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  Now she called Lysandra and handed over the dark little feather she had used to act as the anchor point for her work. Lysandra nodded to show she understood that they were going to complete their original plan to release the creature back into the wild where it was safe from idiot humans. They were sad that Horse was not there to see it, but Kula felt that she would find out soon and then she’d be pleased. That thought was exciting, so she hurried.

  Lysandra leaned over on the leeward rail of the ship, the feather in her fingertips. Kula directed her to let it go. It was snatched away, down and down, onto the waters.

  Kula closed her eyes and remembered the dragon of the river. It took shape in her mind with all the improvements: larger, better, its scale more glossy, its feather a deeper hue, its intelligence sharper and wiser with a vision that stretched into worlds beyond and wisdoms that only the oldest and greatest could reach, beyond Kula’s tiny form and little span. To her it had something of the magnificence and mystery of the sea itself. Without an awareness of changing the pattern she was focused on this sense of power and majesty and limitless grace as Lysandra released the fire of life.

  There was nothing to see. A girl sitting on a coil of rope. A woman leaning over the rail, holding back her hair so she could see the water, seabirds circling and calling above them as they made headway away from the land.

  Then a huge spume of white foam erupted from the mild race of the wavelets in the open water where the feather had been. It was a short distance astern of them and went up in a geyser that fell to shattering on the deck even as the sailors sent up alarms and the helmsman spun the wheel to take them around and away in an avoidance manoeuvre. The ship tilted with alarming speed to one side. Kula screamed and gripped her rope. She heard Heno and Bukham yelling as their feet went out from under them on the deck.

  Kula’s rope was coiled on fixed pitons. It remained in place. Like most things on the ship she was battened fast in place. She reached out as the heavy form of Heno went slithering past her and a huge, rough hand grasped hers. The eyes that joined gaze with hers were the eyes of the mud-man, the Heart Taker. She could feel him resisting the urge to grab harder so he didn’t break her fingers as the ship began to right itself. In that moment he was quite open, quite unexpecting. She read him, one mage to another, and she saw him know what she did. His life, in all its detail, was lightning in her bones. White fire crackled where they touched and in that second he also saw her.

  The ship tilted back, coming to its new course. The crew were running, pointing at a huge shape below the surface which created a humped hill of water as it came alongside them before diving deep. Among them the two Ystachi dragonspeakers were ululating in shrill tones, singing some kind of song, most desperate to get the best view. Atop their scaled heads their frilled crests were rampant, their colours vivid. Unlike the human crew their clawed feet had no trouble keeping them upright on the deck. Kula let go of Heno as the deck levelled. She felt sad for him and as he let go and recovered himself she saw in his long face that he felt sad for her. Then crew and Celestaine ran between them, harpoons in hand, gestures sharp and sudden. Lysandra leant out, her arm flung wide in a clear instruction to the creature—go!

  Kula wasn’t worried. These people were too slow and too poorly equipped to hunt or defend against the creature. She felt their fear, intense, making their senses vivid, as they watched it go deep and then rise sharply, undulating in a single line from the wave to the deep. She felt them brace as they grabbed to whatever they could hold and held so tightly, holding to existence itself, as the dragon burst free of the water and powered up into the air, wings unfolding, riding currents of energy they could not see. It wound upwards into the sky a very different thing to its original form: shorter limbs, massive skull festooned with tentacles and weed-like vanes so that it seemed to swim there, circling them. Streams of water plummeted off its sides.

  It circled them once, twice, the great crystal eye looking down.

  Kula put up her hand and waved.

  Then it bent away to the east, over the water and rising, into the clouds there. A few jags of lightning, white like Heart Taker fire, crackled and lit the huge thunderheads from within as it passed on and away through them. They watched until minutes had passed and there was no more to see. She was pleased. She had made something that didn’t belong into something that did.

  HENO PICKED HIMSELF up slowly and sat down on the deck. He was only lightly wetted and ran his hands over his head to push back his rough hair and adjust his scarf against his ears. He took his time to gather himself after what had just happened. He waited as Lysandra helped Bukham regain his feet and the ship recovered its original course, tacking against the wind. He was a little seasick, truthfully, and it was good to stop trying to fight it and be still on the deck. Celestaine came back bloodied from hitting her head on a beam in the initial swerve, holding a cloth to her forehead. She sat with him. They watched as Bukham found that he had covered himself in mess from the chum bucket which had been prepared for deep sea angling, and the stink and the sight made him throw up. A big fuss took place involving buckets of seawater and brushes which gave them a moment of pause, knee to knee and shoulder to shoulder—well, to arm. He saw Celestaine watching Lysandra closely, amid the doings.

  “What are we going to do with them?” she asked him quietly as the cleanup and chatter went on around them.

  He knew she meant Lysandra and Kula. “Nothing,” he said. “What can we do? You saw that.”

  “I don’t know what I saw. What did you see?”

  “The thing that was dead at the river just came out of the sea, bigger, faster and very much more than it was before.”

  “I didn’t see them do anything,” Celestaine said. “But imagine, if the Kinslayer had had that kind of power.”

