Chapter 91

Stars above, a moonlit sea of cloud below, the orchard of frames glowing softly, each with a different night sky inside it. Wendlan sits on the edge of his workbench, his left hand a mess of splints: little finger, ring finger, wrist. Veyra kneels beside him, binding it with clean linen. Her crystal gauntlets lie on the bench beside her; for the first time we see her bare hands, broad and scarred, a warden's hands.

looking out over his frames, the wind in his grey hair, and for once he isn't smiling.

A long pause.

tying off the bandage.

A lone stone pillar, waist-high, and around it, standing in a tight ring like the petals of a flower, a dozen open frames, each showing a different sky. Between the pillar and the rest of the Yard there's no step that isn't a door.

looking down at her own boots.

(Veyra doesn't answer.)

The crew round the table under a swinging lamp. Kompis is wrapping Vigolas's blistered palm in a bandage. At the empty end of the bench sits Kali's fourth bowl, full.

unfolding the list on the table. Two lines crossed off, two blank lines to everyone else. The next one reads WENDLAN.

his hands stopping on the bandage.

the Codex open, its pages very still.

The lamp swings. Nobody says anything.

looking at his bandaged hand.

his hand on Ivar's little box at his hip.

flexing his burned fingers.

A line of small children in grey Nursery smocks, eight-year-old Kompis among them clutching a cloth bundle, climbing a long white stair into the wind. At the top: the orchard of doors, the sea of cloud, and Wendlan at his bench, not one day younger than he is now (an Architect's face never changes), waving cheerfully at them with a chalky hand. A Nursery matron's voice from above the panel:

The smallest smile.

the grin breaking out.

Trollmage asleep in his coil of rope, the crow asleep on his belly: "Wake me when we're there. I'm banking every minute."

Rougeina on the bow, not Swapping, all day, all night.

Vigolas at the rail, tying a bowline with his burned hand, getting it right.

Smurjan and Drekk at the wheel together at night, not speaking, sharing one cup of troll-coffee neither of them can drink.

at the rail at dusk, looking down at the black water. In the reflection beside her own red braid, for one heartbeat, a black braid.

The reflection is just her own again.

The Marka lies becalmed on the starlit Current. Hanging in the empty sky above her, impossibly high, silent, the Sea Frame: a colossal rectangle of white iron the size of a mountain's face, standing on nothing. Inside it, faint and far, a glimpse of white stone and moonlit cloud.

at the wheel.

Wendlan snaps upright, scratching furiously, and points two fingers at the night.

Under Rougeina's bare feet, mid-Swap, a frame unfolds flat in the deck, and she drops straight into it.

The crew dives after her before the door can fold.

Vigolas grabs the sleeping Trollmage by the collar (Captain's Pull) and hurls him in first, crow and all, then dives after him.

Smurjan steps in without a word, three shadows pouring after him like water.

The panther leaps.

Kompis jumps with Mingus in his arms.

at the wheel, alone, shouting after them into the closing door.

The frame folds shut like a ruler and is gone. Drekk stands alone at the wheel of the becalmed Marka, under the vast silent Sea Frame in the sky. He reaches out and rings the Kettle's bell once.

The crew tumbles out of a frame onto cold white stone, high above a sea of moonlit cloud. Frames stand all around them in rows, every one showing another sky. Rougeina is already on her feet with eight blades out, her panther beside her. In the middle of the Yard, on a stone pillar inside a ring of open doors, Veyra stands at her stake.

Across the terrace, at his workbench, a wind-burned man with his goggles pushed up and his left hand in splints turns round on his stool and looks at them, a hinge in one hand and a chalk in the other, and smiles.