Jendara had been knocked out more than once in her life. She was familiar with the feeling that came before losing consciousness, the strange hollow, metallic ringing in the ears and the distant sensation that took hold of the body. If she could have summoned up those feelings and used them to actually pass out, she would have.
But instead she remained sickeningly awake even as her body began to move against her will. A thickset ulat-kini bound her hands, and she simply followed after him without any kind of struggle. She wanted to rage. To vomit. To close her eyes and wake up and find it was all a dream.
Her body followed meekly, with Kran trotting along beside her.
The pink beast stepped aside as they approached, although she had no idea how it could sense them. There were no signs of any sensory organs on its hideous head. She couldn’t hear its laughter any longer, but she could still feel its presence within her somehow, like a heavy hand pressing down on the inside of her brain. The pressure came with a sensation of oily heat that cut her in half—her thoughts lay on one side of the hot divide, her frozen legs on the other, and any attempt to cross made her thoughts slip and slide away from her grasp until that heavy weight pressed them back down into an inert block.
She couldn’t even force herself to take the deep breaths that might have given her calm. She could only batter her thoughts against the pink beast’s revolting presence and then regroup them, tired and desperate to return to their ordinary connection to her body.
As the group moved back down the long hallway, she considered the strangeness of the entire experience. If anyone had asked, Jendara would have maintained that her mind and her body were two very separate entities, and that she controlled both of them with the force of her will and personality. Now, observing her mind’s struggles to reconnect with her physical being, she wasn’t so sure. Her thoughts were so feeble and weak without the strong support of her senses. While she could see and hear well enough—although distantly, as if the information came to her down a long, echoing tube—she had almost no sensation of movement or balance or touch. She drew up her will and struggled to wiggle a finger, twitch a face muscle, anything at all.
Pain and pink light filled her head, and for an instant, Jendara did not exist.
When she was able to think and focus again, her body and the rest of the group had already marched down into the depths of the island. She had no idea where they were. But the bindings on her mind and body had now loosened a little, giving back her eyes and ears. In her peripheral vision, she could see Kran stump along, chin down and face unreadable. An ulat-kini led them both, but ahead of the ulat-kini walked two squat, black-robed figures, their faces veiled.
It was the first time she had gotten to see the people of Leng up close. She studied them closely. They were stocky folks, shorter than herself and much broader, with no definition of waist or hip. Though they moved easily enough, Jendara noticed a number of lumps and bumps along their backs, strange protrusions their robes didn’t cover. Weapons, perhaps. Their feet struck the ground with the click-clack of a sheep’s hooves.
She wished she could move her head to get a better view of the Leng folk and her surroundings. One of the ulat-kini carried a lantern, but most of the light around her came from the faint blue glow of phosphorescent seaweed. Its cold light provided a soft gloom that made it harder to see, not easier. Blue shadows added a strange dimension to everything.
“Be on the watch for the spiders,” one of the Leng people snapped at the nearest ulat-kini. “And make sure the prisoners’ weapons are free so they can guard our backs.”
“But—” the ulat-kini began, and the black robe cut him off. “They’re completely under the moon-beasts’ control. Like puppets. Or do you want a personal demonstration of the moon-beasts’ power?”
One of the other denizens of Leng gave a nasty laugh. If Jendara could have moved, she would have knocked its teeth out.
The hallway turned a corner and the overpowering stink of old urine, unwashed bodies, and rotten fish washed over her. The ulat-kini stepped aside and Jendara saw what she smelled: a large group of people crowded into a room with a vast open hole in the floor. One man hung over the edge, dangling from the black ropes binding his wrists to the woman beside him. He did not move. He said nothing. And although his weight pulled her nearly over the edge of the pit, causing the rope around her wrist to bite deeply into her swollen, purple flesh, the prisoner beside him said nothing, either.
The only sound was the faint damp rustling that came from far below.
Jendara stared at the nearest prisoner, and he stared back at her. Only his eyes moved, wide and horrified in his filthy face. How long had all these people been standing here, immobilized by that tentacled creature?
“Put her in the back,” a cold and somehow metallic voice announced, and the ulat-kini captor marched Jendara and Kran to the narrow aisle left between the prisoners and the wall.
Now Jendara could see that the orderly columns and rows of frozen, silent humans stretched nearly the full length of the room—a massive cavern nearly as large as the spiders’ cave. A few more of the pink-tentacled creatures—moon-beasts, they’d called them—circled the room, and there were at least two dozen ulat-kini guards, as well as several denizens of Leng.
There were at least a hundred people here, if not more. Half-paralyzed as Jendara was, it was hard to get a look at the full expanse of them. The first man she had seen was filthy, his face mostly obscured by a smear of dried blood and hugely swollen broken nose. The woman behind him looked injured, too, a deep cut on her forehead showing the bone. The moon-beasts may have taken control of these people’s bodies, but some of them had gotten a chance to fight before they’d been captured.
Jendara strained her eyes as far to the side as she could, wishing she could turn her head to make out these brave faces. These people had to have arrived on the longships she’d seen yesterday from the Star Chapel. The ones she could see wore simple wincey or woolen garb, the same homespun fabrics in the same rich colors the people of her own island wore.
A pebble shifted underfoot, and Jendara stumbled sideways, for the first time tilting her body toward the center of the great room. A bearded face leaped out of the crowd, the thick red hair all too familiar. Morul stared back at her with panicked eyes.
The ulat-kini dragged her back in line.
