Chapter 68
A hill of giant mushrooms in the rain: round doors cut into the stems, rope bridges slung from cap to cap, little glowing windows. Half of it is going grey, fading like ink in water. Small figures run down the slopes: the mushroom folk, knee-high people with caps for hats, moss for hair, and glowing lantern-fungus held up in their tiny hands.
A line of Cleaners in robes of printed black and white, grey hounds straining on chains. At the centre, two thin, pale, identical clerks hold one long scroll stretched between them. One reads the first half of each line; the other reads the second.
THE TWIN CLERKS · K-III TESTED · Scalelist #4,411 / #4,412
the smallest, staring at the lantern-fungus in its hands. The blue glow is turning grey.
Blink: a silver-rose afterimage, and Rougeina is behind Four-Eleven with one hand clamped over his mouth. His half of the line dies unheard. On the hill below, the grey stops spreading mid-wave.
still reading his own half, alone. Nothing greys. Without the other half, the line doesn't land.
Kompis, down on one knee on the slope, Mingus braced at his heel, fires Lilla Ulv. The cub-shaped bullet bounds up the ridge, off a rock, off a hound's skull, and bonks the scroll clean out of Four-Twelve's hands.
Kali erupts from Smurjan's shadow into the grey hound-pack, sickle flashing, mouth going faster than the blade.
Vigolas punches a Cleaner clean off the ridge in a burst of green light.
Smurjan walks through the line of Cleaners, unhurried, half an inch at a time, his open palm dropping them one by one. His left palm. He frowns at it mid-strike, and the strike lands anyway.
twisting out of Rougeina's grip, gasping, furious.
seeing Smurjan for the first time. Their faces harden, identically.
deadpan.
Behind the Cleaners, out of the rain, someone tall is walking up the ridge. Wherever her bare feet press the soil, green shoots up, blooms, and wilts again within a heartbeat. The grey hounds stop snarling. They whimper, flatten their ears, and lie down in the mud.
turning. Four-Twelve snatches the scroll back up out of the mud.
A woman well over two metres tall, wrapped in fungus and mould and wet black leaves like a gown. Mushrooms grow out of her collarbones. Beetles and pale moths nest in her long, dark, tangled hair. Her bare feet sink into the earth and root there. Her eyes are dark as wet soil, ringed pale like the gills under a mushroom's cap. Around her, every Cleaner is covering his nose. She smells like a forest floor after a month of rain.
RÖTA · FERDINAND-3 · the Rot-Mother · not counted
scroll stretched between them, reading fast, together:
Nothing happens. Not a leaf of her greys. A moth crawls out of her hair, looks at the Clerks, and crawls back in.
smiling. Her voice is low and warm and slow, like rain on a roof.
She touches the scroll with one long finger, more root than finger. The parchment softens, browns, crumbles, and out of the crumble a nettle shoots up, fast and green and stinging, right into the Clerks' hands.
She walks on past them. Behind them, the Cleaners' iron-shod sleds slump and soften under her gaze and rot into low hillocks of flowering moss. The Cleaners run, dragging their whining hounds, the Clerks shaking their stung hands and wailing, down the far side of the ridge into the rain.
Röta stands on the ridge in the rain, and behind her the grey half of Mosscap regrows in a rush: grey caps blushing back to colour, new mushrooms pushing up through the old, rope bridges tightening, every little window flickering back to warm blue light. The mushroom folk crowd round her feet in hundreds, careful to stay a pace away, never touching her.
In the foreground, small, the crew, mud to the knees. At the front, Smurjan, soil on his robes and moss in his braid, his face lifted to hers.
Röta looks down at him with an expression of enormous tenderness.
close to her now. Things start happening to them:
A fuzz of grey mould creeping up the sleeve of Kompis's hoodie.
Little green shoots sprouting from the cork soles of Vigolas's boots.
Mingus sneezes, enormously. HUPTCHOO!
Trollmage, who has sat down in the mud because standing is effort, has a small brown mushroom growing on his knee.
stepping back: three long steps, hands lifted up and away from them. Sad, and used to it.
three metres apart in the rain.
looking at Kali with a mother's patience and a creditor's eye.
wincing, talking fast to the crew before anyone can ask.
suddenly sheepish, holding up her stump in its red cloth.
touching the end of the stump, very gently, for one second.
pulling the stump back, her grin shaky.
Kompis and Kali stand together, watching Röta talk with Smurjan under the dripping caps.
lying flat on his back in the mud now, eyes shut, Codex on his belly, mushrooms sprouting along the hem of his robe. The crow on his chest has a tiny mushroom growing on its head and doesn't seem to mind.
turning to look at him, delighted.
her gaze going down the hill to the Marka, resting on the soil-sea below, her bark hull glowing faintly gold in the rain.
She leans down toward him, as near as she dares, not touching.
The biggest one, the shadow that's all mouth, slowly lifts its head from the ground. From somewhere deep inside it comes a sound like a landslide in a throat.