Jendara readied her handaxe and threw open the door.
All hell broke loose. Barrels crashed. Someone gasped. Something hairy burst out at her at the same time a wood-splitting maul toppled out and smashed her toe.
She stumbled backward as the dog leaped past her, barking happily. She could hear shouting out in the hallway and her toe pounded, but everything was obscured by the hot mist of rage filling up her vision. There wasn’t much light entering the storage room, but there was enough to see her son’s pale face in the destruction he’d wrought within.
“Get out here right now!”
He crept over a bag of nails and a couple of small casks, cringing away from her. She caught him by the elbow and marched him to the nearest table.
“Sit down.”
“Everything all right?” Glayn skidded to a stop. “Kran?”
“Looks like we’ve got a stowaway.” Jendara glared down at the boy. “I ought to make you swim back to Sorind.”
Fylga barked and jumped into the boy’s lap. The boy pulled her close to his chest.
“What did you think you were doing? I told you that you couldn’t come. So you just disobey me? Are you insane?!”
“Jendara.” Vorrin hurried into the room and took her arm. “Can I have a word?”
“I’m not done here.”
“Hey.” He forced her to meet her eyes. “Come out in the hall and talk to me.”
She spun around so fast her braid caught him in the face. Stomping out to the stairs leading topside, she waited for him with her jaw set.
“You don’t want to yell at him like that,” Vorrin said.
“Butt out.” She raised a hand to stop whatever was about to come out of his mouth. “Kran’s my son, Vorrin. I’m in charge of him, not you.”
“We’re a family,” he snapped. “Don’t forget that.”
She drew a breath to snap back at him and caught a glimpse of Tam peering down the stairs. She swallowed her words and forced herself to search for another, quieter reply. “I told him to stay on Sorind. I made arrangements with Morul and Leyla. He can’t go behind my back like that. He has to be punished.”
“And he will.” Vorrin leaned in closer. “Do you think it’s good for the rest of the crew to hear you yelling like that? This island is bad enough without you sounding like you’re coming unhinged. We’re depending on you to lead us out there.”
He was right, and she knew it. It made her even more furious at her son.
She shot Vorrin an angry look and went back into the dining area. Kran still sat on the chair, the dog on his lap. He put the dog down on the floor.
Jendara glared at the little beast. Kran had always been hardheaded, but the dog represented their longest, loudest battle. She’d tried to explain her logic. Kran stayed with friends part of the year while Jendara traveled; if he was going to get a dog, he ought to get a dog that earned its keep. A hunting dog or one that could pull a cart. She hated to see the little mutt tagging along behind him, an empty belly on stubby legs.
But Kran loved it. He wouldn’t hear of getting rid of it. When she told him to give the dog away, he hid it in his bedroom and snuck food to it behind her back.
And Vorrin had encouraged him. The two of them drove her crazy sometimes.
She forced herself to take a deep breath before she kicked something.
“I’m not sure what I’m going to do with you,” she said, her voice rough but quiet. “But you’re in big trouble, boy.”
Vorrin moved to stand beside her. At least he looked supportive.
“We’re going ashore now. I don’t know how long we’ll be gone. You can have hardtack and some of the apples if you’re hungry, but you’re not to go on deck while we’re gone.”
“And I want this mess cleaned up,” Vorrin added. “Fix the shelf in the storage room. Get everything back the way it was.”
Kran gave a tiny nod, his expression pure misery. Another time, Jendara might have given him a pat on the shoulder, but not today. Couldn’t he see that she made her decisions to keep him safe? He had to learn.
She loved the thought of exploring this island, but imagining her boy climbing around on it made her queasy.
She lit another lamp and went into the storage room to retrieve the adventuring supplies. Sometimes this motherhood business stank like a three-day-dead fish.
* * *
It was nearly an hour later before they made it up the long dark throat of the staircase and into the heart of the island. No one spoke as they climbed those stairs. Even with their lanterns, it was impossible to step into that darkness and not feel the weight of the stone around them, the weight of history pressing down on their flesh. Jendara kept listening for the stone to give way around her, despite her assertion that the place was safe. Safeish. At least safer than a hundred-foot climb up a rope.
When they emerged into some kind of great open space, she felt herself take a real breath again. Glayn patted her arm.
“It’s the darkness,” he said, kindly. “It makes things worse.”
He was right. It wasn’t exactly bright here at the top of the stairs, but a certain grayness permeated the space, as if sunshine filtered in somewhere nearby. She oriented herself toward it.
“Those windows must be this way,” she said.
“I’ll lead,” Tam volunteered. She let him.
