Chapter 73

Saltbrand stands on his iron sled, hood thrown back, both arms spread, white salt-fire running up his cracked crust from his boots to his bald crown like a living torch. Above him rears the mountain of mouth.

lifting his burning arm toward the jaws like a man offering meat to a dog.

Smurjan and Kali arrive at a dead run. Kali leaps, hooks her one arm round a lower tooth, and hauls back with everything she has, heels kicking at the air.

below the jaws, his third eye blazing. A crimson Sightline draws itself to the hinge of the great jaw: the one point that would stop the bite. His palm is raised.

His palm doesn't move.

The jaws close on Saltbrand's burning arm, and on the white fire.

Silence.

Inside Bakasura. A slow black river runs under a sky full of tiny amber stars that drift like embers. On the far shore stands a little village of lamplit houses from three different centuries: a fisherman's hut, a stone cottage, a soldier's tent, a door built for a troll. People sit on the shore by small fires: the consumed. And among them, on an upturned boat beside the biggest fire, sits a very large woman with her back to us and an anchor on a chain lying at her feet.

tied up at the near bank, a lantern on its prow. Asleep on its deck, his flat ferryman's hat tipped over his eyes, an old man with a white beard down to his belt. Torbjörn.

Upstream, where the river begins in the dark, the sky cracks open, and white fire pours down out of it like a waterfall of light, hissing, falling into the river. Where it touches the water, the water turns white and dead. The whiteness starts to flow. Downstream. Toward the shore. Toward the lamps.

The consumed are on their feet, faces lit white: a young girl, a soldier with one boot, an old cook with a ladle in his belt. Nobody speaks.

pushing back his hat. He looks upstream at the falling fire. He isn't afraid. He lets out a small sigh, like a man who's been called out on a cold night and knew he would be.

Torbjörn stands up on his ferry, takes up his long pole, and unties the mooring rope. He glances over at the shore: the big woman by the fire has turned round now, half-risen, one huge hand reaching out toward him. Her face is lost in shadow.

lowering. Slowly. Then lifting again, to her brow: two fingers. A sailor's salute.

Torbjörn plants the pole and pushes off. Upstream. Toward the fire. Humming.

white to the shoulders now, salt in his beard like frost. He looks back over his shoulder, toward the shore.

Faces in lamplight. Nobody can answer him. The big woman's salute is still held.

smiling, his eyes going white.

Outside, the maw stands frozen with its jaws clamped tight, white smoke leaking out between the teeth. Kali still hangs from one tooth, silent now, staring at the smoke.

The wildness goes out of them all at once, like a lamp turned down. They're wet.

Bakasura spits.

Out onto the black soil tumbles Saltbrand, his arm gone to the shoulder, his crust cracked all over, the fire on him guttering. And beside him, rolling to a stop, something small, and white.

A figure of white salt, no bigger than a child: an old man kneeling, a beard down to his belt, a ferryman's hat, a pole across his knees. His face is peaceful. His eyes are closed.

dropping to his knees in front of it.

landing beside him, reaching out her one hand, and stopping a finger's width short. She knows salt now.

A few steps away, Saltbrand pushes himself up on his one remaining arm, his crust already beginning to close over the wounds. He reaches for the branding iron lying in the soil, raises it one-handed at the back of the kneeling man.

Blink, blink, blink: silver-rose afterimages across the field, and Rougeina lands beside the salt line with a huge, slimed, mushroom-furred, snoring shape dangling from her fist by the collar. Trollmage. She sets him down in the soil and kneels by his ear. And for once she doesn't poke him with a pommel. She says his name softly.

opening. Violet. Blazing. Three days of waiting in a realm where waiting grows mushrooms. Brighter than they have ever been.

sitting up, writing in the air in enormous violet letters:

MACRO : CLOUDBURST = 3 DAYS

The dry sky over the Compost Fields opens. Rain, sweet rain, three days of it in one moment, comes down like the sea falling out of the sky.

Every white salt line across the Fields drowns at once in a roar of hissing steam.

Saltbrand screams, a dry, cracked scream. Sweet water runs over him and his crust runs like wet sugar, his legs melting away beneath him to the knee, to the hip.

Thunder. On Kompis's hip, Lilla Ulv whimpers. Kompis, arriving at a run with Vigolas and Mingus, tucks the pistol inside his hoodie.

standing in the downpour over what's left of Saltbrand, who lies dissolving to the waist in the mud, the branding iron cold in a puddle beside him.

in the rain. Water running down his cracked cheeks. Rain filling his bone-dry, red-rimmed eyes. Filling them, and running over. For the first time in his life, the salt man has tears.

Saltbrand drags what's left of himself away through the rain on one arm, toward the gate. Nobody stops him.

in the rain. The rain is melting it. The beard first. Then the hat.

Kali throws herself over it, her one arm and her whole body a roof. Vigolas, arriving at a run, tears off his coat and holds it out over both of them, shards clinking, rain pouring off its hem. Smurjan cups his hands around what's left.

It doesn't matter. It's salt, and it's water. It runs out between their fingers into the soil.

A small white circle, a hand's-breadth wide, dead and white, in the middle of the black, wet, endlessly growing earth.

Röta comes through the rain and kneels at the white circle. She lays her long root-fingers on it.

Nothing. Not a shoot. Not a thread of mould. The circle stays white.

Rain on her face, beetles stirring in her hair.

Bakasura, huge and quiet now, lowers himself onto the soil beside Smurjan. Then he sinks: slowly, gently, back into Smurjan's shadow, like a tide coming home. Behind Smurjan on the wet earth there are three shadows again. Röta watches it happen. Nothing tied him. He came home on his own.

eyes shut, rain running down his face, listening to the inside of his own chest. The voices are back. He counts them, one by one. We can see his lips moving.