Chapter 71

Bakasura moves across the Compost Fields like a landslide that has learned to walk: a hill of black hide and blazing amber veins, trailing torn roots. Ahead of him stands a mushroom forest, caps as tall as towers. He opens his jaws.

Half the forest is gone.

Röta, both arms flung out, roots whipping up out of the earth to snare him. He eats the roots too.

A pack of ten grey hounds at a Cleaner sled, gone in one bite. Bakasura shudders all over; flickers of dead grey run through his amber veins. He's eaten Null again. His eyes go wilder.

A Cleaner, swallowed whole, and spat straight back out, rolling across the soil in a sheet of slime, unharmed, screaming.

An iron salt-sled, crunched, sacks and all, and spat out at once in a white spray before it can reach his throat.

Mosscap hill, where a large slumbering shape lies in the soil furred with mushrooms: Trollmage. The jaws scoop him up with a mouthful of hillside. Gone.

A beat. Then Bakasura's whole enormous face screws up.

Trollmage shoots out of the maw in an arc and lands in a heap of slime, soil and mushrooms. The crow lands on top of him. He is still asleep.

slimed from ears to slippers, snoring peacefully, a fresh mushroom already sprouting from his eyebrow.

just behind Kali, grey and gaunt and caked in soil from the long climb up out of the garden in the night. Behind him on the ground lie only two shadows. He stares across the fields at the mountain of mouth.

Across the fields, a barefoot man walks straight into Bakasura's path with his hands open. The jaws come down on him.

A beat. The jaws work slowly, puzzled, like a man trying to taste water. Then they open, and Ingen walks out between the teeth, dripping, unhurt, picking a strand of slime off his inside-out pockets.

looking up the slope at the Marka on Mosscap hill. He keeps walking toward it.

From the east: a salt line racing up the slope, white fire hissing, and behind it Saltbrand riding his iron sled, the branding iron raised like a torch.

From the west: Cleaners with grappling hooks and grey hounds swarming up the hull.

From the north: Bakasura, turning his head. Toward the ship. Toward the smell of Ferdinand's bark and the golden shape of Ulla's arms. Home.

on the slope with a fresh scroll between them, reading at the deck.

Kompis, Mingus pressed to his side, the golden pulse line flaring along the bottom of the panel, ba-dum: Subtick. The world goes grey; colour snaps back; he fires once. The cub-bullet bounds off the rail, off a hound, off a hook, and bonks the scroll clean out of Four-Eleven's hands. The second half of the name never comes.

White fire reaches the hull at the bow, and the bark catches; the gold of Ulla's arms flickers. Hooks bite the rail and Cleaners haul themselves over. And the shadow of the maw falls across the whole ship.

Mingus beside him, everything coming at once from everywhere. His hand finds the dog's head.

Kind. Brown. Looking at his home on fire, his people boarded, the jaws coming down.

planted on the deck, his gold fur rising. Something golden is coming off him like heat off summer stone.

lip lifting. A sound comes out of him that no retriever has ever made.

Vigolas at the bow, palm out at the white fire eating the bark, a burning patch the size of a door.

Rougeina, mid-Swap with a flying grappling hook, blink, and the Cleaner climbing the rope finds himself nose to nose not with her but with the black panther.

Drekk swings his axe-haft along the rail and knocks three Cleaners off it like ninepins. With his other hand he hauls on the bell-rope, and the Kettle's bell rings out across the Fields. DONNNNNG.

Kompis, under the wing, fires Lilla Ulv again. The cub-bullet runs a bounding path through three scrolls in one shot.

The Manticore doesn't strike anyone. It stands: wings spread over its people, tail raised, the low thunder of a growl rolling out of its chest. Every Cleaner who looks at it lets go of the rail on his own.

The maw descends over the ship and stops, a metre above the golden feathers.

wild, amber, shot through with Null-grey.

looking straight up into them. Kind. Brown. Not afraid. The look Mingus gives everyone he loves, every single morning: I know you.

The wildness flickers. Something deep under it remembers being patted on the teeth.

Slowly, Bakasura lifts his jaws away from the ship. He turns his vast head past it, and his eyes catch the brightest thing in all the dry Fields: the white salt-fire, and beyond the hill, Saltbrand on his iron sled, blazing like a lamp.

watching the mountain of mouth turn toward him. He doesn't run. Something like a smile cracks across his salt.

The Manticore folds its wings. Golden light rolls off it like water off a shaking dog, and Mingus is a retriever again, padding back to Kompis with his tail going, as if nothing whatsoever has happened. He licks the blood off Kompis's upper lip.

On the slope below, Smurjan is already running after his hunger, Kali out of his shadow beside him, her one arm pumping.

breathing hard, wiping soot from his face with the back of his wrist. He reaches over his shoulder for his coat collar, the way he always does, and his hand closes on nothing. No weight. No clink.

While every eye on the deck was on the golden wings and the falling jaws, a barefoot man walked calmly up the gangplank, lifted a midnight-green coat off the captain's shoulders as he raised his hand to ERASE, and walked back down. Nobody looked at him. Nobody ever does.

Down the far slope, walking away unhurried across the dry black fields toward the root gate: Ingen. Over his arm, the midnight-green coat. With every step it clinks. Thirty-six shards.

glancing back over his shoulder, polite as ever.

at the rail, coatless. His grin is gone. Completely. That's how the crew knows it's bad.