  “Kula wanted it to have a good life,” Heno said, taking down the cloth from Celestaine’s forehead and looking at the wound just inside her hairline. “It’s only a scratch. Just very bloody. It’ll be all right.” He let her hold it back in place.

  “How do you know that?” Celestaine asked, keeping her voice low. She was shaken and her hand on the cloth trembled a bit.

  “She stopped me sliding over the side and we had a moment,” he said. “I think we should be grateful that whatever Lysandra is, Kula’s got it covered.”

  “And if we piss her off one day and she has a temper tantrum is she going to throw dragons at us out of thin air?” Celestaine hissed in a whisper, really not wanting Lysandra to overhear from her place at the rail even though the wind was blowing vigorously and noisily, the sails snapping.

  Heno shrugged. “Let’s not piss her off.”

  “I’m starting to think they shouldn’t be on this journey, should they? And she might see things like a child now but what about when she gets older? What about when all the compromises and the bad decisions and the obvious complete lack of control of anything and the temper and all of that kicks in?”

  “What are you suggesting? Perhaps we should chain them up and put them in a mine under strict working conditions so they never think to do anything with themselves.” It came out harsher than he intended.

  Celestaine looked up at him, nodding circumspectly. “You’re doing sarcasm now? A few more smiling lessons and you’ll be a regular ladies’ man.” Then she winced, “Oh, my head aches.”

  “What’s a ladies’ man?” Nedlam asked coming to sit by them on the stashed barrels, Lady Wall carefully put by her. She was chewing a piece of sea tack, the sailors’ biscuit, and offered some to them which they both declined.

  “It’s a man who has learned how to behave to impress genteel kinds of women,” Celestaine said.

  “It’s a man who’s not a man,” Heno translated.

  “Man who never gets any ladies. Right.” Nedlam nodded with the same satisfaction as if she had discovered a lost continent. “Funny way of saying it. Heh, did you like that dragon little Kula made?”

  “Yes, yeah, i
t was great. Terrific,” Celestaine said. “Mmn hm.”

  “That’s a good trick,” Nedlam said. She chuckled. “Hey, if Kinslayer’d had that. Can you imagine?”

  “No,” Celestaine said. “Can’t imagine. Can not. Imagine. Ned, d’you think they’re dangerous?”

  “Naw,” Nedlam said, breaking off another chunk of indigestible stodge and starting to work it down.

  “What makes you so sure?” Heno asked.

  “Because. If they were we’d already be rowing this thing and eating shit like this.” She spat the chunk out and then threw the lot over the rail into the sea. “I wish Buk wasn’t sick all the time. Then he could make a new biscuit.”

  “Biscuits?” Murti edged closer to them and took a perch next to Nedlam, steadying himself with a foot hooked around some of the lashing that was holding the barrels steady. “Are there any?”

  “Only if you want to kill someone,” Nedlam said.

  “I was just wondering what to do about—” Celestaine nodded in a significant way in the direction of Lysandra and Kula, who had also been given ship’s biscuit and were throwing bits of it to the seagulls not far away.

  “What makes you…”

  “No,” Celest interrupted him firmly. “You’re not doing that again, the old throw the question back at me like I shouldn’t even have a question thing. We’re here because you wanted us here and I assume you wanted them here and maybe you even wanted Deffo here, wherever he is, so let’s have a straight answer.”

  Murti blinked as if he was mildly befuddled. “Well, in that case there’s a bit of a situation that requires people like—” he nodded in a copy of Celestaine’s gesture, “—to get it fixed.”

  “How’s that going to work?”

  Murti shrugged. “I don’t know. I gave you a sword, that worked out quite well. I was thinking that this may also resolve for the best without too much of a stranglehold.”

  Celestaine sighed and let the cloth drop into her hands. The bleeding had stopped and the wound was beginning to scab over. “So we’re what? The guards?”

  “In case of heavy lifting,” Murti said. “Also, if you’re here then Deffo isn’t focused on trying to get me to promise to return the gods and restore him to glory.”

  “Who promised to return the gods?” Lysandra sat down breezily cheerful beside Celestaine. “When are they coming?” She looked about at the skies and the deck with eager anticipation as if they might pop up at any moment.

  “They’re um, not here right now,” Celestaine said warily. “We’re going to see what happened to them. Remember?”

  Lysandra put her hands together in her lap. “Oh, yes. I don’t suppose you know why all the biscuits are so horrible? Is it sabotage?” She kept a close eye on Kula who had her head through the deck railings so she could stare down the ship’s side into the sea. Her accent, which had started out days ago as riddled with Tzarkish hard sibilants, was now almost a model of noble Forinthi intonation coupled with a bit of Ilkand society matriarch.

  “I don’t know about the biscuits, I think it’s called preservation,” Celest said, for the first time in her life feeling actually faint, and not all down to the head bashing. “Will you be making a lot of dragons, at all, while we’re underway?”

  “No!” Lysandra said as if that was a ludicrous question. “No, we were only putting that one back.” She patted Celestaine’s knee. “Don’t worry so much. You’ll give yourself grey hairs. Now, the wind is turning. If you want my advice we should avoid this hole the Ilkanders fear and head north with all speed. The hole is not something any of you could survive if you tried to use it as a way into Vadakh and you don’t have the ability to close it from here. It will swallow you up and even if you only go to look it will delay us. If you want to stay alive on this journey, then it’s as Wanderer says. We must go north, to the gate under the ice.”

