Chapter 169: Nobody Stands Up

In the governor’s keep at Bergis, a girl with four black wings dropped a teacup.

It didn’t break. It hit the stone and rolled, and a long, thin line of tea crept across the floor toward the courier’s boots. Nobody moved to stop it.

“Say it again,” Wren said.

The courier swallowed. He was a young man in a dusty Solarian coat, and he had ridden three days without sleep to bring a letter nobody wanted. “The Emperor’s tribunal. Last week. Governor Valerian was found guilty of, of the Ghost killings. Condemned. Then the sentence was commuted. Banished, my lady. To an island off the north coast.”

“Which island?”

“I don’t know. It has no name. No one comes back.”

Wren’s red eyes didn’t blink. Behind her, the great shadow in the corner of the room shifted, and two huge, slitted pupils opened in the dark. Nox, long and black and wreathed in red, uncoiled one wing and breathed out a smoky growl that made the windows buzz.

“The link’s gone quiet,” Wren said, very softly. She pressed a hand to her chest. “I thought he was just busy. I thought he was sulking. But there’s nothing, Nox. I can’t feel him at all.”

*The sea,* Nox rumbled, *is not ours.*

“I know.”

*We do not know the island.*

“I know.”

*We could die.*

“I *know,* you big idiot.” She turned and picked up her cloak. “He’s alone. He’s never been alone. Not once. He doesn’t know how.”

She walked out of the keep, wings trailing, and a dragon followed her into the dark.

The sailors wouldn’t come within thirty feet of the beach.

I watched them from the shallows. They’d run the black ship aground on a spit of grey sand, dropped the ramp, and driven us off it with spears, thirty convicts in chains, stumbling through knee-deep water. Then they hauled the ramp up again so fast it clanged.

“Wait!” somebody shouted. “Where’s the keys? Our chains!”

A man in a captain’s coat leaned over the rail. He looked sick. “Your chains are cursed to rot in the first rain. You’ll be free by morning.” He swallowed. “If you’re alive. Don’t sleep on the sand.”

“What?”

“*Don’t sleep on the sand,*” the captain said, and then the ship’s oars bit the water, and it pulled away so hard I thought it might tear itself in half.

We stood there and watched it go.

My hand twitched toward my hip, where the staff should have been. It wasn’t. I’d get used to that, or I wouldn’t.

Thirty of us. I counted. A big, bald brute with a crescent of scars across his chest. A thin woman who hadn’t blinked since the ship. An old man in a silk coat that had cost a lot of money once. A boy who couldn’t have been fifteen, hugging himself and muttering a prayer. A dozen cutthroats, forgers, poisoners, deserters. Me.

“What did you do?” the boy whispered. He was standing next to me. I don’t know why.

“I’m told I killed some people.”

“Did you?”

“Some.”

“Oh.” He nodded, shaking. “I stole a horse. For my sister. They said it was a *noble’s* horse.”

I didn’t tell him it wouldn’t matter.

*Valerian,* Aurelix said, a thread of gold against my throat. *Look at the tide line.*

I looked.

Along the whole length of the beach, just above the waterline, ran a pale line of driftwood. Bleached, twisted, bone-white. At first I thought it was random. Then I noticed it was *even,* the way a fence is even.

*And the sand beyond it,* Aurelix said, *is a different color.*

It was. Above the line, the beach was grey. Below it, near the water, a darker, wetter brown.

“Get on the dry side!” a voice yelled. The big bald man. He had his fists up and a grin like a wolf’s. “Move! There’s a cliff, there’s caves, we’ll find shelter—”

“*Wait,*” I said.

Nobody listened. Nobody ever does.

By sunset we’d found the caves.

Fifteen of us. The rest had gone off in groups, the brute with a dozen toughs, the old man with the thin woman. Nobody wanted to share a cave with a man who’d been called the Ghost. The boy stuck close, and I’d stopped trying to shoo him off.

The sea went purple, then black. The first stars came out, thick and cold. Somewhere in the distance a bird screamed, and then stopped.

