The Books of the Raksura: The Complete Raksura Series

by Martha Wells

  There was a faint splash against the hull below, then Stone in groundling form climbed up the ladder, his clothes dripping on the copper deck.

  Moon found a hatch, a heavy door with a thick crystal porthole. It opened into a wide interior corridor, dark except for what little light came through the doorway. It was lined with fine dark wood, with bright metal sconces holding white crystal globes for lamps. It was also utterly silent, and smelled faintly of must.

  It felt empty, and Moon’s heart sunk. He had hoped the groundlings would be aboard, that they could surprise them, get the seed, and be flying back to the others before dawn. Obviously coming to the same conclusion, Stone made a low-voiced frustrated snarl. He stepped past Moon and moved down the corridor.

  They found a doorway that turned into the darker interior. Stone stopped to fish in his pack and pulled out a small cloth bundle. As he unwrapped it, light glowed. It was a little beach rock spelled to make light, one of two that he had gotten from Flower before they left. He handed Moon the other one and they followed the passage inward.

  About midway through the ship, the corridor opened into a living area. It had deep cushioned couches and bookcases with clear glass doors, and a white porcelain stove painted with delicate flowers and vines. Moon saw a book left out on one of the couches, and picked it up. It had a leather binding, and delicate paper printed with even rows of characters. He couldn’t read the language, and there weren’t any pictures. He put it back on the seat and stepped over to touch the stove, just to make certain, but it was cold.

  He looked at Stone. “No one’s been here for a long time.”

  Stone grunted an acknowledgement. “Maybe they left the seed. Look everywhere.”

  They searched, opening every door, every cabinet, looking into every cubby. The cabins meant for sleeping had beds built into the wall, and cabinets for storage, so there were a lot of doors and cubbies to investigate. It didn’t help that many of them were still filled with possessions. Clothing made of heavy fabrics, leather boots and shoes, more books in unfamiliar languages, some printed and some handwritten, strange tools that Moon couldn’t guess the purpose of. Everything was as rich as the living area, with fine wood, polished metal, painted ceramic sconces over the lights. There were tiny rooms for bathing, the walls covered with painted ceramic, with basins for the water to be piped into.

  Moon found a room that was meant for preparing food, with a long table and chairs, and a larger stove of metal. The cabinets there held white pottery dishes, and metal cooking pots and utensils, and containers of flour, salt, and other dry foodstuffs he couldn’t identify. Some of it had been sitting long enough to get moldy. There was a bowl on the table, filled with fruit so old it had turned into desiccated husks. Moon poked it thoughtfully, trying to estimate the age. Six changes of the month, maybe seven? Stone walked in, saw it, growled, and walked out again.

  Down below there were strange rooms filled with machinery, all of it cold and silent. One of the rooms held blocks of a mineral, with a scent and texture not unlike the one used as fuel for light and warmth in the Turning City, back in the eastern mountains. Moon assumed the blocks were used to make the ship move, somehow. But searching those areas told them nothing except that the seed wasn’t hidden there. They found signs that the crew had left abruptly but meant to return: a jacket tossed over a chair, tools scattered on the floor in front of one of the machines, a writing book left out on a table with a wooden pen and an open ink bottle. The beds all had blankets and cushions, some tumbled as if the occupants had just gotten up.

  They ended their search in the bridge at the very top of the ship. It was round, with big windows giving a nearly panoramic view of the harbor. They had to wrap their lights up again to keep the glow from being seen from the docks, so they had to search the large area by starlight.

  Not that there was much here to search. There was a brass-bound wheel for steering and other devices Moon didn’t recognize, and papers covered with unintelligible writing strewn carelessly around. Some of them had been stepped on and torn or stained with dirt.

  In the center of the room was a narrow, waist-high pillar of polished wood, the top formed into a heavy glass hexagon. It reminded Moon of the mechanism that steered the Golden Islanders’ flying ships, but there was nothing inside it and there was no handle to steer with.

