I remained still, one hand on the latch to the vault door and the other hanging in the air, half-reaching for my harpoon. Who was this man? What was he doing here? Kural had assured me the vault would be empty of watchmen, but perhaps I was a fool to trust Kural. He did not make the climb himself, after all. My heart sank into my belly as I thought of Bran’s fate, left alone on the forest floor with an untrustworthy caretaker.
Bran was a steppe horse—a gentle one, but trained for a warrior, nonetheless. I had to trust that he could look after himself.
“Who are you?” I asked the incongruous man in the vault.
A procession of pilgrims, all following the darting, bobbing light of a single lantern suspended from a hooked staff, approached from the direction of the seaside city. Kural swept aside his drawing of the estates above with an open hand, erasing it from view. My eyes lingered in the place it had been, recreating its lines and circles from memory. A few of the shapes escaped me.
I would take the hidden path, I decided, and avoid the court of the kingdom above. What could I say to the gathered noblemen of the treetops that would convince them of my need for their relic? Here was a land where the living worshiped the dead, and where hidden, shadowy gods dueled for control of honored corpses kept within vaults of stone or living wood. Whatever I said had an equal chance of offending with grievous blasphemy as it did of earning their sympathy.
No, for better or worse, I would take the Sage’s Mirror from their vault, and I hoped to board a ship back to Gallia before anyone noticed it was missing. I could make the treacherous climb, I was sure of it.
Kural took it upon himself to guide me, leaving the strange, silent folk around their bubbling cauldron. The eyes of the market followed us as we went, me leading Bran and Kural on my other side. At his direction, I purchased a great length of rope, as well as enough grain to fill my saddlebags and feed all three of us for several days. On the forest floor, Kural said, only the fungus grew, and while some of its many varieties were safe to eat, it was wiser not to take the risk.
“The mushrooms are better used for holy days,” he said, “or times of great need.”
The grain merchant was a woman of about thirty, tall and stately, with her hair covered in a silk wrap the color of the sea. She eyed Kural with suspicion, and caught my eye when his back was turned.
I had left one city and come to another, just as grand, upon the shores of the summer sea. The last city was Gallia, Ramla told me, and this one was Ksadaja, which those from the north called the city of the dead. Indeed, its greatest edifices were tombs, built above and below the ground in towering structures and mazes of tunnels, none of which I would ever be permitted to see. Only the people of Ksadaja could walk the halls of the temples, and only their priests could venture below, where the bodies of the esteemed dead awaited the call of their gods, who at the end of an age of calamity, would bring them once again to life and place them as rulers over the transformed world. Towering obelisks, carved with prayers to the same gods in an ancient language, stood like sentries between the temples and greeted us as Ramla’s ship made its way into the harbor.
Cricket was charged with provisioning me for my journey. She took me to a passage hidden behind a tapestry on the first floor, with a staircase that led us into the rocky bowels of the cliff. At the bottom, a tiny kitchen, no larger than a ship’s galley, sat dark and cavernous with only a clay chimney pipe to relieve the smoke. Why this place was hidden, and why it had to be here under the rock, Cricket did not say. Perhaps this was the only kitchen she had ever known. It certainly was her domain; a selection of copper pots and iron pans hung well within her reach, and I had to duck to avoid another rack of herbs hanging from the ceiling.
“Has Deinaros told you anything of my journey?” I asked her.
She rolled a selection of dried fish in a thin cloth and handed it to me. “No. If you return, you can tell me of it.”
“If I return?” I echoed. I could not help but smile at her utter lack of faith in me. “You think I won’t?”
She shrugged, and the trinkets still around her neck clattered softly. “We’ll see.”
I spent three days before Deinaros the All-knowing summoned me. The three floors of the tower to which I had been confined soon lost their novelty, and I wandered the city instead, taking in the sights and sounds of the sprawling metropolis. The markets beckoned me with the scents of fresh fish and warm bread, and the taverns promised strong drink—with some effort, I avoided them, to keep my wits about me. Wherever I went, the steepled temple looked down on me from above, its seven carved pillars a constant reminder of Phyreios. What relation the Ascended had to these tall, faceless gods of the West, I could not deduce. These seven stayed confined to their temple and the small carved icons in the windows lining each winding street, and for that I could only be grateful.
