Raef raised his hand and asked the question that had squirmed through his head all evening. “Where does she go, Father, during the new moon?”
Always smiling, often laughing, Father Hanel wasn’t like the stricter priests, especially the Hierophant, Father Polus. He always hid an extra cookie for Raef, the little lemon crescents the cooks baked for the snow moon, the one closest to the solstice. He took one from his pocket now.
Raef liked this game. If he proved himself clever, he’d get the cookie. If he didn’t, Father Hanel would eat it, and Raef would just pinch another from the kitchens later.
The novices sat in a circle, a clutch of smaller, black-robed versions of the priest standing in the center. Father Hanel turned back and forth, including all of them in the lesson.
“She dies,” he said. “Because you must be dead to enter into the Underworld. Then she sails the Ebon Sea, in her boat, the crescent moon.” He bobbed the cookie through the air. “But she doesn’t go alone. She takes with her all the souls she’s gathered, the dead.”
“Everyone who paid the way?” Raef asked, then cringed at Hanel’s smile.
Hanel always laughed when Raef won. A smile meant he hadn’t been clever enough. At least Hanel was gentle. Father Polus scowled when he corrected the oblates.
“The coins are but a courtesy, Raef,” Hanel said. “What needs our goddess with money?”
“For books!” most of the children said together.
Hanel laughed.
“But why does she go?” a girl asked.
Raef didn’t remember her name. She was younger, one of the orphans. She had a sweet face and had recently lost her two front teeth. Catching Raef’s glance, she stuck her tongue out. He returned the favor.
“For three nights she rows the souls across the sea, to the gates of the Underworld and returns,” Hanel said. “Then she rises, emerging from the Door to fill the sky until she descends again.”
“Where’s the Door?” the girl asked.
It hadn’t been Raef’s question, but Father Hanel looked to him when he answered.
“It is a mystery. One of her greatest,” Hanel said.
He snapped his teeth shut on the cookie.
Raef woke from the dream.
It hadn’t ended in fire, in screams, but he still shuddered. Some truth lay beneath it, some memory, something he needed to know, but it refused to surface.
Usually, he’d reach for the rum, put himself back under, but Kinos lay facing him, snoring faintly.
He was a drooler, this one, but Kinos slept deeply. He must feel safe here. Raef lightened to see it, and the shudders subsided.
He shifted to try and settle back to sleep, but movement at the edge of his sight caught his attention.
A ghost hovered in the darkness at the edge of the crow’s nest. It was the burned man, the spirit always lingering near Eleni’s boat. He mouthed a single word, over and over, his hands held in a pleading gesture.
Fire. Fire. Fire, he mouthed.
Raef took a long breath and tasted smoke.
“Fire!” he said, bolting out of the bed. “Kinos, wake up.”
“Wha—?”
“Fire!” Raef shouted. The shaking threatened to overtake him, but he forced it away. There wasn’t time.
Kinos sprang from the bed.
“Thank you,” Raef said to the burned man.
He chased Kinos down the ladder.
“Eleni!” Raef called.
“No need to shout, boy,” she said. She sat in a chair in the wheelhouse, watching the gangplank. “I can smell it.”
The odor of burning wood and singed mud grew stronger. The flames were coming.
“Then get a move on!” Raef called, looking out the door.
Out across the wooden streets, flames wreathed a four-legged form. As big as a horse, with ears raised to the hunt, it raced toward them. Boat Town resisted, beating at it with boards and whatever they could throw. They slowed it, but still it came on, shrugging off the blows and missiles to charge toward Eleni’s.
“That’s a Hound of Hyperion,” Kinos whispered, his voice raspy with awe.
“We have to go,” Raef said. “Now.”
Eleni shook her head.
“I can’t outrun that thing,” she said.
“Eleni . . .”
“If it is my time, it’s my time,” she said with a shrug.
“We’ll lead it away.”
Eleni settled back into her chair, her crossbow balanced on her lap.
Kinos bolted down the gangplank.
Catching up, Raef grabbed Kinos by the arm and jerked him back toward the city. “Not that way. We’re done if they trap us at the docks.”
“I can barely see,” Kinos said.
“Trust me?” Raef asked, offering his hand.
“Yes,” Kinos said, taking it.
“Then come on,” Raef said. “Run.”
He pulled Kinos onward, warning him of gaps or the chance to trip over broken boards.
