Niwa’s posture—always so straight and controlled—seemed to crumple. “His men are coming,” she said with an expression of defeat. “There will be too many to fight. They will be too fast to outrun.”
Lucy bent her head, studying her new moccasins. She worried that she particularly played a part in Niwa’s assessment of their chances against the raven men.
“What can we do?” Lucy asked. It seemed unfair to have come so far only to be stopped again.
Niwa straightened herself up again. “They will bring me back. I will tell them . . . I will tell them you ran from me,” Niwa said, “and I couldn’t find you. I don’t know where you are.”
Lucy thought it unlikely anyone would believe this. But she nodded her head. She supposed Niwa was the one they wanted anyway—Governor Arekwoy’s daughter. Niwa’s father would send raven men after her rather than be parted from her.
Niwa gestured toward a cut in the western hills. “Go through that gap; there is a canyon, follow it. Find the Ss’til in their sea caves on the coast.” Her dark eyes were full of emotion, glistening like stones in the rain.
They couldn’t give up so easily. They should try to run—together. But even as Lucy thought this, she could see movement along the eastern edge of the forest. Men were emerging from the trees, their black capes fluttering. Five, ten . . . more than ten. And something else was with them, breaking from the shadows with a low-slung stride: dogs . . . though from their long muzzles she thought they might have wolf in them, too.
She watched as the animals jogged ahead, ears up, snouts low and sniffing, tongues lolling out of their mouths in eagerness. Lucy’s heart galloped in alarm.
Pete’s knuckles on the straps of his pack were white.
Niwa cursed in Lupine, then turned to Lucy and Pete. “You must go. Now.”
Lucy stepped toward her, close enough once more to smell her perfume of sage and wilderness. “We’ll bring back the cure,” she said, embracing Niwa quickly. She hoped the Lupine girl believed her.
“Good-bye. Good luck,” Niwa said in a voice that had gone especially rough and raspy. She pressed her palm against Lucy’s as they had done once before on the train. And then she walked out to meet her father’s men.
It was nearly dark when Lucy and Pete reached the coast. Gulls screeched overhead and little plovers darted back and forth across the sand, outrunning the waves. In the fading light, the wet sand near the waterline looked as smooth and glassy as a dark mirror. Here and there, the beach was strewn with long garlands of tobacco-colored kelp. Out bobbing in the crashing surf were the sleek dark heads of seals.
It got colder as the sun dropped. Lucy shivered. They’d made it safely to the coast, but they had no idea where to go next.
There was a boiling hiss in the surf just offshore. Out of the churning froth rose a scaly head as big as a bull’s.
A snake’s head.
The serpent opened its mouth and one of the seals sloshed into it, disappearing down its black gullet along with a flood of water. There was a booming crash as the snake submerged again.
Beside her Pete shuddered. “And we’re supposed to find a boat to take us across that water? There’s no way we’ll survive.”
“Stop it,” Lucy snapped. She shared this assessment, of course. But she would stamp out her fears the way one did coals from a fire. “There’s a way across and we’ll find it.”
Pete gave a victimized shrug. His chestnut hair was damp with sea spray. The wind was driving it right to them. “All right, I suppose there is.”
“We just have to find the Ss’til.” She looked to her left, south: The beach stretched into a vast blackness. The Thumb was that way . . . somewhere. But the other way, north, she could see cliffs rising gray as a shadow kingdom. Niwa said to find the Ss’til in their sea caves.
“That looks like the only place there might be caves.” She pointed north. Of course when it came to direction-finding Pete had to have the last word. He stroked his chin and looked up and down the beach several times before finally agreeing that north it was.
They turned right along the beach and began walking toward the cliffs. A freezing wind came off the ocean, and soon Lucy’s teeth were chattering. Snake track was everywhere—in wide curving trails through the sand. A couple of times they saw a scaly heap coiled in the surf like a giant mound of glistening beach rubble. After trudging for what felt like several hours, Pete tugged on her arm. “Do you hear that?”
