demoness.”
“No one believes the Disjunction is coming. Not even your daughter.”
“What?”
“Listen to me, I am in fact a divinity complex of three goddesses—one of them quite old. My requisites are complicated. What you are offering, equitable theft without being bound by the Sacred Regent, could you accommodate the requisites for all three of us?”
“Unless there is a truly outrageous requisite, human pain or sacrifice or something like that.”
“No, no. Nothing barbaric.”
“Then I can bring you into the league’s pantheon.”
“Then … we shall talk.” Something moved behind Nicodemus. “Raise your hands. I’ll cut you down.”
Nicodemus obeyed and felt something jerk at his legs. He fell a half foot before landing on his hands and rolling easily up to a crouch. Being right-side up after so long was strange. The blood flowed out of his head and he felt as if he could think more clearly.
Grateful, he turned to regard the River Thief and discovered a lithe female figure, wrapped in a white cloth that floated around all six of her graceful arms—one pair of arms from each of the goddesses that had fused to form her complex. The sight made him think of a different river goddess, one he had known long ago.
In each of her six hands, the River Thief held a different kind of knife: a narrow dirk, a throwing dagger, a wavering kris, and so forth. Around her silhouette glowed an aura of blue-green light. Nicodemus was about to bow to the neodemon he hoped to convert, but then he saw her face and he froze.
For the second time that night, Nicodemus could not make sense of what he was seeing. The neodemon’s face … it filled his mind with confusion and fear. A single, absurd question pressed itself into his every thought with undeniable urgency. Before he realized what he was doing, Nicodemus asked, “Goddess, why do you have my daughter’s face?”
From the catamaran’s forward center deck, Leandra regarded the broad limestone formation that was Keyway Island.
Roughly circular and a mile in diameter, Keyway looked from the outside like the bay’s other large standing islands. However, wind and tide had hollowed out Keyway’s center, leaving a wide pool enclosed by a fortresslike formation and accessible only through a breach in the limestone on the island’s southern face. During high tide, the breach seemed nothing more than a sliver in the stone. Low tide, however, exposed a tunnel thirty feet wide and fifty feet long that led into Keyway Pool. At low tide, expert sailors could maneuver into Keyway Pool something as large as, say, a fifty-foot war catamaran. With Lieutenant Peleki bellowing orders, Leandra’s crew did just such a thing.
During the careful maneuvering, Leandra again looked aft at the standing islands. As before, she saw tall moonlit limestone, but this time she glimpsed something dark disappearing behind one of the islands. It made her breath catch. Was this what Holokai had seen? It had happened so fast and seemed so small. The next moment something took flight from a nearby island, and Leandra let out a brief laugh. Some kind of seabird. Nothing more.
Relieved, Leandra turned back as the catamaran coasted into Keyway Pool and looked up in satisfaction at her secret village.
Scattered across the Bay of Standing Islands were several famous “sea villages”—small settlements carved into the limestone islands and adorned with bamboo decks, bridges, and palisades. The inhabitants were mostly fisherman, a few merchants. They were remarkable places.
The sea village of Azure Strait had been built below the ruins of Sukrapor. On the island’s top stood ruined temples crowded with strangler fig trees—their grasping roots patiently tightened around temple facades and statues of the Lotus gods who had been killed in their war with the Sea gods.
Another example of a sea village was Feather Island, the southernmost and largest of its kind. The houses there climbed two limestone formations that stood so close that they were linked by several rope bridges, which swung in a slight breeze. Leandra had no great fear of heights, but once she had crossed such a bridge and found that the disconcerting sway of the blue world—tropical sky above, churning tides below—had made her stomach lurch.
Most every sea village was an exquisite sight at evening, when the inhabitants lit kakui nut lamps and the vertical villages lit up the rock faces like something from a dream.
Keyway Pool, the secret sea village built by Leandra and her followers, was nothing so picturesque. There were no buildings on the outer island walls, nothing that would identify it as an inhabited island.
But inside the island, the pool was nearly a quarter mile in diameter and surprisingly transparent. When sunlight fell onto the water, one could often look down through forty feet or so to see the bottom’s bright marine life. Near the high-water mark, carved into the limestone, were the docks and stores. Above this, in a nearly complete circle, was a row of deeply cut rooms covered with wooden fronts and connected by a sturdy boardwalk, protected from sun and rain by roofs of palm frond thatch. Two more levels were built above the first and connected by rope ladders with bamboo rungs.
Farther up the walls, where they met the island’s top, the limestone had been carved into expanding terraces. With divine assistance, earth had been brought from the big island and placed onto each terrace so that each grew a particular crop: rice for the Lotus Culture, taro for the Sea Culture, chickpeas or lentils for Cloud Culture. A smaller terrace, directly below Leandra’s spacious quarters, held a young plumeria tree, which was slowly snowing pale blossoms onto the pool.
Presently forty souls—most human, all refugees—called the secret village home. But work was underway on another level, and given that the limestone walls ascended nearly a hundred feet farther up to the island’s top. One day there could be as many as a hundred souls living in Keyway Pool. That is, if Leandra could keep her people and their cause secret and safe.
As the crew docked the catamaran, kukui lamps flickered into brightness along the second and third levels, and one of the dockworkers lit two torches, the reflections of which danced on the water and attracted the sleek, dark silhouettes of fish.
According to Sea Culture custom, Lieutenant Peleki accompanied Leandra onto the dock while brandishing the leimako to signify her status as the village’s chieftain. Dhrun, manifesting Dhrunarman, followed close behind. They were met by Master Alo, a sun-wrinkled old man with a long plait of white hair.
Until twenty years ago, he had been the high priest of a Verdantine goddess of wildfire. Then the empire had deconstructed his deity and seized all of his order’s lands and holdings. A few co-religionists had helped him escape to Ixos. Ever since, he had served as steward of Keyway Pool.
“Master Alo,” she said with a nod. “It is always a pleasure to return to your sunny countenance.”
The old priest regarded her with an expression that was about as emotive as a bucket.
“I trust nothing urgent happened while I was away,” she said with a hopeful note.
“News came in from Chandralu by sea canoe last night. It seems a royal messenger appeared at your family complex yesterday evening. The Sacred Regent has summoned you to his court and was distressed that you could not be found.”
Leandra winced. “What did his sacred majesty want?”
“The messenger did not say.”
“Has my father returned to the city?”
“No report of that. But there is civil unrest. Apparently a fishing boat came back to the docks yesterday after going missing for three days. Half the crew lay dead and rotting on deck and the survivors were raving about sea ghosts or the Floating Island having come into the bay.”
Leandra frowned. “That fairy tale again?”