Chapter 8

A comic, wonderful image: four enormous Brygdar trolls, moss-backed and gentle, carry the Kettle down a mountain path on their shoulders like a coffin made of love, lowering it carefully into the fjord. Drekk runs alongside them, fussing.

Trollmage, still on Marka's back, raises one lazy hand to the trolls in thanks. One of them bows to him, deeply.

The crew sits around the little iron stove on deck. Warm light. Steam from a pot. Drekk polishes the boat's dented brass bell like it's a crown.

asleep against the stove, paws twitching, dreaming.

Vigolas sits alone on a crate. He has laid the shards out on a blanket in rows, glowing softly like a city seen from a mountain at night.

hovering over the shards. He touches one.

(a) The library index: a spiral mountain turned inside out, seventy-seven sleeping lights.

(b) A body splitting in three: a single man screaming as his shadow tears into three shapes, and behind them, half hidden, a fourth silhouette glowing silver, watching.

(c) A city's routing ledger: ten thousand souls poured into the wrong bodies, an old woman in a soldier's frame, a child in an old man's, all signed in neat silver ink.

(d) A shard that shows nothing. Black. Cold. When he touches it, his fingertip goes grey for a moment, as if it forgot it was a finger.

pulling his hand back from the black shard, flexing his grey fingertip until the colour returns.

looking over the whole field of glowing lives. Quiet. The most honest he has been.

Kompis comes down the ladder with two bowls of stew and sits beside him.

grinning, hiding something true behind it.

laughing into his stew. Then his eyes narrow over the bowl, past Vigolas.

The crew at the stove. At the stern, alone, sits Ysel. In the stove's light, her shadow stretches across the deck toward the hatch, while she sits perfectly still.

awake, on his feet, lips pulled back. For the first time in the story, he growls.

The lantern gutters. A shadow slides down the ladder by itself: a long black human shape with no face, no edges and no thickness, like a hole cut in the world.

It reaches for the coat on the crate with long flat fingers.

Everything in the hold glows by value: the shards blaze, the lantern is copper, Kompis is warm gold.

The shadow is nothing. Not grey, not dull. Absent. Greed-sight slides off it as if the eye refused it.

Vigolas swings the lantern. It passes through the shadow and smashes against the hull. Oil spreads and catches.

Kompis fires Ivar point-blank. The bullet goes through and punches out the far wall. Water spits in.

The shadow wraps around Vigolas's arm. Where it touches, his sleeve, his skin and the colour of him go grey, and a whole memory starts to drain out of his eyes. A flash panel, fading: his mother's hands braiding a rope.

Mingus barrels down the ladder, still just a dog, and slams into Vigolas's legs, knocking him out of the shadow's grip. The shadow's fingers close on empty air.

Ysel stands up at the stern. For the first time she lowers her hood.

Half of her face is a young woman's, and the other half is fading: grey, translucent at the edges, like a photograph left too long in the sun. Where her eyes should catch the firelight, one of them doesn't.

YSEL · K-? · Scalelist — (the number flickers and won't hold, then blanks: UNCOUNTED)

coming up the ladder, seeing it at last.

Rougeina blinks in behind Ysel with a blade at her neck. The blade passes through her like through smoke. Ysel doesn't even turn.

Ysel's shadow pours down into the hold again and tears. Planks rip, the stove topples and fire races along the oil-soaked deck. Water floods in from below.

face lit by the fire, howling.

Marka grabs him by the collar and hauls him back from the flames.

wide awake, runes flickering weakly on one hand.

He writes in the air: MACRO : SEAL HULL = 4

Four violet patches slap over four holes in the hull, and the water stops… for four heartbeats.

The patches crack. The water pours back in.

The crew abandons ship.

Marka throws Drekk over her shoulder and leaps for the rocks.

Kompis jumps with Mingus in his arms.

Rougeina Swaps with a rowboat.

Trollmage simply falls off the side and lets the crow pull him by the collar.

Vigolas is last out of the hold, coat bundled to his chest, all thirty-seven shards inside it, smoke pouring off him.

On the burning bow, untouched by the flames and not even warm, Ysel stands and watches them go.

through the fire, speaking quietly across the water, and they hear every word.

She steps backward into her own shadow and is gone, swallowed like a stone into dark water. The Kettle slides under the surface. The bell goes silent.

on his knees on the rock.

Silence. Then, from out on the black water, three voices at once, a man's, a woman's and something hungry, speaking in perfect, terrible unison:

Far out on the fjord, standing on the water in the moonlight, one figure: a single body with three shadows cast in three different directions.