Just ahead, the space grew wider, as if the builders had intended this passageway to serve as a huge underground boulevard. The first of the windows started here: great purple slabs of glass that began above head height. Every other one curved up into the ceiling, forming skylights. Jendara had no idea how the glass could have survived its trip below the waves and then back above them. It was either a wonder of craftsmanship that had been lost to history, or there was powerful magical protection on those windows. Either way, their very existence spoke of a culture far more sophisticated than that of most in the Ironbound Archipelago.
“Look at this,” Sarni called. She knelt beside the tumbled remains of what might have once been a kiosk and held something up. “What I can see beneath the muck looks gold.”
Glayn hurried to her side. His eyes widened. As a lover of beauty—and having lived more than two hundred years—he’d seen plenty of good-looking loot. Sarni must have found something really nice.
“There are other hallways connecting with this one,” Vorrin called out. Jendara peered into the darkness of the far side of the boulevard. The opening Vorrin had noticed looked wider than Sorind’s main street. “This part of the island must have been full of people.”
“Or not quite people,” Jendara reminded him, thinking of the strange dimensions of the stairs in the staircase.
He nodded and retreated into the smaller hallway again. With a frown, Jendara went after him, her hand on her new axe. The second hallway was much gloomier than the boulevard with its purple windows. “What are you doing?”
“Just taking a quick look,” he called back over his shoulder. “I wanted to get a sense of how big this all is. I think there’s another staircase down here.”
“Well, come back. I don’t want us splitting up.” She folded her arms across her chest as she waited for him to rejoin her. “You trying to get yourself hurt?”
He leaned in for a quick kiss. “You’re irresistible when you’re mad at me.”
Rolling her eyes, she led him back toward the others. After Sarni’s find, they were looking over the rubble rather more attentively.
“Look at this.” Boruc pointed to the far wall where the light from the first window shone. “It looks like all of this was painted once.”
“It’s sparkly,” Tam noted.
Boruc took a step backward, following the curve of the wall up to the ceiling. Jendara followed his gaze. She could see the faint sparkles that Tam had noticed, but she was far more interested in the blotches and patterns of the faded paint. They looked a little like human figures—bipedal, lumpen figures with eyes that winked in the light. She took a few steps down the great boulevard and glanced back at them. The eyes had followed her movement.
“There’s more light up ahead,” she said. “Let’s keep moving.”
As the boulevard made its way north, the sunlight grew brighter. Jendara’s instincts urged her toward it. She wanted to rush but didn’t dare. More of those fallen structures dotted the space, and here and there the flagstones in the floor had buckled, creating puddles and pools.
Tam looked back over his shoulder as they skirted the edge of one of the larger stretches of water. “I swear something was moving in there,” he whispered.
“I wouldn’t be surprised,” she whispered back. “Stay well back from the water,” she said, loud enough for the others to hear.
A soft splish came from the pool, but nothing emerged.
They walked cautiously for a few more minutes. Jendara paused to check another fallen structure. Built from stone, like the other one, this one had held up better—two walls remained, and Jendara plucked a gold coin from bits of broken shell heaped up in the corner.
“Mind if I sketch that?” Boruc held out his hand.
She let him add a quick drawing to his sketchbook, noticing as he drew that he’d put in the compass rose on the other page. She squinted. “You mapping this place?”
“Trying.” He handed back the coin. “Art on it reminds me of the statues we saw from the ship.”
Jendara held it up, looking carefully at the design stamped on the back. “Think those are tentacles?”
“Ayuh. Noticed them in the murals, too. I think.”
“You all have got to see this,” Tam called. “It’s pretty amazing.”
He stood in a pool of bright sunlight that came from the gap between two enormous doors made of the same stuff as the pier in the cave. Ornate designs had been carved into them, many of which were overlaid with gleaming gold leaf. What looked like an oversized church pew had been jammed between the doors, and now Sarni scurried up over the pew to enter the bright room beyond.
“All clear in here,” she said. “No big puddles, even.”
Boruc and Tam set their shoulders to the nearest door. Despite its size—at least twenty feet tall and probably half that wide—once it ground free of the debris in the frame, it moved easily, a work of inspiring engineering.
Several rows of the great pews still sat neatly in the center of the room, facing what must have once been a wall of glass. But unlike the windows in the boulevard, these had not fared well against waves and time. A few shards of green and red glass stuck out of the first pew, propelled by the ocean’s power.
“It looks like a chapel,” Glayn murmured.
