Page 62 of The Lost Reliquary
“I knoooooowwww. Remember when you pretended to have a sense of humor?” I toss a cracker at him. “Eat. Drink. If it takes imagining Mommy Tempestra-Innara feeding you to get fit again, do it. I expect to see you on your feet before we reach Cyprene.”
Nolan answers with a glare. But he picks the cracker up from his lap and takes a bite.
The city appears before Nolan does, a dark speck on the horizon that gradually grows bigger. At first, I’m a little disappointed at how unremarkable it is, this stretch of sea that garners such fear.
Then I glance into the water, and see a face staring back.
In a heartbeat, it’s gone, carried away by the waves, and it takes me a moment to realize what it was—a ship’s figurehead, floating free. More debris appears, bits of wood and sail, and other things I can’t identify.
“We’re entering the graveyard now.” Captain Cleophas comes up to where I’m leaning on the rail. “I’d suggest heading below if you’ve got a weak stomach.”
I snort. “Do I strike you as someone like that?”
The captain doesn’t share my amusement. “No. But there are places in this world where fortitude fails even the most seasoned soul. This is one of them.”
A whistle sounds.
“That will be for me,” she says, heading for the ship’s wheel.
I gaze back out over the water, chills running down my arms. It’s not the captain’s warning, though; the wind has changed, turned cooler. The debris increases. Masts poke from the water like sodden bones, whole boats appearing on either side of our path. There are hundreds of them, maybe thousands, all shapes and sizes, caught on the massive reef that surrounds the island. But not by accident. Centuries ago, the other gods came for the Salt Goddess, Astris. Like Novena, the battleground of their fall remains unnaturally intact, so much so that I can’t pick out which ships might have come from the ancient battle and which were more recent. Captain Cleophas steers us carefully through the field, but even so, flotsam bounces off the hull.
Another figurehead appears in the water, pale skinned, empty eyed.
My breath catches. Not a body of wood. Flesh. Another appears, and another, all looking as if they’ve been dead maybe hours. But I quickly understand that’s not the case.
Thisis what the captain was warning me about.
“Dear Goddess…” Nolan stands a little way down the rail. His fingers rise, searching for his reverie, though we discarded them when adopting our latest identities. “Their clothing… the insignia… those can’t be…”
“Pretty sure they are.”
Somehow, the sailors that died all those centuries ago, drowned in the battle between the Salt Goddess and their siblings, have been preserved. And been left eerily tethered to the reef we’re passing through. They thump against the prow in ones and twos, bloated faces staring up at a sky they can’t see, like the absolute worst version of the dolphins that joined our voyage earlier.
“Not even a nibble taken out of them.” My breath is white in front of me now, and there’s a heavy, sulfurous brine in the air. “It’s almost like they’ve been pickled.” Nolan makes a faint noise. He might be feeling better, but apparently not enough for me to talk about corpse-pickles. “Sorry.”
He swallows hard. “First Novena, now this.”
“Yeah.”
“And the Storm… you’ve seen it…” He whispers the words, even though no one is nearby. “What else does the death of divinity leave in its wake?”
“Do you mean what else did no one bother to tell us about?” How many other secrets are we going to discover? Devoted as he is, after what we’ve encountered Nolan must be wondering the same. I tear my gaze away from the grim flotsam and plunk it on Cyprene instead. “How bad can the city be if it can put up with being surrounded by the floating dead? Not like the Priors said, I bet.”
Nolan remains quiet, though I catch a hint of irritation at my vague blasphemy.
Soon we can make out the massive, sheer walls of the island, composed of a rock so pale gray that it’s nearly white. A narrow passage cuts through it, leading into a large cove and the main reason the Salt Goddess and their followers were able to hold out for as long as they did. The reef took care of most of the invaders; the rest were forced totighten formation and navigate themselves like thread through a needle, trying to avoid the island’s defenses. That much Idoknow.
As we enter the passage, I feel a constricting beneath my ribs. My gaze shifts, pulled away from Cyprene, back in the direction we came from. The mainland is days behind, but for a moment, I expect to see it. Almostwantto see it. Pushing that longing away, I let the memory of different waters rise, let the inky chill of that unforgiving river swell and smother my yearning, if only temporarily. I’ll return to the Cathedral again, to that distant divine light, soon enough.
And, if I have my way, for the very last time.
That thought steadies me as, beyond the reef, the water turns a pleasant shade of blue, funneled by the high pale cliffs around us. I don’t love how close they are to the ship—barely a stone’s throw away, but it’s clear we’ve left the hard part behind, thanks to Captain Cleophas. The cove is almost like a sea itself, large enough that a hundred ships could comfortably sail it without getting in each other’s way. But there are only a few in sight, small as toys next to a pair of massive towers that rise from the waters. I count enough cannons to blanket the cove in cannonballs, turn any ship into scraps of timber. If an unwelcome visitor survived the reef and the walls, they would still need to contend with these. TheSquid’s Shadowruns up a series of flags. As we aren’t sunk immediately after, I take it we are welcome.
Cyprene proper comes into view. I can’t say it in front of Nolan, but I’m becoming decidedly less impressed with our home the longer our mission goes on. A fantasy resolves before us, the high white cliffs surrounding the city carved with dense, impossible intricacies—figures and ornaments, tunnels and balconies, flowing down from their tops all the way to where the foamy waves crash. There’s a towering, repeated form that must represent the Salt Goddess (the smashed facial features give it away) but also sea creatures so realistic I expect them to slip into the brine at any second. The city itself is more conventional, spreading out in a half moon around the bay, but even at a distance it clearly rivals Lumeris in grandeur.
Nolan does a good job of hiding his awe, but I can see it, lurking in the depths of his careful expression. “Let it out.”
“What?”
