“So what’s the move, Skipper? Are we just going to, I don’t know, drift and wait until tomorrow’s daylight?”
Signe shakes her head. “We can’t just drift. It’s part of a chain of islands….It’s too dangerous. But there is a primitive dock on the Tooth.” She grimaces and exits through the hatch. “Hold on.”
Mulaghesh sits beside Signe and watches as the islands approach, tiny pinpricks that grow and grow…
And grow.
And grow…
Her eyes widen. “By the seas…”
They are not just simple islands—not the rocky beaches she imagined, perhaps scattered with a few withered trees. Rather, these are huge, towering columns of gray rock, stacks and stacks of it, tottering and leaning like fronds of river grass nudged about by the wind. And on their sides…
Mulaghesh grabs the spyglass. “Are those faces?”
“Yes,” says Signe grimly. “Carvings of Saint Zhurgut, Saint Petrenko, Saint Chovanec, Saint Tok…Heroes and warriors with a hundred deaths to their name each.” She slightly adjusts the tiller, pointing the bow so that it threads them through the towering islands. “They are called the Teeth of the World. From the poem, you see. And at the very end is the Tooth. What name it originally had is forgotten, or so I am told. But it was the most important of them.”
Mulaghesh sits in awed silence as Signe pilots them through the forest of massive columns, their surfaces carved with faces and visages and bas-reliefs, many of them terrifying: images of soldiers, battle, churning tapestries of conquest, of raised blades and torrents of spears, skies black with arrows, horizons blocked out with endless banners, and tangled, twisted piles of the defeated dead.
The islands seem to have once had a purpose beyond decoration, too: a few have windows, or doorways, or stairways running up the sides, as if these were not rock formations but rather towers. Perhaps their interiors are as honeycombed and chamber-filled as the walls of Fort Thinadeshi, dark and cramped and secretive. She wonders what could have gone on in these towers. The thought sets her skin crawling.
Many of the columns are lined with torch sconces, and she imagines how the Teeth of the World must have looked a hundred years ago, covered with glimmering dots of firelight and the windows filled with faces, looking down on them as they sailed by.
“How is this still here?” says Mulaghesh.
“I don’t know,” says Signe. “Perhaps it doesn’t persist with any Divine aid. Perhaps they used Divine abilities to make them, but the rocks and the carvings themselves—they’re but simple matter. I can’t tell you, General.” Then, darkly, “That’s the Tooth.”
Mulaghesh looks ahead and sees a wide peak emerging from amidst the towering columns. It’s not at all like the other islands, which are more or less purely vertical: the Tooth is more akin to a small floating mountain, covered with tall, twisted trees and—though it’s hard to see in the dimming light—countless arches of some kind. Its summit is concealed by the tall, warped trees.
She’s suddenly aware of Signe breathing hard as they approach the Tooth—not out of exertion, but terror. “Are you going to be okay?”
“Yes,” she says defiantly. Then she lowers the sails and starts the little diesel engine, piloting the boat toward the island’s south side. She flicks a switch in the cockpit, and the yacht’s tiny spotlight stabs out into the growing gloom, its beam bobbing up and down the distant shore.
Mulaghesh spies the dock, though it’s not like any dock she’s ever seen before. It looks like a massive rib cage made of antlers and horns blooming off the shore of the island, leaving a tiny gap just below what would be its sternum. Beyond the “ribs” she can see distant stone walls, cold and pale. It takes Mulaghesh a moment to realize Signe is aiming the boat toward the gap below the sternum, and she wonders if the yacht will be able to make it through. Then she realizes that the rib cage is much, much larger than she realized, and the boat slips through easily.
She stares up at the carven ribs as they pass underneath them. “Death worship,” she says. “What a morbid civilization this was.”
“I decided it was a memorial when I came here last,” Signe says quietly. “Maybe that’s what all of the Teeth of the World are. They are unusually bedecked in the images of death, after all.”
They approach the stone dock, its steps stained dark from decades of mold.
“The City of Blades is worse,” says Mulaghesh.
Signe expertly steers the boat up to the dock and moors it to an ancient iron ring beside the steps. Then the two women arm themselves, a process Mulaghesh has more guidance for: “Put your ammunition on the left side of your belt. No, your other left. You’re right-handed; that’s easier for you to reach.”
“I did receive training on this, you know.”
“Well, then they did a shit job of it.”
Mulaghesh readies herself, then steps onto the dock. She looks back at Signe, and perhaps it’s the light, but the Dreyling woman suddenly looks quite pale.
“What?” says Mulaghesh.
“I…I was fourteen when I came here last,” Signe says.
Mulaghesh just waits and watches.
“I’d hoped it’d all fallen into the seas, frankly. To come here now…it feels as if I’m stepping into a memory.”
“You haven’t stepped into it yet.”
Signe nods, then hops up onto the dock with Mulaghesh.
“Now to the ruin at the top?” says Mulaghesh.
“Yes. The dome of shields and knives. It feels like it was something out of a dream…but that’s what I remember of it.”
The stone path winds around and around the Tooth like a corkscrew, and each step is old and well-worn. Countless people must have been here during its life, Mulaghesh thinks—processions of warriors and dignitaries and kings and priests, all threading their way up the hill. About every twenty feet is an arch that stretches over the steps, and carved into each arch are images Mulaghesh doesn’t quite understand: a woman, presumably Voortya, firing an arrow into a tidal wave; a sword dicing a mountain as one would an onion; a man disemboweling himself upon a tall, flat rock before the setting sun; a woman hurling a spear at the moon, and showering in the black blood that spills forth.
The bent trees quiver and shake in the steady breeze, making the slopes shift and shudder just as much as the seas below. It’s an eerie place, Mulaghesh finds.
“It’s all the same as I remember,” says Signe quietly.
“The Voortyashtanis brought you here before?”
“Yes. A rite of passage. Twenty children, none older than fourteen. They brought us here and dropped us off with a pitifully small amount of provisions: a few loaves of bread, a few potatoes, some dried fruit. Barely enough for us to last. And then they…And then they left us here. Without a word. Without telling us if they’d ever come back. Alone in this miserable place.