by A. C. Cobble
Oliver nodded. “The journey is what’s of interest to me. I’ll go tomorrow, then.”
“Shall I send company?” asked the governor. “I’m sure some of the factors would leap at a chance to have your ear, and I can arrange for porters to carry food, utensils, and table and chairs if you care for a luncheon up top.”
Shaking his head, Oliver replied, “I rather hoped to get away from business for a moment, and I wouldn’t mind roughing it. If your kitchen could pack us a meal and perhaps include a bottle of that wine I saw on the table, that’d be sufficient.”
The governor’s eyes flicked to Sam and he smiled. “Of course. It’s a long journey from Enhover, even on an airship. I’m sure some fresh air and a bit of exercise will do you wonders. I’ll have the kitchen on it and they’ll have a luncheon packed before sunrise. In the meantime, I have a bit of a conundrum I could use your assistance with. Eventually, I think we could solve it ourselves, but since fortune has placed you here, you could save me a good bit of headache.”
“A conundrum?” wondered Oliver.
“Yes,” replied the governor. “You see, the Company sent a chap to do a more extensive bit of cartography on the island. We wanted to fill in the fine lines and details missing on the earliest maps, find out where there might be mineral deposits, more areas suitable for farming, that kind of thing. As a Company colony, I felt it was important to know everything there is to know about this place. The issue is the man’s sketches have proven irregular. We’ve found his maps close to worthless, to be frank. It’s rather embarrassing, but most of my men end up using your maps from when you first sketched Imbon. Of course, your old maps don’t have our plantations or this village marked. We’ve tried to pencil in details where we can, and we’ve made dozens of copies, but they get muddled, and the copies are never as clear or clean as the originals. The royal marines have been using the maps as well, trying to identify fall back points, positions they could mount guns, and all the other planning bored lieutenants on a peaceful island get up to, but they’re just as frustrated as I. Some months ago, they were planning to lug a cannon halfway up the hill before someone told them what they thought was a ridge was actually a valley. A waste of time even if it had been a good location for an emplacement, but doubly so since it wasn’t.”
“I understand,” said Oliver. “I’ll take a look. You understand, though, I won’t have time to properly ink a new version…”
“Anything you can do would help,” acknowledged the governor. “Perhaps on some of the old maps you could update them with the Company compound and the village. We could extrapolate from there, and maybe I can find someone in this place who can produce a clean copy of your work. I must admit, I’m embarrassed to even request it. A man of your stature…”
Oliver grinned. “Believe me, I’ve been asked to do worse.”
The governor turned back his punch and then held up the empty glass. “Another round, some dinner, and then the maps?”
A night breeze, cooler than the day, but still hot by the standards of Westundon, stirred the air in the room, bringing with it the scent of hibiscus and the hoots of a troop of monkeys traveling through the jungle a few hundred yards uphill from the mansion. Oliver smoothed a corner of the map and placed a jar of ink on it to hold it down and foil any errant gusts of wind. Any movement in the air while drawing on the map would be frustrating but not quite as intolerable as a stuffy closed room in Imbon’s heat.
The room he was in was cooler than most, though. The governor’s mansion sat at the back of the Company’s compound, and the third floor rose above every other wall or barrier in the colony, allowing the breeze to blow through the wide open windows unobstructed.
“It’s an old volcano,” said Oliver, hunched over a long table.
Sam turned from where she’d been looking out the window at the jungle. “It’s so dark here. I can see a trace of the moonlight on the closest fronds and then nothing. It’s like the world just ceases underneath that canopy.”
Not looking up, he replied, “There are few ambient surface lights like we have in Westundon, and the moonlight doesn’t reflect off the water like it does when at sea, but you get used to it. When you’re outside in the clear, the stars and moon provide a bright enough shine.”
“More radiant than in Westundon?”
“I’m sure it’s the same, but you can see it better here. The stars sparkle brighter.”
Sam glanced out the window again and then came to stand at his shoulder. “How bad is it?”
“Well, the man they brought in made a mess of it, to be sure,” said Oliver. He was poring over a set of inked maps, jotting notes and drawing quick lines on a blank sheet of paper he’d pulled from a notebook in his satchel. “I can’t recall the details as it’s been too long, but whoever they had drawing these most recent maps didn’t know the first thing about cartography. The shape of the landmass, the streams and ridges, he’s got it all wrong. I could tell that even if I didn’t have my old maps to compare to. My dear hope is that they hired an amateur, and no Company cartographer is responsible for this.”
His steel-tipped quill scratched over the paper, outlining the mass of Imbon and then sketching the rise of the peak, the curve of the harbor, and a few dozen small blocks that represented the Company’s village of Imbon.
“From the peak tomorrow, we’ll get a good view of the place, and I can fill in more details from up there,” he murmured, bent over this work. “Between the two of us, there are also a few things on my own maps I’m wondering about. Here. See this? It doesn’t make sense.”
She looked over his shoulder at a bowl shape he was indicating on the side of the peak.
“It’s noted both in my map and the newer versions, so I believe the feature must be there, but why?” queried Oliver.
