City of Islands

by Kali Wallace

  She dropped the oilskin sack from her shoulder. With trembling hands she dug out the spare murk-light. She started to hand it to Izzy, changed her mind, and handed it to a sturdy-looking gray-haired woman who didn’t need to be propped up.

  “Driftwood is waiting outside the sea cave,” she said. “There’s a boat at the dock. I don’t know how seaworthy it is, but it can get you away from the island. You have to go quickly. One of the gray men is still down there and he’s—”

  “Mara.” In the glow of the murk-lights Izzy’s eyes were big and round. “We don’t know how to find the dock.”

  “But I have to—”

  Izzy was right. She couldn’t send them into the fortress without help. Izzy was hurt, and the others were thin and shaken, and nobody knew the way. She couldn’t abandon them.

  “Okay. Okay.” Mara was thinking rapidly. “I’ll show you the way, then I’ll come back for Fish Hook.”

  Frightened whispers and wheezing breaths filled the tunnels as they fled, and the prisoners’ stumbling footsteps were as loud as drumbeats. Mara scarcely breathed until they passed through the vertebrate-lined arch. There was no sign of the gray man where Mara had last seen him, no sign of their fight except the glass shards of her broken murk-light. The door to the sea cave was still open. Mara waved the prisoners through, then bounded down the steps after them.

  Just as she reached the bottom step it happened again: a jolt shuddered through the entire island, as though the stone floor had dropped beneath them. The unmistakable sound of stone grinding on stone filled the cave, reverberating briefly before fading.

  “What is that?” somebody asked, his voice rising with panic.

  “The island is collapsing!” another shouted.

  “The mage is angry!” The prisoners clung to each other, looking around the cave with wild eyes.

  “Don’t be stupid!” Izzy shouted, her voice rising over the others. “Get in the boat!”

  The prisoners climbed into the boat. A young man took up one of the oars; the tall gray-haired woman took the other. The boat was barely big enough, but it would have to do until they were outside.

  “I have to go back for Fish Hook,” Mara said to Izzy. “Get out of here. Find Driftwood.”

  “We can—”

  The floor rocked again, and for the briefest moment Mara spotted something shimmering in the shadows by the dock. She stared at it, her heart pounding. A remnant of the obscuring spell? She didn’t know. She didn’t have time to worry about it.

  “Mara?” Izzy said.

  Mara could see now that some of the stains on Izzy’s bandages were blood, and when the light flashed a certain way it caught a shimmering green just below her collar. The other prisoners had noticed too; the young boy was shying away from Izzy’s right side as though he was afraid of touching her.

  “Go,” Mara said. “Get in the boat. Driftwood is waiting. We’ll catch up.”

  Mara didn’t wait to see the last of the passengers loaded. She left the sea cave and raced back to the dungeon. From there, she followed the mage-lit candles along the route to the laboratory; every light that flared as she approached told her she was going the right way. She was panting for breath by the time she reached what had to be the final turn. She had been paying attention when the gray man carried her this way; she knew she was in the right place. She rounded the corner—

  And the floor lurched beneath her, tossing her sideways into the wall.

  She flung her arms out to catch herself. The blocks ground against one another again, the noise so loud she expected one of them to squeeze itself free right in front of her.

  She counted to ten silently, then took another step.

  Nothing moved. Nothing trembled.

  Another step. Down the corridor a candle sparked and flamed.

  Then: a distant thump.

  The walls trembled. Sand pattered from the ceiling.

  It had been so easy to get back into the Winter Blade. So easy to get the keys and find Izzy and the others. Too easy, when everybody in the city knew the fortress had ways of protecting itself. She couldn’t ignore it now.

  There was something in the fortress that knew she was here.

  Again: thump.

  She couldn’t let it stop her. She took another step.

  Thump.

  Mara squared her shoulders, gripped the murk-light in one hand and keys in the other, and ran down the corridor toward the laboratory.

  Thump. Thump. Thump.

  She rounded a curve in the hallway and another lurch slammed her into the wall, knocking her feet out from under her. She scraped her knees raw on the stone.

