Chapter 87
The Marka flies away from the gate-station under every sail she has. Behind her, the refugee boats scatter, the clamped gate still white and shut, and the hundred frames with Wendlan's face fold away one by one like closing fans.
The sea unfolds. Out of the starlit water rises a white iron frame the size of a barn door, opening section by section like a carpenter's ruler, right in the Marka's path.
Out of the frame comes a ballista bolt as thick as a pine trunk. Through the frame behind it we glimpse where it came from: a snowy fort wall in some other realm, a crew of Sentinels at a crossbow the size of a house. Smurjan, at the bow, steps half an inch. The bolt passes his ear and rips through the jib.
Drekk throws the wheel hard over by feel. The Marka heels so far her rail kisses the starlight.
All around the Marka, white frames unfold like a flock of doors taking off: on the sea, in the sky, on the deck itself. Out of them pours the whole Order. Sentinels step through onto the rails with chains of light swinging. Bolts and spears fly out of frames from forts a world away. A frame lying flat on the sea's surface opens onto another realm's sky, three suns in a void-black heaven, and the starlight water pours down into it in a roaring waterfall, dragging at the hull.
The crew fights on every side at once: Vigolas on the main boom, green lightning on both fists; Kali leaping rail to rail; Rougeina mid-Swap, a silver-rose afterimage behind her; Kompis on one knee with Lilla Ulv, Mingus barking at his heel; Smurjan standing in the middle of it all, very still. In every frame, faint and far away, a wind is blowing.
RANK PLATE ×many: SENTINEL · K-II MARKED
Kali cuts a Sentinel's chain of light, catches the loose end and swings him back through his own door.
Bakasura rises out of Smurjan's shadow, closes his jaws on a Sentinel's spear and snaps it like a breadstick.
Vigolas punches a Sentinel so hard he flies back through the frame he came out of, and the frame folds shut behind him like a closing book.
firing Lilla Ulv at the frame on the sea. A little frame unfolds in front of the bullet, and it comes out somewhere harmless, far behind the ship.
Rougeina Swaps with a falling spear to reach the mast-top, blink, and the instant she lands, a frame unfolds beside her and four Sentinels step out of it, chains up.
She Swaps again, with a gull, onto the bowsprit. Blink. A frame unfolds right where she lands. More Sentinels.
breathing hard, her panther snarling at her side, staring at the new door.
Wind, sky, the orchard of frames. Wendlan stands with his eyes closed, scratching his forearm like a man with a mosquito bite, his other hand drawing small rectangles in the air without looking.
Something long and white, with scales like crystal, slides across the stone and coils out of sight. A woman's armoured boot, perfectly still, beside it.
Trollmage, finally awake, sits in the middle of the battle with his Codex open on his knees, the crow on his head screaming warnings, pages flipping by themselves.
a drawing of two white iron frames with an arrow between them.
looking up from the book at Rougeina, his ears drooping.
For a moment the battle is far away.
A huge frame unfolds on the deck itself, between the mainmast and the wheel, and Sentinels pour out of it in a white river, heading for Drekk.
The third eye opens, rimmed in crimson. The world goes to grey diagram lines, and across the frame, one crimson point: the top hinge, where the white iron folds.
Smurjan walks the crimson line, step by perfect step, straight through the river of Sentinels. Spears, chains and fists miss him by half an inch, half an inch, half an inch. The crimson script-scars on his arms glow.
Open palm on the top hinge.
The frame snaps shut like a slammed book. The last Sentinel was halfway through, and his spear is sliced clean in two at the line of the frame: the front half clatters on the Marka's deck, the back half is somewhere else. The Sentinel, safely on the far side, is left holding a stick.
Wendlan's left little finger bends the wrong way.
wincing, splinting the finger against a folding ruler and binding it with chalk-string, quick and practised, as if he's done it many times before.
Around the ship, the frames fold away, one after another, back into nothing. The sea is quiet. The crew stands panting on a deck littered with broken spears and half a Sentinel's stick.
Rougeina sits on the rail, barefoot, blades across her knees, the panther pressed against her back. Vigolas leans beside her.
not grinning.
Gold threads blaze around Rougeina: one to every crewmate, pulled taut as rigging. She isn't hiding herself. She's hiding them.
Kompis sits down on the rail beside her, Mingus flopping across both their feet.
looking out at the dark water. She doesn't Swap. Not once, all night.
Trollmage asleep in his coil of rope, the crow asleep on his belly. Kali lays a blanket over him.
Ahead, two great black rocks rise out of the Current with a narrow channel between them. Behind the Marka, frames unfold across the sea in a long white wall, closing off every other direction. Only one way stays open.
Through the channel: the Weir, the great gate-station of the Shallows. A harbour ringed by white fortress walls, and set into those walls, four realm-gates in a row, every one clamped shut in white iron. Along the quay, pens of white light, packed with people whose hands and throats glow in seven colours. And at the end of the long stone pier stands one tall woman in crystal armour, clear as ice, a crystal-scaled white serpent coiled at her feet, lifting a white iron stake in both hands.
VEYRA · K-IV SHAPED · Scalelist #1,431 · Warden of the Gate Yard
going into the pier. The crystal of her greaves locks into the stone in long spurs.
A line of white light races out from the stake across the water and straight through the Marka, splitting her deck between bow and stern like a cut. The ship stops dead, as if she had sailed into a wall. The crew is flung forward. The Kettle's bell rings once at the bow, DONG. Rougeina is on one side of the line, everyone else on the other.