Vandien picked at the knot on the railing. The woven rein came loose in his hands and he moved to stand behind his slumbering team. His belly was cold with dread; discouragement made him weary before he’d even started. He longed for nothing so much as to go back up the stairs and fall into his bed. Perhaps he could sleep the hours away until tomorrow, and then wake up to a different life as a different person. How he wished!
He had slept, and risen to eat. Helti himself had served him. Though he had peered about for a glimpse of Janie, he had not seen her. The common room had been a lively place, with competing groups singing snatches of different songs. Sticky little cakes poked full of slivered spiced fruit were presented to him. Folk stopped by his table to offer him chunks of a poisonously sour fish pickle. Vandien watched in awe as they wolfed mouthfuls of this dubious treat, following it with hunks of white cheese cut into bells and moons and stars. They had laughed uproariously at his inability to choke down the fish, and tried to soothe his feelings with mugs of potent drink. He had been affable. It was festival, and the fisherfolk were determined that all should enjoy it. When Vandien took a sign from Srolan and rose from his table, few asked him where he was going. And when he told them, none of them followed. ‘Too early,’ they said. Festival was still strong and noisy in the common room of the tavern. When their bellies were full and their heads were reeling, then they would come to watch the teamster flounder about in the water. They pressed him to stay and drink with them. He would miss the best parts of festival. Didn’t he want to hear Collie’s harp again? Before long, there would be dancing, and contests of strength. Had he seen the jugglers yet? Wouldn’t he stay? No? Then they wished him good luck, and would come to watch him in a bit. Vandien left.
He shook the reins and his team uncoiled. He realized then that he had been hoping they would refuse to budge. He would have preferred to struggle with them in the late afternoon sun here in the alley, but they were limbering up their sinuous bodies, arching their short ugly necks, their tails coiling and recoiling like springs. They made chopping sounds with their snouty muzzles. Without warning, they scuttled down the street with Vandien in their wake.
He scarcely had time to respond to the greetings of folk in the street. ‘Early to the task, make a fine catch!’ shouted someone. ‘Let’s follow!’ suggested a woman, but the man at her side pointed to the tavern and said something Vandien did not hear. He found a hard smile on his face and a perverse merriment took over his soul. To the task, then. Be drowned if you must, but do it with style. He gave one glance to the trail that wound down the cliff face. He longed for the sight of a tall panelled wagon on yellow spoked wheels, but he knew better than to hope for it. It wasn’t there. He was alone, and the moon alone knew where Ki was. He might be running her head into the noose as well as his own. He doubted it. It sounded to him as if she had already drawn her own battle lines with the Windsingers. Well, this was his chance to settle a point he and Ki had long argued about. Did he make a greater fool of himself when he was alone, or when in her company?
His team scuttled from side to side in the roadway, flanked by the wooden sidewalks that fronted much of the road, and urged on by the sounds of Vandien’s steps behind them. On one shoulder he had looped the coil of line from Srolan. The prod was tucked securely into his belt. The air off the sea was cool, but not too frisky. A fine day for a festival. Helti had pointed out to him the bluff where the festival Windsinger traditionally stood. Vandien could see no sign of blue robes. Perhaps he and Srolan had outmaneuvered her. She would not expect him to be hastening early to his encounter, not after flattening him this morning.
The wooden sidewalks and tidy cottages gave way to gear huts cobbled together from whatever the sea tossed up. The rocks in the road became larger, the puddles deeper, as the way made the transition from road to footpath. The path itself then spread out and dispersed over the pebbly shores. Vandien had a clear view of the bay now. The only structures now were boathouses and boatways, and then the docks standing stork-legged and tall above the retreating tide. The pilings were black, crusted with barnacles and festooned with sea plants.
Vandien’s team whiffled suddenly as they went, and pulled him on eagerly. He put himself between them and the sea and paced them as they scuttled on, past a pier that trailed out into the water like the rocky spine of some long-dead beast. They seemed to become more anxious with every step. Their splayed feet slapped the pebbly beach, the rounded stones damp and bare from the sea’s retreat. Vandien stepped on a stray rag of seaweed, he slipped, and was jerked to his feet again by the pull of the leather rein in his fist. The skeel were making for the sea. Over their swaying heads, Vandien could see the emerging walls and truncated chimneys of the old village. Beyond them he could sight a darker huddle beneath the waves. The Windsingers’ temple was still covered.
