chapter FIVE
A whisper passed among the men and then a wild cheer. Corin did not move. He only stared into the darkness, disbelief battling with the wild exhilaration clawing at the back of his breastbone.
“We’ve done it,” he breathed at last, inaudible beneath the noise. And now the thrill of victory won through. Now he grinned and turned to Blake again.
“You silly little pup, with your fancy waistcoats. You might have gained more wealth than all your family’s houses could contain, but this little spot of toil was too much to ask of you.”
Corin turned and met the eyes of all his men. “I have asked much of all among you. I have dragged you from the sea and spent you on this wild hunt. Perhaps…perhaps your first mate heard you grumbling. I will not fault a man among you for complaining. But only one of you raised arms against me.”
He touched a hand to the drying blood at his collarbone, then pressed his palm against his black shirt, still wet to the navel. He showed the bright-red palm to the men, then crossed the little distance to the place where Blake stood, now disarmed, his hands roughly bound.
Corin pressed his palm flat against the man’s bare chest, leaving the crimson stain of his accusation.
“Blake will have nothing more from us. He risked everything on this gamble, so we will give him nothing.” Corin stared down at him for a moment, then nodded. “Nothing. No punishment for what he’s done, but no share of this great treasure. No horse from our pickets. No water from our stores. No place among our tents. Let him find his own way from this place.”
Corin ran a look around the circle and saw admiring approval. It was a good pirate punishment. Even in this bleak desert, a man might be marooned.
He hid his smile and turned his attention to the passageway. “Torches!” he cried. “Bring me torches. Let us see what we have won.” He headed for the archway.
“Stop!” cried Iryana. She sounded frantic. “By Oberon’s name, Corin, do not trespass here!”
Corin spared a sad smile for the miserable native. “You do not have to come.” He raised his voice. “You have served us well, Iryana. Take a camel and anything you can carry, and return to your people’s tents.”
“There is no treasure for you here,” she screamed. “I swear it. Not for Godlanders. There is only the record of your sins.”
Corin hesitated a moment, then went to her. He stood over her for a moment, holding her eyes, then bent his head to speak softly near her ear. “You must get out of here. If Blake had accomplished what he intended…I could not have saved you. For all their useful traits, these are not good men.”
“And you ask me to leave you to their mercy?”
Corin shrugged. “I am not a good man, either. But I would not like to see you come to harm. Take the offer I have given you, and get far from this place.” He stepped back, still holding her eyes. She didn’t move. She didn’t blink.
“Please,” Corin whispered. “Take a camel and go.”
Behind him, Dave Taker raised his voice. “Captain? Is there a problem with the girl?”
Corin ground his teeth and turned away. “Not at all. She has served us well. Now…let us see this treasure. Who has my torches?”
“There is some light already,” called Charlie Claire, staring past the doorway. He sounded nervous, and Corin nearly chastised him for the very superstition Iryana had accused them of, but then Corin saw it, too. The glow was thin and gray, an eerie twilight, but it was enough to see by. Corin forced himself not to look back at Iryana. He rested one hand on the hilt at his belt and strode into the mountain.
The entrance was a tunnel, the same size and shape as the scrollwork gate, but roughly hacked from living stone. It went five paces deep then opened up to left and right. The ceiling soared away above, too, so Corin felt himself on the edge of one huge, open chamber. The feeble light didn’t show him much, but the vastness of the place was a taste in the air, an echo in the ear.
The floor was not a cave’s rough floor, but cobbled stone. The rock wall was irregular and jagged like a natural cavern’s, but it did not seem a real part of this place. It was the boundary. But within the cavern, there seemed an unreal space, like something out of dream. Like the heat-haze hallucination Corin had seen before.
He stepped forward onto the cobblestones and a new shape loomed out of the darkness. A tall, square block ahead on his right. Another step made it clearer, even in the gloom: a three-story building, looking for all the world like a fancy shop off Prince’s Way in Ithale’s capital. He saw the shadow of another beyond it, and just perhaps another across the wide street.
