Lightning rent the sky. Rain pounded Izar, slipping through his collar, forming ice-cold chains down his back, but he hardly noticed. His feet landing as gently as a hare’s, he clambered over the rails of the trawler. He examined the coordinates listed on the card in his hand, the card he’d found in the gray tin on his desk—yes, this was the precise location. If the Third Man was here, Izar would find him.
The trawler’s platform, about fifty feet long, was empty. A narrow set of stairs led to an area below deck—the sleeping quarters. Like a trailer, the trawler was a home, and the secluded, rocky enclave in which it was anchored, whose surrounding stones looked like swords protruding over the waves, acted as a private trailer park.
With all the noise of the storm, the Third Man would be unable to distinguish Izar’s footsteps on the platform. Walking on the tips of his toes, Izar crept toward the stairs, his body partially crouched. Dangling low like a white-gold pendant, the moon cast a long, quivering spotlight at his feet. He wished it would not shine so bright this night.
He paused at the mouth of the stairs. The path down was dark. He wondered whether Zaurak and Serpens could be belowdecks as well—that would explain why the Secret Search team had not yet found them. But if they were belowdecks, waiting for him, he would be walking directly into a trap.
A seagull cackled overhead. He jumped. The tin under his arm rattled, the shell within clanging. Losing his balance, he steadied himself with a hand on the railing of the stairs. But when he looked ahead again, he was facing the barrel of a gun.
The gun was pointed at him so smoothly, so naturally, that he asked himself whether he’d almost expected it. He became conscious of every breath entering and exiting his lungs. Strange, he’d never stopped to contemplate his breathing before—how deftly lungs moved, how miraculous it all was—his life, life itself.
The gun touched the bridge of his nose. The trigger cocked. Izar stumbled back.
Out of the shadows, a giant loomed onto the platform. He had a grizzled beard into which an entire body could have disappeared, and into which one of his front teeth seemed to have. His lashes were sparse, absent in clumps like deforested patches, as though they’d decided to abscond to his beard. Belonging to a man of his girth, the gun in his hand seemed ornamental, like a crocodile protecting itself with a fake set of fangs. With his bare hands, the giant could crush any man he encountered, including Izar.
His brown-gray eyes glinted in the moonlight as flat, impassive slits, their expression so still that Izar wondered whether the giant was even human—he could just as well have been a lizard. And yet his face looked distantly familiar; it was not the sort of face one could forget—looking, as it did, like it belonged on a wanted-for-murder poster. Frowning, Izar tried to clutch at a memory, but it was not even remotely close enough to grasp—it was like a song he’d heard as a child, of which he recalled only one or two words—insufficient to whistle a tune. He hated wispy memories—they were like flies buzzing around his head, irritating but impossible to swat.
“The name is Alshain Ankaa,” the giant said, the movement of his lips barely displacing the thicket around his mouth. “I’ve been waiting for ya, Izar.”
Izar’s eyes widened at the mention of his name. So, he had walked directly into a trap. He’d been so impatient to uncover the identity of the Third Man that he’d arrived unarmed and unprepared.
“Why is yer hand bleeding?” Alshain asked.
Izar looked down at the scrape that tore through the palm of his hand like a straight, orderly earthquake. He had shed no blood other than his own this night. He had planned to kill Tarazed, but he’d been unable to bring himself to open Ascella’s bathroom door and see him in her shower. He’d whirled around and walked out of her apartment and her life.
“Never mind my hand,” he said.
Alshain dropped his gun, such that it dangled at his side. But Izar’s exhale of relief caught in his throat, for Alshain stepped closer, such that their shirts were almost touching. His face was perfectly still, as though even the veins beneath his beard had cooled.
“I brought ya to Menkar that day,” Alshain said, “when ya were a boy. Antares and I were on this very trawler.”
That was why Alshain’s face looked familiar—Izar had seen it as a three-year-old! He had gone to the island of Mira yesterday to try to remember his past, but he’d remembered nothing and had heard only the lies of his biological parents’ neighbor, the drunkard Rigel Nihal. Now, most unexpectedly, by means of the mysterious tin under his arm, he had arrived at a bridge to his past—this giant, Alshain.
Was it possible that, in the state of paranoia pursuing the two attempts on his life, he had wholly misinterpreted the tin? Could it be that the man who’d placed the tin on his desk was not an enemy but a friend? After all, the card with coordinates had led him here; the half-shell could be construed as a tool to defend oneself rather than a threat; as for the amber scroll, although he had no means to decipher it yet, perhaps it contained a helpful message. Feeling suddenly better, Izar straightened his shoulders.
“Thank you for helping save me that night,” Izar said. “Can you tell me more about that night?”
“I can take ya to the area where we found ya. Do ya want to go?”
Izar looked up at the sky, but he could make it out just barely, for rain was lashing his eyes. The clouds were emptying bucket upon bucket over the ocean, and he was as soaked as though he was sitting in a bathtub. There was a fury to the night, a challenge to its tempest. To set forth on a night like this, even on a ship much larger and sturdier than Alshain’s, would be dangerous. And Alshain, a giant with a gun, could not be said to inspire trust. He could easily shoot Izar and hurl his body overboard. But Izar needed to know—all his life, he’d wanted to know who he was, how Antares had found him in the ocean, how he’d come to acquire the scar along his jaw. Maybe by going to the stretch of water where Antares and Alshain had found him, he would remember something.
“Let’s go,” he said.
11
Salt and Sea
"I’m nauseous,” Altair moaned.
Coralline looked down at her side. The strap of her satchel lay tight and diagonal over her torso, the satchel itself at her hip, as she swam horizontally. She lowered her luciferin lantern over the satchel’s outer pocket. Altair looked a dull, sickly brown. She patted his star-shaped coronet gently and then returned the lantern in front of her, but it was too late: Her forehead bumped into Pavonis’s tailfin. He muttered irritably, but she found the collision comforting—it showed her physically that, even though she could make out no more than his size and shape in the dark, he was there with her.
He was navigating the way to the Elnath Mansion, his tail swerving sharply around houses. The swim would have been faster had they been traveling in the waters above Urchin Grove instead of weaving among the village’s homes, but they’d found earlier that black poison was more concentrated in higher waters. They’d consequently sought the safety of the seabed, notwithstanding that it was darker there, hundreds of feet below the waves at night, and the swim would take longer because of all the maneuvering.