Over the growling sea came the faint strains of music. It was a witchy, dancing tune that made Lucy think of bonfires and tinkers’ wagons and the long smoky nights of harvest time back home.
“And look.” Lucy pointed just ahead where enormous driftwood logs and large boulders had been dragged up onto the beach to make a series of barriers. The bare driftwood branches looked like the drowned remnants of some vast, silvery forest.
They clambered over the logs and rocks, among the spiky wood, following the sound. When they were on the other side of the barrier they made their way to the nearest cave, from which came a flickering glow and the sound of a fiddle.
Lucy had counted on Niwa being here to deal with the Ss’til, and so, uncharacteristically for her, had asked few questions about the people who lived on the beach. Now she worried that her lack of curiosity was a grave error. If you can find them and if you can persuade them, Niwa had said. It looked like they had found them, but it was the second if that Lucy worried about.
A strange, translucent curtain covered the cave entrance, blocking the cold wind that came off the ocean. It was snakeskin, twitching and shivering on the night breeze.
They ducked underneath it. The shimmering scales floated closed behind them. They were in a large, sandy grotto that stretched far back into the rocky cliff, in a cave crowded with people who were busily playing music, playing dice, eating, talking, carrying children, and throwing darts. Some, bewilderingly, did all at once. Lantern light cast a rich golden glow across them all. Unlike the Lupines, the Ss’til men kept their hair short, and many had tattoos inked into their dark skin.
A boy who’d been sitting by the entrance saw them and got to his feet. In one hand he carried a long staff of polished driftwood. He had a dagger at his belt as well as another small knife with which he’d been carving.
He was lean and straight with a shock of dark hair. The ragged cape draped over his naked chest was fastened with a gleaming brooch made of abalone shell.
“Well met in this life,” he said, approaching them. His teeth were stained a midnight blue, and Lucy tried not to stare at this fantastic adornment. Then he stopped and looked at them quizzically. “Where’s your skin?”
“Skin?” Pete blanched.
“For oil,” Lucy said, remembering Able Dodd’s oilskins the day the Knightlys turned off their electricity.
The boy began to clean his nails with his knife. “Unless you mean to carry oil in your pockets, girl, you need a skin.”
A draft came through the snakeskin curtain, and Lucy shivered. She wished Niwa were here; she didn’t think this boy would be so disdainful then. “We don’t want oil, we’re looking for someone to take us across the bay,” Lucy said.
“You two, go across the bay? Don’t know anything, do you?” The boy had a good laugh. Then he peered at them more closely. “Are you beach haunts, then?” he asked. He raised a lantern up so he could examine them. “You have the look of shipwreck about you. And you’re pale like old bones.”
“That’s because we’re cold,” Pete said irritably. The snakeskin curtain kept slapping him on the shoulder as it was pushed about by the sea breeze. “We’ve been out on the beach in the wind.”
“Just like a ghost, eh,” the boy said. “I hear them out there, complaining of the cold and their seaweed hair. “
Lucy was losing patience with this blue-toothed boy, especially if he thought he could sc
are her with his silly ghost stories.
“Well, I make ghosts disappear,” Lucy said, snapping her fingers. “So they’ll make themselves scarce while I’m around.”
The boy looked unhappy; she was spoiling his fun. “Fetch your skin, pale,” he said rather sullenly, “and I’ll get you your oil.”
Lucy drew herself up. “I told you, we’re not here to buy oil. We’ve come to hire a boat.”
He cocked his head at her. “Ah. But we have no boats for hire.” Behind him some of the other Ss’til in the grotto were turning their attention to Lucy and Pete. Their frank stares were making Lucy uncomfortable.
She took a different tack. “I thought the Ss’til were great sailors. Do you mean to tell me that’s not true?”
“The best sailors in the world. But it’s bad luck to bring karabeho on water. The snakes like the taste of their pale meat.” He grinned blue.
