Chapter 9 — Black and Gold

WELSH — The Novel (Coda's Perspective)

— Rook's Training Yard, immediately —

He started with his hands.

That's what nobody expects. He didn't draw anything, he didn't step forward, he didn't say a word for a long moment. He stood in a yard full of frightened children unwinding the sand-coloured wrapping from one hand and then the other, slowly, the way you'd take off gloves you'd been wearing all day, and he dropped each length in the dirt beside him without looking where it fell.

Then the head. Then the throat. Then a whole outer layer off the shoulders, and another under that.

There was a great deal less of him than there had looked to be.

What came out was a young man, or a man who had decided to look young, in a loose unbuttoned coat of about four colours that did not agree with each other, and a shirt that had come untucked at some point and been left that way on purpose. Nothing about him was armoured. Nothing about him was ready. He stretched his arms over his head like a man who had been sitting on a wall for four days, which he had.

And he was grinning. He had been grinning under all of that the entire time.

Unknown: "Ohh, that's better."

Unknown: "Wrappings are murder in the sun."

Coda: He's not afraid.

Coda: There is a High Warden nine feet from him and he's stretching.

He put his heels together and bowed.

Properly. The full Vell Ardour bow, the one Adam had given the empty chair — to the benches, to the sides, to the high seats — except there were no benches, there were thirty schoolchildren pressed against a wall, and he gave it to all of them anyway, one after another, with his hand over his heart.

It took far too long. That was the point.

Damien: "I suppose introductions are in order."

Damien: "My name is Damien."

Damien: "Damien Obsidian."

Nobody said anything. Sable told me afterwards that she had started to write it down and then stopped, and I know exactly why, because I had the same thought at the same moment. Don't. Don't write his name in your book.

Rook had her hand out sideways, the way you keep children behind you, and she had not managed to stand up.

Damien straightened out of the bow and looked at the two of us properly for the first time.

And his face did something.

It was very quick, and it was the only honest thing he did in that whole yard. The grin stayed exactly where it was, and underneath it, for about half a second, something opened.

Damien: "But this is surprising."

Damien: "I expected one."

Damien: "I was told one."

Damien: "For there to be two is a jackpot."

He laughed, and it came out of him in the same ugly shape it had on the wall.

Damien: "And none the less —"

Damien: "Black and Gold."

Damien: "Gold has chosen nobody in four hundred years."

Damien: "And here it picks a boy in a schoolyard."

I have thought about that more than any other thing said in my hearing.

Because nobody says the colours. Not Edren, who teaches a filtered board. Not Vey, who writes one word at the bottom of a list. Not Venn, who told me to lie in my own notes. In four hundred years the entire machinery of this city has been built to never say which colour is standing where.

And a man in a four-coloured coat walked into a schoolyard and read us both off like a shop sign.

Coda: He can see it.

Coda: He can see what I see.

Adam moved for the first time since the wall.

He didn't turn round. He took one step sideways — one, small, unhurried — and it put him directly between Damien Obsidian and the two of us, and it was such a quiet motion that I don't think anybody else in the yard registered it as anything at all.

Adam: "Headmaster."

I hadn't known Vey was there. He was at the yard door with his folio still under his arm, and he had come at a run and was not showing it.

Adam: "Evacuate the premises."

Adam: "Every child. The front gate, not the yard gate."

Adam: "Protect them."

Oren: "And these two?"

Adam: "Leave these two with me."

Adam: "I'll protect them myself."

Vey looked at him for exactly one breath. Then he turned back through the door and I heard him in the corridor, and it was the first time I had ever heard that man raise his voice.

Oren: "Sound the bells!"

— A held moment, the yard —

Here is a thing I want down before the rest, because it got lost afterwards in everything that happened.

Thirty children went out through that door in under a minute, and Rook went with them, on her feet by then, counting heads with her hand on the frame. She did not look at me on the way past. Elan did — Elan turned round twice and Sable had him by the arm both times. Wick stayed where he was because Wick had been told to.

And the last one out was the smallest girl in our year, and Damien Obsidian stepped aside to let her through the gap, and bowed to her too.

She was crying. He bowed to her anyway, and he meant it, and I will never understand that for as long as I live.

Then the bells started, and they were not two-and-two-and-a-long-one, and they were not three short for fire.

They were all of them, from every tower, with no pattern at all, and they did not stop.

Coda: I've never heard that one.

Coda: I've never heard that one because nobody alive has.

— The Seventh Gate, the outer wall —

The ground went first.

Not a crack, not a tremor. The packed earth outside the Seventh simply lowered, in a long shallow line running away from the wall, the way sand lowers over a thing moving under it — and then it came up, all along that line at once, and what came out of it was not one creature.

