CHAPTER ONE
Cima didn’t always make bad choices. She didn’t always fall through rotten floors in long abandoned houses, either, but it had been that kind of month. As she lay on her back, abandoned by air, light, and good sense, she took stock of her limbs and resources.
They numbered about the same, and were in equally abused condition. Her breath came back in ragged bursts, and her shaky arms refused to cooperate. Rather than risk either, she rolled to one side, paused, and tensed her midsection in order to sit up. A safer course of action than an attempt to stand before she could be sure what had happened.
Nothing seemed broken or irreparably damaged, so she decided not to feel for free-flowing blood, and shoved the pain aside. The more pressing issue was the fact that she was now under a house, in the utter quiet of deep night, in a forbidden quarter of the city.
You could have done anything else. Her thought rang too loudly in her head, without any external stimulus to take up the space. She willed her eyes to adjust to nonexistent light, then squeezed them closed when it didn’t work.
It made for no discernible difference whatsoever.
Cima didn’t have to scavenge like a thief in the middle of the night. Not anymore. She could have done plenty of other things. Take on more of the legitimate scavenger subcontracts. Return to actual thieving through the city’s richer streets. Stow away on a boat in the harbor. Become a milk porter. An ice chipper. Pick one of the sorts of jobs that had their own, normal, mortal risks.
But no. She listened to a soothsayer, talked her friends into madness, crept through the Liddow Quarter’s ancient streets, and got eaten by a house.
With her lantern vanished, her knife useless against even this velvet heavy darkness, and no way to signal her compatriots without also potentially notifying the Watch, her only choice was to drag her battered body through the presently undefinable space around her and hope to find a wall or convenient stairs.
She had never run out of curses before, but this moment tried even her boundless vocabulary.
Should have brought flares. Cima slid one foot ahead and reached with the opposite hand, the best she could do to avoid another fall or a sudden impact between her face and a solid object.
Flares would be stupid. Her mind, deprived of any other input, raced to list the reasons why her last thought had been idiotic. A flare could, at best: summon the Watch. Set the decrepit house around her on fire. Hit a somehow still solid beam of the house and ricochet back at her. Burn the last valuable thing in her corner of the Liddow Quarter and get her found by the Watch and horribly injure her and set her back a week’s earnings just to purchase it in the beginning.
“This is where magic would be nice.” Her whisper, barely louder than the thoughts in her head, nevertheless echoed loudly in her ears. “A trinket in a pocket we could set to vibrate if we found something. A zinibird trained to fly in silence and retrieve another companion. A . . . magic flare that would only signal a targeted individual or three.”
The magic in stories was always meant to be awe inspiring or terrible, with little in between, but it was magic’s potential for convenience that made Cima mourn its loss. Or rather, the idea of its loss, as it had all happened generations before she herself had begun gracing the streets of Broadside and its more haunted corners. The Council, of course, held the firm line that magic could only harm, and that was why it was illegal in Broadside, but they made plenty of things illegal that Cima, for one, couldn’t see the harm in, so that was suspect.
Of course, magic had ended the world, or at least most of it, so what did she know?
Her faint attempts to normalize the unrelieved dark had taken her through ten careful steps forward, and still no wall or obstacle met her halting progress.
With such surprisingly smooth floors, maybe it wasn’t a mystery pit that had opened under her, but a basement? The Liddow was far enough from shore that such a thing could be possible common—over the years they’d seen some older buildings with big open spaces in their deep-set foundations. Meesh and Ackles had found one packed with old furniture on a city-sanctioned job last week, a job not entirely unrelated to their group’s voyage into the Liddow on this particular night.
Those previous findings, and Terio’s insane fortune teller, and . . .
Cima cut the line of thought, eased forward, and her next outstretched limb ended with the tips of her fingers brushing something solid.
The sudden contact, bereft of any context whatsoever, snapped a shock from her hands to the back of her neck, and the air went wonky in her chest again.
She steadied her breath, shifted closer, and rested her hand flat on the wall.
Stone, not dirt or wood. Dry, which explained the lack of mildewy smell in the air, and smoothed by time or long disappeared hands. Not gritty with dirt or cobwebs—she refused to consider the assortment of small crawly creatures she might encounter—and cool but not cold.
“Anna, manna, pina terra,” she muttered, and continued the nonsense childhood rhyme until it chose her direction. With her fingers splayed to maintain contact with the wall, she turned to the left and continued her tentative progress.
Five more steps, and the irregular shapes of the stone fell away into another nameless void. Another bolt, this one to the base of her spine, and she curled her hand closed in a useless fist.
“Onward and inward.” Fingers shifted back to the lost edge of the wall and she reoriented again, squinting as though it might help.
It did not, but it made her realize her head had begun to pound, which might not be a good sign. Still, she continued to take tentative steps forward. Had she been gone long enough for Gaudi to come and look for her?
