Chapter 65
The red maze-planet hangs over the Marka. Its outer walls have stopped moving. No one is laughing on it now; the fox is gone, the Hounds are gone, and the Kits have scattered into hiding. The planet is sinking, slowly, back into the starlight like a moon going down.
flipping his Codex, alarmed.
The Marka's anchor-chain, hooked over the outer maze wall, pulls taut. The ship tilts. The bow dips toward the starlight sea as the planet drags it down.
at the rail.
at the wheel, faceless. Smooth skin where his eyes should be. He can still see, somehow, the way Rougeina could. But he raises his cracked spyglass out of thirty years' habit, and there's no eye to put it to. It clacks against smooth skin.
on the spokes, hesitating. A navigator who has always read the sea through a glass.
coming up beside him.
A long beat. Then he lets go of the idea of seeing. His hands go loose on the wheel, the way you hold something alive.
The chain drags the Marka down toward the sinking planet's shadow. Starlight water boils.
Drekk turns the wheel by feel: the shiver in the spokes, the lean of the deck under his boots, the hum of the hull.
Smurjan walks the Sightline up the anchor-chain and strikes its hook off the maze wall with one open palm. The chain snaps free and whips back aboard.
Trollmage, with nothing banked, throws a pocket Rune of Wind onto the mainsail. Small. It's enough.
Rougeina Swaps up to the crow's nest and points the gap between two sinking walls. Drekk can't see where she's pointing. He feels her land on the mast, and turns toward the weight.
The Marka shoots out between two collapsing red walls as Rävgrytet slides under the Current behind it, swallowed by starlight with a long sigh, gone.
calm. Behind them, a ring of slow ripples where a planet used to be.
hands still on the wheel, shaking. Faceless, but his shoulders say everything.
clapping him on the back.
The crew recovers. Kompis is holding Ivar's box and talking quietly to Lilla Ulv, who's asleep in her holster. Mingus, a retriever again, is curled on Kompis's feet. A fist-sized white-and-gold cube, the Hound-ship, sits on a barrel beside Vigolas, who is practising a bowline, badly.
his rope a hopeless tangle.
Drekk sits alone with a coil of old rope in his lap: frayed, dark with age and salt. The Kettle's bell-rope, the rope that used to ring the bell on his first boat, the boat that sank in the fjord with everything he loved aboard.
unpicking the old rope into strands and beginning to weave. Slowly, carefully. Over, under, over.
Drekk weaving. The stars wheel overhead.
Smurjan sitting nearby, saying nothing, holding the lantern steady so he can see.
Bakasura's small mournful eyes, rising for a moment from Smurjan's shadow, watching the faceless man. Then sinking away, ashamed.
Drekk tying off the last strand.
a mask, woven from the Kettle's bell-rope. A plain oval, two eyeholes, a stern rope-brow, salt-dark and sea-worn. It looks like Drekk: grumpy and stubborn and made of something that has already survived one shipwreck.
Dawn on the Current. A gold seam opens along the horizon. At the Marka's wheel stands Drekk, wearing the bell-rope mask, the Kettle's old rope woven into a face, eyeholes dark, salt crusted at the edges like spray. He has both hands on the spokes. Behind him on the bow, the Kettle's bell gleams in the first light, and the rope that used to ring it is now his face.
Around him the whole crew is waking and seeing it. Nobody laughs. Kompis puts a hand on his heart. Vigolas takes off his hat (he doesn't wear a hat; he takes off an imaginary one).
Above it all, still hanging in the dawn sky, the Arbiter's sentence: ONE MATCH. OF MANY
through the mask, his voice muffled. His voice. The mask gives him a mouth, of a sort.
Rougeina sits alone, her face her own again, knees drawn up. In her hand, a scrap of paper. On it, in her careful handwriting, a single name that nobody else on the ship could read and know: STILLMARK.
very quietly, to the name.
Vigolas climbs up into the crow's nest, uninvited, and sits beside her, squashed. He sees the paper. He doesn't look at it.
They sit together in the crow's nest, saying nothing, while the stars wheel.
Everyone asleep. Smurjan sits against the mast, eyes closed. The lantern beside him throws his shadows across the planks as always: three.
His own, Kali's (one-armed)… and Bakasura's. Bakasura's shadow is bigger than his own. Much bigger. It stretches across the whole deck, all mouth, and the edges of it are moving, chewing slowly on nothing.
his eyes opening, grey-blue, frightened. His lips move, and the voice that comes out isn't his, slow and deep and hollow:
By the wheel, the Marka's sea-compass spins, then stops dead, needle trembling, pointing off the bow at a place on the horizon where the starlight folds into a dark ring, a realm-gate. Above the needle, in the old engraved letters of the compass card, the direction it has never pointed before:
TRINITY.