With the terrible book in my hands, I retraced my steps through the neglected garden and returned to the palace. A cold wind had come in from the sea as the sun set, and the strange warmth of the book’s leather binding cooled until it felt like the skin of a dead man. I considered throwing it from the ship as soon as I reached open water. I could only guess at its contents, but I was filled with the grim certainty that it was an evil book, and I would find no help in its pages that did not cost me my very soul.
The first night I spent on board the ship, I dreamed.
I floated in the abyss before the gate of bone, with blackness pressing around me and the shape of the goddess Nashurru moving in the depths below. The water was cold, and my body ached with it, my limbs stiff and shivering. I kicked my legs and reached my arms toward the gate, but the chill pierced my bones and filled my belly with ice no matter how much I moved. In the vision, I had felt no need to breathe, but now my chest contracted painfully, sucking against nothing. The bright white of the bones blurred as my vision faded. At last, I could withstand no more, and I inhaled frigid water. It burned my chest and stole away the last of my sight.
I would die here, I thought, and my bones would join the gate as Nashurru looked on, indifferent. I would never see Khalim again.
I kicked my legs and held my arms out to steady myself. My body moved slowly, as if I swam through mud instead of the water I saw all around me, as if I swam in a dream. Light filtered down from above and fell upon the gate of bone and upon the fins of a mighty whale that swam in the depths below.
A human hand, the same gray-blue as the whale’s fins and as long from wrist to fingertips as I was tall, emerged from the darkness. An arm, encrusted in barnacles and dappled in white and gray, followed. The figure unfurled its great length, and I found myself face to face with a giantess, her upper body bare and mottled with coral, and her waist tapering down to the tail of a mighty whale. Her hair was long sea-grass, and colorful fish darted between the fronds. Her face, angular and sharp-toothed, held a whale’s huge dark eyes. She studied me with one, and I saw myself reflected in it, tiny and distorted. Unhurried, she turned her head to fix me with the other.
I could not move. Distantly, I was aware of my body breathing, though I remained submerged in the otherworldly sea. A terrible deep note sounded through the water, shaking the bones of the gate and stilling my heart for a terrifying moment. There was a question in that note, and in the wide-set eyes of the giant. At last, I understood: I swam before Nashurru, goddess of the deep and the places between, and she wanted to know why I had come to her.
Here is the tale that the grandmothers told me, as well as I can recall it.
The island was called Mau, and the fairest maiden upon it was named Noa. When she was a girl, and her three small siblings were but infants, their parents were both lost at sea in a terrible storm. From this storm came Soroena, an eel as large as the mountain of Ewandar. In the springtime, a single bright blue star rises above the horizon at sunset, and a serpentine trail of white stars follows it; this is the eel approaching the island, demanding a sacrifice as it did every third year at the end of the rainy season.
“Is this eel like the great lind-worm of the North,” I asked, “scaled and finned, with teeth like sabers?”
“Hush,” Luana said.
The next constellation to clear the horizon was a human figure, arms spread wide. This was Noa, chained to a volcanic rock a short distance from the shore of her island. She had grown to womanhood caring for her siblings, while others fed the slow but inexorable appetite of the eel, but this time she was not so fortunate. At sunset, her fellow islanders secured her to the sacrificial stone, and there she would wait. Soroena would arrive at midnight, and devour her whole, leaving only her hands and feet in the iron shackles—and, more importantly, leaving the waters surrounding the island safe for another three years.
Weight bore down upon me. The broken earth cut into my flesh. Were it not for the pain, I would have thought I had perished, crushed beneath the rock. Absolute, impenetrable darkness pressed in all around.
I awoke just before sunrise, and after only a short while I abandoned my futile attempts to sleep again. It was for the best that I would not compete this day, as I had not rested well. My thoughts were churning like the icy mountain streams in the land of my birth, fed by snow-melt in the spring. I feared that the banks of my mind would be flooded if I remained by myself in the quiet. I rose and left my room to light the fire. In these dry climes, the early mornings were cold, even in the summer.
A fellow competitor, Rhea of the Golden Road team, had been attacked and nearly killed by a man in a mask. Reva had assured us that we would be safe during the Cerean Tournament; that it was forbidden to attack any of the contestants and that fairness in the games was sacred. She had been counting on that principle to keep Khalim safe, so that he and his god would not be at risk from the Ascended even after he made his presence known in the contest of magic. Now all the people of Phyreios knew his face and his name and what he could do.
Could I keep him safe? I was unable to protect Fearghus, all those months ago.
“How is it that you can do that?” I asked. I would not have believed it, had I not seen it with my own eyes, and felt the heat of Jora’s fever and smelled the putrescence of his wound. He had surely been close to death, and now he walked back to his house under his own power.
“Khalim has a gift,” Reva said. “When the time is right, the people will follow him to the ends of the earth.”
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