21
STAR TAKER
Zuna squeezed past Glayn and Jendara to reach for the crock of sugar. She pulled out a lump. “He probably just changed his mind about leaving his tribe. After all, with Fithrax gone, he could take over as leader.”
Vorrin frowned. “Wouldn’t he have asked for his fare? Ulat-kini still like gold.”
Gold. Jendara suddenly thought of the thumping that had kept her awake on her watch. “Who was in the storage room last night?”
Vorrin shook his head. “I was trying to sleep before my watch.”
She looked around at the others. “Did anyone else come back to the storage room last night? When I left the galley for my watch, it was just Vorrin in the kitchen and Kran and Korthax at a table, playing games.”
Kran sat up straight. Jendara moved away from the stove to face her boy. “What happened?”
He wrote very slowly: Got tired. Korthax was eating, so I left him here.
Jendara strode to the storage room door and flung it open. “Not locked.” She gave the lock a cursory glance. “The metal’s all scratched up. He must have picked it.”
The others crowded into the small space. Their stores of flour and ham were untouched. Jendara checked the shelves, trying to see what, if anything, was missing.
“Oh no.”
She turned to face Vorrin.
“I put Kran’s pack in here,” he said. “Just to get it out of the way while he was playing. I knew he’d put that astrolabe inside, and I didn’t want it to get stomped on.” He pointed to an empty hook on the back of the door. “I put it right here.”
They filed out of the storage room. Jendara tried to remember what else Kran kept inside his pack, but she couldn’t imagine Korthax being interested in such ordinary items as a canteen and a bowl for watering the dog. Only the astrolabe stood out. But what could Korthax have wanted with the thing? It was beautiful and likely valuable, but not nearly as valuable as the statue Zuna had found. There was certainly more money to be made collecting gold leaf from the tops of the island’s towers than from hawking an ancient brass astronomical device.
Jendara ate her breakfast beside a frowning Kran. He had liked Korthax, and the ulat-kini had stolen from him. She could understand if the boy was hurt.
She pushed a bowl of dried apples toward him. “You okay?”
He reached for his slate but didn’t write anything for a long moment. He looked around for Fylga and snapped his fingers, calling her to his side. The boy stroked his dog for a moment, and then, still rubbing at the dog’s ear, began to write:
Astrolabe. Stars. The dream.
Jendara’s skin prickled as she read the words. Kran studied her face to make sure she had read them all and then added:
Fithrax said the stars are right.
“But right for what?” she asked. “They kept talking about their god.”
He scrubbed the words off slowly, working his lip between his teeth. He tapped his chalk against the slate and then wrote: In my dreams—had to reach the stars. Had to get out of a deep pit.
Jendara remembered the desperate compulsion she’d felt to pull herself up to those scorching stars. “Yeah, me too.”
What if ulat-kini’s god needs to get to them?
She met his eyes. “You think Korthax stole the astrolabe to take it to the ulat-kini. For whatever this ritual is.”
He shrugged, then nodded.
Something else he said made her pause. “Kran, did you say, ‘in your dreams’? Like, more than one? You dreamed about the stars before this?”
He nodded.
Jendara beckoned Vorrin over. “I think I have to go talk to the ulat-kini again.”
He folded his arms across his chest. “Why?”
“I think there’s something they’re not telling us about this ritual, something that might affect us.” His expression didn’t change, so she pushed on. “I just have a feeling, Vorrin. That dream we had last night? About the stars? Kran had it before. I think that means something.”
“The people who built this place were obsessed with stars,” Glayn reminded them. “Maybe there’s some connection between the stars and what happened here before.”
“By the gods, I hope not,” Vorrin said. “I’d like to think this island sank from purely natural causes.”
Jendara’s eyes widened. “But what if it didn’t? What if there’s some star-planet alignment thing going on, and the island sinks again? We can’t stay here if the ocean is going to come drown us all!”
Vorrin sighed. “Okay, we go talk to the ulat-kini again.”
