Chapter 77
Three of everything: three suns rising in a void-black sky, three roads into a square, a house with three doors. The Marka is moored at a black stone quay beyond the rooftops.
A cracked Scalelist board on a pole, the familiar columns of names and numbers. A crowd of Trinity villagers stands staring at it in silence.
On its right-hand edge, where the stone was blank yesterday, a new column has carved itself in hard square letters. Its heading reads: THE DEAD.
Names and numbers, like any other ranking: SIGVAT · K-IV SHAPED · THE DEAD · #1,877 and OLD TORBJÖRN · #— and thousands more. And the numbers are moving, slowly, the way the living ones do after a fight.
walking into the square: Vigolas yawning, Drekk in his bell-rope mask, Kompis with Mingus, Rougeina on a rooftop, Trollmage asleep on his feet, and Smurjan, freshly back from the Arena, his skin a shade greyer, walking a half-step slower than he used to.
looking at the board. He reaches out and touches one name in the Dead column: OLD TORBJÖRN. His hand stays there.
rising out of his shadow, one-armed, unusually quiet.
squinting at the column.
Repairs after the Compost Fields: Drekk splicing rigging by feel, Rougeina sharpening her eight blades in order, Trollmage asleep in a coil of rope banking heartbeats, Vigolas practising a bowline (still badly).
at the binnacle by the wheel, polishing the brass dome over the ship's compass with his sleeve, Mingus sitting on his feet.
In the curved, polished brass, Kompis's reflection: hood, beard, lake-weed. Then the reflection isn't his.
A woman's face looks out of it: silver-white hair in a high crown braid, beautiful, ageless. As we watch, it changes: an old man, a girl, a soldier, a stranger, a stranger, all in the same frame, never settling.
freezing, the cloth in his hand.
settling for a moment on the silver-haired woman. She smiles kindly, the way a teacher smiles at a mistake.
A slender hand reaches out of the brass: real fingers, cool and silver-ringed, holding a quill of clear crystal. The quill's tip touches the inside of Kompis's left wrist, where his golden sin-mark is.
The sin-mark peels off. Like a stencil lifted from wet paint, the small golden knot comes off Kompis's skin in one piece and unspools into a ribbon of gold light as long as the deck: every thread he has ever seen, every gun-soul he has ever heard, pulled out of him in a single shining strand.
Kompis is flung back off his feet with his mouth open in a soundless scream. Mingus is barking, the crew is running, Vigolas is leaping with green lightning on his fist, and the gold ribbon whips back into the brass and is gone.
The face in the binnacle smiles once, and becomes a stranger, and then just brass.
Silence. The crew around Kompis on the deck. Vigolas's lightning-fist is buried in the binnacle; he punched it flat, too late.
Where the golden knot was: bare skin. Nothing. Not even a scar.
sitting up, looking at the crew. His brown eyes are just brown. No gold film. And around the crew, where there have always been threads, nothing. Just people.
pressing against him, whining.
putting a hand on Mingus's chest. He feels the heartbeat, ba-dum, strong and warm, right under his palm. Along the bottom of the panel, where the golden pulse line should spring to life… nothing.
(The world stays in colour.)
his eyes clearing back to brown. Nothing happened.
wide awake now, flipping through his Codex fast.
very still on the rail.
unbuckling his holster, lifting out Lilla Ulv. Holding the short wolf-engraved pistol in both hands the way he always does when he talks to her.
in his hands. Silent. Just steel.
waiting for the little yip, the soul-text balloon, the cub chasing its tail inside the steel.
Nothing comes. He holds the gun up to his ear, like a shell.
The wolf cub, curled in the dark of the barrel, ears flat, yipping and yipping and crying, pawing at the inside of the metal toward the man holding her.
Kompis sits holding a silent pistol against his ear, the dog pressed to his side, the crew standing around him, and he can't hear a thing.