“Take only what we can use.” Nicci pulled out a long fighting knife the nameless sailor had kept in the bottom of his trunk. She fastened the sheath to her waist. The bout with the insidious poison had left her weak and incapacitated, but it had taught her a lesson. Even if she couldn’t use her magic, Nicci would not let herself be unarmed. Never again.
Using scraps of sailcloth, they fashioned makeshift packs to carry the salvaged supplies. Just after the sun reached its zenith, the three set off down the expansive beach.
Around them, the headlands rose up in sheer sandy ledges dotted with tufts of pampas grass and fleshy saltweed. They worked their way up to the point, from which they paused to look out into the sparkling sea. Nicci saw no other sails, no approaching ships, not even the line of angry water that marked the reefs that had destroyed the Wavewalker.
“We must have been blown far south,” Nicci said, scanning back the way they had come. From Captain Eli’s maps, she thought they might be somewhere down on the Phantom Coast.
In such an empty land devoid of any human markings, an artificial structure stood out like a shout. Bannon spotted it first with his sharp eyesight, pointing ahead across the windswept uplands to a promontory half a mile away on which stood a monolith of rocks, obviously built by people and just as obviously placed there so it could be seen from afar.
Squinting, Nathan said, “Without any frame of reference, it’s difficult to tell how large the structure is.”
Nicci set off. “We have to go see. It might give us our bearings, or point the way to some nearby town or military outpost.”
Above the beach, the bleak, grassy emptiness played tricks on them, and the promontory with its stone tower was much closer than it had seemed. As they approached, Bannon sounded disappointed. “It’s just a pile of rocks.”
“A marker. A cairn—it’s to signal a waypoint,” Nathan said.
The marker was a tower of neatly piled rocks, with the largest boulders around the base stacked and wedged to form a solid foundation on which a thin, tall pyramid had been erected. The apex of the cairn was only a head taller than Nathan. Thick scrub grasses grew around its base, and orange and green lichen mottled the rough black surfaces of the mounded rocks. The rocks did not look like any others in the vicinity.
“Someone went to great difficulty to build this,” Nicci said. “It has obviously been here a long time.”
The wizard shaded his eyes and stared out into the sparkling ocean. “It might be for passing sailors. A point to mark on their maps. Or a signal tower … not that we could signal them anyway.” He sighed. “There isn’t enough brush to build a decent bonfire.”
Nicci turned to him with a thin smile. “A ball of wizard’s fire hurled into the air might draw some attention.”
Bannon circled the cairn, looking for any clues. He squatted down, brushing aside the lichen and moss. “Oh! Words are carved on these bottom stones,” he said, revealing chiseled letters. “It’s a message.”
Nicci and Nathan came around to see the first stone, and Nicci froze. The incised letters read, To Kol Adair.
“Well.” Nathan rocked back, sounding pleased. “I suppose that is the waypoint we were looking for.”
Nicci’s chill deepened as she saw the rough, weathered words carved into the next stone. From there, the Wizard will behold what he needs to make himself whole again.
The words on the third stone made her throat go dry. And the Sorceress must save the world.
Nathan looked at her in astonishment. He lifted his hand, flexing his fingers. “Made whole again? Do you think it means I will be able to touch my Han again? Use magic? Red knew! She knew.”
Nicci frowned, feeling a knot in her stomach. “Much as I hate to admit it, this lends credence to what the witch woman wrote.”
Bannon was confused. “What? What is it? A prophecy?” He looked from one to the other.
“Prophecy no longer exists,” Nicci said, but her insistence did not sound convincing. Maybe if this prediction was old enough, burned into the fabric of the world before all the rules themselves changed …
“I thought we were shipwrecked and lost,” Nathan said with a tone of wonder in his voice. “Ironically, this debacle may have put us exactly where we were supposed to go.”
“I prefer to choose my own direction,” Nicci said, but she could not argue with the evidence of her own eyes. She did not need a prophecy to help save the world or to aid Richard Rahl in any way possible. And if she had to journey toward a mysterious place called Kol Adair, then she would do it, as would Nathan.
The wizard pursed his lips as he regarded the stones. “Only a fool tries to resist a clear prophecy. In doing so, the person usually brings about the same fate, but in a far worse fashion.”
Nicci set off, leaving the cairn behind. “We go to Kol Adair, wherever it is,” she said.
After the tall stone cairn dwindled in the distance, Nicci heard a loud crack and rumbling clatter in the windblown silence behind them. They all spun in time to watch the spire of piled stones shifting and collapsing. The tallest rocks crumbled from the pinnacle, the center buckled, and the whole structure collapsed into a mound of rocks. The cairn had served its purpose.
*
Leaving the high point, they descended the headlands, and came upon the bones of a monster. A long skeleton sprawled among the rocks and weeds just above the high-tide line. Its head was the size of a wagon, a triangular skull with daggerlike fangs and cavernous eye sockets. Its vertebrae draped along the rocks and down into the sand like a rope of bones as long as ten horses in a row. Innumerable curved ribs formed a long and broken tunnel that tapered to a point at the creature’s tail.
“It’s not a dragon,” Nathan observed.
“Dragons are mostly extinct,” Nicci said.
Bannon crossed his arms over his chest. “Sea serpent, but just a small one. We often saw them swimming past the Chiriya shore during mating season, when the kelp blooms.”
Looking at the long skeleton, Nicci surmised that the creature had died out at sea, and the tides had cast its body up on shore, where gulls and other scavengers picked it clean. Only a few iron-hard scraps of meat remained on the curved bones. “If that is a small sea serpent, I’m glad the Wavewalker did not encounter one.”
They walked along the beach until the tide came in with late afternoon. The sun lowered in a ruddy ball toward the expanse of water. The three trudged on, finding no path, no villages, no docks, nor even old campfire circles that would indicate a human presence. This land seemed wild, unsettled, unexplored.
Bannon bounded off ahead, heading toward another large cliff that blocked their way, pushing out into the sea. “Hurry, the tide is coming in, and it’ll block our way. I’d rather walk along the beach than climb those cliffs.”
They were sloshing in ankle-deep water by the time they rounded the point, climbing over seaweed-covered rocks. “This way,” Bannon said. “Be careful of your footing.”