  Thump.

  The door was just ahead.

  Thump.

  Mara pushed herself up.

  There was somebody waiting at the door. But it wasn’t the gray man, and it wasn’t the Lord of the Muck.

  Bindy’s eyes glinted in the glow from Mara’s murk-light.

  “Mara,” she said, smiling. “Thank you for showing me the way.”

  20

  The Truth and the Lies

  “I’ve been trying to get into this fortress for two years.” Bindy tapped the laboratory door, then listened as though she expected it to answer. “There were always rumors of a secret way inside, one hidden so long by magic nobody could remember it. I thought you’d be gone by now.”

  Mara clutched at her side, gasping for breath. “I can’t—my friend— What are you doing here? You said you were going to Quarantine Island!”

  Even as she asked the question, she understood. The shimmer of magic in the sea cave: that had been an obscuring spell to hide Bindy’s boat. Bindy must have been on the water just like Driftwood, waiting for Mara’s light to come bobbing out. She had found her way to the laboratory while Mara was releasing the prisoners. That was why she had parted ways with the pirates earlier. She had her own plans for the evening.

  “How did Renata find it?” Bindy asked.

  “She didn’t find it,” Mara retorted, stung. The Lady may have shared her family secret, but it was Mara who had found the passage and swam not once but twice through that terrifying throat of stone. “All she did was tell me where to look. I found it myself. With magic.”

  Bindy was still examining the door; she showed no sign of being impressed by Mara’s accomplishment. “It certainly took her long enough to figure it out. If she’d waffled another day or two I was going to send her an engraved invitation. This is his laboratory, isn’t it?”

  Mara’s thoughts were all jumbled up, confusion and worry and fear twisting around like eels. Bindy was saying that she was the reason the Lady had sent Mara to the Winter Blade. But the Lady had sent Mara into the Winter Blade because she and Professor Kosta believed the Lord of the Muck was responsible for dumping the bones in the sea. They had been wrong about what the bones were, but not wrong about who had discarded them. It was the bones that had started it all.

  Mara had found the bones because a Roughwater boy on the docks told her where to look.

  He had approached her with his tale during her afternoon off, when she was visiting Fish Hook. She had never seen him before, nor since. He hadn’t said which fisherman he worked for. She hadn’t asked. Mara thought of how sullen he had been, how scowling. He could have been working for Bindy all along, but maybe not because he liked to. Maybe he wanted something too. The old Roughwater woman in the Muck’s dungeon had been worried about her grandson.

  Mara knew that just because two people were from the same foreign land didn’t mean they were related. But she also knew better than to trust coincidences. It wasn’t so hard to imagine: an old woman stolen away, a boy who wanted to find her, and Bindy with a plan. She had known where the Muck was dumping his cast-off experiments—she had been watching him for two years—and she had sent the Roughwater boy to point Mara in the right direction. She had known Mara would bring the bones to the Lady, and the Lady would look to the Winter Blade for the source.

  “W
hat are you doing here?” Mara asked. “If you wanted to come along, you could have just asked.”

  Bindy did not answer. “I wonder what Londe has learned about locking songs since we used to sneak into the kitchens at the Citadel for a midnight snack.” She pressed her ear against the laboratory door, listening. “Has he got a menagerie in there? Is that a parrot?”

  Mara was still holding the keys. “My friend is in there. We have to help him.”

  “Of course we do,” Bindy said absently. She poked at the hinges of the door. In the candlelight, her features looked sharper, the shadows of her fingers long and spindly. “I must say, this fortress isn’t as impressive as I’d always imagined. Rather cold and grim, isn’t it? I wonder what happened to—”

  A loud thump interrupted her, and the walls shook. Mara spun around and raised her murk-light. That thump had been louder and closer than the others.

  “What is that?” she asked, her voice wavering.

  Bindy was looking down the corridor with narrowed eyes, her lips pursed. That was the look she wore when she didn’t know the answer but also didn’t want to admit it.

