Starspawn

by Wendy N. Wagner

  Careful. That was how Jendara had always thought of the woman. She kept to herself most of the time, and had never misguided the ship in all her years of navigating. Jendara had never seen her worried or frightened. While the others had faced cannibals and skinwalkers last year, Zuna had broken her leg on a trip to the mainland and missed it all. Jendara wondered what she’d be like in a fight. No one could be that collected all the time.

  “It might be dangerous,” Jendara warned. “There’s no way of knowing how long that island’s been underwater.”

  Zuna stopped and glared. “If you want to mother someone, mother your son. I can take care of myself.” She pivoted on her rope sandal and strode away.

  “What’s her problem?” Jendara snapped.

  Kran patted her shoulder soothingly, then reached for his chalk. He paused and wrote: Island sounds great.

  Jendara frowned at the slate. “Kran, you’re not going.”

  What? He underlined the word twice.

  “You heard what I said to Zuna. Parts of that island could still be flooded, not to mention who knows what kind of weird magic or critters might be on it. There’s no way I’m letting you go.”

  He threw down his chalk so hard the tip broke off against his slate. It swung crazily on its cord. For a moment, she half-expected him to throw his slate off on the ground, the way he would have just a year ago, but instead he just stood glaring at her.

  She folded her arms across her chest. “Let’s go check on Oric.”

  His fingers curled into fists. He looked like he was ready to explode, but he didn’t.

  She walked up the hill without looking back at him. She couldn’t take him with her, and she wouldn’t cave, but no matter how well Kran knew it, he wouldn’t let the matter go. He was going to be angry with her for a long time.

  Jendara pasted a pleasant look on her face, smiling at villagers as she passed. But inside, she sagged with exhaustion. Raising a boy was like fighting a war, sometimes. And right now she wanted nothing but a bit of quiet and a pint of beer in her own little house.

  In other words, she wanted the impossible.

  * * *

  Jendara stood at the deck rail as the morning wind blew sweet salt into her face. The trip to the island would take all morning and a good chunk of the afternoon; Zuna was planning a careful course that skirted the rocky shoals they’d seen off the northeast side of the island. The crew’s energy ran high—Jendara could hear it in their voices as they called to each other in the sails. It was a skeleton staff without the three Sorinders, although Vorrin had pressed their old friend Boruc into assisting, and she could hear the big man singing someplace up in the rigging. He wasn’t much of a salt, but it would be a short journey to this mysterious new island. They could manage the ship well enough with no weather.

  She rubbed her eyes. She’d slept poorly, even though her and Vorrin’s bed in the captain’s cabin was comfortable enough. There had been a time when she and Kran were inseparable, more best buddies than parent and child, but over the last few years his temper and will had pulled them apart. Things had gotten quieter since Vorrin joined their little family, but in the last few weeks, there had been signs that the good times were coming to an end.

  “You all right?” Vorrin set a hand on her shoulder.

  “I don’t like leaving Kran like this. I hate fighting with him.”

  “I know. But you were right to leave him behind. I tried to explain to him just how much Oric and Morul were going to need his help while we’re gone, but I don’t think it helped.” Vorrin shrugged. “I don’t know that much about being a father.”

  “You’re the closest thing he’s ever had,” she reminded him. “His own’s been gone a long time.”

  “I do my best.” He sighed. “Jendara, do you feel good about this trip? About this island, I mean?”

  “Sure. We just lost everything we own, outside of this boat. After crew pay and all the repairs on the Milady, we’re flat broke. Anything that could make us a copper or two feels fine.”

  He set his elbow on the rail. “I don’t know. I just can’t help but wonder what makes a sunken island come up out of the sea like this. You haven’t seen it yet, so you don’t know. It’s ancient. Just looking at it, you can tell. Whatever built that city, they lived a long, long time ago. Who knows what they were like?”

  “We’ll be careful.” Jendara nodded to herself. “I’m sure everything will be just fine.”

  3

  TALL CLIFFS AND SEA CAVES

  Jendara adjusted the spyglass. “So that’s our island.”