“Not we,” Jendara said. “Just me. The rest of you need to keep searching for Boruc and Tam. That tunnel we found yesterday led somewhere. We saw tracks, we saw a broken lantern. We know someone took Boruc and Tam and that they went that way. Maybe you’ll find them today.”
“No,” Vorrin said. “We don’t split up. It’s a bad idea.”
“Vorrin.”
They all turned to face Zuna, who stood cupping her mug of tea in her hands. “We have to. If Jendara’s right, we don’t have much time. Splitting up makes the most sense.”
“I’ll go fast, I’ll get in, I’ll get out, I’ll be back before afternoon. My pack’s all ready. I can leave now.”
Vorrin leaned down, bracing his hands against the table. “I don’t like this,” he murmured, too low for the others to hear. “If something happens, I want to be there to help you.”
She leaned her cheek against his shoulder. “I know. But you’re the captain, and you have an obligation to your crew.”
“I have an obligation to my wife.”
She pulled back so she could see his face. “I love you,” she whispered.
“I love you, too.”
Jendara gave him a quick kiss. “I’ll be back before you all know it,” she announced. “Kran, you and Fylga had better find our friends, okay? We’re depending on your skills.”
She stopped in the doorway and looked back at them: Vorrin, frowning after her; Glayn, tiny, and for once, unsmiling; Zuna, the skin under her eyes puffed with tiredness, but an encouraging look on her face; and last, her little boy, the only one who wasn’t watching her leave, but instead crouched beside Fylga, his face bent close to the dog’s yellow ears.
Her people. She wasn’t about to let anything happen to them, stars or no stars.
* * *
Jendara set her back to the stone support column and listened hard. Ever since she’d entered this hallway, headed toward the ancient library, she thought she’d heard someone behind her, but every time she’d glanced back over her shoulder, the hallway had been dark and empty. If it was someone—some deep one, perhaps—making for the hallway where they’d found Boruc’s, Tam’s, and Yerka’s tracks, then it must be alone and not eager for a run-in with a lone human.
She hesitated.
The most pressing issue was the astrolabe. Whatever the ulat-kini planned to do with their god and the stars, she had to know more. She had to protect her people.
But if there was a deep one skulking along behind her, maybe she could get it to take her to Boruc and Tam right now. She could have them all back to the ship before Vorrin could even get his gear together.
Jendara lowered the flame on her lantern and left it tucked behind the column. Her boots didn’t make a sound as she crept across the floor the deep ones had so thoroughly cleaned.
A tiny scuffing sound warned her that her prey was nearly upon her. She reached for her belt knife. Her arm was good enough today for her to use her sword, but she didn’t want to kill the creature—just snare it. She stalked forward a few steps and then launched a kick at the form she could barely see in the gloom.
Her kick went over its head as the creature dropped to the ground, rolling across the stone. Jendara launched herself at it, grabbing its narrow shoulders and pinning them to the ground. She reared back, ready to head butt it into submission.
Then sense struck her.
“Kran
, what are you doing here?”
He patted blindly at her face. She realized she’d terrified the boy, and she caught his hand in hers. “It’s okay,” she said, as gently as she could under the circumstances. “It’s just me.”
She led him back to her lantern and turned up the light. He held out his lantern. Jendara reached in her belt pouch. “You left without lighting your lantern or grabbing a flint striker. Let me guess. You didn’t bring water or food, either.”
He hung his head.
“Going out unprepared will get you killed.” She lit his lantern and then folded her arms across her chest, studying him. At least he’d had the presence of mind to replace his belt knife with something from the stores. “What was so important you had to chase after me?”
He brought out his slate and wrote for a second, pausing to dig in his pocket for a fresh stick of chalk. Skortti has star scepter. He paused, then underlined the word “star.”
She looked from the words to his face. An idea began to bubble in the back of her tired mind. “You think there’s a connection between this star scepter and the astrolabe?”
Kran nodded vigorously.