“That’s a Hound of Hyperion,” Kinos said.
“So you said, and so I noticed.”
The nimbus of fire had paused behind them. The hound had slowed, no doubt catching on Kinos’s scent inside the ship—Eleni’s very flammable ship full of old cloth and too-dry wood.
Raef knew of the hounds. Left over from the demon wars, they could track anything once they’d tasted its blood. There’d been nothing in the box for it to eat, so Raef and Kinos should be able to get away.
“Stay here,” he said. Letting Kinos go, he turned back.
“Where are you going?”
“I’m not letting her die, especially not like that.”
Raef ran back toward the broken ship. The hound hadn’t crossed the gangplank.
Skidding to a halt, Raef cast about for a weapon, anything, and found half a brick.
“Hey!” he called.
The hound’s ears straightened. It tensed, perhaps sensing a threat.
Damn, it was big.
Raef threw the brick with everything he had. It slammed into the hound’s side, not hard enough to hurt it, but he got its attention.
It leaped, leaving the ship behind.
Raef didn’t pause to watch. He ran back to Kinos, grabbed his hand again, and yanked him into Boat Town’s depths.
“That. Was. Very. Brave,” Kinos panted out.
“Or very stupid. Maybe we can lose it in the canals.”
He could try to stop it with the shadowknife, but the hound burned with sun fire. That would probably douse the knife before Raef could strike.
It would also mean revealing it, and himself, to Kinos. It was likely too late anyway. He already knew Raef could see in the dark. That was more than enough to connect him to Phoebe.
The planks shook beneath their feet as they splashed and clomped their way through the wooden streets. Raef ignored what remained of the stitch in his side and caught his breath when they squeezed between ships or ducked under keels, forcing the hound to find another way.
Every instinct said to rush ahead, but Kinos couldn’t see.
The hound’s fire, and the screams of panic, told them how close it was.
Flames leaped from boat to boat. Dry wood crackled beneath its hunger, the smoke mixing with the Grief, obscuring the stars and the few lamplights in the upper city.
Raef and Kinos reached the broad canals where the biggest ships used to moor. Maurin’s gang, the Lost, lived nearby, in a crack in one of the canal walls. They couldn’t run that way, but heading farther into the docks meant nearing the warehouses where Versinae stored its dwindling coal and oil. If those were lit, the entire city could burn.
“Into the canal,” Raef said. Its mouth loomed ahead.
It was a risk. He didn’t know if the ladders were missing or too broken to climb. The hound could trap them, though the open sewer at the center might help mask Kinos’s scent.
Many bodies lay piled by the brick walls. Shades lurked by the score.
Raef felt their fingers, damp and slimy, on his cheek and neck.
Just a scratch, he thought. Just a drop.
Kinos’s grip tightened on his hand. They were nearing the canal’s last bend. There had to be a ladder there. There had to be.
“Did we lose it?” Kinos asked.
“I doubt it,” Raef said. He’d never be that lucky.
A splashing followed a howl that echoed off the moldy walls. Firelight chased them.
“Hyperion’s balls,” Raef cursed.
They rounded the bend.
A steel rung ladder was bolted to the bricks.
“Thank you, Lady,” Raef whispered.
“You first,” Raef gasped out.
Kinos climbed quickly. Raef followed.
The hound charged around the bend and leaped, his jaw closing on Raef’s ankle. The creature’s flames licked at his pant leg, singeing the cloth.
His boot kept the hound from drawing blood, but its jaw had clamped on tight. It began to shake and twist, trying to pull Raef from the ladder.
Gods, the thing was strong.
Raef’s grip on the rungs took everything he had. The ladder rattled, starting to come loose from the wall.
“Hold on!” Kinos shouted. “Just hold on!”
He disappeared over the top of the wall as Raef swung his other foot to kick at the hound. They didn’t have long. The knights would catch up. The dead man’s boot was laced too tight for Raef to work it free of his foot.
His grip on the rung began to slip as the hound shook him back and forth.
A broken oar fell, narrowly missing Raef’s head, but slamming into the hound, delivering enough of a shock that the beast let go.
Raef scrambled up, and took a moment to get his breath.
The hound wouldn’t be able to climb out of the canal but it could circle around.
They didn’t have long.
“We have to go,” Raef panted.
“Where?” Kinos asked, casting about, still trying to see through the gloom and Grief. “It’ll just find my scent again.”
“I have an idea.”