  A long shadow fell across them all and they looked up to see Deffo, very pale and unsteady but with a dignified expression of well-borne suffering on his face, holding onto one of the decking cross ropes as he edged towards them. “There you all are.” The ship tilted and he clung for dear life. “A messenger bird has come. It’s brought this for you.” He held out a narrow roll of parchment towards Celestaine who reached up and took it from him, unrolling it and holding it against her knees to read. “It’s from Tricky. What does it say?”

  Celestaine scanned it. “Everything’s fine. She and Ralas got into a bit of trouble. They’ll be delayed. Wish you were here. Haha.” She was trying to close it quickly when Lysandra stopped her and leaned in.

  “Ah, you forgot this bit,” Lysandra said, pointing with her finger and reading aloud with dramatic flair. “The mazagal and the girl are probably part of the Kinslayer’s plot to ensure total destruction of the human races and all of the Guardians. Proceed with extreme caution.” She looked up at them and smiled radiantly, throwing her arms out wide with joy. “See? I can read!”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CELESTAINE READ THE note for the hundredth time and then balled it up. There was more on the back in Ralas’ tiny, cramped script, detailing things. She contemplated tossing it in the sea but in the end stuffed it into her pocket. Nedlam continued to fish. Heno was dicing with the Kula. Lysandra was napping in one of the crew’s hammocks below decks. Deffo and Murti had gone off somewhere and Bukham was being sick over the side for the umpteenth time.

  Ralas could not reach them. He and the Guardian Celestaine least trusted, Tricky, were planning to rejoin them in the world that previously only gods and demigods could tread. It was probably a cunning trap.

  Her mind was still full of the dragon. She had seen how it resembled the earlier, smaller beast of the river. There was no mistake in her mind—whatever Lysandra had done, she had taken something and remade it. That was a godly power. It exceeded, in one stroke, anything the Kinslayer had been able to manage. In comparison the dragon Celest had slain, Vermarod the Invincible, was a bumbling contraption. If they had deployed this new creature to slay all of Ilkand it would take a lot more than Celest and an army to stop it. The Shelliac had not even been prepared to cross the earlier version when it claimed a bit of a riverbank.

  But much worse than was how difficult it was to replace her image of Lysandra as a subhuman monster with the intelligent person who had spoken to her minutes ago, who had done this magic, and who was now, subtly but distinctly, in charge of this expedition. That hurt. Being replaced so effortlessly, so easily. Until now she hadn’t quite believed the story about the fire. She’d been able to get along with Lysandra as a dumb instrument, some kind of walking curiosity. Lysandra as a fresh power in the world was something she felt unequal to grasping and her impulse was to contain it—only she had no idea how to do that.

  Scenarios ran through her mind in which she must act to stop Lysandra from doing something terrible and they all ended in failure. Only slaying her now seemed possible, as, at the rate she was changing, it was likely that within another day or two her intellect and her other abilities would outstrip all of them. If she didn’t act now, she might never have another chance.

  Kula had already lost so much. Lysandra was the product of an entire people’s end if Ralas was right. And he had no idea of the Tzarkomen’s vision for her either. She was a mystery. A potentially lethally dangerous, world-ending mystery.

  She thought of talking to Murti but a great weight in her chest made her hesitate. She realised she didn’t trust him either and wondered when that had happened. Ralas in Nydarrow—he might also be compromised. Tricky had been in cahoots with the Kinslayer a long time, before and during the war. Was anything she said or did remotely reliable?

  She studied Kula, shaking the dice in her hand, blowing on them for luck like Heno did. She did not believe that the child was malign, though she had cause to be. Everything she had done, or Lysandra had done, had seemed to come out of a kind innocence. Yes, it was stupid and unworldly to throw a king’s fortune around in a port town—Ad
ondra was right about that. It would have ugly consequences as well as pleasant ones. But she watched Kula playing with her new, valueless dice, laughing as Heno tried blatantly to cheat to amuse her—and she didn’t believe that there was an evil design at work there. Maybe the Kinslayer had not had an evil design either, for all it looked like it to her. That was too unbelievable to bear.

  Her head hurt. At least there was one thing she could do, however. She went to find the Captain to request a change of course.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  THE JOURNEY TOOK a week just to get them into the Guloss Archipelago proper. They made landfall at Calios, a large island at the tip of the whole Golden Isles chain which led like a handful of scattered grain one mote at a time all the way back to the mainland. It was the end of the true deep water and the last place that Captain Vakloz said he would be prepared to take them without further consideration of considerable danger fees.

  “However,” he added as he toasted them from the head of the table in the cramped seating below decks, “I will be handing your care over to a friend, well, an ally, who operates these waters.”

  “Another freebooter?” Nedlam asked. She was seated with the other larger-bodied amidships on their separate table but still had her knees around her ears as they ate fish stew and listened to a squall hammering the deck with rain that sounded like nails.