He stopped in the deep and echoing silence, straining his ear, but the only sound of life in this whole place was the nervous rustle of his bravest followers shuffling in behind him. They hung back, but Charlie Claire came up behind Corin. He carried a torch that flickered against the darkness, and still it took him a moment to recognize what he was seeing. At last the sailor gasped.
“By all the gods!”
A frightened whisper fluttered among the rest of the crew. Corin turned his back on the row of storefronts dancing in the torchlight.
Charlie’s eyes strained wide. “What is this place?”
“We’ve found the dead god’s tomb.”
Charlie shook his head. “This is no tomb. This is a city! Those are shops. That’s the sign of a money changer, but it never swung in a summer breeze. Not here. Who made this place?”
“A race long dead,” Corin said, loud enough for all to hear. “I have been studying Jezeeli, and no civilized tongue has spoken its name for more than a thousand years. We are safe.”
“You never said it was a city!” Charlie cried.
I never believed it was, Corin thought, but he kept that to himself. He let his eyes dance with mischief. “I asked much of you. Blake was not wrong on that count. We have all toiled toward this day, and this last secret I saved as your reward.”
He stepped aside so they could see right up the wide boulevard. “A whole forgotten city, yours to plunder! This is fitting work for a pirate, no?”
A dozen voices answered, “Aye!”
Corin grinned back at them. “Fetch Blake in here. Let him see what he will miss!” It took only a moment, and every man among the crew came back with him, until they crowded the little plaza at the foot of the road.
The first mate’s gaze was hard as steel, flashing fury not yet touched with despair. Corin only grinned more deeply. Despair would come.
“My men,” he cried, “this place is yours! Despoil it of its riches!”
They cheered at that. They surged forward, leaving only Corin and Blake as they charged up the way, pouring through open doors and into all the shops. The farther they carried their torches, the farther the place seemed to stretch. It felt endless.
“Gods’ blood,” Corin breathed. “Even I had not imagined a place such as this.”
“You do not deserve this reward,” Blake growled.
“Oh, it is mine by right. You whined at what I asked of you, but I’ve spent more effort than the crew combined to find this place.”
Blake sneered. “It will still be in vain.”
“Your mutiny is dead. Be glad you’re not and hold your tongue.”
The first mate smiled, showing far too many teeth for a man in bonds. “I’m not alone. My father’s men will find me here, and they will take what you have found.”
“Your father’s—” Corin began, but he stopped himself short. “You always struck me as a nobleman’s son, playing at being a pirate.”
“An infiltrator,” Blake said. “A planted spy, for the glory of the Vestossi name.”
“Of course you’re a Vestossi,” Corin said. “There’s nowhere in the world I can escape Ephitel’s wretched protégés. But why would I leave you alive to tell them?”
“Because you’re weak. You are a scoundrel when you should be a gentleman, and you are soft when you should be hard.”
“I am a pirate,” Corin interrupted, growing bored.
“You are like no pirate I have known.”
“No.” Corin grinned as his men began emerging from the shops, their arms laden with spoils. “No, I am far, far richer. I’ll take one day’s head start, then let your father try to find me.”
Charlie approached first, coming from the money changer’s shop on the closest corner. Corin saw no sparkle among the bundles in his arms, and he recognized confusion on the sailor’s face. Five paces brought him close enough for Corin to see what he carried.
“Books?” Corin asked.
Charlie nodded, still looking baffled. “The place was full of them. They’re in no language I have ever seen.”
Blake sneered. “Now you can read?”
The sailor answered quietly. “I know the shapes of letters, Blake, and these are not the letters of men.”
Corin plucked a book from the bundle in Charlie’s arms. It was bound in supple leather and stitched with fine silk thread. Rich, soft paper seemed untouched by time, and the symbols on the pages were indeed quite alien. They bore some similarity in look to the scrollwork on the stone-carved gates.
“This is your treasure?” Blake asked. “Books?”
“There is value in old books,” Corin said, distracted. “But look at their condition.”
“And these as well?” Blake asked, nodding past Charlie to the other returning looters. Sleepy Jim was next, from the shop across the street, and he carried books, too. Corin frowned. Clever Karr had books, too, and David Taker. They dumped them at Corin’s feet, expressions demanding explanations, and every man among the crew, no matter where he’d gone, brought back books.
