Chapter 64
Fire pours in from every tunnel mouth. The faces on the walls nearest the flames are curling, blistering, laughs melting. The silent hollow is filling with smoke.
backs together in the centre, coughing. Ekorre clings to Kompis's hoodie.
Hounds pour in through the smoke, grille-masks hissing, chain-leashes swinging. Rank-and-file plates flicker over them by the dozen: HOUND · K-II MARKED.
striding in behind them, torch in hand, the only unmasked face. Old, white-bearded, eyes like a man who stopped sleeping a long time ago.
The crew fights in the smoke:
Smurjan walks the Sightline through three Hounds.
Trollmage, out of waiting, hits a Hound with his Codex.
Drekk swings his axe, faceless and furious.
Vigolas punches green lightning through a wall of chains.
fighting at the edge of it with a stolen chain, not with the crew and not against them, looking past everyone at the burning tunnel that leads to the Kits.
She makes a decision. Her tail goes flat.
She runs into the fire, into the burning tunnel toward the hideout.
faceless, watching her go. For one beat she does nothing. Then she follows, Swapping with a falling ember, blink, into the flames after her.
With two fewer fighters, the Hounds press in. Ten of them break off toward one target: Kompis.
Ten chains of white Ledger-light whip out together and wrap Kompis: wrists, ankles, chest, throat. They burn where they touch, a cold white fire.
wrapped in light, on his knees, being dragged across the stone toward the Hounds. He can't reach the pistol. Lilla Ulv whimpers in its holster.
along the bottom of the panel, stuttering as the chains pull him away from the dog. ba-dum…… ba……
He's planted in front of the Hounds, teeth in one of the chains, pulling with everything he's got, eighty pounds of dog against ten men. He's losing. The chain drags him across the floor.
Kind. Brown. Looking at his person being taken away. And at the very edges of his fur, the gold begins to glow.
Mingus wakes.
Out of the smoke rises a golden sabre-toothed lion the size of a cart horse: shoulders like a hill, a mane of fire-gold, and two great fangs like ivory scimitars, each as long as a man's arm. His coat is the same warm retriever gold and his eyes are the same kind brown, and furious.
He bites through the ten chains of Ledger-light in a single snap, and they explode into white sparks across the den. Hounds are thrown off their feet like dolls. Kompis falls free onto the stone, and the great golden lion stands over him with one paw on either side of his person, ROARING into the smoke so loudly the faces on the walls shake.
thrown against the wall, torch gone, staring up at the lion. For the first time in twenty years, something has frightened him.
on his back under the lion, laughing and coughing, reaching up to touch the golden mane.
getting to one knee under the shelter of the lion's chest. The golden pulse line roars back along the panel border, strong, ba-DUM, ba-DUM. He draws Lilla Ulv.
going grey. Subtick.
Inside Subtick: Brannvik getting up, a dozen Hounds regrouping, and a thousand versions of one shot playing out in faint gold lines, ricocheting off walls, off faces, off the lion's fangs. Kompis finds the one. The collar. The white collar at Brannvik's throat, the Ledger-link that gives every Hound its nose.
Colour snaps back. He fires once. The bullet is a running wolf cub of light that bounds off the den wall, off the ceiling, off a curling stone face, and bonks straight through Brannvik's white collar, which shatters like ice.
clutching his throat. The collar's pieces fall away. He breathes in, sharply, through his nose.
quietly, smoke curling from the pistol.
the planet's surface. The crew bursts out of a tunnel into the open air of Rävgrytet. The Hounds are routed and scattering for their white ship, anchored on the maze wall with chains of Ledger-light.
staring at the Hound-ship, eyes narrowing. It's big, far bigger than him. Bigger than anything he's folded since the mountain.
Vigolas raises his open hand at the empty Hound-ship as the last Hounds tumble off it.
The ship folds: masts, hull and hound-head prow crumple inward along green creases of light, smaller and smaller, until a cube the size of a fist, white and gold, drops into his palm.
holding it. Something passes over his face. A flicker. A blank.
looking down at the rope coiled at his belt, the rope he's tied ten thousand times. He turns it in his hands. He doesn't know how.
faceless. A long beat. Then he takes the rope out of Vigolas's hands and, very slowly, ties a bowline, so the captain can watch.
Out of the fire comes Rougeina, faceless, smoke-black, Swapping backward in short blinks with burning beams, clearing a path. Behind her, Räva, carrying two small Kits under her arms and herding five more ahead, coughing, singed, her tail on fire at the tip. Little Ekorre runs to them, screaming names.
setting the children down, slapping out her tail, then turning to look at Rougeina, the faceless assassin who just walked into a fire for children she'd never met.
reaching into her coat. She takes out a face, folded like a silk handkerchief: crimson hair, green eyes.
She presses it gently against Rougeina's blank face. It settles. Rougeina's face is back, her real one, and on it, wet with soot, an expression she doesn't know what to do with.
But Räva is already running, tail streaming, Kits scattering behind her into the maze, and as she vaults the outer wall she looks back once, wearing Drekk's face, and lifts two fingers to her brow, Marka's salute.