Sixteen splayed feet flapped and splashed into the water. As soon as it felt the damp, the left rear skeel sank to its belly and tried to lie motionless. The team seesawed around it, the others eager to go but unable to pry their teammate loose. Vandien could see it attempting to work its flat feet in deeper among the pebbles and sand. The other three squealed and struggled to go on. Just as Vandien bent to give its tail a tweak, one of its brethren gave it a stinging slash with its whiplike tail. A bubbly welt rose instantly on the mottled grey hide, and the recalcitrant skeel squeaked and surged to its feet. The team plowed into the retreating waves. Vandien followed.
The water was cold but not numbing as it rose over his low fisherman’s boots. The loose trousers flapped around his calves and then grew heavy with water, but the wool held its warmth. Vandien soon found himself grateful for that. The skeel were more eager to advance than the tide to retreat. Vandien held them in with a firm hand, but he soon found the waves licking about his hips. He braced his feet and prodded his team to a temporary halt. They stopped, but there was no lessening of the tension on the rein. As soon as he yielded, they would surge on.
Vandien stood wondering about the team’s usefulness, and catching his breath. They were not swimming. They had scuttled out belly deep and, with no hesitation, pressed on, ignoring the waters that rose to cover their squat bodies and then their ugly heads. Vandien looked for rising bubbles, but either there were none or the action of the waves obscured them. His team squatted completely underwater, straining at the leash. Well, at least they seemed willing to pull.
Slowly the sunken village ebbed into view around them. Walls rose from the falling waters. There was not much left. Sturdy stone walls had worn down until they stood no higher than Vandien’s knees. The small artifacts of a fishing village were long gone, either salvaged by the survivors or buried and eaten by the ocean. Rooms had been silted in with fine sand. Barnacles crusted chimneys. Crabs scuttled behind the angle of a crumbled doorway. Little had survived except for walls and hearths. Anything wooden had long since been nibbled away by the sea. Metal items such as chimney spits had been eroded to skeletal remains. Vandien wondered how long it would be before even the walls were gone, how long until not one stone remained atop another. When that time came, would False Harbor still hold Temple Ebb, and would it still remember why?
He loosened his hold on the team and they promptly surged forward. It was hard to guide them now, for all he saw was the reins following them like a diviner’s rod. The sun was sliding down the sky. Its light glanced off the waters, all but blinding Vandien. The breeze that rose was only the ordinary evening breeze off the sea. He stumbled over stones of walls long fallen as his team dragged him into deeper waters; the reins caught on the corner of a sunken building and the pull of the team whipped Vandien around it. He barked his shins on hidden obstacles, stumbled and caught himself. The water was nearly to his chest now. He had to fight both the pull of his team and his own buoyancy. If ever they dragged him completely off his feet, there would be little he could do about it.
He squinted his eyes against an orange and rose sunset. The light made sea and sky one before him. As the skeel dragged him inexorably deeper, the cold of the water began to close tight around his body. The heavy wool shielded him, hugging his body warmth to him, but the weight of it was becoming frightening. Although it helped him to keep his feet as the skeel pulled on, it would make it harder to rise if he were dragged under. ‘So I won’t be.’ He smiled inanely at the sound of his own voice. The shushing waves and the tragic cries of the sea birds were a special kind of silence, not to be broken by the voice of a mere Human.
Ahead of him, a wave suddenly tipped white in the middle of its green-capped family. Again, and again, there was that flash of white amidst creamy green. Then a black tooth began to rise slowly from the water. The uppermost of the surviving walls of the temple were beginning to emerge, tracing the outlines of their old foundations. The temple was as jagged as a decayed molar of black bone. The sea water trapped inside it swirled angrily, seeking escape. Vandien heard the rattle of stone against stone. The pull of the tide was thwarted by the stubborn walls. The frustrated water seethed within the temple.