“Perhaps this was the bookbinders’ lane,” Corin tried, but the expressions on their faces denied it as clearly as the money changer’s sign. Corin wet his lips. “We should search farther in—”
“We tried the other avenues,” Dave Taker said. “I looked through four dozen different doors, and everywhere was only books.”
“There must have been a strongbox somewhere, a shelf of silver—”
“Books,” David said. “Just books in every room. Go see yourself. This place…this place is wrong.”
“We never should have come here,” Blake said softly. To Corin’s horror, even Jim nodded along.
“There is good money in old books,” Corin repeated. “Don’t let the traitor fool you. This book alone—” he waved the one he held “—might fetch a hundred pistoles in silver at the universities.” He waved to the pile spilled at his feet. “Just here, we have a fortune! If there are more—”
“You haven’t seen the rooms,” Dave answered. Too much white showed in his eyes. His voice cracked. “The slave did warn us, Captain! You heard what she said. We never should have come.”
Corin stormed up to him. He managed by sheer rage to loom over the taller man. “Would you join Blake in bonds, you gutless dog?”
The man did not back down. “I would leave this place. That’s all I know. We never should have come.”
Too many of them nodded now. Acid boiled in Corin’s stomach—anger and fear in equal parts. He’d come too far to lose this now.
“You heartless cowards! I’ve seen you face the despot’s grays. I’ve seen you board a ship full of gladiators. I’ve seen you cut down enemies and lords. Would you quail now for fear of books?”
None of them would meet his eyes but Blake, who grinned with the thrill of victory. “You brought us to this desert hunting gold. Pirates in the desert!” He spat his disapproval. “A little solid sparkle can overcome reason, but lacking that, these boys know right from wrong.”
“Still your tongue or I’ll still it for you,” Corin snapped.
Blake’s smile twitched. He jabbed his chin toward David Taker. “Cut me free.”
Corin caught Taker’s eyes before the man could move. “Show me. Show me these terrifying libraries.”
Taker nodded once, mute, then turned on his heel. Corin jerked his head toward the treacherous first mate and raised his voice to the other men. “Bring him along. Bring everyone along.” Corin looked at the book in his hand, the pile at his feet, and slowly shook his head. Then he stomped off after his guide.
He followed up the boulevard in the flickering gloom of their torches. As they passed the money changer’s shop, he glanced in. Books were everywhere, stacked in neat piles of varying heights. He caught only a glimpse of it, but he saw the same through the next open door, and the next. David Taker passed half a dozen shops before stopping at a door that hadn’t yet been opened. He stepped easily aside, ceding Corin the opportunity to try this one.
Corin’s hand closed on the dusty brass knob, but he hesitated. His whole crew waited in the street behind him, more than a hundred deadly men, and all of them afraid. Corin could feel Blake’s hateful gaze, his mocking grin. The pirate captain turned the knob. He pushed the door open to a slow, grinding creak, and torchlight danced into a long-abandoned room.
It showed him books. Not on shelves or tables, not neatly sorted for storage or sale, but stacked in tottering piles. Corin entered the room, moving as though in a dream, and his eyes roved over the stacks.
There were hundreds of books. Thousands. Not a stick of furniture, not a strongbox standing open, not so much as a discarded boot. Just books. They were all identical in shape and binding, and the air was rich with the scent of ancient paper. Corin turned in a slow circle. He saw an open doorway beyond the piles, and the room it revealed was full of books.
A dark stair climbed up to another floor, and even the steps held little piles of books. Corin backed slowly out the open door and into the boulevard. His eyes traveled up the building’s facade to the dirty windows of a second floor. Knowing what to look for, even through the gloom he could see the squared edges of more books piled high. His gaze went on up to a third floor. A fourth.
And there to the right was another building like this one. They stretched half a mile to the first intersection, and beyond that were more. Across the street were more. It was a sprawling city, hidden from the world of men, robbed of life and wealth but completely filled with books.