Obviously not, as no one had thumped on a wall or crashed down after her, and hopefully the interminable stretch of time had been exaggerated by her inability to see anything—or picture anything other than being eaten by a monster in the dark.
Gaudi would always come for her, and for any of their crew. They’d found each other when they were small, over twenty years ago, and now they were family and crew both. Terio, who’d been orphaned with a baby sister to protect, took in her sister’s scared orphaned friend because she was good, in addition to being clever. Ackles, Terio’s blood sister, Cima’s best friend and adopted sister, who could light up even this unrelenting darkness. Gaudi and his pretty face who would go along with anyone’s idea as long as it was fun or stupid, always game so long as he didn’t have to be alone. Meesh, a better little brother than any actual sibling could have been, always needling Terio but never to the point of no return—he could walk that line as well as he could squeeze into the smallest of spaces. They’d been through it all over the decades, and they wouldn’t leave her under a house.
They’d braved the Liddow because she’d asked, and because no matter how hard times were, they got through together. Given their past, the current situation was nothing. Lack of coin and suspect decisions sending them into an abandoned part of town rumored to disappear visitors? Easy. Head injuries? Cima paused and felt her head, but there was no obvious wound. Was her vision blurry? How would she know? She dismissed the worry and her wandering thoughts, and continued moving.
After another eternity the new room ended, and she followed its wall until it unexpectedly changed texture. It took far too long for her to understand there was wood set into the rock, and then an equally embarrassing long stretch of heartbeats before her brain informed her to back up and feel for a door latch.
That at least she found quickly, the metal textured but unflaking under her questing fingers. Cima took another breath to keep her limbs from going unhelpful and clumsy again, then ran her thumb over the release mechanism and flipped the latch.
Every muscle tensed in anticipation and her head throbbed an immediate reminder of what she’d recently put her body through. Nothing else happened, and she flicked the latch again.
“Why won’t the door open?” If she had any trust in her ability to gauge distance, or the current solidity of her skull, she would have thunked her forehead against the door. “It’s only sat here untouched for a couple hundred years. A handful of generations. No reason to stop working.”
With a further effort to ignore all the physical protests her giant ache of a body flashed at her, she lifted, strained, slammed, kicked, and finally threatened the door.
It remained unmoved. Though she wouldn’t have confessed as much to Gaudi, who loved detailing the feelings of inanimate objects, honestly the door radiated more than a little smugness about its successful resistance.
“Yeah yeah.” Cima didn’t whisper, though her voice remained low. If no one had heard her attempts to manhandle the door into compliance, they wouldn’t be close enough to catch her attempt at verbally convincing it. “You’re a very good door. Superior in make and purpose and I swear to every drowned god and forgotten relic if you are keeping me from the way out I will get a flare and I will set us both on fire and—ugh even you can tell I’m lying.”
She leaned forward until the side of her face pressed against the sturdy wood. “If only the floor upstairs had been made half as well as you, we wouldn’t be in this situation. You could just stay closed and sturdy and stubborn and I’d have a lamp and less headache which would give me room to make a plan and . . .” Her heavy sigh did little but take the worst of the tension from her shoulders.
The wood warmed nicely under her cheek, and she marveled at how well it must have been sanded once, to retain its unmarked smoothness all these years later. “There are probably worse houses to get eaten by,” she murmured, and resigned herself to wait until her friends came looking. They’d targeted a single block for the night, with four houses in this curve of their chosen street. Terio had pointed Cima to this particular house, and so knew where to find her.
Even if the Watch ventured close enough to scatter her friends, they wouldn’t forget her here. This was the furthest section of the Liddow, and the last scheduled for reclamation and demolition to better meet Broadside’s ever-growing demand, so if they left her in its depths, they’d be leaving her to rot. At worst her crew would come back the next night, once they didn’t find her at the Barren or their flop.
She could survive an endless night in unrelieved dark and an entire day without snacks or water. She’d done worse.
Besides, maybe the dawn would bring a smidgen of light through the hole in the floor that had betrayed her, enough to find her gear and maybe even a way to lever herself out.
“It’s not so bad, door.” She rested her hand on the latch again and took a moment to determine if her eyes were open or closed. “And if you keep me safe from anything else that would like to eat me, I won’t even come back with an axe. You can just stay here, closed, until ten or so years from now when the city’s teams come to pull the house down and bury it under fresh slurry to build new houses.”
That would be nice, wouldn’t it? The door would fulfill its purpose until the next end of the world, she would eventually get out, and hopefully Terio, Ackles, Meesh, and Gaudi were having better luck in their assigned houses.
Wouldn’t it be nicer, though, if she contributed something this time? While she had, more often than not, been the most productive of their little band, she had not been remotely at her best this last month . . .
