Chapter 76
The grey plate hangs over the bow, blank and smooth as an old coin. The crew stands around it the way people stand in a doorway when they've forgotten why they came into the room.
a hand pressed to his head, groping for it.
pale. The name is going out of her like a tide going out. She grabs it before it's gone, and says it out loud.
not stopping, her voice low and fierce.
scrabbling his Codex open on his knee, writing in the margin with a stub of charcoal: S-M-U-R-J-A-N. As he watches, the letters go grey and soft and fade. He writes it again underneath. And again. And again.
on his knees beside the plate, Mingus pressed hard against his side, both hands closed round something we can barely see: a gold thread as thin as a hair, running over the rail into nothing.
He's lost the name. He's losing the face. He grabs the grey plate with both hands anyway.
He steps up beside the captain and lays one hand flat on the grey plate, heavily, the way he once laid it on a grey man's shoulder by a brazier.
Silence. Rain falling indoors. Smurjan lies face-down on the cracked white tiles, one step from Sigvat, his palm still reaching. The grey dead in the tiers are perfectly still. Sigvat stands over him, looking down.
eyes open, grey, still. Nothing in them.
under its amber stars. The lamps on the far shore. The ferry crossing at the narrows is empty. The place where an old man used to sit and hum has nobody in it.
out of the shadow, on her knees on the tiles beside the body, shaking him with her one hand, screaming at him.
lowered to the tiles beside him, nudging his shoulder with one enormous lip, the way a dog nudges a man who won't wake.
under Kali's hand. Silent. His own heart doesn't move.
And then, faint, underneath it: ba-dum, in hunger-red. And slower, deeper, amber: ba………dum.
freezing, her hand flat on his chest, feeling them.
the understanding lighting her whole face like a fire catching.
hearing it. He looks down at the one-armed woman and the colossal maw, both uncounted, both alive.
on the grey plate. His shoulders shaking. Rain running off the bell-rope mask. His voice through the rope, muffled and breaking:
He can't finish it.
on the tiles. And from inside his own chest, under Kali's hand, from among the voices, comes a voice heard once in a saga: warm, impatient, laughing even now. Unmistakable.
Smurjan rises from the cracked white floor. Grey from head to foot. His name gone from him. His own heart silent.
And behind him, holding him up, his family: Bakasura's colossal lower jaw beneath his back, lifting him like a hand; Kali's one hand fisted in his collar, hauling; and around him, faint as breath on glass, sixteen ghostly figures from a lamplit shore, humming an old ferryman's crossing song. In his chest, two hearts glow, hunger-red and amber, beating for three.
His third eye opens, crimson-rimmed, and a crimson line burns across the whole white room, straight to the scar on the dead man's chest.
In the tiers all around, every one of the grey dead is on his feet.
standing. He opens his mouth, and reaches in the dark for the stair that hasn't been there for days. His foot finds it.
recovering, raising his hand, reading fast, clear and dry:
Nothing happens. The words come out of Sigvat's mouth, drift across the room, and fall off Smurjan like ash off a coat, and lie grey on the floor.
staring.
One step. The last step. Sigvat reads at the floor, "The floor before—", but Smurjan is already there.
The same open palm. The same strike. Into the same thin crimson scar, along the same perfect line it drew once across the snow of a ridge, a whole saga ago: a single crimson line ruled across the entire panel.
Sigvat falls backward. And this time, Smurjan catches him: one arm behind his shoulders. He doesn't let him hit the floor.
in his arms, young, looking up at him with something like relief.
taking off his glassless spectacles, folding them neatly, tucking them into his robe.
Sigvat stands, walks back up into the tiers, and sits down in the front row. The dead don't speak here. He lifts one hand, open, palm out. Not a salute. A clerk's gesture, at the end of a long day: done.
Across the white room, hard square letters write themselves, bright as struck metal:
THE MATCH DECIDES.
SMURJAN.
His name is written back into him, not in the Order's ink but in the Arena's hard square letters, glowing white across his skin over the crimson script. And beneath it, his own heart starts: …ba-dum. A half-beat behind the other two. ba-dum ba-dum… ba-dum.
Colour floods back into it from the centre outward. The letters rewrite themselves, and not in the old script: in the Arena's hard square ones.
SMURJAN · K-IV SHAPED · Scalelist #1,602 · Wrath
RECORD: CALLED 2 · WON 2
staring at his Codex margin: forty-one copies of the same name, and every one of them black and solid again.
The plate flares, and Smurjan drops onto the deck out of nowhere, on one knee, grey and soaked, mushrooms on his shoulders, moss on his cheek. Drekk's hand, which was on the plate, is on his shoulder.
looking up at the masked navigator.
A long beat behind the bell-rope mask. His hand tightens on the shoulder.
The crew piles on. Kali out of the shadow hugging everyone she can reach with one arm. Vigolas hauling Smurjan to his feet by the collar. Kompis laughing with a bleeding nose. Mingus licking every face in turn. Trollmage asleep again, instantly, on top of the pile. Rougeina standing just apart from it, saying the name one more time under her breath, to be sure.
And Kali, in the middle of it all, puts her hand flat on Smurjan's chest. Listens. Hears the third heart, a half-beat behind the other two. Says nothing.
The Marka slides down off Mosscap hill onto the soil-sea, under a sky that's only drizzling now, heading for the root gate. On the hillside behind her: the ring of white flowers round the little white circle where nothing grows. Röta stands beside it, three steps back, the mushroom folk around her feet, watching them go. On a far hill, small, a barefoot man with his pockets inside out lifts one hand.
A market island in the Shallows. On the battered Scalelist board on its pole, beneath the old familiar columns, with a sound like a bell struck once, a new column writes itself. Its header: THE DEAD.
A troll hall in Brygdar. A huge old troll drops his tankard. Again.
A Trisdel fortress. Sentinels on the wall stare up at their board, where numbers race down the new column faster than anyone can read.
Glasheim, an office of white stone. Aldhrun Vesparid on his feet behind his desk, his pen rolling off the edge of it, staring out of the window at the city's great board.
The Witness Wood. Fenna, milk-pale eyes, smiling at nothing.
A sled-ship sliding away through a gate. The Twin Clerks at the rail, staring at the board in the glass of a lectern-book. One line in the new column they know by heart. Four-Eleven takes off his hat. Four-Twelve takes off his.
The Marka bursts out of the root gate into the starlight of the Current, the Shallows spread out before her, islands drifting like lanterns. Across the whole sky, the Arbiter's sentence still hangs, ONE MATCH. OF MANY, without its full stop. On the nearest drifting island, a Scalelist board on a pole, and on it the new column, glowing, its numbers still climbing.
at the bow, Mingus between them, the Kettle's bell above them, all three looking at the board.
The column THE DEAD, numbers falling down it like rain, thousands upon thousands of lines, and among them one we can read:
SIGVAT · K-IV SHAPED · THE DEAD · #1,877