Chapter 86

Fish stalls, bunting, gulls, and at the end of the harbour a stone arch with a realm-gate inside it: a ring of folded light, shimmering like heat over a road. And all across the market, sparks of seven colours are going off like firecrackers.

A blacksmith with a fresh crimson mark on his wrist taps a horseshoe, and his anvil splits clean in two. He stares at his hammer.

An old fisherwoman's hands glow amber. A whole basket of herring has vanished into them, and she has never felt so full in her life.

A girl yawns, a violet hourglass on the back of her hand, and the whole stall around her slows to a crawl. A dropped apple falls like a feather.

A small boy with a rose ribbon curling up his arm stares at the baker, and suddenly he has the baker's enormous moustache.

standing on a barrel, white armour, faceless helm, holding up a counting-slate whose numbers spin uselessly.

The crowd breaks and surges toward the stone arch and its shimmering gate: mothers dragging children, sailors, a troll carter with a cart of cabbages, an old man with a glowing amber cane. Everyone who woke up different is running for home.

The glass floor with clouds drifting beneath it, the ring of twelve chairs under the frieze with its black bar. Nine Signets glow white on nine hands. The Third and the Sixth chairs sit dark, each with a dark Signet on its seat and a blank nameplate above. The Twelfth is empty, a lit Signet hanging over it.

Nobody sits in it. Standing on its seat is a small white iron frame, the size of a hand mirror, and through it blows a steady wind: blue sky, a scatter of chalk dust, and a lean, sunburned face pressed close to the opening, wild grey hair whipping, brass goggles pushed up on his forehead.

WENDLAN · K-V ARCHITECT · Architect Eight, Keeper of the Gates

broad and grey-bearded, a scar across his face, his tower-shield leaning against the arm of his chair.

One by one, Signets light up on the glass like lamps being lit down a street. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven.

the wind still blowing out of it.

The highest terrace of Glasheim, open to the sky, above a sea of cloud. A round floor of white stone, and standing on it in rows, like an orchard of empty doorways, dozens of upright white iron frames. Through each one shows a different sky: crimson stars over black, violet light over golden spires, a slow grey river, three suns in a void-black sky, a white so bright it hurts to look at. A long workbench covered in chalk, folding rulers and hinges. At the terrace's edge stands one frame bigger than a ship's mainsail, and through it, far below, glitters the starlit sea of the Current.

stepping back from a hand-sized frame on his workbench, the partner of the one on his chair. Lean and wind-bitten, sleeves rolled to the elbow, a tool belt slung over his white robe, chalk dust to the wrists. He takes a long, happy breath of wind.

A teenage boy, a fresh crimson mark crackling on his neck, sprints through the crowd with two Sentinels behind him, straight for the stone arch.

Wendlan, not even looking up from the hinge he's oiling, lifts two fingers and draws a small rectangle in the air.

The boy dives headfirst into the shimmering gate, and comes flying out of a white iron frame that has just unfolded, section by section like a carpenter's ruler, in the square behind the Sentinels. He lands right in their arms.

Wendlan walks out into the middle of his terrace, the wind roaring around him, coat-tails and grey hair streaming. He cracks his knuckles and lifts both hands, like a man about to conduct a choir.

The Marka under full sail on the sea of moving starlight, the Kettle's bell gleaming at her bow.

Kompis sits on a crate cleaning Lilla Ulv, Mingus snoring across his feet, Ivar's little box tied at his hip. The pistol hasn't stopped talking in two days.

Drekk, in his bell-rope mask, holds one end of a length of rope. Vigolas holds the other, tongue between his teeth, fumbling.

grinning, his fingers going to the thin braid behind his left ear, tied with a scrap of faded red sailcloth.

A dock in a downpour. A skinny six-year-old boy with wild black hair is stealing an apple off a barrow. A huge tarred hand closes on his collar and lifts him off the ground. Above him looms a broad woman in a salt-stiff sea-coat, two grey braids, a gap in her front teeth, and a face like a walnut that laughed: brown, deep-lined, every line made by grinning. Behind her a ship rides at anchor under red sails.

The same woman kneeling on a rolling deck, tearing a strip off a red sail and tying it into the boy's hair while he stares up at her.

rubbing the faded red scrap between finger and thumb.

the grin fading. For a moment he's looking out at a wave that isn't there.

pushing the rope back into his captain's hands.

The eel comes out of the rock, round the anchor, back in the rock. A perfect bowline. He holds it up over his head like a prize fish.

The realm-gate home: a great ring of folded starlight standing in the Current, the way to the Prime, to Brygdar, to the troll shipyard. But it's wrong. A colossal white iron frame has clamped down over it like a portcullis. Beside it, on a black rock, squats a white stone fort: a gate-station. And in front of it bob dozens of small boats (fishing smacks, rafts, an old ferry) packed with people whose wrists and hands and necks glow in seven colours. A fence of chains of light holds them back.

bolted to the white iron:

TRANSIT CLOSED · BY ORDER OF THE COUNCIL · NOTHING CROSSES

Gate-wardens in white, each with a hammer and a bundle of long glowing stakes, and on the gatehouse a warden-captain with a speaking-horn.

RANK PLATE ×6: GATE-WARDEN · K-II MARKED

on the bowsprit, the grin back, green sparks crawling over his knuckles.

Smurjan steps from the bowsprit onto the fort's water-stairs and walks straight up them through a rain of spears, each one missing him by half an inch.

Kali bursts out of his shadow and cuts the chain-fence of light with her black-glass sickle. The people in the boats cheer.

Vigolas's green-lightning fist knocks two wardens clean off the battlement into the sea.

Rougeina Swaps with a gull, blink, onto the battlement, her panther a shadow behind her, and a warden's hammer drives a stake into the stone at her feet: TANG. Frost-lines spread across the stone. Her next Swap fizzles.

Kompis, Mingus planted at his heel, levels Lilla Ulv at the warden-captain, who is raising his hammer to drive a second stake beside Rougeina.

He fires. The bullet is a wolf cub of light, bounding off the water toward the hammer, and right in its path a tiny white frame, no bigger than a hand, unfolds in the air like a carpenter's ruler. The cub runs straight into it.

A second tiny frame, unfolding. The wolf cub of light comes leaping out of it, teeth first, straight at the back of his skull.

Subtick. The golden pulse line runs along the bottom of the panel, ba-dum. The cub hangs frozen an inch from his hood. Kompis lives it again and again: he ducks left and it follows him, he ducks right and it follows him, he turns and it takes him in the eye. Then, in one version, Mingus barks and he drops flat, and the cub sails over him, straight into the warden who has come creeping up the bow-ladder behind him with a stake.

Colour snaps back. WOOF! Kompis drops flat. The wolf cub sails over him and bonks the creeping warden off the ladder into the sea.

Silence across the whole station. On the walls, on the water, in the air, white frames are unfolding by the dozen, little ones and big ones, one on the Marka's own mast, and in every one of them is the same face: wind-bitten, grey hair blowing in a wind from somewhere else, goggles up, a smear of chalk on one cheek.

All the faces turn together to the battlement: to Rougeina. In one frame his hand comes into view, scratching his forearm like a man with a mosquito bite.

very still on the battlement, eight blades in her hands, a hundred Wendlans looking at her.