No need to dwell on that in the depths of Broadside’s oldest, hungriest, creepiest abandoned house. She reoriented her looping thoughts to sketch out all the what if’s that could be behind the smug door and got so lost in them she almost missed the click.
But it had been a long time since Cima had forgotten the actual world around her in favor of the imaginary ones in her head. Besides, the endless depths of silence could not have better highlighted a distinct sound where previously there had been absolutely none.
“Door?” The word barely qualified as such, more an indent on her next breath than a true sound, but her hand unerringly found the latch once more. Again, she toggled it, and this time . . . it shifted.
Her ongoing weight against it, maybe? Body heat somehow affecting an ancient mechanism? Luck? She’d convinced it with her charm and fancy compliments?
Cima filed the matter away for later, leaned harder on the door, and swung with it as it opened.
Then immediately reared backward, her entire body a giant wince before her conscious mind was able to catch up and register the issue.
Light. Faint, but given her surroundings for the last questionable amount of time, it shone like the midday sun in the center of a cloudless sky reflecting off perfectly smooth water.
But of course, it wasn’t that at all. It was a bare hint of purple and blue gathered in a corner of the dimly outlined room. Illuminated stone walls, bare floor with a minimum of aged detritus. The ceiling stretched high above. Higher than she’d expected—no wonder her brain was rattled, if that was how far she’d fallen. The recesses of the space above her were mostly lost in clinging shadows, but the general shape of trestles and beams and bottoms of unbroken floorboards could be vaguely made out, if well out of her reach.
A later problem. For the now, she squinted at the corner, the soft illumination still too much for her previously sightless eyes. Nothing to do but move toward it, so she did, adopting the same slow shuffle, one-foot-forward-at-a-time pace that had carried her through the dark. While she could see the floor, that didn’t mean it was any sturdier than the one that had collapsed under her minutes or hours or years ago. Another fall did not seem in her best interest.
The floor remained solid underneath her, and her battered mind had time to focus on a more important question: where was the light coming from? There was a glowing plant or fungus in some of the caves above the harbor, though it was a yellowish green and she hadn’t heard of any other varieties. Someone from the Heights would know, but that wasn’t helpful in the moment. Surely it couldn’t be a lamp, left behind to persist well beyond its possible useful expectancy?
Within three steps her vision adjusted and she could make out another outline against the corner of the room ahead. Still not a light source, but she let herself be fully distracted by the silhouette.
A long rectangle with a curved top, and heavy straps across its width. All at once the shape resolved into something she could recognize. An old-fashioned trunk, like merchants might use for bulk goods?
Old-fashioned, a voice in her brain repeated. Several generations previously, when the Liddow had last been occupied. It wouldn’t have been old-fashioned then. Not at all. Such a design would have been in fashion.
The back of her throat itched, and she swallowed hard and yanked back the surge of excitement that set her hands to trembling. It was probably nothing. Clothes. An old shoe. Children’s toys packed away generations ago, crumbling silently in much the same manner as their former owners did at the bottom of the ocean.
The fuzz of her thoughts burned into clarity, and she snorted. None of those would cause an eerie glow.
Despite a sudden weakness in her legs, Cima lowered herself carefully to the ground, knees pressed into the creeping cold of the floor. Her pants had been chosen for maximum flexibility rather than warmth in the comfortable fall night. Despite the chill radiating underneath, a flush climbed her neck and heated her cheeks, and she took yet another steadying breath before reaching for the clasps of the trunk.
It’s nothing. Or it’s locked, and I’ll need the tools in my bag to pick it, or Gaudi to smash it. The words looped through her mind on repeat, and it took longer for her clever fingers to work out the locking mechanism than a woman of her experience should have needed.
Ouch. She snatched a hand back, the movement complete before the pain fully registered. Something had broken in the fastenings and sliced across the top of her index finger. In the barely illuminatory light she couldn’t tell if it had actually broken the skin—the thin dark line could be a slight beading of blood or an immediate protest lodged by the many nerves clustered in her fingertip. She shook her hand, and with her bag too far, did the next best thing and pulled a pin from her hair.
“Cut me, you stubborn thing?” Cima tsked and slid her hairpin into the old lock.
Some minutes and a satisfying clunk later, she touched her ear for luck and repositioned herself to lift the top, bracing in case it was sticky or heavy. Which meant, of course, it flipped open at once and overbalanced her.
Which meant, further of course, she nearly planted her entire face into the contents of the chest—but the laws of momentum twisted, or shock froze her solidly enough to ignore them. Because even the dim glow was enough—or did they shine—or—was it . . . ?
Cima blinked, but the scene in front of her neither disappeared nor resolved into sense of any kind whatsoever. Loose gems, intricate jewelry, gold, silver, metals she didn’t recognize—gleaming, shining, glowing, gorgeous treasure. It overfilled the chest, but none slid out now that it was open, even though it was all in irregular heaps.