Pete had been watching this exchange, a look of dull dislike on his face. He must have been as cold and tired as she was. “Come on, Lucy,” he said. “I doubt these fellows could pilot a boat across a puddle.”
“Get out of here, then, ghost,” the boy said. “You are nothing but foul vapors.” He flicked his fingers in Pete’s face.
Pete reared away but then quickly recovered, clenching his fist. “I’ll show you a ghost,” he said. “I bet you never had one give you a black eye before.”
“Pete, stop.” Lucy clutched his arm, then turned to the boy. “Let us at least talk to someone about it. We have money.”
Money—that was the word she should have said from the beginning. Hearing this, the boy shrugged. “If you like.” He motioned for them to follow.
Lucy and Pete drew curious glances from the Ss’til as they made their way deeper into the grotto. The musicians and the card players, the mothers and the crones all turned their faces to gaze at them. Lucy couldn’t help staring back. Both men and women wore jewelry: necklaces, bracelets in particular, but also piercings through the nose and earlobes. Their clothes were long, dark, iridescent garments, scaled and shimmery. Underneath their ethereal capes, many wore vests of purple mussel shells, which glittered and tinkled as they moved.
The boy led them past several branching passages until they came to a small cavern where they found a tall, heavyset man whose plump rolls of flesh put Lucy in mind of an upright seal. Numerous bone earrings pulled at his earlobes. He wore a necklace of polished shells that shone over the frayed snakeskin collar of his robe.
This man peered at them from heavy-lidded eyes, and Lucy felt it would be dangerous to assume he was as sleepy as he looked.
The boy said something to him in the sibilant language of the Ss’til, and Lucy was almost certain she detected mockery in his tone.
“Sit,” the man said. He indicated a nest of sealskins piled on the ground. They all sat down. Next to the man was a carved driftwood platter on which lay strips of a dark and reeking meat. He took a piece of the meat and chewed it slowly, licking his fingers and smacking his lips. His mouth and chin were slick with oil.
Lucy settled cross-legged onto a sealskin beside Pete. Tired as she was she kept her back straight and tried to stay alert. This was the man she needed to convince.
“Pale strangers, you are far from home,” he said, making a vague gesture of distance with his hand.
She supposed the thing to do would be to speak in equally flowery language. But she was never good at dancing around what she meant. “We need passage on a boat.”
The man raised his eyebrow at this direct approach. “Where would you go?”
A snake oil lantern at the back of the cavern cast dark shadows on the rock walls. Lucy looked him full in the face. “To Devil’s Thumb.”
The man laughed, and his shells and bones clicked together with a sound like a wind chime in a gentle breeze. “We do not take pale strangers to the cursed place.”
The boy grinned as if to say I told you so, then scooted close to the plate and thieved a piece of meat, which he stuffed into his cheek.
“You took a man there. Maybe a month ago,” she said, gambling that this was the way her father had come.
The man fingered his bone necklace with greasy fingers. “Perhaps,” he said. The expression in his heavy-lidded eyes was guarded. “A man who went away in a boat would have paid us well.”
Lucy swallowed. So he wouldn’t reveal if her father received passage. Still, the important thing to focus on was paid.
“We have ten dollars,” Pete said. It was all Lucy could do not to groan. Ten dollars was all they had left of Angus Murrain’s money. And now they had no bargaining power.
“Ten dollars.” The man wiped an eye as if the thought of so mean a payment made him laugh. “You must pay us twenty-five.”
“Twenty-five? That’s crazy!” Pete sat up in the sealskin; even his freckles seemed to blaze with outrage.
What did Pete expect, having started at ten?
“Ten dollars to take us across,” Lucy said firmly. She’d seen her father bargain at many trading posts. He always acted as if he was prepared to walk away if they didn’t meet his price. She elbowed Pete. “I’m sure we can find someone else who will take us for less.”
The big man didn’t like this so well. “But it is very dangerous to cross the sea of snakes.” He held out his hands as if she were the unreasonable one.
