15

Lopen soared up high, Rua at his side, surveying the island. From up here, it seemed so small.

The city had a curious shape, like a flower with radiating petals. The rest of the island was boring: one big long beach. Nothing moved; nothing seemed suspicious, which he figured was how a place that was suspicious would act.

He dropped down to the rest of the group, where Rushu was doing a sketch of some of the buildings here at the outskirts of the city. These were covered in crem, giving them that familiar melted appearance that he associated with old things.

“From up there,” he said, “it all just looks like rocks. Why do you suppose there’s crem here, but not on the beach?”

“I would guess,” she said, still sketching, “that some of this was already covered in crem when the highstorms stopped reaching this island. The carapace and gemhearts by the beach are certainly old, but they must be fresher than these ruins.”

What he’d mistaken for walls when first approaching was really a line of buildings. Homes, perhaps? They were uniform, and groups of them formed the “tips” of the flower petals he’d seen from above.

Rushu finished her sketch, then turned to another page in her notebook—one that contained some kind of map.

“Hey!” Lopen said. “That looks exactly like the city!”

“An ancient map of Akinah,” she explained. “I was hoping to use it to conclusively prove this is the same place. You seem to have done that for me.”

“Glad to help,” Lopen said. With their squad of eight spear-wielding sailors, they moved inward, passing the grown-over buildings and entering the heart of the city.

Here, the roofs had all fallen in, leaving pillars and some remnants of walls. It was covered in just enough crem to make the ruins feel like they were sinking into the ground, but not enough to turn them into lumps. The result gave the place an almost rotting cast, reminding him of the refuse he’d find in the chasms with Bridge Four. These were the bones, the broken branches, and the withered flesh of a once grand city.

“It’s smaller than I’d imagined,” Lopen said, turning about and using his spear to gesture toward the far end of the city. “I could walk across the whole place in, sure, less time than it takes Punio to do his hair before we go out dancing.”

“Older cities were all that way,” Rushu said. “It was harder for the ancients to build windbreaks and aqueducts, and they didn’t have large trade operations to resupply cities with food. So everything was constructed on a much smaller scale.”

Lopen turned around in a circle, feeling like those broken buildings were skulls, with sunken eye sockets for windows, all dripping with hardened crem. Rushu sent the sailors to go searching through some of those, and he shivered. Why was he so nervous about this place?

“I . . . don’t know that we’ll find anything useful in here, Rushu,” he said, scanning about. “The place is less ruins than rubble.”

“The fact that it exists in such an undisturbed state is monumentally important, Lopen,” Rushu said. “It will be of great interest to archaeologists and historians. The more we’ve learned about the Recreance, the more we’ve realized that our understanding of the past is painfully incomplete.”

“I suppose,” Lopen said as she held up her little map. “Any idea where the Oathgate would be?”

“Well, the optimal place would be in the center of the city for equilateral access,” Rushu said. “Either that, or nearest the docks for maximum trade convenience. Unfortunately, judging by the three in Azimir, Kholinar, and Thaylen City, the Oathgates were not placed optimally. Instead, all three are within convenient access of the ruling class.”

“Storming lighteyes,” Lopen muttered. “Always making things more difficult for us common folk.”

“Us common folk?” she asked. “You are a Knight Radiant.”

“The most common one.”

“You frequently tell me how uncommon you are, Lopen.”

“It’s only a contradiction if you think about it.”

“I . . . I have no response to that.”

“See? You are getting it already. So . . . where would the rich folks have been in this city?”

“My guess is those larger lumps over there. The Oathgates tend to be on large platforms, and that section seems to be raised higher than the surroundings.”

They began walking toward the ruins she had indicated. As they did, Lopen found himself holding his spear tightly and checking over his shoulder. And storms, it wasn’t just him being jumpy. There was something unnerving about this place. With those clouds overhead, the distant fog, the stillness.

It was, sure, a mausoleum. But instead of being for kings or such, it was for an entire people. This had once been a vibrant capital, a center of trade.

It wasn’t simply ruins. It was lonely ruins, always overcast and never seeing the sun, but also never seeing rain or storm. Was that why Rysn’s porter had worked so hard to keep them away? To prevent them from disturbing the place’s slumber? Or had Lopen listened to one too many of Rock’s firelight stories about spirits and gods?

At any rate, he nearly jumped all the way to the Halls when someone came around the corner. Lopen yelled and drew in Stormlight, then felt foolish. It was only Pluv, one of the sailors.

“Message for Ardent Rushu,” he said, “from the rebsk.”

