Ori’s screams accompanied them for a little less than an hour, guiding Selena through the forest. When they ceased, Selena was relieved and frightened both, for the silence likely meant Ori’s death. She marched on, now without direction though she could hear the crash of surf against shore that meant they had traversed the entire island.
Selena called a halt at a small rise in the woods. She gestured for her army to wait while she scaled it. She gestured for her army to wait while she scaled the rise. From the vantage, she could see a stretch of black sea laced in white-caps hugging the western shore. Three Bazira ships at anchor—black-winged shadows— bobbed on the water. A half a league to the west, Bacchus’s temple: a twisted, thorny-looking tangle atop its own small rise. It seemed too small; a one-room shack and not fit to house the Bazira priest and his retinue for so long. She guessed there was more to his dwelling than she could see in the storm-swept night—an enormous underground stronghold perhaps filled with Bazira.
No, impossible. The island is too small, she thought and hoped that she and her Zak’reth had already faced the bulk of Bacchus’s protection.
She started back down the rise but was brought to her knees. An unseen hand, cold as the deepest sea and just as heavy, pressed down on her. The air tightened and chilled, burning her lungs and she hugged herself, as if she could keep from shattering to pieces. The clouds released the moon and she watched as a sheen of ice spread outward from the little temple on the hill— like a flood of molten silver—and raced outward in all directions. Under the soft sounds of the squall that was building toward a second siege came the cracking snaps of trees as the cold swept over them.
She planted her borrowed sword into the ground and pushed herself to her feet. The thin sheen of frost crunched under her feet as she started down the rise, hunched over like an old woman. She returned to her army.
They marched, slower now, following Selena’s halting step, and arrived at the foot of the small hill upon which Bacchus’s temple sat. Its walls were remnants of the village that her wave had destroyed ten years before, and the Zak’reth ships that had been her intended target. Plain, simple wood beams were haphazardly tacked to lengths of planking that still bore flakes of the red and gold paint the Zak’reth favored. Pieces of a ship’s deck made up the roof, and two masts formed a pinnacle at the top.
The bones unnerved her the most. She had thought the bodies of her victims must have long ago found rest at the bottom of the sea, or in the bellies of sea creatures, but skulls adorned the jutting spars on the temple roof and piles of jagged femurs and ribs lay strewn about the grounds, now rimed in ice. Selena stopped, the black sockets of the dead staring down at her, accusing. But the bones at her feet—a skeleton with a dolphin’s tail and a human’s skull—told her the truth. The Calindari and the Zak’reth who perished with them were long gone.
There are merkind here. Bacchus’s dead, not mine.
She remembered Accora’s words; that darkpools formed in places where great death and grief had been wrought.
I did this ten years ago. These are my dead.
She glanced behind her, to try to gauge if the sight of the remnants of that mighty Zak’reth armada stirred emotion in her Zak’reth. But they were silent. Waiting. Their yellow eyes flickered in the dark and she found them strangely comforting.
Another scream tore the night. Accora’s scream, ragged with pain, emanated from inside temple and then tapered off in something like a sob. Selena understood what Bacchus was doing, calling her to him, using the suffering of others as his clarion. Coward. She whispered the sacred words to call healing to her body.
The healing energy glowed inside her. The cold of Bacchus’s magic still wrapped her in its icy grip, but she could move and think and fight. She turned to her Zak’reth, ready to order them to siege the temple when the stomping thunder of booted steps sounded from the western side of the island, near the shore. She watched as a line of Bazira marched out of the ground from a tunnel she could not see, and began to curve around the temple hill toward her. She guessed there were near fifty of them, armed with swords and ice.
“My enemies come this way,” she told the Zak’reth general. “Follow the bend around the temple and head them off.”
The Zak’reth’s guttural words were spoken aloud but Selena heard Tradespeak echo in her mind.
The dawn comes soon. Our service ends with the light.
Selena’s voice was cold and flat to her own ears. “Then you had best kill them quickly.”
“Yai kah!”
The Zak’reth hoisted their blades that glowed with a heat Selena would never feel, and marched past her to meet the smaller Bazira force. From inside the small temple, Accora screamed again.
Selena crept up the hill, to the entrance that was cobbled from a cabin door. Her boot crunched through the thin layer of frost that lay over the ground. It sounded to her like a thousand branches cracking in the night, echoing in the air made thin by the unnatural cold. She stopped and tightened her grip on her sword, using it to nudge the door open. It opened like a corpse’s jaw and again, the noise made Selena cringe.
He knows I come. He can feel me as I feel him. We are drawn to each other; a light to dispel the shadows and a shadow seeking to snuff the light.
She stepped inside slowly, letting her eyes adjust to the dimness. Selena had the impression that she was walking inside her own wound: down a well of unending blackness and cold. The thought was horrifying and yet strangely exhilarating.
It means it’s true, she thought, trying to quiet her own rapid breaths. Skye was right. I kill the beast that lurks in this frigid dark, and my own wound will heal.
It was small—one room—and lit by one torch that guttered on the far wall. It melted the ice that lined the walls and threatened to snuff itself out with the dripping water. The water hissed as it rained down on the torch, or smattered the ice-rimed floor beneath.
Above, the roof was thatch, wood, bits of old ship and the homes of those who had lived before. Like the rest of the temple, it was crude and looked as though it might collapse at any moment, especially under the additional weight of the ice. A rough hole in the shape of a crescent moon was cut into the roof so that even the Shining face’s full moon would be diminished to the crescent of the Shadow face.