“I told them, the snakes like the meat of settlers most of all,” the boy chimed in. His quick fingers darted to the platter again.
Lucy really was beginning to dislike him.
“We can pay you more on the way back,” Pete said. He leaned forward earnestly on the sealskin.
This made them laugh.
“The way back?” The boy’s eyes sparkled maliciously.
“You think anyone comes back?” The man held the rolling folds of his gut with laughter. Then he belched.
“We will,” Lucy said, clutching the pouch that held her vitometer. She looked at Pete and he nodded.
“You bet we will,” Pete said. “You take us for ten and we’ll pay you twenty-five when we return.”
Don’t get carried away, she wanted to tell Pete.
“If you aren’t ghosts now, you soon will be,” the boy said with satisfaction. “With spiderwebs for hair and tatters for clothes. Maybe some night I’ll see you out on the sands, moaning your laments.”
That did it.
“Wait,” she said. “I have something to trade for the fare.” She reached into her pack and drew out a long cylinder, wrapped in worn blue velvet. Made of brass with ivory inlay, the device inside resembled a spyglass—or it would have, if not for the series of strange interlocking rings about its barrel, engraved with arcane symbols that her father once told her corresponded to the location of certain stars.
“It’s an archevisual spectrometer,” she explained as she handed it to the big man. “Worth fifty dollars. At least.”
He studied it without much interest, then handed it back. “No.”
“It sees fifteen minutes into the past,” she continued. “Like a telescope, but for time.” It was another of her father’s many inventions, built for the purpose of determining whether household disturbances had been caused by poltergeists. It used to see an hour into the past, but then she had dropped it from her rooftop lookout in Wickham. Her father was always saying he would repair it but never had—presumably to teach her a lesson about spying on the neighbors. Fifteen minutes, however, should be enough.
“Look,” she told him, and somehow she put enough steel in her voice that he raised it to his eye.
The man squinted into the eyepiece.
She knew what he would see.
He frowned, glaring at the driftwood platter. The boy had been careful not to take all the meat. Without the spectrometer the man might never have noticed.
The big man’s
expression changed. First she could see his wonder, then his anger. When he finally put it down he looked like a man who’d made a decision.
“Pale strangers, you have a boat,” he said.
Pete’s jaw dropped. Then he turned to Lucy with the biggest grin she’d ever seen. For a moment she almost thought he was going to hug her.
“Hm,” the big man nodded. “I’ll take you now.”
As they walked out, he gave the boy a good kick.
“What was that for?” the boy cried.
“Now he’s moaning his laments,” Pete noted as they passed out of the cavern.
• • •
They were given space in a rocky alcove and told to sleep for a few hours. Even with a pile of sealskins underneath her, Lucy felt the hard-packed sand of the grotto floor, and it seemed like she had barely closed her eyes before they were awakened. It was very late by the time Lucy and Pete followed the Ss’til man out of the grottoes and onto the beach. The surf pounded violently against nearby rocks and the air was freezing. A high, distant moon shone down on them like a cold spotlight.
Ahead of them they could see a black boat pulled onto the sand. A lone boatman in a long black robe was waiting beside it. In one hand he held a tall, hooked pole.
Pete whispered to her, “He looks cheerful.”
She eyed the ominous boatman. “As long as he gets us there.”
“This is Obwe,” said the fat man nervously; he seemed eager to get back to his warm cave. “He will bring you where you want to go.”
The two men exchanged quick words in Ss’til. Obwe nodded.
Then, sensing something Lucy could not, both men tensed.
Without a word, Obwe reached over and picked Lucy up under the armpits, heaving her into the boat. She struggled to get her balance, only to fall to the bottom again when Pete was flung in beside her. They were in a hopeless tangle. Obwe pushed the boat into the water, running and picking up speed. The other man was already loping over the sand, surprisingly fast for someone his size, headed for the protective barriers of driftwood.
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