Page 83 of The Ragpicker King
“Isn’t pleased with me, yes.” Kel sighed. “I heard you. I was actually hoping for a chance to talk to him tonight. I didn’t realize he wouldn’t be with us.”
Ji-An turned to look at the oarsmen, but neither seemed to be paying any attention to the conversation in the boat. Turning back to Kel, she said, “Well, what did youexpect? Turning up like that yesterday with the Kutani Princess, not warning either of us what she wanted, or even that you’d be with her—”
“I didn’tknow.” Kel stretched out his legs. He was wearing all black, like the rest of them, and had both his boot daggers, his wrist knives, and a blade strapped at his waist. “All she told me was that she had a meeting and required me to guide her around Castellane.”
“Hmph.” There was a faint green tinge to the moon tonight; it lent an eerie cast to Ji-An’s eyes. “And why does a Princess require contact with a criminal? She’s a tricky one, Anjelica Iruvai. I’m not sure how much you should trust her.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” Kel said. He saw that Merren was blinking around in some wonder; they had reached deeper water, where the tallships were anchored. The great craft rose straight up from the water, dwarfing the tiny skiff. It was as if they were in a dark valley with mountains rising on either side.
Only, these mountains were inhabited. Lights glowed from the ships, and the sound of voices traveled across the waves. The oarsmen rowed close to the ships’ sides, doing their best to avoid being seen.
There was something about the vastness of it all that struck Kel with a peculiar loneliness. He had spent all his life in a city, a place where he was rarely more than a few steps from another human being. But the sea was immeasurable. Once you left the harbor, a vast empty plain of bitter water stretched all the way to Kutani, unfriendly as a scorching desert.
“Was Anjelica correct about the weapons cache? In the warehouse?” Kel asked.
“Yes,” Ji-An answered reluctantly. “She was. I suppose Andreyen will do as she asked and send word for Aden. He probably already has.”
“So she was right about Prosper Beck. He’s come back.”
Ji-An pressed her lips together tightly. “It seems so.”
She almost sounded weary, in a way that was very unlike her. Kel wanted to ask her more—what Andreyen thought of Prosper Beck’s return, what Beck might want—but at that moment, the skiff darted out from between the tallships and he saw Tyndaris, rising out of the water.
From the shore, the drowned island had always seemed to shine, a fragment of broken quartz jutting from the waves. Up close, Kel could see that the glow came from the Chapel of a Thousand Doors. The temple columns were the only part of Tyndaris that never sank below the water, and the white marble pillars gleamed like polished bone. Most of its spires had broken, but a few still reached toward the moon like fleshless fingers.
The rest of the island, the earth it sat atop, was a mass of wet dirt and crumbled ruins, now thickly overgrown with blackish-green seaweed. Barnacles clung to the island’s sides; what Kel had at a distance taken for trees were in fact branching towers of coral, from which hung damp clusters of sea-moss.
One of the oarsmen muttered; the other made the sign of Aigon’s Wheel, a circle over the center of his chest, meant to ward off bad luck. Kel could not blame them, even as they drew closer to the island. There was something forbidding about a place that spent most of its life sunk into an alien atmosphere, where sharks and crocodiles roamed around its ruins, and the sun did not reach.
The skiff came to a halt in a foot or so of brackish water. It seemed they could go no closer to the island without grounding the boat. The oarsmen indicated a set of stone stairs cut into the island’s side; that was, they explained, the only way up to the chapel.
“How long before the tide rises?” Kel asked, swinging himself out of the boat. He could feel the cold of the seawater even through the leather of his high boots.
“An hour, maybe,” said the elder oarsman, a man whose pale-gray hair stuck out like hay from beneath a flat cap. “It’ll take a while to cover the island, but you want to get away well before that. We’ll be waiting here for you as long as we can. But if we have to”—he shrugged—“we’ll leave you here.”
The four of them were all silent as they trudged through the shallow water to the foot of the mossy steps. Kel suspected they were all imagining the same thing: what it would be like to be trapped on Tyndaris as the tide rose until only the very tops of the temple pillars were visible above the water. Until you floated among the ruins, waiting for a green death—by drowning or crocodile—to claim you.
Ji-An reached the steps first. She hopped up, her bow in one hand; her quiver was slung over her back. Jerrod and Merren followed, and Kel came last. When he set his foot down upon the first step, tiny pinkish crabs scattered.
The stairs wound up through what had once likely been a forest and was now a stepped path lined by dead trees whipped to driftwood by years of sun and salt water. It was necessary to step carefully: Not only was the stone slippery, but cracks in the steps held small tide pools in which flashed starfish and hermit crabs.
The sea fell away below them as they ascended. Kel took comfort in the sight of the skiff, a bright lantern-lit dot out on the water. The sea seemed to sigh and breathe and wind about the island like a living thing. By the time they reached the peak of the island, their little boat had vanished below an overhang of rock.
The vegetation changed swiftly, between one step and another. Now there was seagrass and a few hardy bushes, starred here and there with flowers. The steps became a neat path that cut across the top of the island to the Chapel of a Thousand Doors.
“Funny,” Merren said as they approached. It was the first thing any of them had said since they’d set foot on the island. “It doesn’t actually haveanydoors.”
“Hard to have doors without walls,” Kel said.
“That’s a little unfair,” said Jerrod. “There’sonewall.”
Indeed, a rectangular marble floor, lined with marble pillars, was nearly all that was left of the place. The roof the pillars had once supported was long gone, and all but one wall had collapsed. The whole place had likely once been brightly painted. Here and there, faded flecks of color still clung. A well-preserved mosaic still decorated the single wall, showing Aigon in full glory, his blue-green hair and beard flowing. Before him knelt a man presenting him with a sword—the signal of surrender. The man was a Sorcerer-King; one could tell by the pattern of black tiles above his head. A stone glowed in the hilt of the sword, represented by a cluster of golden tesserae.
“Look.” Ji-An pointed, and Kel realized why he was able to see the mosaic so clearly. A small storm-lantern hung from a hook in the wall over the ruins of the altar. A flame burned steadily inside it, which meant...
“Someone’s already here,” Kel said in a low voice. He ducked behind a copse of leafless pine, and the others followed.
They had only been waiting for perhaps ten minutes when the sound of footsteps became audible, boots on stone, and then a low clamor of voices. A moment later, Lady Alleyne appeared, trampingthrough the scrub toward the temple where the lantern hung, a beacon indicating a meeting place.