Her gaze skipped from one piece to the next too fast to determine pattern or logic, and her heart hammered against her throat in perfect match to the increasing pace of her eyes.
“No. Not like this. What would Terio do?” she murmured, and pushed back onto her heels in an attempt to ground herself. Cima rested her hands on her thighs, took a deliberately slow breath, and resolved to better take in the enormous bounty in front of her.
The mountain of jewels did not make any more sense, but with iron effort she focused enough to make out individual pieces.
A diamond-studded silver bright chain wound across the top, faintly reminiscent of the sea snakes occasionally caught in tidepools. The far left corner was dominated by an opaque globe, fist-sized and ice-white like nothing she’d seen before. A waterfall of sapphires cascaded around it, tangling in a pile of emeralds, one nearly the size of her face and all but glowing. A dagger, sheathed in unidentifiable material and with an impractically, impossibly filigreed hilt. Her palm itched to curve around it, test the weight or trace the figures, and she bit down hard on the inside of her cheek to keep from giving into the urge.
A piece of gold, shining as though freshly scrubbed, curved into a double-sided hook. Strands of pearls wound through the piles in half a dozen colors. Coins stamped with unfamiliar figures. A faceted gem so dark a red it might have been violet. Thin shards of metal that might have been hair sticks or weapons or both. Rings and carved figures and crystal-studded rocks so perfect her thudding heart wrenched in her chest.
“And that’s only the top.” The scope of it, the sheer weight of wealth in front of her . . . Possibilities raced through her thoughts like scattering rats—she could stuff herself with as much as she could carry, run for Ky’s shop, be out on the next ship as a wealthy passenger. Never have to worry again a day in her life, never scrape and scavenge and get eaten by a house . . .
Cima shoved the selfish impulse away. She could be that wealthy and comfortable even with this divided by five, and they wouldn’t have to run. They could go together, if travel was what they chose. A corner of her mind took quick stock of the group, and determined none of them were likely to murder another for an increased share. If no one had ever strangled Meesh at his worst, not even all this would turn them murdery.
Given she didn’t even know if she could get out of the house without their help, it was rather a moot point. Still . . . She studied the heaped treasure once more, fighting the urge to unpack it all now and determine everything that was there before she went and figured out a way to signal her friends. Inventory would go faster with help, and so what if a set of clever hands or two tucked away a piece for their own? There was plenty here.
More than plenty. More than would fit in any of the bags they’d brought. More than Ky could move at one time. They could take their time, and she could sketch every piece. They could get it bound in a book and display it on the ornate mantel they would build, to remember everything they had found and sold for their fabulous, perfect lives.
That was the future, she reminded herself. As for this, very present, very pressing moment, she needed something very particular.
One of the strands of pearls, each the size of a quirl’s egg, shone with a peculiarly uniform blush of purple and blue which matched the light that had drawn her to the corner. She stretched her hands, shifted her posture, and tentatively reached for them.
Her attempt to resist temptation and not touch anything else failed, through circumstances beyond her control. The pearls were a longer strand than she’d thought, and wound under too many other pieces. She tugged gently, then a little harder, and finally rolled her eyes.
“Touching isn’t taking,” she reminded herself, and plunged her hand under the upper layer to try and work the strand free.
The weight of treasure was surprisingly smooth and frigid, and she worked her fingers carefully, following the curve of pearls between the edges of more riches than she’d ever so much as imagined in her life. She was so careful not a single piece rolled out of the chest, though several shifted and resettled.
The small bones of her hand ached as the cold intensified, but the pearls began to loosen and she persisted. She wound them around her free hand and twisted her other arm to reach deeper, ignored the cold, and—
“OW!”
Something had cut hard into the thin web of skin between her forefinger and thumb, and she barely kept herself from dragging her hand back out and potentially making it worse. Idiot. What did she expect, digging around where she couldn’t see in a trove of unpredictable edges?
Damage done, she glared at the vague outlines of the wall behind the trunk and continued to sift through—earning another sharp pain in the meat of her palm—until what must have been a larger piece moved. Coins shushed in a ripple to fill the newly opened depression and the pearls came free.
“Thank you,” she said to nothing in particular, and twisted the strand—easily two feet long—around her unmarked hand. As for the cut one . . . Cima turned her palm over, but in the faint light all of her skin looked the same unnatural cool purple. She stretched her hand experimentally, and it sent a shock from the center of her palm to her midsection. A lingering result of the cold maybe, or perhaps she’d twinged her hand in the fall and it only reacted now—she shoved the potentially injured hand into a pocket and resolved to use it as little as possible until it warmed enough to regain normal function. Whether caused by her fall or the treasure or both, it was another problem for later.
“Relics grant I don’t get disgustingly rich and then die of a wasting sickness,” she said, touched her ear once more, then brandished the softly glowing pearls ahead of her and made her way back through the basement.