  “Do you remember how this fortress was first built?” Bindy asked.

  “The founders,” Mara said absently. She didn’t know why it mattered. She couldn’t tear her gaze away from the long hallway. Her murk-light and the flickering candles barely penetrated the darkness. “They made it with their stone magic.”

  “It’s the very oldest kind of magic,” Bindy said. “Stone remembers magic better than anything else. It never truly forgets the songs it hears. Which is a good thing for us, because if magic faded from stone the same as it faded from water or wind, this entire city would have crumbled into the sea centuries ago.”

  That was what Mara had been taught all her life, in every story and every song, beginning with her mother’s murmured bedtime tales: the only stone magic in the city was that which the founders had cast themselves. It was as good as extinct, no more than a magical artifact from centuries ago.

  But Gerrant of Greenwood might disagree.

  “There is so much magic in these old stones, and the people who built this fortress were vicious,” Bindy said. “The island does not take kindly to intruders.”

  “Everybody knows that,” Mara said impatiently. She wondered if Bindy had always tried to explain the obvious in a tone that made it seem profound. Maybe Mara had been too young to recognize it for what it was. “But this didn’t happen when I was here before. I was here for hours and—”

  And she had heard something that first night. Something strange and unexplained. Not the distant song and loud clanging door, but after that, when she had sung her mother’s song while searching for the laboratory. Right before she had found Gerrant of Greenwood.

  “And?” Bindy said.

  Mara licked her lips. “So it’s just us being here that’s making it—do that? Whatever it is?”

  “There are surely nasty curses at work in this fortress that have been here for hundreds of years,” Bindy said. “Who’s to say what wakes them from their long slumber?”

  That wasn’t an answer, Mara thought. It wasn’t an answer because Bindy didn’t know the answer. Had she always mistook Bindy’s cageyness for wisdom?

  “Maybe it was a spell,” Mara said. She drew her gaze away from the dark tunnel to look at Bindy. The longer the fortress was quiet, the more nervous she became. “Maybe it was a song the stones remember.”

  Bindy didn’t laugh or dismiss the idea as childish. She wasn’t looking down the corridor anymore. She was looking straight at Mara, her expression both knowing and guarded.

  “It’s possible,” she said, as though granting Mara a favor by considering it. “It may be that a pretty little song sung in just the right way was enough to wake the spells in the stone.”

  Mara’s whole head was filled with a low, insistent buzzing. “What a pretty little song.” Words she would never forget, for they had been the first sign of warmth and kindness after her parents died. She had been huddling in the crypts of the Ossuary, surrounded by darkness and cold and walls made of ancient bones, singing to herself in the way little children do when they wish their mothers were there to comfort them. My heart is bound but my dreams are free. Bindy had appeared in the darkness, first her lantern’s light in dancing yellow, then her shadow, then her voice: “What a pretty little song.”

  It had been a spell all along. Mara hadn’t known, all the years she had been humming that old sailors’ song to herself, but Bindy had. She had heard a spell one night in the catacombs, and she had searched until she found the source.

  Thump.

  Mara stared down the hallway again. Something moved in the darkness, just beyond the reach of the murk-light.

  Thump.

  Something large, and slow, and coming closer.

  Thump.

  A stone fortress. A stone spell. A stone man.

  And in the water: bags full of stones. The Lord of the Muck had weighted down his cast-off experiments with stones from the Winter Blade. It was the stones that had answered when Mara sang her mother’s song. Not the bones. What she had heard was magic answering from pieces of the fortress itself. She didn’t know why her mother’s song called to the Winter Blade, but she knew she was right.

  “We had better hurry,” Bindy said. “Give me the key.”

  Mara’s grip was so tight her palm was sweaty, her arm trembling.

  “Mara. Give me the key.”

  Fish Hook was in the laboratory. Bindy could open the door with a spell. Think, Mara told herself frantically. Think. The shadow in the hallway was moving closer, slowly but inexorably. She had to ask. She might not get another chance.

  “Did you know?” she said.

