Chapter 94

The crew tumbles out of the far end of the Sea Frame, high, high above the sea of moving starlight. Stars above them, stars below them, and no ground anywhere. Smurjan falls upright with Trollmage asleep over his shoulder. The panther claws at nothing. Vigolas's coat cracks like a sail.

The Sea Frame hangs in the sky, black: a dead rectangle of white iron the size of a mountain's face. Slowly, it tilts, and begins to fall after them.

falling, Mingus clutched in his arms, the wind tearing at his hood.

Kind. Brown. Looking at his people, all of them, falling through the stars. And at the very edges of his fur, the gold begins to glow.

Kompis lies face down in warm gold feathers, laughing and crying at once. Vigolas stands up on the Griffin's shoulders with his arms flung wide, whooping. Rougeina holds on tight, the tip of her crimson tail cut short. The panther lies flat, ears back, hating every second.

Past them, the dead Sea Frame tumbles end over end toward the sea, enormous and silent.

alone at the Marka's wheel far below. He can't see the falling frame. But under the bell-rope mask his head lifts: the air is pressing down, the wind on his neck is changing, the sea under the keel is holding its breath.

He spins the wheel hard over.

The Marka swings out from under, just in time, and the dead frame slams into the Current beside her, throwing up a wave of starlight taller than her mast. She rides it. At her bow the Kettle's bell rings out.

The Griffin glides down out of the stars and lands on the Marka's deck, wings folding like a great golden sail coming down.

And then he's just the dog again, padding across the deck with his tail going, as if nothing happened. He licks every one of them in turn, checking each.

at the wheel, not turning round, counting heads by the sound of the boots and the weight on the deck.

In a violet square in Codexia, a merchant's cart stands cut clean in half at the line of a black frame. The merchant stares at his half.

On a quay in the Prime, a father stands with his hand flat on a dead black door. Somewhere on the other side of it, in another realm, are his children.

In the slow grey country of Thanatos, a ferry waits at a door that will never open again.

In the Weir's harbour, four realm-gates in a row, all black. Below them, in a little fishing boat, the Bloom girl sleeps in her mother's arms. Whatever happens, they're on the same side.

On every Scalelist board in every realm, the numbers jitter, unsure where anyone is any more.

Twelve roads run onto it from every direction, and every one of them has gone grey, the colour drained out of them like ink out of an old map. The thicket of signposts at the junction points every way at once, at nothing.

alone at the centre of the junction, the great bark horn on her back, looking down at her dusty boots.

The glass floor, the clouds far beneath it, the ring of twelve chairs. Eight Signets glow white on eight hands. Four chairs are dark: the Third, the Sixth, the long-empty Twelfth with its lit Signet hanging above it, and the Eighth. On the Eighth Chair's seat a small dark Signet lies beside a little white iron frame the size of a hand mirror, black, with no wind blowing out of it at all.

Its brass nameplate is blank.

(Nobody answers.)

the scarred, grey-bearded Architect, staring at the empty seat.

A ring of white stone above the clouds, covered in red rust like fallen leaves. A hundred crumbled frames. The workbench, chalk scattered across it. A pair of brass goggles on the stone. Sentinels stand around, confused, lanterns guttering.

crystal armour dusty with rust, the serpent coiled around her shoulders. In her bare hand lies a lock of crimson hair.

Veyra stands at the very edge of the terrace, alone, her hand closing slowly around the crimson lock, looking out over the sea of cloud toward where the Current would be. Her face could be grief, or anger, or something new that has no name yet. We can't tell. Neither can she.

The crew on deck, bandaged and quiet. Trollmage snoring in his coil of rope. Vigolas with his burned palm wrapped. Smurjan sitting very straight, a fresh bruise on his jaw from a crystal fist.

frowning at the deck.

Rougeina sits alone with the list unfolded on her knee and a stub of charcoal in her hand, her shortened tail of hair stirring in the wind.

She draws one long, careful line through WENDLAN. To her, a name. To anyone looking over her shoulder, a line that was always blank.

Vigolas has come up behind her.

Absently, without noticing she's doing it, she rubs the place over her heart with two fingers.

Kali sets out the bowls on her one arm: one, two, three, four, with the fourth at the empty end of the bench. Kompis sits with Ivar's little box in his lap and Lilla Ulv on the table, Mingus's head on his knee.

smiling, scratching Mingus's ears.

Vigolas alone, turning the red scrap of sailcloth in his braid between finger and thumb. Drekk sits down beside him, the bell-rope mask turned to the sea.

tapping the rope mask where his own face used to be.

He closes his eyes. And there's no face, but there's a voice, as big and loud as it ever was, in a balloon with nothing drawn behind it:

He opens them and looks back down the deck at his crew: Kompis and the dog, Kali and her four bowls, Smurjan sitting very straight, Trollmage snoring, Rougeina on the bowsprit, Drekk beside him. Every one of them on this side of the rail.

The Marka alone on the endless starlit Current. Every gate-ring on every horizon is dark. Only stars, and the long way.

Across the starlit water comes a sound so huge and so slow that the whole sea shivers under the hull, and the crow wakes up screaming. On the far horizon a pale round shape is rising out of the Current like a second moon, with hands.