the black dabs of kohl on his cheekbones his eyes were wide.
He spat out a word-nothing she was meant to answer, she thought. Then he flicked his knife sharply: Get up. Thasha stood. The man whistled softly, and in seconds a pair of his comrades stood beside him. All three stared at her wordlessly. Then they began to talk. She heard 'Arquali girl' and a few other familiar words, but she could not piece them together into any sort of meaning. She tried gestures, pointing toward the shore and shaking her head: I'm not with them. The men paid no attention.
At last the one who had found her sheathed his sword-but not his knife-stepped forward, and took her roughly by the arm.
To a thojmйlй-trained fighter like Thasha, his moves (sheathed weapon, casual grab) told her all she needed to know. He expected nothing from her but weakness and fear. She let him pull her a few steps. Then she whimpered, planted her feet. She gave a little tug of protest, blinking as if on the point of tears.
The other two men had not moved. The one who held her scowled and released her briefly-long enough to strike her backhanded across the face. Thasha cringed, penitent, and followed him weeping down the rest of the dune.
She could taste her own forced tears. No, that was her blood. Wrong! Hercуl would have shouted. That is distraction! What matters now, girl? Her foe's impatience. The slide of his feet. The way he fingered the knife.
When a good twenty feet separated them from the men above, she blundered into him as if by accident. She floundered and cried out-still the frightened little girl. The man turned, perhaps to hit her again, but in that instant Thasha leaned back into an elbow-thrust that snapped his head sideways with the force of a wooden club.
He was enough of a fighter to stab at her even in his shock, but not enough of one to land the blow. Her right hand caught his wrist; her right knee drove up into his now-exposed belly, and as his own knees buckled her left fist smashed down against his jaw. Then she snatched the knife from his hand.
He could not even gasp. His eyes rolled, astonished. Before he fell she had the sword off his back and turned to face the others, her mouth blood-smeared and furious, a blade raised in challenge in each hand.
Plunder on the Haunted Coast
4 Teala 941
82nd day from Etherhorde
The guards drove the prisoners on. As they neared the base camp, another facet of the operation came into view. Iron cages dangled from the ropes between the land, the cargo ship and the sea barge with its bathysphere. Shielding his eyes, Pazel saw that the ropes were threaded through a gear-and-pulley network in an enormous loop, and that the dangling cages were moving between the vessels and the shore. On the towering rock beside the shore camp, Volpeks were turning a heavy crank like a ship's capstan.
Even now a cage was making its jerky way out to sea. And inside the cage, he saw with another start, were a dozen prisoners.
'So that's how we get to the wreck,' said Neeps.
'I want to go home!' sobbed the small boy. The round-eyed Tholjassan girl held him by the shoulders, then bent and whispered in his ear. The boy sniffed but cried no more.
At least twenty well-armed Volpeks were at work in the camp. Besides the gear-turners and the lookouts, a great many were clustered about a heap of what at first glance looked like no more than slimy, vaguely colorful rocks. Using picks, chisels or their bare hands, the men attacked the objects: tearing out weeds, cracking coral deposits, stripping barnacles. In most cases they found nothing but stone. In a few, however, the objects' true forms came suddenly to light: here a sea chest, there a broken amphora, elsewhere a bust of some forgotten prince. There was a birdbath fashioned from a giant clamshell, a stone eagle with a broken wing, a curling elephant's tusk banded with gold. The men pushed these treasures aside with hardly a glance. They were clearly after something quite different.
'Is it the Red Wolf they're seeking?' Pazel asked a guard.
'Of course! Now step back!'
Another cage was nearing the shore, also heaped with plunder. It passed above a tall mound of freshly dug sand.
'Hold!' shouted someone. The gears stopped; men scrambled up the mound with nets and poles. One pulled a latch and the bottom of the cage swung open like a trapdoor. Out tumbled the salvaged artifacts, into the waiting nets. A guard-captain looked around until his eyes settled on the newly arrived youths.
'Ten divers!' he shouted.
Quite at random, the Volpeks seized ten, among them Pazel and Neeps, the round-eyed girl and little boy. All were marched up the sand mound, then lifted one by one into the air.
'Grab the bars! Climb in!' roared the guards.
The young people could just reach the swinging cage. In they went, shaking with fear, and clung to the sides with hands and feet. When the last boy had entered, the men latched the trapdoor anew.
'Rest easy,' they jeered. 'Enjoy the ride.'
Another shout and the cage began moving seaward. The prisoners gripped the salt-slimy bars, looking down as sand turned to foam beneath them. The cage moved slowly: Pazel had time to look back and see Arunis' covered wagon being carried, not rolled, over the dunes.
Then Neeps cried, 'Look!' and Pazel turned in time to see the brass sphere vanish-no, plunge-from the arm of the crane straight down through the barge's main hatch. There came a distant boom and a spray of water from the hatch; then a great chain began to slither through the crane into the depths. And Pazel realized that he was not looking at a hatch at all but rather a square opening built right through the hull.
A diving portal. Of course.
'They're going to put us in that thing, aren't they?' said Neeps.
'Yes,' said the girl.
'You seem to know a lot about diving,' said Pazel. 'Can you guess how deep it is out there?'
She frowned at the waves. 'Twelve fathoms?'
'Lord Rin!' cried Neeps. Twelve fathoms was over seventy feet. How could anyone dive so far? But the girl remained calm. She had the look of someone almost irritatingly calm, Pazel thought, although the talk of ghosts had rattled her a bit.
'There's something wrong with the water,' she said, pointing to their destination. 'See how green it is? I think that wreck is in a kelp forest.'
She was right about the water: nearly all of it near the spot where the bathysphere had plunged was shimmering green.
'But that will make finding anything much harder, won't it?'
The girl just nodded, her face expressionless. Her name was Marila, she told them. She had been diving for sponges in the coves around Tholjassa since she was twelve. The frightened little boy, Mintu, was her brother.
'This sorcerer's mad,' she said. 'Nobody ever gets away with treasure from the Haunted Coast. Everyone knows there's a curse on it. See that wreck?' She pointed at a single, tilting mast in the distance.
Pazel nodded. 'What about it?'
'That's a Mzithrini Blodmel, ninety guns. Tholjassan ships turn away from land if they're close enough to see her. They say she had a captain who noticed something shiny at low tide. He dived himself and came up with a golden Star of Dremland. One little star. He tossed it up to his son, told him the seafloor was covered in jewels, and dived back for more. It was just twenty feet deep, but he vanished.'
She made a little poof gesture with her hands.
'The ship left him and retraced its path exactly. But this time there was a reef, where there had been nothing before. It split them wide open. They abandoned ship, and a storm blew up and swamped the lifeboats, and the only one who made it out was the man who had thrown the gold star back into the water. You can't take so much as a shell from this place, everyone knows.'
The Mzithrinis did what Thasha feared most. They waited.