  Stone hissed in frustration. “The damn seed isn’t here.”

  “It’s the only thing that isn’t here.” Moon straightened up from peering into the bottom of the empty pillar. “They left food behind, and their books, their writings, clothing. If they left voluntarily, they meant to come back.”

  “Or somebody came aboard and killed them.” Stone shook his head and paced to the window that looked out at the harbor and the misty city rising above it. “And took the seed away somewhere. Flower didn’t say the seed was on the ship, just that the ship would lead us to it.”

  Moon scratched the back of his neck, thinking it over. “But somebody still pays to keep this ship here.”

  Stone turned back, frowning. “What do you mean?”

  “Trading ports don’t let ships dock for free.” He had heard enough captains and sailors complain about this in the trading cities along the Crescent Coast to know it was a fairly universal practice. “Somebody has to own the pier, or be paying for the ship to stay here. And what about when the monster moves? The bigger ships can’t just be dragged along, they’d get damaged. Somebody has to sail this one. Or tow it.”

  Stone turned to look out toward the city again. “So somebody must come down here to keep an eye on it.”

  

  They wanted something fairly dramatic, something that would catch attention quickly. Setting the ship on fire was the first thing that occurred to them, but that might rouse the whole harbor. So Stone climbed down the hull again, slipped underwater and shifted, and used his claws to snap the heavy cable at the ship’s bow.

  Moon swam back to the docks, climbed a piling, and slunk through the dark to crouch among stacks of casks and boxes waiting to be loaded. Once his scales dried, he shifted to groundling and settled in to wait.

  The ship was still attached to the pier by a few lighter lines and a cable in the stern, but without the bow cable it soon swung out from the pier and drifted sideways. It was a potential hazard to the big sailing vessel docked at the next pier, and it didn’t go unnoticed.

  After some time, the groundling who guarded the deck of the sailing ship passed by that side, stopped, and stared for a moment, then hurried away. Soon he was back with more groundlings. Two of them went down the gangplank to their pier and crossed over to the buildings just above the dock.

  More groundlings came out to look, then went down the pier. They brought out a small boat and readied lighter cables to fasten the ship back to the pier again. Moon cursed wearily. It looked like the dockworkers were going to deal with the situation without summoning the ship’s owner.

  The lights and noise woke the crews sleeping on the ships nearby, and they started to come down onto the dock to watch. They were mostly of the dark and golden groundling races that Moon had seen in the top of the tower, though they were all dressed like sailors, in pants, shirts, and vests of rough cloth and leather. There were no blue-pearl people, and none of the sea-people with the grayish scales and head crests. Moon got up, wove his way through the forest of crates, and slipped into the crowd.

  One thing Moon had wanted to find out, while it was still dark out and they were in a spot relatively easy to escape, was what the reaction would be to his and Stone’s groundling forms. It looked like the people here were used to seeing a variety of groundling races, but you could never be too certain. He had been in situations where a settlement had seemed to welcome a large number of diverse races, only to find out that his groundling form looked just enough like their hereditary enemies.

  But while some of these people glanced at him, no one seemed to find his appearance shocking. Several were having an ann
oyed conversation in Kedaic, mostly about the stupidity of whoever had tied up the ship.

  Moon took a chance and said in the same language, “Who does it belong to?”

  Without looking around, an older woman with weathered golden skin said, “It’s been there a long time.” She tapped her chin thoughtfully. “Most of the turn, I think.”

  One of the dark-skinned men said, “At least. It belongs to Magnate Ardan.”

  Someone off to the side said in a thicker accent, “Does it? I thought it was farcoast traders brought it here.”

  Another woman shrugged. “Maybe they sold it to him. His emblem is on the pier.”

  “Ah, you’re probably right, then.”

  There was a pause, as everyone was distracted by two of the small boats almost blundering into each other.

  “Magnate Ardan?” Moon repeated, hoping that was enough to get them started again. He didn’t want to say too much or show particular interest. They didn’t need any rumors spreading about the funny-looking stranger asking questions about Magnate Ardan’s ship. “I didn’t know he was a trader,” someone said.