Rushu took the note and read it while Lopen scanned the ruins again. He spotted all eight sailors, and a part of him was surprised that one hadn’t vanished mysteriously. He ought to go tell them to stick together, just in case.

“Curious,” Rushu said, tucking away the note.

“What does she say?”

“It’s a warning,” Rushu said. “She thinks everything about this place is too expected, too perfect. An opening in the stones out in the water, leading toward a perfect landing beach, with gemstones littered around for the taking? I suppose even these ruins are exactly as I imagined them. . . .”

“So what does it mean?” Lopen asked.

“I’m not sure. Did you, by chance, grab any of those gemstones on the beach?”

Lopen fished in his pocket for the small gemheart he’d picked up earlier. “Grabbed one,” he said. “I was going to ask you what you thought about there being no crem on it, but got distracted.”

She took it from his fingers, then brought out a jeweler’s loupe and began inspecting it.

“You . . . carry one of those in your pocket?” Lopen asked.

“Doesn’t everyone?” she said absently. “Hmm. I can’t be certain, as I’m no expert. But I think . . . Lopen, I think this is a fake. Quartz, not a diamond.”

He frowned, taking it back. Quartz couldn’t hold Stormlight, and it could be made by a Soulcaster. “You think . . . they might all be fakes?”

“It’s possible.”

Lopen gave a mighty sigh. “And thus, my great fortune evaporates like a man’s beauty upon the weathering shores of time. Like how that one time I, sure, almost had a chasmfiend pet that would—”

“Yes, you’ve told me,” Rushu said. “Six times.”

“I have a new joke though,” Lopen said. “For the end of the story. I’m going to say, ‘And that is why I let it eat my arm.’ Funny, yes? Well, it will be. Eventually.” He tossed the fake gemheart up in the air and caught it again. “So . . . why make these? Why set this place up to appear so rich?”

“I’m wondering the same thing,” Rushu said.

“They wanted to wow us, maybe?” Lopen said. “Perhaps they thought we’d be so distracted by the riches that we’d be stunned and confused. They did not know that I am accustomed to such incredible sights, for I experience something even more impressive each morning after I awake.”

“Is that so?”

“When I look in the mirror.”

“And you wonder why you’re still single.”

“Oh, I don’t wonder,” he said. “I’m fully aware that so much of me is difficult for any one woman to handle. My majesty confuses them. It’s the only explanation for why they often run away.” He gave her a grin.

Surprisingly, she grinned back. Usually people threw things at him when he said lines like that.

She led him the rest of the way to the raised section of the city, which did kind of look like an Oathgate platform. She pointed to a structure in the near distance that looked like it might have been a palace.

“If this is like Kholinar,” she said, “then . . .”

They turned and walked to a solitary structure—one of the few that still had a roof—near the center of the raised platform. Inside, they found what they’d been searching for. Kind of.

This had obviously once been an Oathgate chamber. It had the remnants of the same mural on the floor as the ones in other cities, but the mechanism had broken or decayed. There was no place to put a Shardblade, no way to rotate it. The structure had been destroyed by the elements. All that remained was dust and corroded bits of metal.

Lopen frowned, picking up some of these and feeling them with his thumb. He glanced at Rushu, who stood with her hands on her hips, her forehead wrinkled in thought. Something about this place felt wrong. Like it . . . like it had lodged in his throat as he tried to swallow it. And he couldn’t get it down. He had to cough it back up instead.

“This is fake too, isn’t it?” he said.

“What makes you say that?” Rushu asked.

“Well, the Oathgate on the Shattered Plains sat there, sure, for thousands of years—and it still worked when we found it. This place is better preserved. But here, the Oathgate mechanism has disintegrated?”

“I agree,” she said. “I might have bought it, but those gemstones . . . And then finding this next to the palace, like in Kholinar? It’s too obvious.”

“So where’s the real one?” Lopen asked.

“Go fetch the sailors,” she said. “See if they can locate a set of stairs. Or a trapdoor. Or anything in this rubble that would let us go down.”

That seemed strange to Lopen. People didn’t often build down, since basements tended to fill with water. Still, Rushu was a smart one, so he shouldered his spear and walked out to do as she asked. He gathered the sailors and had them, in pairs, start searching for steps.

He couldn’t banish that feeling of wrongness as they did so, and he kept seeing things at the corners of his eyes. Storm him, but this place had him jumping at shadows.

But Rushu was right. It didn’t take too long before they found a stairwell hidden by some debris in one of the least impressive buildings on the outskirts of the central plaza, not particularly close to the palace at all.

