Chapter 66

The same night. The ship sails dark, one lantern lit by the mast. Behind her, a ring of slow ripples where Rävgrytet sank. Above her, across the whole sky, the Arbiter's sentence still hangs in hard square stars: ONE MATCH. OF MANY, with no full stop.

Smurjan sits against it, wide awake now, very still. The lantern throws his three shadows across the deck. His own. Kali's, one-armed. And Bakasura's, which covers the planks from rail to rail and is still growing, sliding up the mainsail like a tide coming up a beach.

The voice that comes out isn't his. Slow, deep, hollow, a huge round balloon with almost nothing in it.

The ship's compass, needle trembling, still pointing off the bow at the dark ring on the horizon. On the compass card under it: TRINITY.

pressing both palms flat to the deck as if he's holding a door shut from the inside. Sweat on his grey face. The crimson script-scars on his forearms flare, one line at a time.

Its edges lift off the planks. The flat black shape becomes thick, then deep, then solid, rising.

The jaws come down on the row of water casks lashed along the starboard rail.

Casks, lashings, and two metres of rail are simply gone. Water sheets across the deck.

Mingus is up first, four legs braced, barking at the sky.

The jaws swing toward it, dripping. Inside the coil, Trollmage snores on. The crow on his belly opens one eye, sees what's coming, and screams.

Blink: a silver-rose afterimage by the rail, and Rougeina is crouched beside the coil (a belaying pin clatters to the deck where she was).

She grabs Trollmage by the collar.

Blink: both of them are at the foot of the mainmast. Behind them the jaws close on the rope coil. KRUNCH. A perfectly round hole in the deck-clutter where it was.

dangling from Rougeina's fist, still asleep, the crow clinging to his hair.

Kali bursts out of the shadow, red braid whipping, one arm. She doesn't strike. She throws herself at the maw, hooks her one arm around a lower tooth like a pillar, and hauls back with her whole weight, heels skidding on the wet deck.

Vigolas vaults onto the capstan, green lightning crawling over his knuckles, fist cocked, and stops. His eyes ring with gold: Greed-sight. In it, the maw glows like a bonfire, worth everything to someone. He lowers the fist.

Kompis reaches Smurjan, Mingus pressed against his leg. Smurjan is on his knees now, both fists against his own chest, his white braid stuck to his face with sweat.

Kompis's eyes film gold. From Smurjan's chest run eighteen gold threads, every one of them climbing up into the maw above, pulled taut and trembling like mooring lines in a storm.

The maw swings away from the rail, with Kali still dangling from its tooth and shrieking, and turns toward the bow. Toward the Kettle's bell, gleaming on its post. And below the bell, on the hull, the long scar of dead white bark with the shape of Ulla's arms and hands glowing gold inside it.

seeing where it's going.

Drekk is already moving. He lets go of the wheel, walks the length of the deck without hurrying, and stops between the jaws and the bell, his back to the bell. The woven mask of the Kettle's old bell-rope is his face now: two dark eyeholes, a stern rope brow. He spreads his arms wide, the way someone once spread hers across a pair of jaws in a silent dawn.

a metre above Drekk's masked head. Teeth like broken pillars. Drool steaming in the lantern light. Behind them, the hot dark of a throat that goes down forever.

small and high and wild, looking down at the masked man.

Old rope, salt-stiff, dark with thirty years of hands. The rope that rang the Kettle's bell. Marka's bell, on Marka's boat, before there was a ship that bore her name.

The wild amber ring falters. Something underneath it. Recognition. Grief.

And from inside it, under the roar of the hunger, a new sound. An old man's voice: low, slow, a little off-key, humming to the rhythm of oars. His balloon is soft and round, with a small ripple drawn under each note.

All across the deck the crew goes still. Vigolas on the capstan. Rougeina at the mast with Trollmage. Kompis with the dog. Even Kali, hanging from the tooth, stops kicking.

The great jaws close, gently, on nothing. The maw sinks. Down and down, like a tide going out, back into the shadow at Smurjan's knees. Kali drops onto the deck on her backside with a thump.

A bite out of the starboard rail. No water casks. A round hole where the rope coil was. Water sloshing. Mingus going from person to person, sniffing each one in turn, checking them.

on his knees in front of Drekk, head bowed to the deck. His three shadows lie flat behind him like three people prostrated.

He looks down at the kneeling man for a long moment through the eyeholes of the mask. Then he lowers his arms.

The Marka sails on, patched with spare planks. Smurjan sits at the stern rail, legs crossed, eyes closed, meditating over the starlight. Kompis sits down beside him with two tin cups of something hot. Mingus flops between them.

eyes still closed.

A wide, slow river under a grey sky. A flat-bottomed ferry with a lantern on its prow. Poling it across, an old man with a white beard down to his belt and a ferryman's flat hat. On the ferry, huddled: a gaunt young grey-skinned figure with three shadows, starving, all ribs.

The old ferryman looking up at a vast mouth opening over him. He isn't afraid. He's smiling, sad and kind, holding out one open hand, the way you'd hold it out to a frightened dog.

sitting on the stern rail behind them, half out of the shadow, swinging her feet. Quieter than we've ever seen her.

Vigolas drops down beside them out of the rigging, his tangle of rope still round his wrist. Serious.

very quietly, for her.

Eighteen gold threads, all tied to one heart. And a nineteenth that wasn't there last night. It leaves Smurjan's chest and goes down: through the deck, through the hull, into the Current, off toward the horizon where the needle points. It isn't gold. It's brown, and fibrous, and it branches.

Far ahead, between two drifting islands, an arch rises out of the starlight like a bridge made of black earth, wider than any island, its far end plunging back into the Current: a root, of a tree too big to see.