Jendara began to walk. “So Skortti’s his uncle, and Skortti’s obsessed with the star scepter. Maybe Korthax wants to give Skortti the astrolabe to win him over.”
Kran tugged on her arm. He scribbled: Skortti made Fithrax leader.
“Good point. With Skortti’s help, maybe Korthax could become the ulat-kini’s new leader. If—”
She broke off, hearing feet on the floor behind them. She spun to face the sound.
And then stopped.
Not because she wanted to stop, but because her body might as well have been made of wood. She stared at the creature in front of her, its soft pinkish flesh making it look like nothing so much as a hairless bear. But its face was no bear’s face. Instead of a snout or a mouth or even eyes, it had only thick, fat tentacles that wriggled and writhed like snakes seeking out its prey.
And worse than all that was the horrible mocking laughter resounding inside Jendara’s mind.
22
MOON-BEASTS AND MINDS
Jendara had been knocked out more than once in her life. She was familiar with the feeling that came before losing consciousness, the strange hollow, metallic ringing in the ears and the distant sensation that took hold of the body. If she could have summoned up those feelings and used them to actually pass out, she would have.
But instead she remained sickeningly awake even as her body began to move against her will. A thickset ulat-kini bound her hands, and she simply followed after him without any kind of struggle. She wanted to rage. To vomit. To close her eyes and wake up and find it was all a dream.
Her body followed meekly, with Kran trotting along beside her.
The pink beast stepped aside as they approached, although she had no idea how it could sense them. There were no signs of any sensory organs on its hideous head. She couldn’t hear its laughter any longer, but she could still feel its presence within her somehow, like a heavy hand pressing down on the inside of her brain. The pressure came with a sensation of oily heat that cut her in half—her thoughts lay on one side of the hot divide, her frozen legs on the other, and any attempt to cross made her thoughts slip and slide away from her grasp until that heavy weight pressed them back down into an inert block.
She couldn’t even force herself to take the deep breaths that might have given her calm. She could only batter her thoughts against the pink beast’s revolting presence and then regroup them, tired and desperate to return to their ordinary connection to her body.
As the group moved back down the long hallway, she considered the strangeness of the entire experience. If anyone had asked, Jendara would have maintained that her mind and her body were two very separate entities, and that she controlled both of them with the force of her will and personality. Now, observing her mind’s struggles to reconnect with her physical being, she wasn’t so sure. Her thoughts were so feeble and weak without the strong support of her senses. While she could see and hear well enough—although distantly, as if the information came to her down a long, echoing tube—she had almost no sensation of movement or balance or touch. She drew up her will and struggled to wiggle a finger, twitch a face muscle, anything at all.
Pain and pink light filled her head, and for an instant, Jendara did not exist.
When she was able to think and focus again, her body and the rest of the group had already marched down into the depths of the island. She had no idea where they were. But the bindings on her mind and body had now loosened a little, giving back her eyes and ears. In her peripheral vision, she could see Kran stump along, chin down and face unreadable. An ulat-kini led them both, but ahead of the ulat-kini walked two squat, black-robed figures, their faces veiled.
It was the first time she had gotten to see the people of Leng up close. She studied them closely. They were stocky folks, shorter than herself and much broader, with no definition of waist or hip. Though they moved easily enough, Jendara noticed a number of lumps and bumps along their backs, strange protrusions their robes didn’t cover. Weapons, perhaps. Their feet struck the ground with the click-clack of a sheep’s hooves.
She wished she could move her head to get a better view of the Leng folk and her surroundings. One of the ulat-kini carried a lantern, but most of the light around her came from the faint blue glow of phosphorescent seaweed. Its cold light provided a soft gloom that made it harder to see, not easier. Blue shadows added a strange dimension to everything.
“Be on the watch for the spiders,” one of the Leng people snapped at the nearest ulat-kini. “And make sure the prisoners’ weapons are free so they can guard our backs.”