The ocean had not wrought its will upon the temple. It had been built in old times and by old ways. What powers had lifted and arranged those huge blocks of black stone? No mortar showed, but there were fine seams showing blacker between the stones. No seaweed dared to cling to them; even the barnacles were only scattered white dots over the surface. The few crustaceans that clung to it were small ones. There were no generations of barnacles clinging to the backs of their parents like on the walls of the submerged village. The black stones stood immune to their encroachment.
The closer Vandien got to the temple, the more monstrous it loomed. Only a sunken building, he reminded himself as its ominous shadow fell upon him, shielding his eyes from the glaring sunset. It stood open to the sky, its vaulted ceiling long gone. If ever it had boasted a lofty bell tower, that, too, had fallen. Vandien wondered briefly about the legends of the bell ringing. How likely was a bell in a cellar? Perhaps there had been a bell tower that had stood after the temple sank. Perhaps it had rung beneath the water, dampening the spirits of the villagers long after the fall of the temple. Such a sound would not have been forgotten in a generation, or even three. It did not matter that it no longer rang; if it had rung but once before it fell, it would have been enough to spark a legend.
The skeel stopped. The black stone wall blocked them. They could not surge over this wall, and drag Vandien after them. He stood chest deep in cold water, looking up. The black stones rose higher than he could reach. His team pulled left, and then right, seeking a route around this obstacle. With a sinking heart, Vandien realized that he did not know where the entrance was. He had assumed the walls had been worn and crumbled away like the village huts. How was he to get into the place to search it? If the entrance wasn’t on this side, it was on the other, still underwater. The temple was huge. Even one circuit of it would take up precious time. The light was ebbing as fast as the water. Vandien’s courage sank with it.
A stab of light and a slosh of white turned his head. The light and the slosh returned for an instant. Sound poured forth from the temple with the ebbing water. The descending water bared the arched portal of the temple. Now a handsbreadth of light showed above the water. The waves swirled in and out of the draining temple, creating a current, and eddies. Waves rushed in and then gushed out almost immediately. Vandien bided his time, staring up at the chiseled lintel. A row of Windsingers was depicted. Their outstretched arms were linked, their robes fluttered in a petrous breeze. Their lips were wide with song. A common enough scene to be carved in such a place, but Vandien found it unsettling. A subtle wrongness teased his eyes. He saw the lintel only as it was illuminated by the same flashes of sunset that blinded him. But were not the mouths stretched too wide in song, the eyes inhumanly puckered? Humans were not the only species to become Windsingers, he reminded himself. Perhaps these changelings were some other race. Their arms were sinuously long from shoulder to elbow, but stout and stumpy from elbow to wrist. The robes sheltered his eyes from the rest of their bodies. Vandien continued to stare at them. ‘Probably just a poor sculptor,’ he remarked reassuringly to his sunken team.
The light of the sunset that broke through the portal was dimmer now. Soon the sun would sink completely, and he would have to work by touch. He did not want to waste what little light he would have. He could pass safely through the door now, if there were no steps down into the temple.
His groping feet edged behind his team. They scuttled away from him, following the wall of the temple. As soon as they reached the portal, they surged through it. Vandien saw no sign of his beasts except for a skirling in the waters. The stout rein followed them. The water became deeper, rising shoulder high. Before he could check them, the team dragged him on. Salt water licked his stubbled chin as the Windsingers danced over his head. He stumbled, but could not catch himself though his free hand flailed the water. The strap twined around his wrist dragged him ruthlessly on. Vandien went down and under. His sodden clothes sank him as his team towed him on.
The water cushioned his impact as his chest met the stone steps that rose just inside the temple’s entrance. Vandien scrabbled to his feet spitting water. A toss of his head flung wet curls from his eyes. Water from his hair streamed over his face. He gasped in air gratefully. His team had stopped. He stood within the temple of the Windsingers.
Jagged black walls cupped the orange sky of the dying sun. As much of the temple had fallen within the walls as outside them; huge stones nosed up from the swirling waters. The voice of the water was amplified here as the sea breathed in and out through the temple door. Vandien felt it tug at him with each passage. The temple stretched before him, immense and sullen, glory fallen on hard times. Bas-relief figures had paced those walls once, but most of their heads had crumpled away with the upper walls. Their gilt adornment had peeled and fled, remaining only as traces in the corner of a mouth, or an unshed tear at the angle of an eye. No barnacle or sea plant had ventured within the temple. The retreating waves left the black walls bare. The tumbled stones could have hidden a thousand chests from a hundred searchers. A fool’s errand.