Cricket left each morning to sell her trinkets at the harbor. I went with her, on the first day, curious as to why her teacher sent her alone to the market. At best, I feared she would be robbed, weighed down as she was by such a quantity of silver; at worst, I had just recently learned of the flesh-markets of Nyssodes. A clever kidnapper needed only to coincide with a waiting ship, and Cricket would never have returned to the tower.
She bade me keep my distance, though, when we reached the docks. She had charms to sell, and my looming presence frightened away her customers. I asked if she was afraid, and if she had the means to defend herself.
With the book removed from my care at last, a weight lifted from my shoulders. The relief came with a flare of panic—had I handed my one and only lead to the realms beyond death to a charlatan? Deinaros turned the pages, his brows furrowed in concentration and a pleased smile playing upon his lips. I had already faded from his awareness.
If nothing else, Deinaros knew this book. On the word of his young attendant, he had expected it, like an old friend returned at last from a journey of decades. He greeted each horrifying diagram with a nod, each twisting line of text with a tap of one long finger.
“Well done,” he said, more to the book than to me. “This copy is nearly complete. The only things missing are the long, rambling musings of my former master. Everything useful is here.”
“Your master wrote it?” I asked. “He must have traveled nearly as far as I. I retrieved this book many months ago, from an island in the southern sea.”
Deinaros glanced up for the briefest moment before his eyes returned to the page. “No, he only penned the original, centuries ago. He never left the city of his birth. His followers, myself among them, made copies, and those who found those copies made more still.”
My heart sank. How many ambitious rulers became like the king of Salmacha, their souls clinging to their bodies even as their flesh rotted and fell from their bones? A second, selfish question followed the first: how many ill-starred lovers, grieving parents, and lonely widows had taken the book and attempted the same task I had undertaken? Had the gods already taken up arms against a sea of sorrowful humanity, chasing away any chance I had of breaching their ordained defenses?
“Very few now,” Deinaros said. “It was purged from the kingdoms of the West. So many were burned that the pyres reached the heavens. I have not seen a word or line from this book in many years.”
The girl led me through the market, her trinkets ringing like tiny bells and catching the afternoon sunlight. She glittered from shoulder to wrist. She wore straw sandals with fraying edges, and her steps on the stone pavement whispered like wind through a stand of reeds, disappearing under the din of the market and the roar of the surf below the cliff. The smell of salt and fresh fish filled the air.
I had missed the sea. My persistent melancholy lightened, like a small weight removed from the heavy pack on my back, as the white sails bloomed like flowers on the far horizon and the sun touched the waves with gold. Perhaps I should not have gone to Nagara, and instead stayed with my companions on the Lady of Osona, making my way here by means of the trade winds. There was no guarantee that Captain Hamilcar would have brought me here any faster; he followed his own maps, and went where the call of treasure and adventure led him.
I left the tiny commune around Isra’s well, and I left the serene face of the goddess, and I wandered across the desert to the lands of the West. Somewhere beyond the northern horizon lay the lands of my people, where our gods walked the plains of endless ice in pursuit of the great beasts that ever eluded them, and my dragon-headed ship lay beneath water cold and dark as death. My journey would not lead me back there. I had to press forward.
Once, my friend Aysulu had told me of the gods of the West. There were seven of them, she had said, like the seven Ascended of Phyreios, though they moved between faith and legend and metaphor and not in the streets of their cities. Isra was one of them. Like her, the others had wind-scarred faces and the faded implements of their stations held in their stone hands: a shepherd’s crook, a set of balancing scales, a scepter, a smith’s hammer. They towered over the dunes, their eyes long since etched away, the human hands who carved their figures buried beneath centuries of sand. At their feet, the remains of their temples crumbled into dust.
This small community of green-robed women had been constructed around a deep well. The underground spring, they told me, belonged to the goddess Isra herself, and it was her will that the water be given to any who asked for it. It also irrigated an expansive garden of small, hardy vegetables and a date palm on either side of the chapel. No matter how much I stared at the garden, it stubbornly remained, its thin yellow-green leaves trembling in the harsh desert wind. This was no illusion. Already this goddess stood higher in my esteem than the serpent god of Svilsara.
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