in the heat.
Silhouetted against the flames: grey coats, hound-masks, chain-leashes. And at the front, his white beard lit orange, Hound-Master Brannvik, holding a torch.