“I need to piss,” said a big man near the mouth of the cave.

“Go outside, then.”

“I will.” He laughed. He stood up.

Out on the beach, a lantern was burning, left behind by the sailors, a little yellow wink on the sand. A few of the toughs had gathered around it, cooking something over a driftwood fire. They were laughing. Somebody was singing.

I saw the sand move.

It was subtle. It always is, the first time. The beach, which had been still, rippled, as if something huge had rolled over in its sleep. The singing faltered. A man near the fire said, “Did you feel that?” and stood up to look.

It took him around the waist.

I don’t know what it was. A white, boneless arm the length of a ship’s mast, soft as bread dough, with a thumbprint pressed into the end like a hungry little mouth. It shot up out of the sand, wrapped around the standing man, and *folded him in half.*

There was a wet crack. A noise like a sack of walnuts. His scream cut off in the middle, and then he was gone, down, into a hole in the beach that closed over his boots like a mouth.

The singing stopped.

“Down!” I roared. “Everybody down! *Get on your faces!*”

A second man stood up to run. The arm came out of the sand behind him and took his head clean off.

“*Flat!*” I screamed. “Flat on the ground! It’s looking for the ones who stand!”

Some of them heard me. They threw themselves down, hands over their heads, shaking. Others didn’t. Others ran, screaming, scrambling for the cliff, and the sand came up around them in pale ropes, plucking them off the beach like berries off a bush.

The big bald brute fought. I’ll give him that. He roared and swung a rock, and the arm caught his wrist and bent it backward until the bone popped through the skin. He kept swinging with the other hand. The arm wrapped his throat.

“HELP!” he screamed. “SOMEBODY!”

Nobody did. I couldn’t have. I lay flat on the stone with my cheek pressed to the cold rock and a small, shaking boy beneath my arm and watched a man get pulled into a hole in the sand while he screamed.

It took four minutes for the beach to go quiet.

When it was over, only eleven of us remained.

We lay there until dawn. Nobody dared to stand. The boy had stopped shaking and gone grey and still, his hand locked in my sleeve. The old man in the silk coat was whispering the same prayer over and over. The thin woman lay flat beside me with open eyes, completely silent, and for the first time, I saw her *look* at me.

“You knew,” she said, very softly.

“I guessed.”

“How?”

“The driftwood line. The dry sand.” I kept my voice down. “The captain said don’t sleep on the sand. But he didn’t say don’t *stand.* The sailors weren’t scared of the beach. They were scared of being *tall.* They put the ramp up and crouched when they left.”

She stared at me.

“A rule,” she whispered.

“Yeah.”

“The island has *rules.*”

“I think every part of it does.”

“Venn,” she said, after a moment, and offered a hand. “Poisoner. Eleven counts.”

“Valerian.”

“I know. The whole ship does.” She almost smiled. “I’d like to stay close to the person who knows the rules.”

“I don’t know the rules.”

“You know more than anyone else here.” Her eyes slid to the old man in the silk coat, still whispering. “Oswin there forged a duke’s will. He’ll be useful. In a month.”

The sky went grey, then pink, then gold. The first light touched the cliff, and with it, the sand went soft and ordinary again, and the arm was gone.

Slowly, one by one, we crawled to our knees.

Down at the waterline, something had washed up in the night. A scrap of black cloth. A sailor’s coat, wet and torn. I walked down to it on my hands and knees, with every nerve screaming.

There was a piece of paper pinned inside the collar.

I knew the handwriting before I unfolded it. Neat. Precise. A little too cheerful.

*Dear Governor,*

*I hope the beach was educational. Do mind the rules. They are the only mercy the island has.*

*A small gift will be arriving within the month. I’d be most obliged if you’d be kind to her. She’s rather young, and she’s been told so much about you.*

*Yours in anticipation,*

*The Doctor*

I read it twice. Then I folded it, very slowly, and tucked it into my sleeve.

*Valerian,* Aurelix whispered. *What does he mean, ‘her’?*

I looked out at the empty sea.

“I think,” I said, “we’re about to find out.”