Feeling with his toes, Vandien edged up four steps. Pushing his foot forward, he found a flat floor beneath him. The water reached only to the bottom of his ribs. Either he was at the top of the steps or on a small landing. His motionless team was invisible under the water. He had ceased to wonder if they needed air. Those big feet would paddle them up to the surface if they wanted a breath. For now, the less bother they were to him, the better.
He slipped the coil of rope from his shoulders and stooped to knot one end of it to the center ring of the harness. The skeel had settled. He intended to explore the temple, and he did not wish to have the reins fouled on hidden stones. The skeel remained still as he stepped away from them. Slowly he paid out the grey line as he clambered and sloshed to the southwest corner of the temple. It had nothing to recommend it except Janie’s story; one stone-jumbled corner of the temple looked much like the other to Vandien. The water eased in and out of the temple, but the level continued to gradually fall. The submerged floor of the temple was littered with pieces of stone ranging in size from the ones that barked his shins to the ones he had to clamber over. He went slowly, testing his footing. If there were steps up into the temple, then Janie’s tale of a chamber below was probably true and he had no wish to suddenly plunge down into it. But the stone underfoot was as sound as the stubborn walls.
The light on the water was wrong. He could see nothing through it. Everything within the walls of the temple shone with the same wet blackness. Time leaked away as he moved slowly through the temple, prodding the floor with his toes, and occasionally stooping beneath the cold water to try his fingers against objects he encountered. He found many rocks, some more or less rectangular in shape and feeling, to his shod feet and chilled hands, much like metal chests. Three times he raised such objects, only to find a square rock as his reward. How many times had this temple been searched since the days of Janie’s grandfather? How many times had stones been raised and dropped? Whatever the old man had found here could have been buried even deeper by the searchers that followed. In the corners of the temple, sand and smoothed pebbles had been heaped by the endless dance of the waves. The chest could be buried there, the metal gnawed away by the salt water, and whatever treasure it held, scattered. It was a hopeless task. And the light was failing.
The water was only waist deep now. Vandien climbed out of it for a moment, and sat on a pile of leaning stones jutting up from the water. Their hard cold surface was no comfort to his chilled body. The skin of his hands and fingers stood up in tender ridges. Calluses made harder yellowed patches on his hands. Within the sodden boots, his feet were tender and sore. The constant immersion had softened his skin until the least abrasion felt like a blow. He could not count how many times his toes had rapped against immovable stones beneath the surface. The weight of his woolen clothes sagged on him. Vandien’s spirit, shored up all day by black humor, sank into the depths of the cold water.
A voice rose in a paean of loneliness. Higher than bird song, purer than the wind’s whistling, it soared into the greying sky and hung there. The note stretched, breathlessly, impossible, filling all the sky with sound. It called forth the stars that suddenly shone there. Night cupped the world beneath its hand. The temple walls were a starless blackness against the speckled sky. Then the voice fell suddenly, sliding down the scale, swirling music through the night sky. The wind began to rise. Higher, the voice now went, higher, and the winds followed it, rushing up to match its pristine flight. Then Killian let her voice fall again and the winds dashed down with the weight of dropped stones.
The water around Vandien boiled, tipped with white in the darkness. The line to his team grew taut in his hand. It slid through his water-wrinkled fingers. He tightened his grip but the rope burned through his palms. He rose, feet braced, both hands gripping the line that was, despite all his efforts, ripping through his fingers. Then, like a breaking axle jolt, the knot at the end of the line caught behind his fists. He was jerked from his pile of rocks, dragged floundering through the water. His body caught between two upthrusting rocks. Vandien dragged himself to his feet, fighting the line, and braced himself against the two stones. The line tightened in his grip, seeming to stretch with the tension. His hands burned, his shoulder gave a creak of protest. Vandien’s teeth were bared and he would not loosen his hold. Let the rope break, or his hands be jerked loose from his body, but no one would say he had let go.