Jendara nodded, lost for words. She stood in the center aisle and slowly turned in a circle. The other walls were dark blue, perhaps painted, perhaps some kind of stone, and golden stars stood out in complicated networks around the room. She caught one grouping that looked familiar and moved to stand in front of it. The stars weren’t just gold paint: they had beaten out of metal and then fixed firmly on the wall. Tracings of the same glittery paint they’d seen outside connected the stars into constellations.
“That’s The Dancer,” she said, “but her arms aren’t right. There are too many stars in her left hand.”
“Stars shift,” Zuna reminded her. “The oldest star charts aren’t quite the same as ours today.”
“Everything’s stars here,” Boruc pointed out. “They’re even carved on the backs of the pews.”
“The Star Chapel,” Vorrin said. He smiled at Jendara. “Sounds promising.”
Zuna moved behind Jendara’s pew to explore the back wall. Very little sunlight entered that part of the chapel, and when Zuna knelt down, she was nearly invisible. “This is interesting,” she called back over her shoulder. “There are recesses back here.”
Glayn jogged over to join her. “Reminds me of the places where people leave their offerings—light candles and whatnot.”
Zuna stepped back into the light, examining what she held. “And strange statues,” she mused. “This was just sitting there. Do you think it’s worth anything?” She held the statue out to Glayn.
He weighed in it his hand and turned it so the light played over it. The statue stood about eight inches tall, its base square, the whole thing vaguely columnar. Lumpen shapes stuck out around it. Barnacles and a few black mollusks obscured the statue’s details—the first reminders of flooding they’d seen inside the chapel. Glayn pulled out his belt knife and scraped off one of the barnacles. “I think there’s gold under all the garbage,” he said. “You’ll have to do a lot of cleaning,” he warned her.
Zuna beamed. “Gold? Really? Gold!”
For the first time, Jendara felt like she was seeing the real Zuna. It was as if her reserve had scraped off with the barnacle. She took back the statue and studied it for a moment, the uncharacteristic smile fading as she looked at all the barnacles and corrosion.
Vorrin approached Jendara. “This is going well. We’ve been exploring for barely an hour and already half the crew’s found gold.”
“Speaking of which, we’d better look for a path to the surface before it gets much later.” Jendara squeezed between Vorrin and a pew to stand in the doorway.
She shook her head. They’d been so distracted by the chapel with its sunshine and ornate doorway that no one had noticed the staircase only a few yards down the boulevard. This was no dark, enclosed stairwell but a wide, grand staircase built from pale stone. The railings must have once been embellished with carved details, but now mussels and chitons covered most every surface.
The mussels gave her pang. Hadn’t Oric said they needed mussels for her birthday dinner? If Kran hadn’t been such a generous soul, he wouldn’t have gotten trapped on the beach with a tsunami rolling in. And now the little dunderhead had to pick a fight with her. She didn’t want to be angry with him when he’d just done something sweet.
Jendara shook off the tender feeling. “I found the way topside.” Without waiting for the others, she went toward the light-filled stairway.
By the time she was halfway up the stairs, the others had caught up.
“Six people could walk side by side without bumping into each other,” Vorrin noted.
“Steps are the same awkward size,” Tam grumbled.
“They’re fine for me,” Glayn said. “The folks that lived here must have had short legs.”
“Stone’s a little worn here at the top,” Boruc pointed out. “It’s awful slick, so be careful.”
Jendara sidestepped the spot he’d noticed and stepped out onto the surface of the island. The tall buildings and statues that crowded the island cast dark shadows across the open space at the top of the stairs. At one time, the area must have been a large, enclosed plaza. The low heaps of white stone suggested the remains of walls, and one taller section still stood. She leaned against it, noticing that the spot had an unobstructed view of the sea to north and south. To her left she could make out the yellow-and-blue pennant snapping above the Milady’s mainsail, and to her right, the open sea stretched out in lonely peace.
Her eyes narrowed. Maybe not so lonely. She reached for the spyglass on her belt.
Off to the west, she could just make out the shape of a large black ship accompanied by several small, blocky vessels and a handful of canoelike boats. They were several hours out, but they were headed straight for the island.
“Vorrin,” she called. “Come take a look.”
He took the spyglass from her and scanned the horizon. His back stiffened. “What kind of ships do you think those are?”
She’d forgotten. He’d grown up on ships, but he was still a mainlander at heart. What she’d seen out here, he’d probably never had to deal with.
The rest of the crew came closer. Sarni’s eyes were fixed on Jendara’s face, her expression nervous. Tam had put his arm around Glayn.
“I’m not sure about the big black ship,” Jendara admitted, “but the smaller ones probably belong to ulat-kini.”
He shook his head. “Ulat-what?”
“Scum,” Sarni spat. “They’re thieving, kidnapping bastards that don’t deserve to breathe.”
