CHAPTER1
The shore. Black sand as fine as powder, the slick gleam of washed-up kelp. Over the restless grey waters, rain clouds loomed low and heavy.
A lot of people died here, thought Karys. The sea breeze ruffled her dark hair, and she drew her coat tighter. Died violently.
Coren Oselaw was watching her, his hands buried deep in his pockets. His jaw worked languidly as he rolled osk around his mouth. He had been chewing the resin stimulant since they left Psikamit, and the crunching had frayed Karys’ nerves to their breaking point. He noticed her scowl and raised an eyebrow.
“Well?” he said.
In all honesty, Karys had wanted to refuse the job. She had wanted—and still wanted very much—to tell Oselaw to take a hike into the sea. But that risked offending Marishka, and people who pissed off the Second Mayor usually found themselves floating facedown out on the honey reef.
Besides, the money was good; she couldn’t deny that.
“It was here,” she replied. “Something happened near the beach, something bloody. Probably within the last three days.”
“Was it our boys, then?”
“Maybe. I can’t tell from this distance.”
He grinned, revealing red-stained teeth. “Then I guess we’d better take a closer look, eh? After you, deathspeaker.”
The path down to the beach had crumbled. Fallowgrass and whiteblossom pushed up from the thin soil and rustled in the breeze. Salt glittered on the rocks. Karys moved with thoughtless assurance, picking her way along the steep track, her mind elsewhere. It had taken three hours to reach this stretch of the coast. Three full hours of Oselaw’s prattling, and he still hadn’t told her what they were looking for.
Some of the boss’s people failed to make a delivery, he had said with an evasive shrug. She wants you to find out why.
Karys didn’t like it, and with every step toward the water, her unease mounted. Over the hush of the waves, she could hear a deep, discordant droning—a sound like swarming wasps. The hairs on her arms and neck stood up. She did not know what the noise signified, but it felt like a living creature was trying to burrow into her ears.
She glanced over her shoulder at Oselaw. He was struggling down the track, sweat glistening on his forehead, eyes narrowed in concentration. Didn’t seem like he could hear it. Which suggested … nothing good.
The path ended at a rocky scree below the base of the cliffs. Beyond, the beach stood desolate and untouched, and the sour stink of rotting seaweed hung thick in the air. Small copper-winged flies scattered in front of Karys’ feet. No gulls, she noted. If there were bodies here, she would have expected scavengers. The grey cliffs hunched around the shore, forming a jagged cove.
“How late was the delivery?” she called back to Oselaw.
“Two days.”
That fit. She walked a little further and then stopped, listening. Death pressed up against her skin like a wet cloth.
“How many people?”
“Five to ten? It can vary.”
That, on the other hand, felt wrong. Too few. Frowning, Karys closed her eyes and listened deeper, seeking out the edges of the Veneer and the bitter-bright whistle of snagged memories. She found the seam, and eased open the surface of reality. Opalescent light oozed through her eyelids. Waves crashed on the shore, and the strange droning continued, relentless and unchanging.
There. The faint murmur of a woman’s voice.
Are those lights? A pause. Then the memory reset, and it spoke again: the same words, the same tone of puzzlement. Are those lights?
Oselaw’s boots crunched on the sand behind her. Karys kept her eyes closed, still listening, but that was all she could hear—that single thread of memory, the last words of a stranger.
“They were caught by surprise,” she said.
“In the water?”
Sand flies whined around her legs. Karys shook her head. “I don’t think so. Maybe in the shallows, depending on the tide. But not past the breakers.”
Are those lights?
“It happened so quickly,” she murmured. “There wasn’t even time for fear, just … confusion.”
“You can’t tell what killed them?”
“No, not without a body.” She let the Veneer fall closed, and opened her eyes. “What’s going on here, Oselaw?”
“Getting spooked?”
“Getting tired of your bullshit. What were you smuggling?”
He folded his arms and continued chewing his osk with deliberate slowness. Karys stared at him flatly, but he remained unmoved. The barest hint of a smirk tugged at the corner of his mouth.
“Is this amusing to you?” she asked.
“Am I laughing?”
“People died. Your people, specifically.”
He paused to spit a wad of soggy resin onto the sand. He took a fresh osk ball out his pocket and popped it into his mouth. Resumed chewing. “Keep your nose out, deathspeaker. I thought you were supposed to be a professional.”
Nuliere alive, but he was getting under her skin. Karys forced herself to unclench her jaw. It wasn’t even Oselaw, really, but the whole job: the secrecy, Marishka’s refusal to speak with her beforehand, and the sense that something deeply wrong had occurred here. A gust of wind caught the sea spray and whipped it through the air. Oselaw was right, she was spooked. With effort, she moderated her tone.
“Look, all I’m asking is whether the cargo itself might have killed them,” she said. “That’s all.”
Oselaw crunched a harder shard between his teeth. He raised his gaze in thought, then shrugged.
“I doubt it,” he said. “Not based on what you’re telling me. What else can you sense?”
