Still, the mountain’s heart burnt with fire.
“Takaminara,” he said, naming god and mountain, a sleeping volcano that would occasionally quake the entire land.
“Truly? It doesn’t appear as tall as I’ve heard tell.”
“The distance deceives-as it has many men and women.”
“And it’s true that the god lives in caves at the top of the mountains? No castillion. No handservants. By herself.”
“There are the occasional pilgrims who have braved the cliffs and crumbling ice,” he said. “And those foolish few who seek merely to touch the sky. But most of those who climb seek to become her acolytes, to be blessed at her feet, to be burnt by her Grace and have their inner eye set ablaze.”
“The rub-aki,” she said, touching her forehead, “the Blood-eyed.”
He nodded. The rub-aki were stained with the fiery blood of Takaminara. Each bore a crimson print of her thumb burnt into the middle of their foreheads.
“Can they truly see the future with their inner eyes?”
Brant shrugged. “It is said that by staring into their alchemical fires, they can portend the future. But few have ever witnessed a true foretelling.”
“I once saw one of the Blood-eyed at the Grand Midsummer Faire back in Chrismferry.”
“A charlatan surely. Master Sheershym once told me that fewer than two acolytes a decade survive the ordeal of Takaminara and return from her caverns into the world.”
“But I’ve heard of plenty-”
“It’s easy to tattoo one’s forehead and claim to see the future. Master Sheershym said that for every thousand who claim to be rub-aki , only one truly is. And they certainly would not be selling their skills at a fair.”
He said the last more harshly than he intended.
“Oh…” An edge of embarrassment returned to her voice and manner.
He suddenly felt like a cad. He stood up, drawing her up in his wake. “But in the end, I guess none of the god-realms really matter. Not even Saysh Mal. It is into the hinterlands that we must ultimately tread. Once there, we’ll all be on equal footing.”
“Equally blind,” Dart mumbled.
From the shadows that moved over her features, he had only unsettled her further.
She stepped away. “I should return to my room. I need to collect my cloak and prepare my bag.”
“Wait-” he blurted out before he could stop it.
She glanced to him.
He struggled for some way to make up for his poor manner. He didn’t want matters to end this way. “I-I wanted to ask you something else. Something’s that been troubling me.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s about your creature-Pupp, isn’t it?”
Brant noted her turn slightly to the left, where Pupp must be roaming.
“I mentioned this to the regent, and I didn’t know if he told you. My stone-I can see Pupp if it touches him, and I sense him if he draws near, a warming in the stone that can turn fiery if he’s very close. Not like the skull, but still mightily hot.”
She nodded. “I heard. That’s how you found the room where Pyllor attacked me.”
Her eyes found his, no longer shamed but more grateful and open. Under her immediate gaze, he struggled to find his tongue and failed.
She finally broke contact and explained, “Your stone must be ripe with wild Grace. If strong enough, any Grace-blood or otherwise-can draw Pupp fully into this world for a short time.” After a moment, she gestured toward his hand. “Could I see your stone? I never did get a good look at it.”
With a nod, he tugged the cord to pull the stone free from his shirt. She leaned closer to examine it.
Brant caught the scent of her hair and noted the curve of her neck as she cocked her head to study the rock. He suddenly found himself warming all over. He wanted to step away, but at the same time to step closer. Trapped between, he stood very still, as if he were being hunted.
“It’s beautiful,” Dart said, fingering the stone. “I hadn’t realized. The way it catches every bit of light.”
He felt the gentle tugs on the cord around his neck as she turned the stone in her fingers. It all but unmoored him.
Then underfoot, a slight tremble reverberated through the ship’s planks. They both took a step back and glanced to the windows. The flippercraft turned inland and passed over the first of the black cliffs that shot straight out of the churning white waves and treacherous currents.
“We’ve crossed into the Eighth Land,” Dart whispered.
As the flippercraft angled higher and the sun cleared the seas to the east, the entire land suddenly ignited, awash in morning light. Past the climb of the Nine Pools, the highlands awaited, framed in green peaks, thick with mists that glowed as pink as the clamshells of Farallon’s Ruby Pool.
But as the sun rose, it revealed a disturbing sight farther up in the highlands. A black pall mingled with the mist.
Dart noted it, too. “Smoke…”
With a growing sense of unease, Tylar stood on the captain’s deck, sharing a rail with Rogger and Krevan. “Still no word from any of the ravens we sent?”
“Not one’s returned,” Rogger said.
They had sent four birds flying with each bell as the flippercraft crossed into the Eighth Land. They bore messages toward Saysh Mal, announcing their arrival, inviting welcome and tidings. Tylar had ordered their craft slowed when smoke was noted rising into the skies.
Smudge smoke, Krevan had assessed with his more experienced eye. It did not churn and writhe with the breath of fresh flame. The pall here seeped from an old fire, one still smoldering in ember.
“What about the raven we dispatched to Farallon?”
Rogger shook his head, then shrugged. “No surprise with that one. When I stopped at the Nine Pools during my pilgrimage, Farallon was lost to his own dreamsmoke, wallowing in a torpid state from inhaling too deeply on his water pipes, bubbling with the dried and burnt petals of the realm’s water lotus. You could burn his palm-thatched castillion down around his ears, and he’d still not move. His household had been little better.”
Krevan pointed to the mountainous peaks with their vertiginous cliffs draped in greenery. The cloud forests still lay hidden in the valleys beyond, blanketed behind mist and smoke. “We should continue forward. We waste the day’s light. I’d prefer to be there before night falls.”
Tylar agreed and motioned for the captain to stoke the alchemies and gain the height necessary to climb from the Nine Pools into the highlands. The flippercraft rose with the barest shudder. Two massive peaks stood as sentinels before them, framing the gateway into the forests of Saysh Mal.
They had no choice but to trespass.
The flippercraft circled out and back, gaining the height to push over the falls, but just barely. The ship sailed forward between the towering peaks, fording the waterfalls from a distance close enough for spray to sparkle the flippercraft’s glass Eye.
Then they climbed higher yet, following a twisting concourse that switched up between jagged peaks until at last the squeeze of the mountains released them. A vast valley opened ahead, a gulf of mist cupped by green peaks. A few taller sentinels of the forest poked through the clouds and patches of open jungle shone brilliantly, like emeralds half-buried in snow.
But all was plainly not well.
Except for a few green pockets, the entire western edge of the valley floor lay exposed like a charred scar. Rising heat held back the morning mists, revealing the devastation. The forest had burnt to embers, leaving black trunks sticking out of the burnt ground like planted spears, a fiery palisade between Saysh Mal and the hinterlands that stretched out from the border there.
“What happened?” Lorr asked.