  It looked like a giant tree stump rising out of the sea—the sides some kind of dark stone that stood nearly vertical, the top mostly flat beneath the city structures. A trio of ridges at the center made several of the largest buildings stand tall above the others. The imposing structures gleamed in the sunshine, the pale stone and gold details blindingly bright between patches of scabrous seaweed.

  At the base of the island, knobs of rock stuck out like a tree’s roots bulging above the surface of the soil. Jendara scanned the waters around the lower rock formations for a safe place to tie up, but her attention kept wandering back to the top of the island.

  She had visited a dozen cities on the mainland—even Absalom, the largest and most beautiful city of all the Inner Sea—but she’d never seen a city like this. The island itself wasn’t large—about five miles across—but every inch of it supported some kind of building or statue, and most of them glinted with the sheen of gold.

  She lowered the glass. “It’s stunning.”

  “Incredibly,” Vorrin said. “Let’s make a full circuit to get the lay of it.” He walked away toward the bow.

  Jendara couldn’t take her eyes from the city. The amount of treasure visible to even the naked eye was astonishing. It was hard to believe that all of this had been sitting quietly beneath the sea while her people’s longships had been passing over it, none the wiser. If that earthquake hadn’t brought it up to the surface, no one would have ever known it was there.

  Of course, if there hadn’t been an earthquake, the village of Sorind wouldn’t be a mud flat right now, but that was beside the point. Now she was here, and so was all this treasure.

  “Pretty amazing, isn’t it?” Sarni bounded up to Jendara and gripped the railing. She bounced on her toes, too excited to contain all her energy. “Not much to a former pirate like you, I’m sure.”

  Jendara rolled her eyes. “Please. I was picking off merchant ships, not emptying the king’s coffers. I bet most kingdom treasuries don’t have as much gold in them as the top of this city.”

  Sarni laughed, nearly a giggle. Sometimes she seemed younger than her age, as if, since she’d missed out on having any real childhood, she was trying to get some of it back now. Jendara thought of Kran and was glad she’d gotten him away from her life of crime. Piracy was no life for a child.

  “Hey, can I use your glass?”

  Jendara handed it over and Sarni stared through it. She went quiet for a minute, then laughed again.

  “Look at all those statues. That one over there has got to be as tall as the Milady.” Sarni turned to grin at Jendara. “It’s got a lot of seaweed on it, but I’m pretty sure it’s got wings and tits.” She went back to scanning the island. “Oh wait, those might be a pair of krakens. Tits are funnier.”

  Jendara rolled her eyes.

  Sarni handed the spyglass back to Jendara, face suddenly serious. “I’ve never seen anything like this place.

  “Well, it’s old and it’s in pretty rough shape. It’s going to be an adventure for all of us.”

  Sarni shook her head. “It’s not that. It’s … all the gold and the decorations?” She turned to put the railing at her back and folded her arms around herself. “Can you imagine living like that? Even the palace in Halgrim ain’t that fancy, not by half.”

  “Well, we’re islanders. Everything we’ve got we had to pull out of the sea or grow ourselves. Takes a lot
of work to get what you need, let alone fancy things.”

  “Ain’t that right. Down by the harbor, where I grew up, nobody had shit.” She shrugged. “Well, shit we had, but that was about it. If we got lucky, there was enough fish to eat and the ice sealed up the hole in the roof.”

  Jendara searched for the right answer. There had been hard times in her life—more than enough—but at least as a child, her family had been able to live off their land. Her clan had always been able to pull together during hard times, and no one had to suffer on their own.

  “The first pair of shoes I ever had?” Sarni continued. “Stolen. My mama wouldn’t steal, but I would, and it felt damn good not to be barefoot on the ice. Stealing was the only way I ever got anything.”

  Jendara put a hand on the young woman’s shoulder. “That’s behind you now, Sarni. You’re not living on the docks and running with gangs. You’ve got us.”

  Sarni glanced back over her shoulder at the island. This side didn’t look nearly as fancy as the south end. There were no golden towers, only boxy stone buildings packed in beside each other. Gold winked off what must have been window frames. “If we get rich, I want to help people. I don’t know how, but I want to.”

