Chapter 75
Rain falling indoors. Sigvat standing on the white tiles with the two halves of his scroll; Smurjan kneeling in chains at the centre, thirty metres between them. The grey dead watching from the tiers.
They crack, and fall away, and clatter on the tiles. The memory has changed.
pushing the glassless spectacles up his nose with one ink-stained finger. His hair is thick and dark. His hands are young.
getting to his feet.
opening, crimson-rimmed. A crimson line draws itself across the whole white room, straight to Sigvat's chest, to the thin crimson scar where the first strike passed.
He walks it. Step. Step. Unhurried and perfect, the way he always walks it.
not even glancing down at the scroll.
The white tiles in front of Smurjan's next step go grey, and then they are gone: a hole of black wet soil. His foot comes down on nothing, and he drops into it to the waist.
Smurjan hauls himself out and steps forward.
Gone. He drops again.
He jumps the gap.
Gone before he lands.
He catches the edge of a hole with his left hand, his strange new left hand, and climbs.
calm as a clock.
Out of the shadow behind Sigvat, Kali bursts up: Shadow-Lash. Her black-glass sickle sweeps once and slices both halves of the scroll out of his hands. Paper scatters in the rain.
watching the paper fall without interest.
Bakasura rises out of Smurjan's shadow, jaws open over the dead man. One bite. One heartbeat. Gone.
And then the jaws stop.
looking down at the clerk.
staring up at him, then getting it.
The single plate hangs above the bow, pulsing. Everyone is gathered around it. Drekk stands beside it, arms folded, rain running off the bell-rope mask.
His thread to Smurjan runs over the rail and simply ends, a metre past the ship, as if the world stops there.
sitting on a fresh coil of rope, uncharacteristically quiet. Mingus lies against the base of the hanging plate, chin on his paws.
Kali leaps onto Sigvat's back and clamps her one hand over his mouth.
Sigvat, a dead man, strong the way dead things are strong, peels her hand off his face and throws her across the tiles. Then, clearly:
Nothing happens. Not a flicker of grey.
frowning. The first expression we've seen on him.
turning his head slowly toward Smurjan, with new attention.
scrambling up, her eyes going wide as she understands.
filling the panel, taking the biggest breath of her whole life.
The white room becomes a storm of noise.
From Sigvat's mouth, his dry decree-words stream out like ribbons of printed black-and-white paper, greying every tile and drop of rain they brush. And crashing into them, smothering them before they can land: a flood of Kali's jagged red balloons, overlapping, overflowing the panel, and from the shadow, Bakasura's maw thrown open in a ROAR, a wall of amber sound with no words in it at all.
Through the middle of it, along a perfect crimson line, Smurjan walks: step, step, step, toward the dead man, while the floor greys and steadies and greys again under him. In the tiers all around, the grey dead are leaning forward.
Sigvat stops trying to shout over them. He simply waits, patient, while Smurjan comes on along the line: twenty metres. Fifteen.
red-faced, voice cracking, still going.
(a gasp)
his roar trailing off into a rasp. One action in a heartbeat is all he's ever had, and he's spent a hundred of them roaring.
For one beat, everyone is out of breath at the same moment. The rain falls. Nothing else makes a sound.
into the silence, clear and dry:
Smurjan runs. For the first time in any fight he has ever fought, he runs, flat out, along the crimson line. Ten metres. Five.
At its edges, the letters are going grey, like paper left out in the sun. Drekk unfolds his arms and steps closer.
His thread to Smurjan thinning, fraying, gold going pale.
two metres away, his palm drawn back, the Sightline blazing on the crimson scar.
looking him in the eye. Almost kind.
His heart. One last beat: ba—
Then nothing. The crimson script across his skin goes grey, line by line.
Smurjan falls forward, one step from Sigvat, his open palm a hand's width from the scar, and lies still on the cracked white tiles in the rain.
The hanging plate, entirely grey now, its letters worn smooth like an old coin. The crew stands around it. Trollmage looks up at it, puzzled, a little sad, and doesn't know why.