“It’s probably a stormcellar,” Lopen said, following Rushu down and holding a gemstone for light.

“Probably,” she agreed.

“Or . . .” he said as they reached the bottom, “it’s just a dead end.” Indeed, the stairwell ended abruptly at a stone wall.

Rushu took a small pouch off her belt, one that clinked as she moved it.

“Why did you want us to find steps anyway?” Lopen asked.

“It’s not uncommon for ancient cities to be buried over time,” she said. “Crem builds up. While modern cities keep chipping at it to prevent being swallowed, many older towns were built on top of the submerged ruins of ancient ones. It’s not uncommon to discover an architectural site when digging a mine, for example.”

“All right . . .” Lopen said. “So . . .”

“So I have double the reason to believe that city above is fake,” she said. “The real Akinah probably sank into the crem years ago.” She held out her hand—which glowed suddenly with a fierce light. The ardent wore gemstones on it, connected with silver chains.

“Storms!” he said. “A Soulcaster?”

“Yes,” she said. “Let me see if I can remember how to use one of these. . . .”

“You know how?”

“Of course,” she said. “The Soulcasting ardents use them all the time. I went through a phase when I was very keen on joining them, until I discovered how boring their work was. Anyway, plug your ears and hold your breath.”

“Why—”

He cut off as smoke filled the stairwell, making his ears scream with sudden pressure, as if he’d dived deep beneath the ocean. He shouted, then coughed. Then drew in some Stormlight.

Ahead of him, the stone wall had vanished. Rushu was wiping the soot from her face with a rag and grinning.

“You’re crazy,” he told her.

“Well, I suspected that if an Oathgate was here in Akinah, we’d have to cut through stone to get to it. I didn’t anticipate this one being underground—more that it would be covered over like on the Shattered Plains. Regardless, I demanded that Navani send me with either a Shardblade or a Soulcaster to get through. Alas, she picked the less exciting option. I do like being right though. It makes my stomach flutter.”

Lopen stepped up beside her, holding out his gemstone to reveal what she’d opened up. An underground cavern, somewhat shallow—maybe twelve feet high—and expansively wide. Like . . . a plateau.

“Storms,” Lopen said. “The Oathgate is down here.”

“It must have taken extraordinary effort to hide it,” Rushu said. “Whoever did this could have simply buried it, but they wanted to leave it functional. So they built a room around it, then let the crem pile up over the years.”

“But why?” Lopen asked, stepping into the place, squinting. His light barely revealed the control building at the center. Yes, this really was an Oathgate. “Why hide it, then go to all that trouble to construct fake buildings?”

“Obviously,” Rushu said, “they hoped we’d find the fake one, then leave, assuming the Oathgate lost.”

Lopen halted in place. The words sank in. This idea he swallowed, but it tasted terrible.

“This was like . . . a failsafe,” he whispered. “So if someone reached the island, they’d find nothing useful.”

“But we outthought them!” Rushu said. “I’ll have to remember to thank Brightness Rysn for her timely note. It—”

“Rushu,” Lopen interrupted, fishing out the gemstone Huio had given him. It wasn’t blinking. “You’re a genius.”

“Clearly.”

“But you’re also a storming fool. Gather the sailors, stay here, and try not to get killed.” With that, he went dashing back up the steps, pulling in Stormlight. He took to the air immediately, zipping out of the city and toward the beach.

Whoever was watching this place, they’d gone to great lengths to prevent them from arriving. But once that plan had been foiled, they’d probably been willing to let the expedition gather up fake gemhearts and sail away. So long as they didn’t find the real secret of the island.

But he and Rushu had done just that. Which meant the entire group was in serious danger, even if Huio’s gemstone wasn’t blinking. He needed to get to the others quickly.

He was glad for his instincts. Because when he arrived at the beach, he found Huio being eaten by a monster. And that wasn’t the sort of event a cousin should miss.

Rysn’s first clue came as a curious sound. A clicking, like moving carapace?

She’d been waiting for a rowboat to return to take her to join the shore team. She wanted to inspect the greatshell remains there, see if she could spot anything that gave her a clue on how to help Chiri-Chiri. Now, she turned around in her seat on the quarterdeck and looked toward the strange sound. Had Chiri-Chiri returned?

But no. This sound she was hearing was too loud to be made by one creature. It was . . . the sound of hundreds of legs moving at once.

