a deep green, mottled with black flecks, toward its rim blushing deeply red. Alone, the rind would not have meant much of anything to Leandra. But this rind, she could not help but notice, lay motionless in a small pool of liquid feces.
It was a trifling detail—a distasteful smudge compared to the bright day, the beautiful city. Most would have ignored it, but Leandra could not look away.
Spurred on by the godspell around her head, the divine aspects of Leandra’s mind leapt forward. Her body, weakened by her recent prayer, flared into its disease. With her textual mind working so hotly, Leandra’s perception continued to widen.
Leandra could sense every fiber of her robes, her headdress, the leather of her sandals. Then she sensed Holokai and Dhrun, their every divine sentence.
Out and out her divine perception stretched. Now it included the buildings around her, the mud in the alley, the mango rind, the shit. Her perception included more and more of the city until the limits of herself began to dissolve.
Now she not only sensed the city’s whitewashed walls, but felt the hot sunlight shining upon them. Now she not only sensed the distant temple-mountains but also became their cool stone hallways. She became the docks. She was the wooden planks groaning under cargo and foot. She was the stalls up in the Hanging Market filled with bags of dark coffee, plates of ground taro root, tiny piles of sugar, larger piles of salt; pyramids of jackfruit, mountain apples, lychee; folded bolts of silk, arrays of hammered bronze amulets, jade necklaces, cheap baubles.
In the Water Temple, she was the marigolds on a young bride’s flower necklaces. In the Lower Banyan District, she was a bougainvillea vine trying to swallow a kitchen wall. She was the smoke coming from a cooking fire, the wooden ring of a man striking his wife, the lone brass rupee in a beggar’s bowl. She was a hovel in the Naukaa District, stinking and empty after a cholera outbreak. She was a squat plumeria tree dropping white petals on an old black dog.
“Lea!”
She discovered that Holokai was gripping her right arm. She was falling. Her vision dimmed … Grab his arm … Hold on … Dhrun loomed over her, his dark face a mask of concern.
“You stopped breathing!” Holokai’s voice boomed in her ear. He shook her. “I can’t even look away from you for a second, hey? You start breathing now, okay? No fooling. Start breathing.”
He slapped her, hard. Everything shifted. Her cheek stung. At last, Leandra’s perception began to consolidate.
“You start breathing, Lea!” Holokai shouted. “No fooling now!”
What he was saying … it seemed absurd … until … until …
He drew his hand back as if to slap her again, but now air rushed out of her lungs.
“No!” she squeaked between gasps of air. “I’m … breathing …”
She felt a tangle of emotions: terror, giddiness, a distance from the world as if she were intoxicated. She was clinging to Holokai’s arm, panting.
They waited.
When her breathing finally slowed, Holokai asked, “It happen again? You becoming the city?”
“Yes.”
“Huh. You know how I could tell? You said that your disease flares make other people near you fluent in the magical languages you’re near, right? Well, this time, I was looking over at four-arms over there”—he nodded at Dhrun—“and I could understand some of his prose. Pretty clever, hey?”
Leandra only nodded. Suddenly her vision blurred with tears. She stood up straight. She tried to rub the tears from her eyes. She thought of the beautiful things she had been, the disgusting ones: the shit and the wooden ring worn by a man beating his wife. The tears seemed to grow hotter in her eyes. “Creator damn it all, I hate this disgusting city!” she swore even as her heart ached for the beautiful city, her city.
She kept rubbing at her tears until they stopped. Hopefully this wouldn’t rekindle her disease flare. Hopefully she wouldn’t need to take the stress hormones again.
Holokai and Dhrun waited until Leandra could stand on her own. “It was that prayer to Baruvalman,” she said, “and this new spell around my head. That’s what tipped me over.”
Holokai nodded. “Well then, no more tipping, hey?”
Dhrun gingerly touched her shoulder with his lower right arm.
“Are we ready to go?” she asked.
Dhrun answered. “We are, but there is no need to rush to your family compound if it’s going to kill you.”
“Right,” she said and took a few deep breaths. “Right.” At last she turned toward the Jacaranda Steps. “I’m fine. Let’s go.”
“Lea, you sure you’re all right?” Holokai whispered, so softly that not even Dhrun could hear it. “If you do that again when I’m not around, that might be the end.”
“It’s okay,” she said while gingerly feeling her tender belly. “There are worse ways to die. So come on, let’s go find one.”
The ghost ship listed. A sailor was rowing Nicodemus from the first barge to the smoldering ship, the bay water blue around them.
The pilot of the lead barge had seen a column of smoke as their convoy left the Matrunda River and entered the Bay of Standing Islands. The captain had wanted to avoid any trouble, but Nicodemus ordered him to investigate.
Over the horizon had come a small junk. What was left of her rigging smoldered. Not a stitch of sail remained. Scorch marks raked her bow. No one moved on her deck and not even the loudest of hails raised a soul from belowdecks.
Nicodemus had sent Doria, Sir Claude, and three armed sailors to investigate. When Doria had shouted for him to follow, he knew they had found something important. The swells were minimal, so Nicodemus made it to the ghost ship’s deck without taking an embarrassing dip into the bay.
First Nicodemus noticed the bodies. Four men. Or, Nicodemus corrected himself, very likely four men. Two were burnt beyond recognition of sex. The other two wore drab, bloodstained lungi and were sprawled on deck.
Then Nicodemus noticed the smell. Burnt flesh and … something else … Doria was standing by the mast, frowning at a book in her hands. “There’s a smell like …” he said and paused to sniff. “Maybe like … hot metal maybe … or like sulfur?”
“It smells like vog,” she said without looking up from her book.
“Vog?”
“Pollution from active volcanoes or from lava flows meeting the sea. It can get pretty bad north of the big island and near the active volcanoes on the outer island chain.”
Nicodemus sniffed again. “But there’s no active volcano near here, is there?”
“Not for hundreds of miles.”
“Then why should this boat smell like vog?”
“I’m not sure, but it’s hardly her most pressing mystery.” She held up the book. “According to the captain’s journal, she’s a merchant sailing out of Feather Island, makes a run to Chandralu once every three days or so. Sometimes she takes commissions to ship cargo to the other sea villages. Three days ago she was in Chandralu. The last entry put her in Feather Island yesterday. There’s no entry about departure. The hold has been half emptied. The ballast is off. She’s tilted back.”
Nicodemus looked at the bodies. “You think she had to leave her home port in a hurry?”
Doria clapped the book shut. “I do. Even a half competent crew would have redistributed her cargo. If she was attacked on the water, the pirates would