“But—” the ulat-kini began, and the black robe cut him off. “They’re completely under the moon-beasts’ control. Like puppets. Or do you want a personal demonstration of the moon-beasts’ power?”
One of the other denizens of Leng gave a nasty laugh. If Jendara could have moved, she would have knocked its teeth out.
The hallway turned a corner and the overpowering stink of old urine, unwashed bodies, and rotten fish washed over her. The ulat-kini stepped aside and Jendara saw what she smelled: a large group of people crowded into a room with a vast open hole in the floor. One man hung over the edge, dangling from the black ropes binding his wrists to the woman beside him. He did not move. He said nothing. And although his weight pulled her nearly over the edge of the pit, causing the rope around her wrist to bite deeply into her swollen, purple flesh, the prisoner beside him said nothing, either.
The only sound was the faint damp rustling that came from far below.
Jendara stared at the nearest prisoner, and he stared back at her. Only his eyes moved, wide and horrified in his filthy face. How long had all these people been standing here, immobilized by that tentacled creature?
“Put her in the back,” a cold and somehow metallic voice announced, and the ulat-kini captor marched Jendara and Kran to the narrow aisle left between the prisoners and the wall.
Now Jendara could see that the orderly columns and rows of frozen, silent humans stretched nearly the full length of the room—a massive cavern nearly as large as the spiders’ cave. A few more of the pink-tentacled creatures—moon-beasts, they’d called them—circled the room, and there were at least two dozen ulat-kini guards, as well as several denizens of Leng.
There were at least a hundred people here, if not more. Half-paralyzed as Jendara was, it was hard to get a look at the full expanse of them. The first man she had seen was filthy, his face mostly obscured by a smear of dried blood and hugely swollen broken nose. The woman behind him looked injured, too, a deep cut on her forehead showing the bone. The moon-beasts may have taken control of these people’s bodies, but some of them had gotten a chance to fight before they’d been captured.
Jendara strained her eyes as far to the side as she could, wishing she could turn her head to make out these brave faces
. These people had to have arrived on the longships she’d seen yesterday from the Star Chapel. The ones she could see wore simple wincey or woolen garb, the same homespun fabrics in the same rich colors the people of her own island wore.
A pebble shifted underfoot, and Jendara stumbled sideways, for the first time tilting her body toward the center of the great room. A bearded face leaped out of the crowd, the thick red hair all too familiar. Morul stared back at her with panicked eyes.
The ulat-kini dragged her back in line.
Morul! Had she really seen him? Jendara’s heart sank. Sorind sat apart from the other inhabited islands of the archipelago, easily reached without interference from the more heavily armed islands of Battlewall or Flintyreach. If the people of Leng were looking for prisoners, the island would have been a tempting destination.
The ulat-kini shoved Kran sideways, his bindings dragging Jendara along. The boy slammed into the arm of the nearest prisoner, a heavyset old woman that Jendara recognized by her posture and simply braided gray hair. It was Chana, the healer and wisewoman of Sorind. Behind her, a bored-looking ulat-kini snapped to attention.
Out of the corner of Jendara’s eye, she noticed a narrow doorway at the very corner of the room, the tunnel beyond unlit. She felt the ulat-kini’s webbed hands dig into her skin as it lashed a tough rope of seaweed around her arm. It knotted the rope to the bindings of the prisoner in front of her, then quickly secured Kran in the same fashion, adding a second rope running from his wrists to Chana’s.
Jendara squeezed her eyes shut. Her people, her Sorinders, captured by these loathsome fish-men. And why? Why would they steal an entire village of innocent people and hold them captive in their horrible sea cave? What did they want with them?
A familiar voice came from her right. Skortti said: “Has the device been taken to the Star Chapel?”
“It will be there when we need it.” This was the same speaker with the cold, metallic voice that had sent her and Kran to the back of the room. Jendara’s eye muscles trembled from straining to see farther to the right. She could just see Skortti emerging from the dark doorway, and moving toward him, one of the black robes of Leng.
Starspawn Page 22