What she saw in the water made her feel as if she’d been struck by a bolt of lightning. Hundreds of cremlings—crustaceans smaller than a person’s fist—were crawling out of the ocean and up the side of the ship. And each seemed to be carrying a piece of flesh on it. She even spotted one with an eyeball on its back.

Had these things ripped apart a person? Were they carrion feeders? Something worse?

She screamed, but did so a fraction too late to be of help—for a shout went up across the ship’s deck. Sailors on watch called out as the water around the Wandersail boiled, spitting out thousands of similar cremlings. Clacking and chittering and scrambling as they swarmed up the sides of the ship.

Violet fearspren gathered at Rysn’s feet. Never before had she felt more trapped by her inability to walk. Cord muttered something in Horneater and backed away. Rysn, however, had to unstrap herself before she could escape.

She was too slow. Her trembling fingers didn’t seem to work as she fought with the buckles. The strange cremlings flooded over the side railing.

She finally got the belt undone, but by then the things were swarming all around her. She couldn’t flop onto the deck and crawl away. She’d be overrun. Instead she tried to pull herself farther up into the seat.

However, instead of crawling up her legs and attacking her, some of the cremlings pooled on the deck nearby. Then, in a bizarre display, they began to fit together. Like people grabbing hands and forming a line, the cremlings interlocked their wriggling legs, putting their backs outward. The bits of flesh and skin on them fit together like pieces of a puzzle.

Humanlike feet formed, then legs. Cremlings crawled up, pulling together into a writhing heap that became a torso—then finally the full figure of a nude man, lacking genitals. The head came last, eyes popping into place as cremlings squeezed inside the “skull.” Lines of tattoos hid the seams in the skin.

For a moment, the look of it was nauseating—the figure’s stomach pulsed with the creatures moving within. Lumps twitched on the arms. The skin of the legs split as if sliced open, revealing the insectile horrors within. Then it all seemed to tighten and settle down, and appeared human. A near-perfect likeness, though the lines across the stomach and thighs were far more visible than the ones on the hands and face.

“Hello, Rysn,” Nikli said. He smiled, and his face creased along lines she now knew weren’t merely wrinkles, but splits in the skin. “Your expedition has, unfortunately, proven very persistent.”

Storms. Nikli wasn’t a man or a Voidbringer. He was something worse: one of the gods from Cord’s stories, a monster from Jasnah’s tales. An abomination made up of hundreds of tiny pieces pretending to be a single entity.

Cord put her hand on Rysn’s shoulder—making her jump—then stepped deliberately forward to position herself between Nikli and Rysn. The Horneater woman spoke in her musical language, and the creature—remarkably—responded in kind.

“Cord?” Rysn whispered, trembling. “What is happening?”

“I did not realize . . .” Cord whispered in Veden. “The Gods Who Sleep Not . . . they can appear as people.”

“Do you know how to fight one?”

“I told you, you cannot,” Cord said. “Lunu’anaki—he is trickster god—warned of them during my grandmother’s time when she was the watcher of the pool.”

“We had not expected to find one of the Sighted on this trip,” Nikli said in Veden. “You have long guarded Cultivation’s Perpendicularity. It is regrettable that you joined this expedition. We do not kill your people lightly, Hualinam’lunanaki’akilu.”

Some of the other swarms formed into similar individuals on the deck, though several remained scuttling masses. The captain gathered the remaining ten or so sailors, but they were quickly surrounded by the strange creatures. Storms. The men had grabbed spears, but how did you fight something like this? One man stabbed a creature that drew close, and the spear stuck straight through the body, then cremlings began to swarm out of the body cavity along the spear’s length.

“Stop this,” Rysn said, finding her voice. “Nikli, let us negotiate. Please, tell me what you want.”

“All opportunity for negotiation has passed,” Nikli said softly, looking away—a very humanlike gesture of shame. “You ignored my warnings, and your friends on the island did not take the bait we offered them. That was your last chance to escape safely, and some of us argued long to give you even that chance.

“But you are persistent, as I said. Some of us knew it would come to this. Some who are less idealistic than I. For what it is worth, Rysn, I’m sorry. I genuinely enjoyed our time together. But the very cosmere is at stake. A few deaths now, however regrettable, will prevent catastrophe.”

Cord shouted something at Nikli in Horneater, and he retorted, sounding angry, then turned to shout toward the others on the deck.

“That was a distraction,” Cord whispered to Rysn, turning. “Be ready. Hold your breath.”

“Hold my—”

Rysn yelped as Cord grabbed her around the waist. The tall woman heaved Rysn over her shoulder, leaped onto the chair, then launched them over the side of the ship toward the dark waters beyond.