As suddenly as the line had pulled, it went slack. He fell backwards in the water, catching himself before he went under again. Black and silver shone the watery temple in the starlight. The voice sang on.
Wind blew his soaked hair from his face. Vandien struggled through the choppy waters within the temple. Spume flew up whenever the water dashed against a rock. The salt stung his eyes, leaked into his tightly closed mouth. His scar shrank and pulled at his face. The old pain of it began to eat into his flesh and send spasms of agony into the bones of his skull. And still the Windsinger sang, never pausing even for a breath, rising impossibly high and raining down in streamers of pure sound. It whipped the wind to frenzy, and the wind battered the waves to froth. The cold came.
This was no chill of autumn, but the full slash of winter’s claws, brought down from the moon’s cold heart. Vandien shuddered before that attack. He was blinded by the salt spray flung into his face. The wind buffeted him, filling his ears with a roaring that could not drown out the silver notes of that distant singer. Vandien leaned on a rock, sucking in air between clenched teeth.
‘Vandien!’
A woman’s voice called his name through the howl of wind and hymn of Windsinger. More than that he could not tell. Hope surged up in him as rapidly as it had fallen. He squinted his eyes through the dark and storm.
‘Ki! Over here! Ki!’ He stood up on his rock, waving his hands, reckless of his balance. ‘My damn team’s bolted, but I’ve got a line on them. They’re somewhere in this mess.’ He leaped down from the rock without waiting for her reply, and began winding up the line. It was a struggle to follow its twining course between the rocks in the darkness, but he’d be damned if he’d let her see just how out of control the situation was.
Wood scraped against stone. A dark lantern was partially unshielded; its yellow light guttered brightly in the darkness. Janie sat on a crude driftwood raft, the lantern firmly fastened to its center. Her drenched clothes showed that she had pushed the raft out to the temple through the ebbing tides. She rested on it now, one hand hooked on an outcropping of rock. Her eyes were stony as the walls of the temple, and as cold. Her fair hair was a colorless flame blowing about her face. The lantern illuminated little besides her. She shouted to be heard.
‘I thought you deserved at least an audience of one, for your sincerity.’ She paused. ‘The others are too well into their drinking and singing, you know. Killian has stirred up too much of a storm to make it entertaining to watch you. Only a handful turned out last year to watch the teamster. Perhaps in a few more years “teamster” will be an honorary title given to whatever minstrel or clown they can find to entertain on festival night.’ She stared down at his face. His curls had given up their spring and lay dank against his skull and neck. Chill reddened his face except for the scar like a white brand. His clothes hung sopping from his narrow frame. His eyes were dark pits, his mouth a flat line.
‘In truth, I had forgotten to expect an audience,’ he said.
‘Yet you sounded glad when first you answered my call. I thought for a moment that you had found the chest.’
‘I thought you were someone else. A friend of mine who had said she would try to come and help me with this task.’
‘Well, I don’t suppose you would name me as your friend, but I have come to help you.’
‘Janie. That isn’t what I meant.’
‘Explain later.’ She cut him off roughly. ‘The singer’s in full voice now, and we haven’t much time until the tide turns. Hard to believe that’s little Killian up there, isn’t it? Who would have suspected lungs like that in her dainty form?’
‘There are many shades to the word “friend,” Janie.’
‘And none of the colors suit me. Stow it, teamster. We’ve work to do here. Have you found any sign of the chest?’
‘None!’ The wind snatched his reply away, but she read his face. ‘Let me get my team in hand again,’ he roared to her, and she nodded.
She sat cross-legged on the bobbing raft, watching him wind up his rope as he followed its zigzag course through the temple. Twice he had to duck under dark and heaving water to unhook the line from jagged projections. He finally reached the knot that attached it to the ring. He nearly stepped on the team huddled in a corner of the temple, not far from where he had entered.
‘Now what?’ he demanded of Janie. It was a comfort to roar out words at someone. She would hear him over the wind and slam of waves. It was a small vent for his frustration.
She shrugged. ‘Pull some rocks over!’ she yelled back. ‘Start in my grandfather’s corner!’
‘Why not? Giddap, team.’ Vandien stooped under the water and gave a coiling tail a tweak. The team sidled off and he herded them to the southwest corner. ‘Pick a rock!’ he invited jovially.