  Jendara just smiled. That was why she’d taken in Sarni. Beneath the foul mouth and loud voice and the history of trouble, there was a warm, kind human. She had no doubt Sarni would use her funds from this mission to help the less fortunate.

  Vorrin strode toward her. “We’ve almost made it completely around the island. Any thoughts on where we ought to try landing?”

  Vorrin may have been the ship’s captain, but he let Jendara take the lead on anything involving land. They made a good team together. Even before she’d fallen in love with the man, she’d liked working with him.

  She thought for a moment. “I’ve seen signs of stairs and streets while looking over the city. To me, that suggests people with legs built this, not swimming folk. I’d guess this was all above the water at one time.”

  “So they had to have some kind way to load and unload ships.”

  “Probably. I mean, gold isn’t exactly common in this part of the world. I imagine it came from someplace.”

  “And that means ships.” He shook his head. “To the east, there are too many rocks for a ship to get close. At the north and the south, there’s some good anchorage, but I don’t know how anyone got up or down the sides of the island. I wouldn’t want to try to climb them with ropes.”

  Jendara imagined what a long, muscle-eating climb that would be and rapped her left hand on the wooden deck rail. It was her private good luck ritual, a tiny nod to the ancestor spirits she’d witnessed firsthand last summer. She didn’t keep a shipboard shrine or even make offerings to them, but she knew the ancestors were out there, watching over her people. The silver scar on her left hand was a mark they’d left behind when they’d driven out both a nasty spell and a tattoo devoted to the pirate goddess Besmara.

  The thought made her stretch out her right hand. Jendara’s remaining jolly roger tattoo, twin to the one the spirits had burned away, had faded over the years. The ink was beginning to seep into the white spaces, running the skull’s teeth together into a solid bar of gray. Jendara wasn’t troubled by the reminder of her old life, but she was glad all that was behind her.

  But she didn’t think they’d need to do any climbing. She’d already had another idea.

  “There was a cave on the southern tip. Can we get a closer to it?” She caught the questioning expression forming on his face. “I thought I saw something down there. I might have an idea.”

  In a few minutes, they approached the southern end of the island with its glorious spires and fantastic statues. Seaweed and slime covered a great deal of it, but what showed nearly took Jendara’s breath away. She might have grown up simply, but she could admire fancy when she saw it.

  She lowered her attention to the rock wall just below the city. “There, starting at this tip of the island, and running a good ways along the west side. See that purple shiny stuff?”

  Vorrin squinted. Without the spyglass, the glints of purple were mostly obscured by layers of algae and ropy weed.

  “I think it’s glass.”

  “Purple glass?”

  “Sure,” Sarni chimed in. “When glass gets old, it turns purple. We used to keep our eyes out for purple glass at the market. People pay more for old things.”

  Vorrin raised an eyebrow. “Why did you want to find old glass?”

  “To steal.” She smiled innocently.

  Jendara nudged Sarni aside. “So those are windows, probably. Which means there have to be rooms, passages, even stairs inside the island.” She nodded toward the sea cave. “Maybe I can get in through there.”

  “A sea cave? Sounds dangerous.”

  She folded her arms across her chest, eyes narrowing. “I think I can handle a little spelunking.”

  “Jendara!” Boruc waved his notebook at her. His boots thudded as he hurried their way.

  “I don’t mean to interrupt,” he began, and she waved aside the apology. He opened the notebook, holding it toward her. She saw that charcoal smudged his nose. “Have you noticed the artwork?”

  “It’s pretty amazing, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. Even these columns are fantastic.” He grabbed the stick of charcoal from behind his ear to jot a note in the notebook.

  “Columns?”

  “Sure.” He shoved the notebook at her. He’d drawn in the cave mouth, and she looked from the paper to the cave, taking in the details. “They’re overgrown, but you can see the chamfered capitals, the subtle ornamentation.”

