Should you ever be tempted to dip your toes in the Garden’s aquifers, just remember where the water flows. One man’s bath becomes another man’s broth.
—Folkways and Right of Ways in the Silk Gardens, Anon.
The water was as cold as a springhouse. It needled their skin and made their muscles seize. Edith had been right about the pool: There was no tapering of the shore, just a sudden, severe drop.
As they sank, still clinging to each other, Senlin watched the blue glow of the forest ripple overhead. Spiders cascaded across the surface, their fat bodies buoyant as corks. The darkness that followed, quick and complete, stole his sense of direction. It occurred to him that the cistern might be as deep as the Tower; it might flow into the plumbing, which might connect to the subterranean seas. The two of them were sinking to the center of the earth. There was nothing inside the perfect dark to orient him except for his hold on Edith.
A moment later, his feet touched the rocky bottom, quelling his disorientation. The full weight of the water bore down upon him. He didn’t let go of Edith, though he knew it was her arm that had brought them down so quickly and that held them to the floor so firmly. He knew, too, that even if it meant he would drown, he would not leave her behind.
Then the surface above them was lit again by a great commotion. Legs and long-trunked bodies shattered the water and thrashed across. The passage was so violent and swift Senlin hadn’t time to really observe the animals, but he was certain he had just seen his first spider-eater. A pack of the beasts had made the spiders swarm.
Senlin peered up at the stormy surface, glowing again with the light of the forest. The chopped water began to calm. There was no sign of the spiders or the eaters, though for all he knew, the beasts might be waiting by the waterside.
It didn’t matter. He was running out of breath. He began to swim toward the light. Only then did he understand the full burden of Edith’s engine. She kicked along with him, but her boots were taller and heavier than his, and these, combined with her armored limb, hampered her terribly. She began to flail. He redoubled his grip on her belt and beat his legs more fiercely. No, not fiercely—fearfully.
It felt like swimming back up a waterfall. He strained until his neck ached, and still they made little progress. When he slowed his frenzied kicking, even for a moment, they sank back down twice as fast as he’d raised them. His legs burned despite the chilly water. Edith nudged him to the wall of the pool where she could use her arm to help pull them up. With her help, they began to ascend more quickly, though still not fast enough. His panicked lungs pushed on his mouth to open; his throat spasmed, swallowing again and again. He wanted so badly to breathe the water in.
They broke the surface with a gasp that hurt when it filled them.
They hauled themselves ashore, too exhausted to appreciate the absence of spiders and spider-eaters. At that moment, Senlin would’ve been happy to roll around on a bed of broken glass: anything so long as it was dry.
Both felt pressed beyond exhaustion. They hadn’t slept in days. They had been beaten, starved, and now nearly drowned. It was too much. Their panting slowed. The sand felt as soft as goose down. Lying at arm’s length from each other, they closed their eyes just for a moment, just to catch their breath, and without meaning to, they fell quite asleep.
At a distance the shipwrecks reminded Iren of presents waiting to be unwrapped. Inspired by visions of full pantries, kegs of rum, and powder to load their guns, she enjoyed a little burst of energy while dragging Adam’s cobbled sled across the beach.
But it didn’t take long to realize they were not the first to unwrap these gifts. The silk of every wreck was slit open like a tent. Because many of the vessels lay on their decks or sides, crude entries had been chopped in the hulls. Adam lit lanterns for them, and they began to search the wrecked, crazily turned cabins for salvage and supplies.
Amid the detritus of shattered lockers and kitchen cupboards, they found no sign of food, liquor, or black powder. They did find rope, lumber, a tank of hydrogen, and most miraculously an undamaged umbilical duct tied up neatly in one corner of an engine room. These much-needed materials gave them hope they would be able to repair their ship, but it did not make them feel any better about breakfast, which seemed again to retreat from them like a desert mirage.
They scoured the places that months of piracy had taught them not to overlook and discovered under the stairs of one cargo hold a chest that had been boarded up inside the hollow. They cracked the feeble lock and found six ornate pistols lying on a bed of straw. They were the sort of weapons more suited to formal duels than battles, with butts of carved horn and pearl-pointed ramrods, but they appeared quite functional. Included in the chest were two horns of powder, bundles of wadding, and cases of shot. It was a thrilling discovery, but the only one of its kind.
After another hour’s work, they were at the end of their list of supplies, and the sled was full. They had what they needed to repair the Cloud.