  “I don’t know that he is.” The gold woman turned to point. “He has that tower, right up there. The one with the gold turret.”

  Chapter Nine

  Once the metal ship had been secured again, the excitement died down and everyone wandered back to their ships or the dock buildings. Moon lingered, just in case the ship’s owner belatedly appeared, but finally gave in.

  He took the first stair upward, where it wound up among platforms braced atop the knobs and swellings in the monster’s side. As the stairs curved inward, he saw someone standing on the platform above, under the vapor-light, waiting for him. It was Stone, radiating impatience.

  “Well?” Stone asked, as Moon reached the platform.

  “It didn’t work like we thought.”

  “I noticed.”

  Moon ignored that in the interest of not spending the rest of the night

  fighting. “I heard the other crews talking. They think the ship belongs to somebody called Magnate Ardan. He lives up there.” He jerked his head up toward the tower, the gold top barely visible from this angle.

  Stone turned to look. Then he hissed out a breath and started up the stairs. “That’s going to be a problem.”

  Following him, Moon agreed. They had a whole tower to search now, and it would probably be occupied by a large number of groundlings.

  And they didn’t know for certain that the seed was there, just that this Ardan now owned the ship, so he must know what had happened to the crew.

  The steps twisted up through a heavily shadowed, unlit walkway. Stone kept walking, but Moon shifted and scaled the nearest wall, then climbed up to the rust-streaked metal roof of the house that overhung the walkway.

  He had a better view from here. Above the crowded buildings overlooking the dock, the walkways turned to narrow caverns, winding their way past the feet of other towers, far smaller than those toward the center of the city. It was well past the middle of the night, and many of the lights had gone out. He didn’t see much movement on the walkways and bridges in this area, either.

  He could understand why groundlings might be reluctant to venture out into the night. The mist had sunk into the low spots of the city, the walkways and lower platforms, so heavy it obscured everything but the brightest lights. Unless these people had a Raksuran-like sense of direction, they could easily become lost in their own city. He sprang up from the roof, spreading his wings to catch the strong wind, and turned toward the city’s central ridge and Ardan’s tower.

  It loomed out of the misty dark, a tall octagonal structure with a domed roof of green-tinged copper topped by a slender gold spire. But there were no open terraces and balconies like the other big towers. He flew closer, slipping sideways in to make a wide circle around it. There were windows, narrow arches set deeply back into the heavily carved façade, but they all seemed to be covered by metal shutters. That’s not helpful. He had hoped to at least get a glimpse of the inhabitants—

  He slammed into something and the stunning blow sent him spinning away. Dazed, he plunged down, falling toward the rooftops. He struggled to extend his wings, then managed to roll out of the dizzying tumble and caught the air just in time to break his fall.

  Moon glided down, then dropped onto a slanted rooftop. He hooked his claws in the slate shingles as he folded his wings and pulled them in protectively. The skin under his scales tingled, as if he had fallen into something acidic. He shook his spines out with an angry rattle, but he wasn’t sure who he was more mad at, himself or the damn groundlings.

  Still shaken, he crept to the edge of the roof, climbed down to a lower rooftop, and finally down a wall to a walkway cloaked in mist. There, he shifted to groundling. The sudden change in sensation made him stumble; the tingling was worse, like being bitten all over by firebugs. And he had a headache.

  Snarling under his breath, he found his way through the narrow caverns of the walkways. The damp air seemed to congeal on his skin, weighing his clothes down. He crossed a bridge over a mist-wreathed chasm and came out onto the open plaza at the base of the tower.

  Two bridges led off from the plaza and several stairways wound up and away from it amid the smaller buildings clustered around. Vapor-lights hung from arches and eaves over some of the ground-floor doorways. The doors were all sealed, except for one. It was off the second landing of a stairway, and was lit and open; piping music came from it, and an occasional muffled voice.