Janie used both hands to push the hair from her face. The salt water borne on the wind had soaked it already. Tendrils clung to her forehead and cheeks. ‘That one!’ She pointed to the tallest, a narrow jagged thing like a crooked finger pointing at the sky.
‘Fine!’ He kept a grip on the rope near the ring. The free end of the line he tossed to Janie. ‘I’m the teamster,’ he reminded her. ‘You’re the fisherwoman, and the world looks to the seafolk for sturdy knots. Make it fast to the rock you picked, and let’s see what we can turn up.’
His twisted grin was not to be refused. A wry smile lit her usually sullen face and she slipped willingly from the crude raft into the chill waters. Vandien watched her settle the line in loops around the stone, throwing the line into a knot as easily as he told stories on his storystring. She threw up her hands to show she was finished and waded clear of the rock.
Vandien stepped toward the team and stooped and felt for tails. But before he found one, the rope snapped taut, stinging his hip as it burned past him. His movement had been enough to spook the team. He dodged back from the thrumming line and threw up a forearm to shield his face. The silver grey line shimmered with the intensity of the pull. But the stone did not budge. The wind whistled past them as Killian’s voice rose and fell. The cold water boiled around them as the skeel maintained a steady pull. But the stone was adamant.
‘Let’s try a different one!’ Vandien suggested loudly.
Janie nodded with a grimace. She was plainly unimpressed with his efforts. But Vandien would not fault his beasts. The humming line attested to the steadiness of their pull. He doubted that mules or horses could do better, given these circumstances. He could not even picture Ki’s great grey horses standing among these rocks; they would have no room to maneuver the bulk that made up their pull. He stepped toward his skeel, intending to prod them to stillness so Janie could unfasten her knots. Churning water told of the skeel’s agitation at his approach. Before he could tap them down, he heard Janie’s scream of warning.
The stone was coming. Silently it fell like a bludgeoned giant. Vandien gave a hoarse cry and tried to scramble out of its path. His frantic efforts were swallowed by the clinging sea. The water cradled him as he fell backwards. The line never went slack. The scrabbling team kept it taut as they surged away from the falling stone. Vandien saw the line pass between two standing stones before the black water closed over his head. A wall of water washed over him and pressed him down.
A hundred years later he came up out of the darkness. A searing cold wind was a blessing on his aching face as he spat and coughed and snorted. He could hear Janie screaming his name, but he had no breath to answer her. Water poured down his face from his sodden cap and hair, flooding his nose and mouth with water when he tried to suck in air. It was pitch black now, night, all trace of evening gone in the moment he had spent under the water.
His eyes found Janie’s lantern first, a tossing bit of yellow light in the blackness. She crouched over it, unharmed. His team had vanished. The tall stone they had pulled down lay where he had last seen them, partially jutting from the water. He could see one loop of the rope still knotted about it.
‘Janie!’ he roared, and she heard him at last. The lantern light caught the wildness of her eyes as she turned to him. She jumped from her raft into the water and waded toward him. One hand, hooked into a log of the raft, towed it along behind her.
‘I thought you were dead!’ she screeched. ‘I thought it had landed on top of you.’ Her face had gone white, fear dragging at her mouth. She reached him and let go of her raft to seize him in a convulsive hug. Vandien was amazed at the strength of her arms as she clung to him. ‘You were under so long!’ she said into his ear. Her body trembled against him.
‘Just long enough to learn how stupid I was to jerk at the stone that way.’ He patted her shoulder lightly. ‘It’s all right. No one was hurt.’
Janie stiffened and was instantly apart from him, the frightened child swallowed by the outraged woman. ‘And small credit to you, you stupid landsman!’
Vandien let the wind blow her words away. ‘Did you see my team?’ he asked. She shook her head, still torn by conflicting emotions. She turned away from him, and hurried over to where the stone had stood, to begin poking diligently about in the water. Vandien trudged forward through the water to where the line was still wrapped around the fallen stone. He managed to latch his hand under it and followed it forward along the length of the fallen giant. The rope was tight against his hand, but not singing with pull as it had been. He grimaced in the darkness, making his scar wrinkle painfully. Despite their ugliness, he had grown more than tolerant of the skeel. He hoped they had come to no harm.
