“You mind your pets, now,” the innkeeper warned Selena. “It’s bad enough, the dragonman—” he nodded at Ilior who was already seated at the hearth, waiting for her—“but now a sirrak too? I been real nice since yer coin is good, but…” He leaned on the gleaming wood and said in a low voice. “Don’t you think it’s about time you moved on?”
Selena stiffened. “Yes, I do.”
She left him at the bar and sat with Ilior at a table near the empty hearth. Outside the windows, the wind howled and the rain battered the glass. A sullen, skinny boy wearing a stained apron plunked a mug of black coffee in front of her. Selena wrapped her hands around the mug and let the steam waft over her face. She told herself it helped.
“I haven’t seen Svoz,” Ilior said, his voice a low rumble.
“I sent him to the wilds to feed.”
Ilior picked up a strip of limp, greasy bacon from his breakfast plate. “Don’t let him deplete the boars too much, or I might be deprived of such glorious fare.”
“That is kind of you to make light, when I know how much his joining us bothers you.”
Ilior shrugged his massive shoulders. His lone wing rose and fell. “The success of your quest is too important.”
“If it could only begin,” Selena said. “We are no longer welcome here,” she said with a nod at the innkeeper behind the bar who watched them with a scowl twisting his jowls.
“You want me to talk to him?”
“No. This inn is the finest in Port Sylk. I’m sure some pirate boss has a stake in it. We don’t want to invite that kind of trouble.”
“What next, then?” Ilior asked. “You’ve interviewed every halfway reputable captain on the island, and more that aren’t. I hate to suggest it, but writing to the Temple might be the right thing.”
Selena sighed. “I was thinking the same.”
“Tell the High Reverent to send the Armada.” Ilior’s scaled lips curled. “Her choice of captain wasn’t too keen the first time.”
“She’s doing her best,” Selena said. She’d had the same ire for Celestine, but felt it was her duty to defend her now. “She should have left such matters to Admiral Crane, but done is done.” Selena pushed her coffee mug aside. “But your advice is sound. The rain has let up. I’ll go to the scriveners now.”
“Fair enough,” Ilior said, rising.
“No, stay,” Selena said. “I’ll go myself.”
“That does not seem safe.”
“Neither is staying here. Not for much longer. I need you here in the event the innkeeper has notions about tossing our things in the street. I can buy some time if I tell him we have a ship on the way.”
“I don’t like this,” Ilior grumbled. “It’s the pirate isle—”
Selena held up a hand. “Please, my friend. I want to be alone. For a bit.”
He nodded reluctantly as she rose and started for the door. She felt his scaled hand on her wrist.
“Be careful.”
She knew that every time she ventured alone Ilior considered it a dereliction of the duty he’d assigned himself. Since the war. Since that terrible day where she found the Zak’reth warriors hacking off his wing in the Farendus Isles. She dreamt of that day too, sometimes, but at least she didn’t wake up screaming. In those dreams, it was Ilior who screamed.
She held his hand in hers. “I will. I promise.”
Despite the hidden sun, the heat was intense—or so Selena observed as she walked along the rain-soaked planks of the boardwalk. The smell of fish was trapped in the humid air, as were the scents of salt, sweat, and old rum.
Selena couldn’t feel the wrath of the heat, but she had another misery. It might be a fortnight before an Alliance vessel arrived. A fortnight in which the Bazira trail would grow colder. Moreover, it was a missive of failure she would be sending to Isle Lillomet. Defeat before her mission could even begin.
She strolled the boardwalk, stopping frequently to peer into shops or listen to the hawking of street vendors. Eventually, the scriveners came into view, off the walk and on the docks. Three men sat on overturned buckets, sheaves of parchment tucked under their arms and bottles of ink set on make-shift tables made of crates or pieces of planking before them. Behind the scriveners were cages with peliteryxes, cawing or sleeping, their copper beak satchels glinting dully in the gray daylight.
Selena sighed with resignation, and the scent of pungent but sweet-smelling incense wafted in the air. Without thinking, she turned into the shop from where it came.
It was a small shop, spare in furniture, but rich in wares. Trays of jewelry with gemstones of all colors and sizes were arrayed neatly against every wall. Strings of crystals and beads hung from the ceiling, and shelves of exotic old books and jars filled with unknown plant and animal specimens lined the walls. Fat candles burned low, spilling their tallow over more stacks of books and at the rear hung a tapestry in dark velvet.
A seer’s shop, Selena thought. Isle Uago was flush with them, but this shop seemed finer for its inventory, and also strangely empty.
The tapestry was adorned with stars sewn in silver thread and Selena recognized the constellations, having been taught them at the Temple. The celestial plane from which the djinn of Isle Juskara were summoned was elegantly rendered; a conical outline of silver spangles that tapered to one bright star.
The other shapes: an oval like an unblinking eye, a slant of lightning, and a flaming sword were familiar to her from her days of study as a youth. The other gods. Lesser gods to whom some island nations on Lunos paid fealty. Selena could not recall their names. I disdained learning them, she thought, such is my total devotion to the Shining face.
Selena remembered a chart she had seen at the Guild on Isle Parish. So ancient, it had to be set between two panes of glass lest it fall apart at the slightest touch. It was of Lunos before the Breaking, and three thousand years old. Instead of many islands, there had been one country, wide and whole. Selena couldn’t imagine so much unbroken land, but the archivist had said it was true. The dragons had smashed the world in their war. They shattered it and cast the shards afloat over the vast oceans. The Breaking. The dragons died and the gods came to power, none more powerful than the Two-Faced God who ruled supreme. A moon god to rule over a world of water.
The Two-Faced God’s full silver moon was prominent in the tapestry hanging in this shop before her.
Where it belongs.
But the tapestry’s beauty was ruined, Selena thought, by the inclusion of the Void. There was a blank space on the right side of the tapestry. The Void was a strange, unknowable hole in the sky from which the sirrak came, and from which coppery rocks sometimes fell to Lunos. These rocks were valued for their rarity and brought their lucky finders fortunes in gold doubloons.
“Abysmite,” Selena murmured.