  From this angle, the tower itself looked even more like a blocky, windowless fortress. The entrance was large but sealed with heavy ironbound doors and there was a big vapor-light mounted on each side.

  The plaza wasn’t uninhabited. Moon immediately sensed movement down several of the byways. And Stone, still in groundling form, was just across the way, sitting back against the wall, near a bundle of rags. Swearing silently, Moon crossed over to him.

  “So they don’t want visitors,” Stone said, apparently having decided to be unperturbed by this development.

  “I’m fine, thanks for asking.” Moon leaned on the wall and eased down to sit. The paving was gritty and smelled of mold. The shock of running into the tower’s barrier had left him feeling every moment of all the days of long flights, tension, and little rest. “Who’s that?”

  The bundle of rags was peering around Stone, staring at Moon. Its eyes were big, dark, and slightly mad. It smelled like a groundling; based on the size, Moon was guessing one of the gray ones with the waterling scales and crest.

  “This is Dari.” Stone jerked his head to indicate his new groundling friend. “They threw him out of that wine bar up there.”

  “Halloo,” Dari said, or something similar. Moon realized that Dari wasn’t mad, but just very, very intoxicated.

  A group of blue groundlings tumbled out of the wine bar’s doorway, the vapor-light gleaming off their pearly skullcaps. They careened down the steps, talking loudly. Moon leaned his aching head back against the wall. “The crewmen were speaking Kedaic. They used a word I thought meant ‘magnate,’ but maybe it means ‘magister.’” That would explain how the thieves had found the colony tree, why they had been so bent on getting the seed. If Ardan was a powerful groundling shaman, he could have wanted the seed for magic, used his powers to locate it, and sent the thieves after it. Moon just hoped Ardan hadn’t noticed that something had flown into his damn magical barrier.

  Stone said, dryly, “That would agree with Dari, who says a powerful magic-worker lives in that tower, and that everyone’s afraid of him.” Dari nodded emphatically.

  Stone added, “I checked. That barrier goes all the way down to the pavement in front of the doors.”

  The drunken groundlings staggered across the plaza. Two spotted Moon and Stone, and broke off to rush aggressively toward them. Dari yelped and cowered.

  When they were less than ten paces away, Stone growled, a low reverberation that Moon felt th
rough the paving. The two groundlings stumbled to an abrupt halt and peered uncertainly. Groundling eyes often weren’t as good in the dark as Raksuran, and they probably couldn’t see much except three shapes sitting against the wall. They hesitated, wavering, then retreated, throwing uneasy looks back. They rejoined the rest of the group, which was making its way loudly and erratically across the plaza.

  Dari made a noise of relief, pulled a pottery jug out of his rags, and drank deeply.

  Stone waited until the groundlings had wandered out of sight, before he said, “He’s had our seed most of a turn, depending on how long it took his thieves to get back through the forest. We need to get in there.”

  “But not tonight.” Moon had had enough for now. They needed to rest, get more information about Ardan, then think of a way to get past the protective barrier. “Dari, show us where the nearest abandoned house is.”

  

  There were several not far away, a crowded huddle of houses around a dark octagonal tower. Dari pointed it out for them, then wandered off back toward the wine bar.

  They made their way down a little alley that wove between the other buildings. It opened occasionally into small courtyards, barely thirty paces across. Moon could hear people sleeping in some of the houses, but others sounded empty. The odor of mold was worse here, almost as bad as the musky stench of the monster. The rock everything was built from seemed too strong to crumble, but the perpetual damp caused mold and mushroom-like plants to grow on it.

  They came to the tower’s base, and there was no mistaking the fact that it was abandoned; the entrance archway was bricked up.

  Moon glanced around, making sure the houses overlooking this plaza had either blocked windows or blank walls. Then he shifted and jumped up onto the side of the tower.

  The openings below the third floor had all been blocked up, the seams filled with layers of dirt and mold. He climbed up to the first open window. Stone flowed past him and disappeared into an opening on an upper floor. Moon slipped inside, scenting nothing but rot.