“I…”
“I don’t expect you to answer that,” he said, standing up straight and rubbing the small of his back with one hand while the other twirled his quill. “If we can’t get a good visual from the top tomorrow, we’ll take a route down that passes through this spot. I can’t believe I didn’t take more notes on it when I was last here, but admittedly, I wasn’t the student of geography that I am now. I believe the company directors hired me solely to get an avenue to my father, and they were rather surprised when I showed an aptitude for cartography.”
“Why does it matter?” asked Sam. “On the side of that mountain, surely it’s not suitable for agriculture. Even I can guess that.”
“No, but any unusual features may speak to mineral wealth or perhaps a clue to the nature of this island. It appears volcanic, which matches the other islands in the Vendatt chain, but you never know…”
“How much of a hike is it?” asked Sam.
“Not far,” assured Oliver. “Well, not too far.”
The Priestess VI
From the top of Imbon’s peak, its volcanic origins were obvious even to a laywoman. Duke pointed out the features while she watched and sweated. His eyes were bright with excitement and he spent an excruciating two hours circling the rim of the crater which crowned the island, peering down at the jungle below, making notes in his sketchbook as he went. When they finally arrived back at their starting point, it was midday, and she was famished.
“Time to eat?” she begged.
Duke nodded and squatted beside his satchel. He pulled out several packages and began peering into them, seeing what the governor’s staff had packed. He unwrapped a roasted chicken, a handful of fruits, and a small bag of roasted and salted seeds.
Sam grabbed the bottle of wine and worked the cork out of it then cursed when she saw there were no cups.
“I don’t have a problem sipping from the bottle if you don’t,” remarked Duke.
“You don’t have any infectious diseases, do you?” she jested.
“None that have been diagnosed yet,” replied Duke with a wink.
She grunted and then took a long pull of wine. Warm from the morning in the n
obleman’s satchel, it was still better than water, their only other option.
Snacking on the seeds, Duke peered down the slope at an area five hundred yards below them.
Around a mouthful of chicken, Sam asked, “What is it?”
“This peak is a classic formation for a volcanic island except that one spot,” explained Duke. “The hollow there, see? There’s no reason that shape should exist on a slope like this. There’s no natural way the lava flow would form such a depression.”
“What is it, then?” wondered Sam.
“It could be the remains of an earlier mining operation, where rock was dug into a pit, but that makes no sense given the native level of technology when we found this island. More likely, it is evidence of an impact.”
“An impact?”
“A meteor,” answered Duke.
Sam watched as the royal swapped the packet of seeds for a hunk of chicken and tore off bites with his teeth. He paced back and forth, studying the layout of the land below them. Intellectual curiosity, a thirst for adventure, and a surprising disregard for the comforts they could be experiencing down in the governor’s mansion — the man was proving to defy all of her expectations.
They ate quietly and quickly, catching their breath, not wanting to waste daylight. The hike down the slope should be quicker than the hike up it, but the sun had already crossed the midpoint in the sky above them. Neither one of them had any interest in traipsing through the jungle after dark.
“Ready?” asked Duke.
When she assented, he led them down the mountain.
Following close behind the man, she admired the ease in which his booted feet found footing on the loose soil and how he dodged between the branches of trees, using their trunks to steady himself as they descended. He was comfortable in the jungle, even if it’d been a decade since he’d hiked through this particular one, perhaps even more comfortable than how she’d seen him in Westundon. Though, to be fair, they had been sneaking an unconscious baroness down the backstairs of a pub there.
As they hiked, she also realized, he was in incredible shape. Ahead of her, he was breathing heavily in the thick air, but so was she, and she’d trained for years with her mentor Thotham to build endurance and speed. The fact that a coddled peer was able to traverse through the jungle as easily as she could irritated like a burr in her britches. Whenever he suggested a pause for rest, she shook her head, and they continued on.
Within two hours, he unerringly led them to a thick wall of foliage, and when they broke through, they were looking out over a crystal-clear pool. One hundred yards across, the thing sat down in a hollow of jungle that would have been difficult to spot if they hadn’t viewed it from above.
She peered into the depths of the pool before noticing that surrounding it were dozens of waist-high wooden posts.
“That’s odd,” remarked Duke.
She walked to one of the posts and studied it. It was a cylinder the thickness of her leg and flat on top. It wasn’t recent, but it wasn’t ancient, either. On top of it and down the sides were scores of tiny runes. Holding out a hand, she waved it around the post then in between it and the water.
Duke was standing beside the pool, stripping off his jacket and unlacing his shirt.
“Don’t,” she warned.
“Why not?” he asked, peering at her curiously.
“These runes are describing life spirits, but they seem to be a warning or a… a trap.”
Duke’s curious look slid into a frown.
Sam stepped closer to the water and looked down, searching the depths for… “There.”
He looked along the length of her finger, and suddenly, his eyes widened.
“A trap,” she affirmed.
Two dozen yards below the surface of the placid water, they could see the sun-bleached bones of a human skeleton. Looking harder, she spotted two more and wouldn’t have been surprised to learn the bottom of the pool was littered with a carpet of the things.