He clambered over the fallen stone to follow the line as it snaked between two standing pillars. He took another step and found himself in water to his chin. The line still led down. Vandien slid his booted foot forward and found emptiness. His toe slid across a straight edge of stone. The answer came to him. He was standing on the first downward step of a stairwell. He backed up, staring down at the black water before him. The beasts had scuttled down those submerged stairs and taken the line with them. He pulled at the rope and felt an answering tug. At least they were alive. He could imagine them huddling their bodies down flat, digging those splay feet in for purchase. Four beasts that could pull down that standing stone weren’t going to be budged by his pulling on a line. He’d lost them.
Janie sloshed up to him. The waves alternately cloaked and revealed her breasts beneath her sodden smock. Vandien became suddenly aware that the water was higher than it had been. The tide had turned and was advancing on them. It would be easy to be trapped here. The Windsinger’s voice stirred the tide to new energies. Every wave that came in the temple’s door surged higher than the previous one. Once the door was covered, they would grow exhausted long before the waters rose above the black walls. They’d drown like rats in a pit. The urgency in the story Janie had told came home to him. Leave or die. That had been their choice then.
He looked at Janie’s lantern raft. If he abandoned his team, they could cling to it. It was no more than a few driftwood logs hastily lashed together, but they could hold onto it and survive. He pictured the rising water carrying them up slowly, until they could float free over the temple’s walls. And probably be driven out to the sea, still clinging to it, to drown there. Scarcely an improvement over drowning in the temple.
‘There was nothing under it!’ Janie was shouting in his ear. ‘We’ll have to try another one. Back up the team. My knot’s trapped under the stone, but with some slack I may be able to work it loose. Otherwise, we’ll have to cut the line.’
He stared at her silently. Laugher welled up in him, but found no voice. The wind drove salt water between his lips and into his mouth. All things were lost to him; his chance for his face, for the gold, to earn Srolan’s respect, to ease Janie’s woes, even the ugly team he had borrowed. He had lost it all, and this child did not even comprehend that. Janie took his silence for assent. She turned from him, still towing her raft, and struggled along the fallen stone. She stooped by the rope, and then shook her head. ‘Back them up. I need some slack.’
‘They went down stairs.’ Vandien spoke low, but somehow the words carried to her.
‘They couldn’t. We covered it up years ago!’ Janie was incredulous. ‘I was a little girl, then, but I heard about it. They covered it up because someone fell in it and nearly drowned, during a Temple Ebb. Everyone was so busy watching the teamster, no one saw the danger until it was almost too late.’
‘Well, it’s not covered now. And my team’s down there.’
Janie sloshed over to stare down at the water in front of him. ‘I guess this gives you an easy out,’ she said with sudden bitterness. ‘There’s never been a teamster yet that put his heart into this. Why should you be different? Keep your scar, damn you! Go back to the inn, laugh and drink! Damn you, damn you, damn you!’ Her voice rose in shrillness and vehemence, cutting through the wind to beat against him.
Gripping the rope loosely in his hand, he took a deep breath and a step down. Water lapped his chin. He steeled himself, and stepped down again. His eyes were useless now. His body wanted to float back up to the surface, but he kept his grip on the rope. He’d see how far down these steps went, if nothing else. He reached his other hand down and gripped the rope to pull himself deeper. His feet lost their contact on the stairs. He trod water and felt his feet scrape and glance off the stairs. His lungs were beginning to swell within his chest. He resolved to try one more step. He reached his free hand, got a good grip, and hauled himself deeper.
The surge of the team jerked Vandien deeper before it snapped the rope free of his grip. Salt water stung the abraded skin of his water-softened hand. It took a moment before he realized the rope was gone. His tuggings had spooked the team. He’d have to find the rope and start again, but first some air. His bursting lungs prompted him to kick strongly, reaching up for the air. With two strokes his outstretched hands met smooth stone. He scrabbled along it in the dark, hoping his sense of direction was good. The opening of the stair well had to be nearly overhead, unless the team had jerked him farther than he thought. Unless. A bubble escaped his mouth.