Too many people for a routine smuggling job. Which meant that either Oselaw was lying to her—entirely plausible—or that someone else had lied to him. At least eight had died on this stretch of the beach alone. Karys pursed her lips and scanned the water.
“I think their bodies might have washed out to sea,” she said. “But not everyone died here. Come on.”
The cliffs grew taller as they walked down the shore. The dark sand was strewn with kelp, but no footprints, no sign of life apart from the flies. All the while, the droning in Karys’ ears grew louder. Oselaw slouched along behind her, humming to himself, but even his nonchalance seemed a little forced.
You can feel something too. Karys’ skin itched. She slowed.
“There,” she said.
Ahead, the dolomite wall veered sharply inward, forming a bowl-like indentation at its base. Heaviness lingered over the stone-strewn sand: the weight of many deaths, the crush of memory. Tucked inside the curve of the rock was a dark oval. Kelp and driftwood choked the mouth of the cave, and a fringe of green slime hung from the roof. The droning was coming from inside.
“Well, look at that,” said Oselaw. “You found our collection site.”
“What?”
He gestured to the cave entrance. “The place where our boys usually leave the goods. The boss does a retrieval every few weeks; sends me out on a fishing boat to collect. It keeps us out of the port authority’s—”
“You knew this was here?”
“Well, yeah, that’s kind of my role, logistics and such. Makes you wonder if the boys managed to bring along any merchandise before they snuffed it.” Noticing her expression, he raised both hands. “Kidding, kidding! Although I don’t see what’s wrong with making the best of a bad situation.”
Karys gritted her teeth. “Why not bring me here in the first fucking place?”
“Because this place is need-to-know. You didn’t. But seeing that we’re here now anyway, want to take a look inside?”
“Absolutely not.”
“Oh, don’t be like that.”
“I have no intention of crawling into that hole, Oselaw. Not in my job description.”
“Sure, but you are getting paid to find out what happened. And there’s more likely to be a body stuck inside, right? Harder for the sea to reach?”
Karys returned her gaze to the narrow opening. The waves rocked the shore behind them. Oselaw was, annoyingly, right.
“Coward.” Oselaw ambled past her, grinning. “I’ll even go first.”
“How gallant.”
He crouched and awkwardly manoeuvred his legs through the gap, sliding inside on his back.
“You’ll find it interesting.” He pushed himself forward and disappeared down the hole. His voice drifted out of the darkness. “It’s not what you’d expect.”
Karys looked back at the beach. There were still a few hours of daylight left, and the weather would hold until evening—even with the delay, they should be able to get home to Psikamit before the storm hit. She just couldn’t shake her sense of foreboding.
“Hey! Deathspeaker!” yelled Oselaw.
She sighed and crouched. The sand was damp and fine under her hands, and the rocks proved smooth as polished metal. She crawled into the gap, and the temperature dropped sharply. The passage ahead only stretched about eight feet in length, but it sloped downwards at an uncomfortable angle, and she suddenly understood why Oselaw had tackled it feetfirst. She felt like she was going to fall on her face.
The perfect way to finish this job. She reached her hands out in front of her, groping her way forward. By breaking my own nose.
Oselaw’s chewing sounded even louder in the closed space. Her outstretched fingers met a flat, glassy surface, colder still than the air. Floor tiles.
“Mind your head,” said Oselaw affably.
Karys stood up. Judging by the light filtering through the passage and the way that noises echoed, they were inside a small chamber. She shivered. The cold cut straight through her clothing.
“The boys stumbled upon this place a few years ago.” Oselaw walked forward. “Asked around town and apparently no one’s heard of it, leastwise nobody willing to talk, except some crab-haulers down in Creakers. And they won’t touch the place; they warn us off, don’t even like speaking about it. Superstitious old bastards.”
He snapped his fingers. Blue light bloomed across the walls, spiderwebbing outward along thin channels scored into the stone. In seconds, the whole chamber was illuminated.
“It was perfect for us,” he said. “We couldn’t believe our luck.”
Karys blinked in the sudden icy brightness. The chamber was small, dank, and curiously shaped: the polished stone walls undulated like frozen waves. The light gleamed crisp and cold through the rock.
“That’s hallowfire,” she said slowly.
Oselaw flashed his teeth at her. “Worried your master will be mad?”
She couldn’t help it; she flinched. “We shouldn’t be here. This isn’t the sort of thing you mess around with.”
“The Lady is superstitious, who would have thought?”
“I’m being serious. Your people are all dead; surely that’s a hint?”
He brushed aside her concern with a careless wave of his hand. “We’ve been using the place for years. Besides, you said that most of them died on the beach.”
“I never said that.”
“All right, fine, but you said that they were ‘surprised’ on the beach. Right? So it seems to me that the threat came from outside and our boys ran inside to hide. Whatever killed them just followed.” He pressed on before she could object. “Trust me, there’s nothing left to haunt this place. Let’s just finish up here and head back to town, hey?”
Copyright © 2024 by Kerstin Hall
We hope you are enjoying the book so far. To continue reading...
Copyright © 2024 All Rights Reserved
Please log in to recommend or discuss...
