Chapter 67
Up close it's beyond scale: a root of Ferdinand, wider than a mountain, rising out of the Current in a vast arch and plunging back in a league away. Between the arch's legs, filling it, falls a curtain of black soil, pouring endlessly from the root's underside like a waterfall, steaming, roaring softly. The starlight sea pours into it.
the Marka sliding toward the curtain. Trollmage sniffs the air, ears lifting.
at the wheel, mask on, hands loose on the spokes.
out on the bowsprit, one hand on the Kettle's bell, hair whipping, grinning straight into the falling earth.
at the mast, his three shadows long behind him.
The Marka plunges into the curtain of soil. Black earth thunders onto the deck, onto the sails, onto everyone.
A tunnel of roots, black and endless. The only light is the Marka herself: Ferdinand's bark hull glowing a faint, warm gold in the dark, and brightest of all the shape of Ulla's arms on her flank. Around her, roots as thick as towers, pale as bone, hang and twist and coil. They're moving. Slowly. Turning toward the light.
Roots lash out of the dark and wrap the hull. Not striking. Holding, the way hands close on something lost and found again. Wherever they touch, the bark glows brighter, as if it's answering. The whole ship groans and slows.
his third eye open, grey-blue rimmed in crimson, reading the roots.
Rougeina Swaps up into the root-dark, blink, blink, blink, eight blades flashing silver-rose afterimages across the gloom, cutting holds loose.
Kompis draws Lilla Ulv, Mingus braced at his heel. The cub-bullet bounds from root to root to root like a puppy on a staircase. bonk. bonk. bonk. Roots recoil.
Kali erupts from the shadow with her black-glass sickle, hacking one-armed.
Drekk, at the wheel, leans his whole weight against a root wrapped round the spokes, mask to the wood.
A root as thick as the mainmast coils round the bow, crushing toward the bell. Vigolas, on the bowsprit, puts out one open palm.
The root is wiped from where it stands: a clean round hole in the dark, the coils on either side of it twitching. The Marka lurches forward, free.
Something is happening only to him. Thin roots, dozens of them, hair-fine and pale, have come curling up over the rail and are winding round his ankles, his wrists, the end of his white braid. Gently. Lovingly.
looking down at them. He doesn't fight. He knows them. His voice is very quiet.
They pull. In one heartbeat Smurjan is yanked over the rail into the black wall of the tunnel, into the soil itself, and the soil closes over him like water.
Kompis at the rail, eyes gold. The threads from the crew to Smurjan run straight down into the black earth of the tunnel wall: down, and down, and down, into a depth that has no bottom.
Ahead, grey light. The Marka bursts out of the far end of the root tunnel.
The Marka slides out of the gate and onto soil. A sea of black loam rolls away to the horizon in slow, heavy waves, steaming. Rain falls from a low grey sky and keeps falling, soft and endless. Mushroom forests stand on the swells like islands: white caps, brown caps, some taller than masts, some glowing a faint blue from underneath. Fallen trees furred green with moss. Tiny lights twinkle in the forests, the windows of small villages. Far, far away, a single colossal root rises out of the earth into the clouds like a pillar holding up the sky.
The Marka's bark hull cuts a furrow through the loam, throwing wet black earth up over her bow like spray. The crew lines the rail, filthy with soil, staring. And there is a gap among them, where a tall grey man with a white braid should be.
Kompis kneels at the stern rail, one hand flat on the wood, eyes gold, following the threads down into the soil under the hull. The others stand around him, dripping.
rain running off the end of his droopy ears.
The Marka ploughing slowly across the soil-sea through the rain. Drekk at the wheel. The crew sitting along the stern, waiting, not talking. Mingus lies with his chin on the rail, staring at the black earth sliding past the hull, ears down.
His ears come up. His tail moves once. A low, questioning sound.
The soil beside the hull heaves. A grey hand punches up out of the earth and grabs the bottom of the rail.
Smurjan hauls himself up out of the ground and over the rail onto the deck, streaming black loam from head to foot, robes torn, coughing up soil. Alive. Behind him, as he straightens, his three shadows unfold across the planks. Kali's first, then the huge one.
The crew rushes him. He sways. Drekk tosses him a rope from the rigging to steady himself on—
—and Smurjan catches it with his left hand.
staring at his own left hand wrapped round the rope. He has always been right-handed. His right hand hangs at his side, a little clumsy, as if it belongs to someone else.
Woven into it now, growing out of it near the root, is a fine green strand of living moss. And at the end of the strand, the size of a fingernail, a tiny white mushroom.
wiping soil from his face, very calm and very tired.
The brown root-thread from Smurjan's chest is thicker now: braided, pulsing slowly, running down through the deck into the soil like a taproot.
A hill of giant mushrooms rises out of the soil-sea: round doors in their stems, rope bridges between the caps, tiny glowing windows. A village. Over the top of the hill, the falling rain is turning grey, colourless, like ink fading out of water.
all of them turning their heads at once, listening. Across the fields, through the rain, two dry voices drift, droning, steady as clocks. One starts each line and the other finishes it.
His third eye opens, crimson-rimmed. Soil still on his face. Moss in his braid.