Morul! Had she really seen him? Jendara’s heart sank. Sorind sat apart from the other inhabited islands of the archipelago, easily reached without interference from the more heavily armed islands of Battlewall or Flintyreach. If the people of Leng were looking for prisoners, the island would have been a tempting destination.
The ulat-kini shoved Kran sideways, his bindings dragging Jendara along. The boy slammed into the arm of the nearest prisoner, a heavyset old woman that Jendara recognized by her posture and simply braided gray hair. It was Chana, the healer and wisewoman of Sorind. Behind her, a bored-looking ulat-kini snapped to attention.
Out of the corner of Jendara’s eye, she noticed a narrow doorway at the very corner of the room, the tunnel beyond unlit. She felt the ulat-kini’s webbed hands dig into her skin as it lashed a tough rope of seaweed around her arm. It knotted the rope to the bindings of the prisoner in front of her, then quickly secured Kran in the same fashion, adding a second rope running from his wrists to Chana’s.
Jendara squeezed her eyes shut. Her people, her Sorinders, captured by these loathsome fish-men. And why? Why would they steal an entire village of innocent people and hold them captive in their horrible sea cave? What did they want with them?
A familiar voice came from her right. Skortti said: “Has the device been taken to the Star Chapel?”
“It will be there when we need it.” This was the same speaker with the cold, metallic voice that had sent her and Kran to the back of the room. Jendara’s eye muscles trembled from straining to see farther to the right. She could just see Skortti emerging from the dark doorway, and moving toward him, one of the black robes of Leng.
“The offering will keep the god calm enough for travel,” Skortti warned the denizen of Leng, “but it will still be dangerous. The god has been sleeping a long time. It will not be easy to control.”
“The moon-beasts will be more than its match,” the denizen of Leng answered.
“So you have said, Ahrzur. But the people of this island worshiped this creature. Their whole city worked to keep the creature happy. If such superior beings could not keep the god under control, I worry that a few pudgy pink beasts can handle it.”
Was Skortti right? Had the entire island civilization existed just to control some sleeping god? And if so, what had made the civilization fall? Jendara struggled to move her hands. She had to get free and find Vorrin. There was no way she was going to risk staying on this island with a rogue god that may have already destroyed an entire society.
She missed Ahrzur’s reply. The man seemed to be the leader of the denizens of Leng, or at least their representative to the ulat-kini. Though she couldn’t hear his words, his condescending manner was unmistakable.
Ahrzur’s answer seemed to rankle Skortti. “Yes,” the ulat-kini snapped. “I am certain of the calculations. Not only have I been studying the scepter since Fithrax gave it to me, I’ve also done extensive study of the Old Ones’ library since our arrival on this island. The scepter’s symbols are clear: tonight is the best time for the ritual. Beginning before moonrise would be foolhardy.”
The two leaders moved away, still discussing the ritual. Jendara wished she could follow behind them and learn more. What would happen during the ritual? What kind of device was going to be moved to the Star Chapel?
The ulat-kini who had tied up Jendara stepped away. A black robe joined him. Jendara couldn’t quite tell, but she thought they were the only guards at this end of the room.
“The god seems restless,” the black robe mused.
“I hope we have enough humans to satisfy it,” the ulat-kini said.
The two guards disappeared into the dark tunnel.
Jendara could only widen her eyes, although she wanted to scream. That was it, then—Skortti was going to kill them all, a sacrifice to his god. A hundred people were going to die for the ulat-kini’s deal with the denizens of Leng.
A sharp tug on her wrists brought her tumbling down to the ground. Kran pulled her face so she could look into his eyes. Whatever had held them immobilized no longer seemed to work on her son.
He held her gaze for a long moment, his huge brown eyes filling her vision. She had to get free. For him. Her mind struggled in its prison. For a moment, a horrible squeezing sensation filled her head.
And then, somehow, she could move.
Kran pulled out his belt knife and cut her bonds. She had no idea how he’d gotten free of both his ropes and his mind control, she was just glad their guards had left them their weapons in case of spider attack. Jendara glanced around. The nearest exit was the doorway that Skortti had used. She had no idea where they were on the island, and the ulat-kini had taken her lantern, but it was better to be free in the dark than trapped in here.
She jerked her head toward the doorway, but Kran held up a hand. He pointed to his left, toward the edge of the pit. Jendara frowned. She hadn’t been able to turn her head and look down inside the pit before, but now she might be able to get a glimpse. She wondered what Kran wanted her to see.
Easing around Chana, she peered down into the dark pit. She thought she could hear the faint sound of waves coming from far, far below, but she saw very little. The walls of the chasm gave off a blue-green glow that filled the pit with an eerie gloom. She squinted.
Something moved in the deeps, something huge and moist and horrible. Just looking at it made her remember her nightmare the previous night, as if the endless screaming of the stars still resounded in her head.
Jendara wrenched her gaze away, feeling blessed silence fill her skull. What in all hells was down there? She didn’t want to stick around to find out.
She seized Kran’s hand and hurried toward the doorway. Suddenly, Kran’s hand was ripped out of hers and she stumbled forward.
“Hey, that kid’s getting away!”
Jendara realized she hadn’t been seen, and was now hidden in the doorway—but Kran stood completely exposed, as still as a statue under the moon-beasts’ renewed control. An ulat-kini guard burst into view. Jendara shrank into the shadows. The guard grabbed her son’s frozen figure and dragged him back toward the others.
Every instinct screamed at Jendara to charge the bastard, but she could hear more guards running their way. She backed away, holding her breath. If she was seen and paralyzed again, she couldn’t help anyone.
She had to leave her boy behind if she was going to save him.