Jendara glanced at the girl. There was a story behind that anger, she was sure of it. Jendara held out her hand for the spyglass, then slipped it back in its case. “Ulat-kini are trouble. They look part human, part fish, with a little frog thrown in. My father said they used to keep to themselves, out at sea, and that every now and then they’d come to raid little villages.”
“Not just little villages,” Sarni said. “We’d see them skulking around plenty on the edge of Halgrim.”
“Now their raids are a lot more common,” Jendara explained. “They can breed with humans. The human hybrid type don’t breathe underwater like the others, so they build boats out of what they can find or steal. Real awkward vessels—that’s why they’re easy to recognize.”
“I never saw an ulat-kini, myself.” Tam scratched at his beard. “But I’ve heard plenty. If they’re coming this way, we’d better move the Milady out of sight. They’ll plunder anything they can get their webbed hands on.”
“Shit.” Jendara’s eyes widened. “Kran!”
“We’d better get moving.” Vorrin frowned. “Where’s Zuna?”
The tall woman no longer stood behind Boruc at the edge of the stone plaza. She had vanished into the great city. Jendara felt a rush of impatient anger. This was what came of bringing someone with no experience on a raid. She should have never let Zuna off the ship.
“Everyone just be quiet,” Glayn said. “Remember, she’s got those bells in her hair.”
The stupid bells. Jendara cocked her head, listening hard, mind racing. There hadn’t been any noise, no gasping, no screaming—that had to mean Zuna was fine. She must have just wandered off. Jendara realized she was rubbing the ancestor’s spot on the back of her hand and made herself stop.
Tam caught Jendara’s eye, pointing between two precariously leaning buildings on the eastern side of the plaza. From a distance, the city had looked untouched, but up here Jendara could see how badly warped the structures were. Even the golden spires stood askew. She led the group forward, taking careful steps.
Then she saw Zuna a few yards ahead, hunkered down beside a massive fallen statue, furiously chipping at some detail. Jendara’s lips tightened. One taste of success, and Zuna had turned treasure-mad.
“What do you think you’re doing?” she snapped.
Zuna looked up, so focused on her find she missed the anger in Jendara’s voice. “Rubies!” She held one up that was the size of her thumbnail.
“Wow!” Sarni hurried up beside her. “That’s amazing!”
Boruc stooped. “There’s gold inlay and little emeralds beneath the seaweed. It’s got to be worth a fortune.”
Jendara wanted to be angry, but pragmatism won over. She could talk to Zuna about the idiocy of leaving the group later. “All right, let’s get it down to the cave. We can load it onto the Milady and get moving before those ulat-kini arrive.”
She studied the statue more closely. It actually looked a bit like the columns down in the sea cave—she could see the flat top where it must have supported something at one time, and the broader base where it had met the ground. Upright, it would have towered over Tam or Zuna, the tallest members of their party. Mud and seaweed covered most of the sides, but she could see details of sea creatures in the gaps. What looked like a solid gold dolphin with sparkling emerald eyes caught her attention. It was nearly as long as her arm.
“I don’t know how we’ll get it down all those stairs,” she admitted. “It’s going to weigh a ton.”
“Tam and I can sort it out,” Boruc said. “I know a thing or two about hauling stone, remember?”
They began laying out their supply of rope, discussing the project animatedly.
Vorrin caught Jendara’s eye. “That’s just one statue. Think how much we could make if we put a little effort into it.” He pointed out the next building. “I think that’s a gold sea star above that doorway.”
They walked closer, their boots slipping and splashing over the rough ground. Shells crunched beneath Jendara’s feet. The creatures of the sea had made this island their home during its time beneath the waves.
Vorrin balanced on a fallen slab of rock and poked at the starfish ornament above the open doorway. Silhouetted against the darkness of the interior, he looked like a more heroic form of himself—something out of a story. “I think it’s solid gold.”
A noise like low mumbling made Jendara look away from him. She hurried to the corner of the building and peered around it.
A group of creatures walked in the narrow alley between the next two buildings, chanting in a glottal language. Their massive dorsal crests and bulging eyes spoke of some deep-sea progenitor, their thick limbs ending in webbed and clawed appendages that only vaguely resembled hands or feet. They moved on two legs like humans, but there the comparison stopped. And despite the presence of the ulat-kini ships she’d just sighted, these were no ulat-kini. They were some kind of fish-folk the likes of which she’d never seen.
She whipped back around the corner, hand going not for her handaxe, but for her sword.
“What’s wrong?” Vorrin had the good sense to whisper.
“There’s somebody else up here,” she whispered, “and they’ve got us outnumbered.”