Ling groaned in pain, then lost consciousness.
Only twenty yards from the camp.
“I DON’T LIKE THIS, LUCIA,” Bianca di Remora said, eyeing the decayed hulk looming above them.
HMS BRITANNIA was written on the ship’s prow. Rust had devoured some of the letters. “Then go back,” Lucia said crisply.
“And let you board a ghost ship alone? No way. We’re both going back. We shouldn’t have even come here. If anyone ever found out that we did…”
But Lucia wasn’t listening; she’d already started for the top deck. She’d come to see Kharis and nothing was going to stop her. Bianca, fretting ever since they’d snuck out of the palace, trailed Lucia, wringing her hands.
Vallerio still hadn’t attacked the Black Fins. Soon, he’d said, when Lucia had asked him why not. I can’t send my troops to the Kargjord right now. I have other tasks for them. He’d refused to tell her what those tasks were, so Lucia had devised her own plan for dealing with Serafina. And Kharis, a servant of the death goddess Morsa, had something for her—something she desperately needed in order to set that plan in motion.
Figures flitted inside the ship. Lucia glimpsed them as she swam past portholes to the aft deck. She heard laughter. Glasses clinking. A piano playing.
The Britannia had been a luxury ocean liner. A storm had taken her down in the Adriatic Sea in the summer of 1926. Nearly a thousand had perished, passengers and crew.
Humans who died under the water became ghosts. Their bodies decomposed, but their souls lived on trapped beneath the waves—restless and hungry. The Britannia pulsed with the force of its ghost passengers’ longing. Lucia could hear it in the mournful groaning of the ship’s hull. She could feel it in the shuddering of its deck.
The Britannia hadn’t broken up as she’d sunk, but had settled in one piece on the seafloor, listing slightly to her port side. Her smokestacks still stood, as did the pilothouse. Lifeboats remained in position.
On the top deck, crabs scuttled over upended deck chairs. Tiny fish darted in and out of a woman’s shoe. Anemones clustered on hats, books, a pair of binoculars.
Other creatures lived on the decks, too, growling deep in their decayed throats, staggering on their tattered legs, swiveling their eyeless heads.
Rotters.
Bianca grabbed Lucia’s arm. “What are they?” she asked, terrified. “They look like dead terragoggs.”
“They are,” Lucia said. “They died in the Britannia’s wreck, too. The priestess uses them for protection. They kill anyone—human or mer—who tries to board the ship.”
Unlike ghosts, rotters possessed no soul. They were merely the decaying bodies of humans who’d died on the surface of the water. Their souls had been released at death, and their bodies had sunk to the seafloor. Practitioners of darksong knew how to reanimate the bodies and make them do their bidding.
The rotters lumbered toward Lucia and Bianca now, their hands swiping at the water. Bianca screamed. She tried to pull Lucia away, but Lucia shook her off.
“I am Lucia, regina of Miromara. Take me to Kharis,” she ordered.
The rotters stopped their attack. Their growls became sullen. They turned and headed for an arched doorway.
“Ghosts shun rotters. They think they’re disgusting,” Lucia said, following them.
“I can’t imagine why,” said Bianca, her voice trembling.
“We need to stay close to them. They’ll keep us safe.”
“How do you know all this?” Bianca asked, hurrying to keep up with her.
“I’ve come here before,” Lucia replied. “Many times.”
“Alone?” Bianca asked, looking at her with a mixture of disbelief and awe.
Lucia nodded. Temples to Morsa, the scavenger goddess of death, were outlawed, but a few still existed—if one knew where to look. A couple of doubloons placed in the right hands bought names and locations. The priestess Kharis had chosen the ghost ship because she knew that fear of its inhabitants would allow her to do her dark work without interference by the authorities.
Lucia knew the way to Kharis’s altar, but she allowed the rotters to lead her. They took her down a grand staircase that led into an enormous ballroom. Gleaming mahogany banisters swept down either side of the staircase, and it was lined with bronze statues of sea nymphs. High above it, electric chandeliers hung from the gilded ceiling.
At the ballroom’s far end, a ghost orchestra played. Revelers danced and laughed. Women with bobbed hair wore sparkly sleeveless dresses. Diamonds dangled from their ears and glinted on their hands. Their cheeks were powdered and pale; their lips painted vermilion.
Men wore tuxedoes. Their short hair was slicked back off their foreheads. They all looked just as they had in the seconds before the storm-tossed sea sent a rogue wave hurtling at their ship.