The Ashen Guard on the Seventh had drilled for fire, for a gate rush, for a wall breach, for a riot in the lower market. They had not drilled for this.

Guard: "W-what is —"

Guard: "What is this?"

Guard: "Sound the bells!"

Guard: "Sound them! We are under siege!"

The serpent-kind were there, the sort that had come up under the eastern wall in the spring, fraying at every edge, coming on in that way they have of not quite ending where they should.

But they were not in front.

In front of them, walking — walking, upright, on two legs, at the unhurried pace of somebody arriving somewhere they had been invited — were things shaped like people.

Not people. Nobody who saw them thought they were people. The proportions were close enough to be obscene and wrong enough that a boy on the Seventh put his crossbow down without deciding to. They had the shapes of arms. They had something where a face goes. And they frayed at the edges exactly the way the serpents did, so that the space around each one was slightly uncertain about where the thing stopped and the air started.

No record in Vell Ardour has a drawing of those. There is no entry in the bestiary. Nobody in the city had ever seen one, because nobody who had ever seen one had come back to say so.

Rosse Sinclair reached the Seventh at a flat run and came up the stair three at a time, and she saw it in one look and put her hand on the parapet and went completely still.

Rosse: No.

Rosse: No, I'd have felt that.

Twenty years. Twenty years of Bearing and the ground has never once lied to her. She can feel a cart at four hundred paces through stone. She followed a forgetting four days across the Marches in the spring and never once lost the thread of it, and the only thing she has never been able to explain is how it got there in the first place.

She put both palms flat on the wall and reached down into it the way she has reached down into ground since she was a child.

And the ground said nothing had happened.

Rosse: They didn't come from anywhere.

Rosse: They didn't come from anywhere at all.

Below her the line was wavering. Four hundred men on a wall is only ever four hundred men deciding, one at a time, whether to be there, and she could see it going along the parapet the way a name goes, one mouth to the next, the wrong direction.

So she did the only thing that was hers to do.

She stood up on the parapet — up, on the stone itself, in full view of everything below — and she did not draw her sword, and whatever she carries came off her like heat off a road, and she shouted so the whole run of the wall could hear her.

Rosse: "DEFEND THE WALLS!"

Rosse: "On your line! Eyes front!"

Rosse: "The Wardens are all here!"

It wasn't a plan. It wasn't even entirely true yet.

But she is one of the Twelve, and she was standing where anyone could shoot her, and she had said we are all here — and four hundred men who had been about to be four hundred separate frightened people became a wall again, all down the length of it, in about the time it takes to breathe out.

Rosse: "Second rank, up! Loose on my word, not before!"

Rosse: "Nothing gets to the gate."

Rosse: "Nothing gets near the gate."

And under all of it, where nobody could hear her, she was still asking the ground the same question and the ground was still saying nothing at all.

— Rook's Training Yard —

The yard was empty except for four of us.

Damien had not moved while the bells started. He had his head tilted, listening, the way you'd listen to a song you half know.

Damien: "There they are."

Damien: "Right on time. I do like it when things are on time."

Adam: "You brought them under the wall."

Damien: "I brought nothing anywhere."

Damien: "I opened a door."

Damien: "There's a difference, and it matters enormously."

He turned to us.

Damien: "Sorry, boys. You're going to have to come with me."

Damien: "Our leader would very much like to speak with you."

Wick, beside me, in a voice I'd never heard him use:

Wick: "No."

Damien: "Oh, don't be like that."

Damien: "I'm sure it'll benefit you too."

Damien: "Don't you want to know the truth?"

Damien: "The truth of this world."

Damien: "Bhahaha!"

And I want to be honest here, on my own page, because there's no point otherwise.

I wanted to know.

For about a second and a half, standing in a yard with bells going and my hands shaking, with a year of cold stone and a room I'd never looked into and a colour nobody would name, and a man offering me the answer like a sweet out of a pocket —

I wanted to know.

Adam did not turn round. He said it to the air in front of him.

Adam: "Don't listen to him."

Adam: "Listen, boys. You might not understand this now."

Adam: "But watch me."

Adam: "You'll learn in time."

Then he set himself.

That was all. He put one foot back and his weight went down through it and he drew, and if you had been watching from the wall you would have said nothing had happened.

Then the ground under him began to give up light.

I have tried to write this down four times.

In Venn's room, thirty of us called and the floor gave up maybe two dozen apiece, and it was the strangest thing I had ever seen. In the yard, Wick and I made dozens off our own bodies and the whole school ran for a teacher.

This was thousands.