“I don’t understand,” muttered Duke.
“Someone enlisted the help of a water spirit,” explained Sam. “It appears as if… as if the spirit has the strength to pull someone down into the depths and hold them there.”
“To drown them,” replied Duke. “A life spirit, you said?”
She nodded. “Life and death, the spirits have no natural aspect, remember? It’s merely a matter of whether they exist in our world or the underworld. A life spirit wouldn’t normally be inclined to kill, I don’t think, but…”
“But why?” wondered Duke. “Why would anyone do such a thing here in the jungle?”
“To keep anyone from finding this place, obviously. Or more specifically, finding what is in that water.”
Peering around the clearing, Duke rubbed his chin. “Have you encountered anything like this before?”
“No,” answered Sam. “I spent most of my life in Enhover, with only a few trips to the United Territories. There’s nothing like this in Enhover, no life spirits at all. If magic like this ever existed there, it wasn’t in our lifetimes”
“Life aspected spirits, you’re sure?”
“I believe so,” she responded.
“The Company has never been interested in the land on this slope,” said Duke. “It’s too steep for agriculture, and besides, the more valuable plants grow closer to the sea anyway where the rich soil has washed down and settled. This peak is all volcanic rock, so there are no minerals worth exploiting. It’s quite possible that no more than a few dozen men and women from Enhover have ever climbed that peak as we did this morning. There’s nothing to see there except the view. I doubt any of them would have been as curious as I was about this depression, and it’s not on the direct path to and from the colony.”
“We may be the only non-natives to see this,” guessed Sam, “in addition to whoever those bones belong to.”
“Not Company men or women. Search parties would have been formed and reports would have been filed. Surely, though, the natives are aware it’s here,” said Duke. “There is edible plant material growing at this elevation, and someone put these posts here. I suspect there’s a shaman on the island, at least one, and the Company has never heard of them.”
“Perhaps this is a holy place to them,” wondered Sam. “A shaman, as long as they commune with life spirits and not those of the underworld, is not illegal. Would the Company be aware of local religious practices?”
“Maybe,” said Duke, starting to walk around the edge of the pool, not letting his boots come within a pace of the glass-smooth water. “The Company attempts as little disruption as possible in a colony except where necessary for commercial gain. There’d be no reason Company officers would come here and interfere with local practices. You met Towerson. Do you think he would bother learning about native customs?”
“Maybe the natives don’t know that,” suggested Sam.
“When we discovered this place, we found they were aware of Finavia’s colony just a few days’ sailing from here,” responded Duke. “It took some time to convince them we weren’t actually part of Governor de Bussy’s forces. Finavia maintains much the same attitude we do toward their colonies. No, I don’t think the natives would be concerned for religious reasons.”
“Then what?” asked Sam. “These totems and the spirit below are a trap, but it is not a hidden one. Anyone who saw these, who was familiar with the language used, should understand the warning and avoid the pool.”
“Well, I can’t read it,” grumbled Duke.
“It’s not a warning for you, then,” remarked Sam, “and I doubt it’s a warning to other residents of this island. Perhaps rivals from another landmass, or it could be that the warning is to residents here, and the rivals are thrown into the pool as a sacrifice.”
“That could be,” agreed Duke, tossing his coat onto the grass-covered bank, “but why would one sacrifice to a life spirit?”
“Practitioners are not always educated, particularly on a small island lik
e this,” explained Sam. “A shaman may be communing with a life spirit but not be aware of its nature. Spirits in the underworld have use of fresh souls, but I don’t know how…”
“Or, they could be hiding something else,” guessed Duke. “This may not be religious at all. They could be covering a commercial opportunity, like star-iron.”
“Star-iron?” wondered Sam. “Like from the… oh. A meteor.”
“Exactly,” said Duke.
He stripped off his shirt, displaying well-developed muscles, little fat, and pale skin that rarely saw the light of day. She looked away, fighting down a sudden flush of… of interest.
“What are you doing?” she asked, looking into the pool again instead of at him.
He grunted, and she looked back. He had his broadsword out and had stuck the blade into the soft, rain-damp soil around the base of one of the wooden posts. He worked the steel back and forth then left it there and wrapped his arms around the totem.
“I don’t think that’s a good—”
He settled his boots on opposite sides of it then arched his back, tugging on the post.
Her mouth hung open and further protest died as she watched his muscles pop into sharp relief.
Suddenly, with a wet squelch, the post slid free, and Duke stumbled back, his arms still wrapped around the wood. With a strangled curse, he fell and landed on his bottom in the pool.
Sam gasped and jumped after him, her boots splashing in the shallow water, but by the time she reached him, she already knew there was no water spirit. The totems and skeletons were a ruse.
“That was exceptionally dangerous,” she chided as she collected the wooden post from him and tossed it onto the bank. “You realize runes like this are not used to bind a life spirit, right? Destroying the pattern would have done nothing. I think these are fakes, but if they’d been real and you’d fallen in, you would have died.”
Struggling to stand in the water without pitching over again, he mumbled, “Would I?”