  Mara’s voice was small, and small it might have remained if Bindy had turned to look at her. But Bindy studied the laboratory door as though it was the most fascinating thing she had ever seen.

  “Did you know my mother’s song was a spell?” Mara said, louder now, a thunder-low gathering of anger giving her courage. “Did you know when you heard me singing in the crypts? Is that why you helped me? It was only because of the song?” Her voice cracked on the last word.

  “You’re being ridiculous,” Bindy said. “Give me the key.”

  “I want to know. Tell me the truth.”

  “We don’t have time for this,” Bindy said.

  “Did you ever take me back to Gravetown?” Mara asked. “Did you ever ask if I had any other family? Did you even try?”

  “You had no family left. Nobody wanted you. Give me the key.” Bindy’s voice lashed like a whip. She held out her hand and snapped her fingers.

  But Mara did not jump to obey, as she would have two years ago. She remembered how Bindy had taken her straight from the Ossuary to the shop on the Street of Whispering Stones. She remembered Bindy telling her that her parents were gone and this was her home now. She remembered promising with the solemnity of a grief-stricken five-year-old not to tell anybody where she had come from. Bindy had told her she had nowhere else to go, and Mara had believed her.

  “You must have been so disappointed,” Mara said quietly, “when you found out I only knew the one song.”

  Deny it, she thought, staring hard at Bindy. Deny it. Tell me you were never disappointed. Tell me you never wanted the song. Tell me you only ever wanted a little girl to raise and teach and care for and love.

  “Oh,” said Bindy, her voice as soft as Mara’s, the two of them almost whispering. “You have no idea what a disappointment you were. I tried for years to pry more out of your little mind, all for nothing. It was a worthless song anyway.”

  Tears sprung into Mara’s eyes. She scrubbed them away, angry and embarrassed and hurting all over. Instead of handing over the keys, she searched through the clump for the right one. Fish Hook needed help, and Bindy was Mara’s only hope of getting into the laboratory. Even with all the unexpected, surprising, magical things Mara had done in the past few
days, the simple task of unlocking a spelled door was beyond her.

  She put the key in the lock and turned it. The door didn’t budge, so she stepped back to give Bindy space. When Bindy brushed against her, Mara flinched. Only a day ago she’d flung her arms around Bindy, so relieved to find her alive, so sure Bindy would help. But it had all been a lie. Bindy had been using Mara all along.

  After a few seconds of studying the door, Bindy began to sing. Mara recognized one of the unlocking spells Bindy used to break into crypts at the Ossuary. Her song and the Muck’s locking spell intertwined, like instruments slowly falling into tune, one rising to a higher pitch and a faster melody, the other slowing to meet it.

  Thump.

  The shape in the corridor was moving again.

  Thump.

  There was a snap, like a string breaking, and the locking spell was broken. Bindy opened the door. Mara pushed by her to run. She sprinted across the laboratory to the Muck’s worktable, where Fish Hook was lying with his hands and feet bound in the leather cuffs.

  “Fish Hook!”

  “Mara?” Fish Hook craned his head toward her. His voice was a weak, rasping croak.

  Mara skidded to a stop beside the table. There were bloodstained bandages on Fish Hook’s neck, a swath wrapped around his head, and she couldn’t see what was underneath. She reached for the scraps of cloth, then withdrew her hand quickly when Fish Hook hissed.

  “Did he hurt you? What did he do?”

  “Don’t know,” Fish Hook said. The words sounded as though they caused him terrible pain. He coughed; it was a horrible, racking sound. He strained against the bindings, but weakly.

  “Stop squirming and let me rescue you.” Mara swatted Fish Hook’s shoulder softly, well away from the bandages on his neck. He could still talk. It wasn’t like the gray man. It couldn’t be like that.

  But there were dashed ink lines around his eyes that disappeared beneath the bandage across his forehead and black-thread stitches closing cuts on the sides of his face. Just under the edge of the bandage, where the motion of his head had pushed it up, Mara spied a gleam of iridescent greenish blue. She swallowed painfully.