But uncovering the pistols had whetted Adam’s appetite for treasure. He still had a mind to return to Senlin’s good graces, and what surer way was there to recover a man’s faith than with treasure? He had his eye on a particular round-bottomed schooner that lay mostly submerged in the sand. He hoped that its state of interment would’ve discouraged foragers. Iren was keen to get back to the Stone Cloud. Lingering between open beach and a stand of trees made her nervous. But she had just begun to load the pretty guns, and the activity was so pleasant she wanted to finish. She agreed to give Adam five minutes (not one minute more) to search this one final wreck.
The wrapped ship lay almost perfectly upside down. He entered through a breach in the side of the forecastle. The craft had sunk so deep a little dune had poured into the great cabin below. In another decade or two, the beach would probably fill the ship.
Inside, he raised his lantern against the darkness and felt a swerving sense of disorientation. All of the furniture in the room was above him, clinging to the ceiling that had once been the floor. A four-post bed, a chest of drawers, two bookshelves, and a nightstand stood perfectly squared overhead. It was not unusual for airmen to fix their furniture to the deck, especially in the captain’s quarters where the furnishings had some value, but these pieces had been so ruthlessly bolted that even a violent tumble and an era of rotting hadn’t uprooted them.
The room beneath the furniture was another matter. Broken crockery, navigational instruments, and linens lay in a great haystack. The whole space was sprayed with playing cards, cutlery, papers, books, and maps that had spilled out of the open chart house at the rear of the room. Amid this domestic rubble, skeletons were strewn in undignified poses: head between legs, or tailbone in the air, or nosed into a corner like a naughty child.
Adam forced himself to look past the ghastliness. He hadn’t any time to waste.
Searching the other wrecks had taught him he’d find nothing of value in the open, so he began tapping on the walls and feeling for misplaced seams in the paneling. After a little hunting, he found what he was looking for: a secret alcove behind the shelf of a suspended bookcase. The back plate opened when he pressed it. Inside he found what he took to be the captain’s private cache. And what a pitiful captain he must’ve been. Two thin gold chains with painted tin charms, eight shekels, and a few coppers made up the entirety of the captain’s fortune. Adam swept all into his palm and pocketed the woeful prize.
He was about to slam the panel back in disgust when he spied a leather-bound book discreetly stuffed to one side of the compartment. When he removed the book, something fell out of its spine. He caught it in the air and turned it toward the sallow lantern light. It was a bar of gold: six inches long, narrow as a thumb, and no thicker than a coin. But it was pure gold, heavy and lustering.
Adam opened the book and began reading where the ribbon marker lay. The account was written in an educated hand. The final entry read:
I have done it. I have scrabbled into heaven. I have broken through the Collar and touched some of her riches. But the sparking men pursued us, and we had to flee. I must console myself with this taste of my future fortune. I am resolved to return with a fleet. I have seen things I can hardly believe: posts of silver and roads of gold. All the Tower under the Collar now seems little better than a poorhouse.
The words brought to mind the old airman from the Ugly Rug and his apocryphal description of the fortune that lay beyond the Collar of Heaven: “Trees of silver and rivers of gold. All you have to do is run up, stick out your arm, and pull treasure in by the handful.” Here in his hand was some proof of that impossible promise.
Iren’s muffled voice interrupted his excitement.
Assuming his five minutes were up, he stuffed the gold file back into the book’s spine and secured the volume in his waistband under his shirt. He’d just begun to scale the slope of sand at the entry when the crack of a pistol froze him in his tracks. A second shot quickly followed, and then a third, each progressively farther away.
Hurrying up the unstable slope, he found the sled abandoned. A confusion of tracks pitted the sand. One of the ceremonial pistols lay on the ground. He picked it up, and a wisp of acrid smoke twisted from the barrel.
The angle of the wreck obscured his line of sight of the Stone Cloud. He rounded the silk-wrapped aft of the ship just in time to hear a fourth pistol report. A split second later, the shot thudded into the wood by his head. Someone was shooting at him.
Then he saw the beast, charging away. From the back, it looked like a stretched-out bear striped with swaths of gray. It nearly galloped. Iren ran ahead of the beast, dodging left and right. Her feints did not seem to confuse the animal in the least. It charged at her headlong, narrowing the gap. She threw a pistol at it, the very one that she’d blindly fired over her shoulder and nearly struck Adam with. The beast wagged its long neck and snorted when the butt of the gun bounced off its head.
She was running for the refuge of the ship.
Adam knew at once she would never reach it in time.