Chapter 79
The Marka on a calm sea. Every mirror, lamp-glass and barrel-top on deck is wrapped in sailcloth. Rougeina sits on the bow, blades across her knees, eyes red from no sleep.
the one brass thing they didn't wrap. Nobody wraps the bell. It gleams.
It ripples. Not like the Wards: slower, gentler, the way water ripples when someone steps into it carefully, not wanting to wake anyone.
He steps out of the bell onto the bow: a young man the exact height and build of Kali. Wiry, ash-grey skin with a sheen like polished metal. A long black braid. Red war-markings on the other cheek from hers. Eyes like polished steel: you see yourself in them instead of his pupils. A long coat of overlapping mirror-steel scales, glittering like a shoal of fish. Barefoot. Twin sickles of mirror-steel at his hips.
BALI · K-IV SHAPED · Scalelist: — (no reflection to count)
on her feet, blades up.
He looks at her with something like sympathy. When he speaks, the voice that comes out of his mouth isn't his: a woman's voice, warm, gentle, the way you'd wake a child.
She goes white. Her blades dip an inch.
and now the voice is his own: soft, slow, Kali's voice with every edge sanded off.
her voice cracking.
already looking past her, toward the mast, where the crew is scrambling up from their blankets.
The crew on deck: Vigolas, Kompis, Trollmage, Drekk in his mask, and Smurjan at the mast. Out of Smurjan's shadow rises Kali, one-armed, black-glass sickle up, hair wild from sleep, red braid swinging.
staring at Bali. Bali staring back. Two faces, one red-braided and one black, the markings on opposite cheeks. Mirror images.
a small, aching smile.
For once in her life she has nothing to say.
third eye snapping open, and his voice is hard:
Smurjan walks the Sightline: a crimson line from his third eye to the exact point of Bali's chest. One step, two—
Bali doesn't move. The crimson line hits the polished sheen of his skin and comes back, folding along itself, and lands on Smurjan's own forehead, exactly where the third eye is. Smurjan reels backwards into the mast.
Everything comes back.
Rougeina Swaps toward him, and arrives exactly where she left, Swapped back, staggering.
Vigolas swings an Emerald Knuckle, and the lightning returns along his own arm and sends him tumbling across the deck. "Why does everybody do THAT to me now?!"
Trollmage, with nothing banked, throws a pocket Rune of Wind, and it comes back and blows his own hat into the sea.
Kompis, sinless, has nothing to send, so he swings a fist. It connects: Bali takes it on the jaw and blinks. Nothing to return.
rubbing his jaw, almost amused.
Kali comes in fast, one-armed, black-glass sickle flashing. Bali draws his twin mirror-sickles, and they meet. CLANG.
The fight between them is perfect. Every move she makes, he makes in mirror: her overhead cut meets his overhead cut, her feint meets his feint. It's like watching someone fight their reflection, except the reflection has two arms and she has one.
snarling, and she does the thing she always does: she borrows. Her eyes flash silver as she breathes in his Pride—
gently, as the silver lifts off him toward her:
The silver comes back. Out of her eyes, into his. Borrowed and returned in one breath.
Bali hooks her sickle with his and pulls her toward the bell. The brass ripples like water. He steps backwards into it, up to his shoulders, still holding her, and pulls. Kali's one hand is already inside the brass up to the wrist.
scrambling: Vigolas diving, Smurjan up from the mast, Rougeina Swapping—
Half in, half out of the Kettle's bell, face to face, almost touching: Kali and Bali. Red braid and black braid. Her face, his face, the same face. The brass surface of the bell rings out around them in silver ripples, and inside the bell, in the reflection, we can see where he wants to take her: a vast silver room of mirrors, endless, quiet, cold.
And in the sheen of Bali's cheek, inches from her eyes, Kali sees her own face reflected, and she doesn't let go.
his steel eyes wet.
torn, her hand still in his.
Mingus lunges, a golden blur, and grabs the hem of Kali's tunic in his teeth and pulls. Not a form. Just a dog, eighty pounds, digging in. And then Smurjan has her by the shoulder, and Vigolas has Smurjan by the belt.
The tug of war tips. Kali comes out of the brass. Bali lets go, gently, rather than tear her.
sinking back into the bell, only his face left in the brass now, soft and sad.
(The brass goes still. He's gone.)
Kali on her knees, breathing hard, Smurjan's hand on her shoulder. Behind them, the morning sun throws Smurjan's shadows across the planks: his own, Kali's, Bakasura's… and for one panel, faint as breath, a fourth, with a long braid, turned toward the bell. Then it's gone.