Though the corridors varied and his path was never the same twice, he always arrived at the same destination. He stepped into a brightly lit room. It was full of people, loud with laughter and music, a sound of tinkling glass that was almost like cascading beads of water. A hundred faces turned toward him, smiling. They had gathered to honor him. It was his birthday. That was what he’d been searching for all along! His tenth birthday celebration. They crowded forward, calling him by the same name Leeka had. That name, actually, was the only word they said: spoken in myriad pitches, strung together in sentences, lilting like questions, forceful like accusations. They spoke a language made up entirely of a single word. His name.
One of them, the youngest girl, stretched a hand out toward him, her white palm upward, fingers crooked and beckoning. The gesture racked him with spasms of fear. She moved toward him, whispering, motioning that he need not be afraid. The more she indicated this, the more he believed it to be a lie. She had enormous brown eyes. They were too big for her face. He realized in a single, telescoped moment that she was not who he had thought her to be, even as he grasped that he had not even conceived an identity for her. This paradoxical realization was what hurtled him toward consciousness.
As always, the experience left him shaken. Who had he thought the girl was? Who had he realized she actually was? Sometimes he spent a greater part of the day plagued by her image, haunted by her eyes. He knew that her identity was within him. It was as if he had a hundred-sided die with the truth written upon one side. No matter how relentlessly he rolled the die, he never found the answer.
Wren stirred on the pallet beside him. She rolled from her back to one side, facing away from him. He felt as if he could hear her eyelids split open. They were not eyes at all like those of the girl in his dreams. Wren was from a coastal people north past Candovia. Her hair was brittle and straw silvered like a woman of the Mein, but her eyes were narrow, set flush with her face instead of recessed. They had about them a sleepy quality, although this belied her predatory sharpness of mind. “Dreams have no power beyond their realm,” she had told him before. “Only actions do.” Spratling felt sure that she was right but was not sure whether to read that statement as a comfort or as a challenge.
Later, when he joined the crowd of raiders taking their morning meal, he walked among them, smiling and joking, teasing in the easy manner he had with his men. They sat on benches ranked around a cook stove that had come from the mess hall at Palishdock. It was a massive, cast-iron thing. Spratling himself had led a small party back to the settlement to rescue it from the ashes and destruction the league warship had inflicted on the place. Its appearance here-on the southern isle that had become their third hideaway in as many months-had raised morale.
Standing in the sand before it, inhaling the bacon scent sizzling atop it, bent forward and preparing to pluck a strip up with his fingers, he did not take note of the general’s arrival until he spoke. Leeka stood some distance away, on the other side of the stove. He spoke for everyone to hear.
“Why haven’t you told everyone about the key?” he demanded. “Why haven’t you told them what the prisoner has said?”
Spratling’s appetite, his pleasant mood, his transitory sense of equilibrium all vanished in an instant. He had known this moment was coming, of course. It was eight days since his attack on the warship. He had sworn to silence the few who had heard just what the key was for, but secrets among raiders do not last, especially not with a league pilot held prisoner among them. Spratling cursed himself for bringing the prisoner with them. He should have killed him on the night, but he could not resist taking so valuable a prisoner, could not help but want to know what the man could tell him. He had made sure only those who had been with him in the pilot’s room took food and water to the man, and only Spratling and Dovian interrogated him. But his presence had been on everybody’s mind since their return.
“I make the decisions here, not you. If I do a thing, there’s a reason for it.”
“I thought Dovian led this group,” Leeka said. “You’re only one of his raiders, right? You said so yourself. Spratling, the raider. Just one of many…”
Turning to face him through the rippling heat thrown up by the stove, Spratling said, “Either way, you don’t make decisions for us.” He cast his voice tight and dangerous. He had not meant to respond with such obvious anger, but his passions tended to flare each time this man prodded. He had not kept the key secret out of any timidity, damn it! He just needed to think its significance through, to research what he could do with it. Leeka had no business calling him on it.
“Dovian agrees with me,” the soldier said.
As if on cue, the old raider rose from where he had been sitting at the edge of the group. He hobbled forward, his bulk like that of a wounded bear. Whatever pain the movement caused him he kept clamped between his teeth. He might have been getting better these last few weeks. He was certainly on his feet more often, but Spratling was not sure just how much of his illness he was hiding.
Leeka went on. “You have a weapon that could cripple the league. You should let it be known, and together we should plan how to use it.”
Spratling shifted his gaze from the Acacian to the Candovian, expressing his annoyance through his eyes. Dovian simply stared back at him, his face sad, apologetic, rimmed beneath the eyes with disappointment. “We will talk about this later-”
“No,” Leeka said, “we will talk about it now. Don’t you all wish to talk about it now? Your young captain wears a key about his neck that you should all know about. You want to hear of it, don’t you?”
Nobody answered. They did not have to. Their silence had a quality to it that anyone could read. Of course they wanted to know. And, Spratling knew, they deserved to know. He tossed his food down, no longer having a taste for it.
That afternoon they had the open meeting that Leeka wished for. They sat on the sand near the ocean, under the ribboned shade of coconut palms, the sky above them cloudless, a light blue dome undisturbed by anything save the progress of the sun’s blazing whiteness. Spratling did not attempt to run the meeting. Wren and Clytus, Geena and all of the others who had been involved in the attack on the league warship were glad to break their enforced silence and sing in chorus.
“Think back a few months ago,” Geena said, “to when they took the brig with Spratling’s nail. We came away with a fair bit of treasure, yes? There was one piece, however, more valuable than the rest.”
“See that pendant about Spratling’s neck?” Wren asked. “That’s what we speak of. You’ve all seen it, but we didn’t know its value until the pilot of the warship explained it. It’s one of a handful of keys that unlock the outer rim platforms.”
“There are only twenty of them in existence,” Nineas said. “Only twenty. And we have one.”
“And we brought the pilot with us,” Clytus said. “Spratling’s been learning all sorts of things from him, I wager. So you have to ask yourself if there’s a use we could put this key and our new source of intelligence to.”
For the next few hours the raiders enthusiastically considered that question. They threw about schemes and notions, filled with a lust for revenge and with the possibility of an unheard-of bounty. Leaguemen were enormously wealthy and their tastes extravagant. What might those platforms house? Slaves by the thousands? Warehouses stacked high with mist? They might find concubines of amazing beauty. Gold and silver by the bargeload. Floating palaces hung with vines and flowers, paved in marble. They could drape themselves in silken clothes and drink wine from chalices of carved turquoise and eat and eat and eat as they had never eaten before. They could spend the rest of their lives in the pursuit of pleasure. They could drown in excess, as all raiders dream. They could even take over the mist trade themselves! They would have Hanish Mein by the balls then, and their fortune would know no bounds.