  Boruc may as well have been speaking a foreign language, but his drawing in the notebook made sense. Now Jendara wondered how she’d missed the shapes of the columns outlining the cave.

  “If they decorated that cave, that means they looked at it. A lot.” She turned back to Vorrin. “I’m going in.”

  Vorrin opened his mouth, but Boruc was already nodding. “I’ll come, too,” he said. “This stonework is too good to miss.”

  The hairs on Jendara’s arms prickled. The cave, the columns, the gold: this entire island was too good to miss. She couldn’t wait to get in that cave and start exploring.

  * * *

  Jendara caught herself grinning as she rowed the dinghy toward the mouth of the cave. Without Vorrin to give her disapproving looks, she let the smile spread. It had been months since she’d done anything more exciting than negotiate a trading agreement, and while some of the craftspeople she knew drafted some severe contracts, it was work that called for wits and ledgers, not a sword. Now here she was, rowing toward a mysterious cave, a new handaxe in her belt and an unexplored island beckoning. It felt fantastic.

  “Four fathoms here,” Boruc said, dropping their sounding line back into the bottom of the dingy. “The Milady could sail right up to the cave.”

  “That’ll be convenient if we’re loading a lot of gold.” Jendara craned to see over her shoulder at the oncoming island. But of course, this close all she could see was the steep cliff face. Without the sight of the city on top, the island looked a little less otherworldly.

  “Slow down now, we’re almost in.” Boruc reached for the lantern cached in the bottom of the boat and lit it with his flint striker. Jendara twisted around in her seat, no longer rowing but just letting the obliging current pull the vessel inside the great mouth of the cave.

  “Merciful Desna,” Boruc breathed.

  Jendara stared around the space. Vast darkness surrounded them. Their little lantern cast a golden circle around the dinghy, but it was a firefly’s glow inside the enormous blackness, and for a moment, direction became meaningless. The dinghy floated in a bubble of brightness like a star in a limitless sky. It would have been magical if not for the thin keening whistle resounding throughout the space. The wind, probably. The pitch of it made Jendara’s ears feel strange.

  She lowered her oars to slow the boat. “Can
you make out anything? Rocks? Walls?”

  Boruc put the light on the seat beside him and reached for the sounding line. The lead made a solemn plunking as it broke the surface of the water, and then silence prevailed—save for that faint whistle.

  “Do you hear that?” Jendara asked.

  “That wind? Damned annoying, ain’t it?” He retrieved the sounding line. “Three and half fathoms. The Milady could sail all the way inside if Vorrin wanted.”

  He lifted the light again, and this time the flame reflected on something besides the deep waters of the grotto—something glossy off to Jendara’s left. She began to row toward it.

  “That a beach?” Boruc asked.

  A broad shelf of pale stone stuck out into the water. About the width of the Milady, its damp surface glinting in the light of their lantern. A darker shape jutted out of it like a tongue.

  “Could that be a pier?” Jendara asked.

  “Can’t see how wood could have survived being underwater all these years,” Boruc protested.

  But it was a pier. The way it stuck out from the stone beach, it had obviously been designed as a place for ships to tie up.

  “Sometimes the saltwater preserves wood,” she began, and stopped. She couldn’t begin to explain away the mystery of this place. There was nothing ordinary about this island. It was covered by an actual city of gold, for the ancestors’ sakes. For the first time, she wondered if it might be worth adding a wizard to her crew.

  “You’re thinking magic, ain’t ya?”

  Boruc knew her too well.

  “Wish I knew more about magic.” She turned the dinghy so it lined up with the strange pier. “But as my father would have said, ‘If wishes were pigs, beggars still wouldn’t have bacon.’”

  “What does that mean?”

  “You’ve got to think on it a bit.” She looped the mooring rope over the nearest mooring cleat. Giving the rope a sharp tug, Jendara was pleased to feel the pier hold strong. “You stay in the boat while I take a quick look around.”

  Boruc didn’t argue with her, but let her scramble up onto the pier alone. She held out her hand for the lantern and he hesitated a moment before passing it up. She wouldn’t want to be left waiting alone in the dark, either.