They came up out of the packed dirt in a flood — green, the green of a leaf held to a lamp — so many so fast that the yard floor looked like water coming to a boil, and they did not drift, they rose, and they kept rising, and the count went past anything that means anything. And at the same time, off him — off his arms and his shoulders and his back and the length of the sword in his hands — blue. Deep blue. The bottom-of-a-glass blue. Coming off his body the way ours had, and there were as many of those as there were of the others.

Both. At once. From the ground and from himself, at the same time.

And then he closed his hand, and they came in.

Not into a sphere above his palm. Into him. Thousands of green went into his boots and his legs and his spine, and thousands of blue came in along his arms, and the two met, and they did not stay two.

Green and blue went through each other and came out as one thing. I don't have a word for the colour. Nobody does. It was both of them and it was neither and it sat along the edge of his blade and the line of his shoulders and the backs of his hands like it had been cast there, steady, not flickering at all.

It made no noise.

Adam: "Are you watching, boys?"

Adam: "This is called fusion."

Coda: So this is a Warden.

Not the seal. Not the twelve gates or the ledger or the bow to the empty chair.

This.

I had spent a year in a classroom being told magic is memory and a year in a yard being told Bearing is the body's, and I had understood them as two subjects, the way you understand sums and grammar as two subjects, because that's how they're timetabled.

He did not have two. He had one.

The magic was not something he was holding. It was in the arm that held the sword, and when the arm moved the magic was already where the arm was going, and there was no reach and no ask and no wait, because the ground had already agreed and the body had already remembered and the two of them were the same sentence.

Coda: A magic swordsman.

It is the stupidest way to say it. I was fifteen and it's what I thought.

He moved.

I'd like to describe it properly. Here is what I actually saw: the fused light at his back foot swelled — a half-beat of it, thickening, the way a lung fills — and then he wasn't standing there.

Under a second. A grown man, in a coat, across a training yard.

The sound came after him. That's the part I can't get out of my head. He arrived, and then the noise of his leaving caught up and went past us both.

And Damien Obsidian got his forearm up and took it, and was moved eleven feet backward through the dirt with his boots ploughing two clean lines, and came to a stop, and was still grinning.

Damien: "Bhahaha!"

Damien: "Oh, this is fun."

It went on. I'm not going to pretend I followed it.

What I did do, because it is the only thing I have ever been able to do, is look at him.

And I still couldn't see anything.

No — that's the wrong way round, and getting it wrong is what cost me the next hour of being any use. On the wall there had been nothing around Damien Obsidian. Here, up close, with him moving, there was something, and it was worse than nothing.

There were shapes near him. Not bubbles. Not spheres, not memories, nothing with a half-seen picture inside. They had no inside. They were the idea of an edge, hanging near a man, and they did not stay where they were put, and when I tried to follow one it stopped being anywhere.

They frayed.

That's the word. The edges did not end — they frayed, and went on fraying, and if you traced one out you'd still be tracing.

I had seen that exactly once before, in the spring, in a street off Lantern Row, on a thing the size of a house that a woman with red coming off her had cut out of the world.

Coda: He feels like the Unmade.

Coda: He doesn't look like them. He feels like them.

Coda: Something about him isn't finished.

I didn't say it. There was nobody to say it to.

The messenger came in over the yard wall rather than through the school, which tells you how the streets were.

An Ashen Guard, young, one gauntlet gone, breathing like a bellows, and he didn't salute, he just found the man in the travel coat and shouted at him.

Guard: "News, Twelfth Warden!"

Guard: "All walls under siege. All of them."

Guard: "The remaining Wardens are defending."

Guard: "No casualties as of yet."

And then he was gone back over the wall, because he had eleven more places to be.

Adam didn't stop moving. He said one thing, and he said it almost to himself, and it was not what I expected.

Adam: "Hmm."

Coda: That's not relief.

Coda: Eleven gates hit at once and no one dead is not good news.

Coda: It means nobody out there is trying very hard.

Coda: It means all of this is for something else.

And on the other side of the yard, a man who does not weigh anything laughed and came forward again.

Damien: "So much fun!"

— Vell Ardour, from above —

Come further out. Past the ring of teeth, past the Marches, down to where the Hathren road comes up out of the southwest.

It is an ordinary road. Carts use it. It runs to a small city that handles whatever comes in off the Pale — and past that is the Pale itself, and a long way past that, further than anyone in this city has ever had reason to think about, there is a place that wrote things down.

Somebody is on that road tonight.

One figure, a long way off, coming on at the pace of a person who has been travelling for a very long time and has no intention of arriving out of breath. Every gate shut. Every wall occupied. Not one living soul free to look that way.

Nearest the road, a few of the Unmade turn their heads. Only the nearest ones. Only for a moment.

Then they lose interest, and go back to the wall.