Cobwebs clung to every corner of the room. The grime was so thick on the floor that No-Face had left a little dust-angel where he’d fallen. Behind the bar, the shelves were empty, save for dirt. There was no evidence that the place had been a thriving business full of people only moments before.
Menagerie stepped into the room. Aurora and Infidel followed.
Menagerie muttered something to himself I couldn’t quite catch, save for the word ‘time.’
“Oh no,” said Aurora, who’d apparently caught what he was saying. “She was too old to go back more than a day or two. She’d never survive a longer trip. She-”
“You aren’t blind, Aurora,” said Menagerie.
“Is this a private conversation, or would you care to fill me in on what’s happened?” asked Infidel.
Relic hobbled into the room. “They won’t betray the Black Swan’s secret. I, however, am not bound by their oaths of loyalty. The Black Swan owes her power and influence to a rather tragic curse. She-”
“Guys!” shouted Reeker as he rushed into the room, water streaming from his clothes. “You gotta come look at this.”
The whole building shuddered as he spoke. The air took on the stench of rotten eggs, but Reeker didn’t seem to be the source of the odor.
Menagerie furrowed his brow. “Did the barge just hit bottom?”
“All the water’s draining out of the bay!” said Reeker, waving his arms for emphasis.
“Luhguptaruh,” said No-Face.
“Good idea,” said Menagerie. “To the roof!”
Before he finished speaking, where the man had stood there was an owl gliding forward. He flapped his wings once and shot toward the cobwebbed spiral staircase in the far corner of the room, vanishing as he tilted his wings and flew up to the second floor.
No-Face and Reeker followed without hesitation.
Aurora grabbed Infidel by the arm. “You took my side,” she said. “Thank you.”
“What?” asked Infidel.
“In the fight with the Goons. You defended me when I was down.”
Infidel shrugged. “It was three against one. I always side with the underdog. It’s nothing.”
Aurora nodded. “Still, I owe you one.”
Relic sighed as he hobbled across the room toward the staircase.
“You women can bond another time,” he grumbled. “Right now, we should follow the owl.”
CHAPTER FIVE
The roof of the Black Swan was a broad, flat deck with four large stained-glass dome skylights and a sixty- foot mast that jutted up from the middle, with smaller masts fore and aft. It had been many years since the bar had actually been moved with sails; the masts now served mainly as flag poles to fly the barge’s banner, a field of pure white with a black swan in the center. Menagerie stood in the crows nest atop the tallest mast, peering out at the bay, his hand raised to shield his eyes from the morning sun. Infidel leapt, grabbing the rigging, and in seconds reached his side.
Ignoring the main reason we’d come out here, her gaze was instead drawn to Menagerie’s face. It took me half a second to understand why it was so interesting at this particular moment.
“You have your teeth back,” she said.
“Owls don’t have teeth, so when I changed back, I grew new ones,” said Menagerie. “Can we focus on the problem at hand?”
The water was flowing out from the bay so swiftly that fish were left flopping in the mud. The Black Swan was anchored in water ordinarily twenty feet deep at its lowest, but it now sat flat on the bottom, the whole structure shuddering as it slowly sunk into the muck. As far as the eye could see boats were stranded across the bay, except, I noted, the ships of Wanderers. These had been the ships that had gone missing during the night. They were now far out at the mouth of the bay, dozens of them, riding on a ridge of water that bunched up near the gap leading to open water.
“You ever see anything like this?” Infidel asked.
Menagerie shook his head; he was the oldest of the Goons, a resident of Commonground for over forty years. He pointed toward the bright blue forms of river-pygmies running out on the mud flats, snatching up the stranded fish. “Maybe they know what’s going on.”
But before Infidel could leap down to speak to a pygmy, a mountain of bright blue-green water rose from the sea just beyond the Wanderer’s ships. It kept rising, as other bulges formed around it. It vaguely resembled, from a distance, an enormous sea-turtle, assuming one could grow to be several miles wide.
Suddenly, the impossibility that this was a giant turtle changed into reality as the beast’s eyes snapped open. Its vast maw yawned wide, a mouth several hundred yards across. The Wanderer ships were pulled toward it by a fierce suction. Yet, these expert seafarers proved the match of the turbulent white water, guiding their schooners across the ship-studded waves as agilely as a river-pygmy steering a canoe through the pilings of Commonground. In moments, all the vessels had ridden the flow of water into the mouth of the great beast.
“It’s Abyss,” said Menagerie, his voice hushed in awe.
Abyss is the primal dragon of the sea. His consciousness spreads through every wave and ripple in the world’s vast ocean. Due to his pact with the Wanderers, he’s one of the few dragons who still intervenes in human affairs. Most of primal dragons don’t even notice mankind, any more than an earthquake notices the cities it topples, or a tornado notices the villages it smashes to splinters. To witness a primal dragon personify itself, taking on at least an echo of its original form, was something few men would ever see in their lives.
With the last of the Wanderers swallowed, Abyss closed his mouth and spun, heading back toward the open ocean. The mound of water that had been heaped up by his arrival collapsed, sending a wave fifty feet high surging back into the emptied bay.
“Brace yourselves!” Menagerie shouted, before changing into an eagle and launching himself into the air. He could barely be heard as the roar of the water reached us, a thundering wall of sound that made the timbers of the Black Swan tremble. The tidal wave hit the far end of the docks, sending boards and pilings flying high into the air. The boats of slavers, pirates, and pleasure seekers splintered as they were crushed by the rushing water.
The wave hit the Black Swan. The barge was solidly built, but still the timbers cracked and snapped as the water lifted it, spinning it sideways, carrying it up over the docks and gangplanks, crushing everything in its path. Infidel clung to the railing of the crow’s nest; the mast groaned, but didn’t topple. The barge began to bob in the relatively smoother water behind the crest of the wave. The tsunami kept moving, reaching the normal boundaries of the shore, then beyond, carrying debris and corpses up over the marshes, into the forests.
Infidel looked down as the barge settled on the remains of docks and boats trapped beneath it. Relic was nowhere to be seen. No-Face had wrapped his ball and chain around the mast and was still on his feet, completely drenched. Reeker dangled in his hammy grasp, his normally well-groomed mane now tangled with a mass of brown seaweed. Aurora stood on the water next to the barge, seemingly walking on the waves, until the current calmed and revealed an ice floe beneath her.
The ogress shouted to the eagle circling overhead, “This is what she saw! This is why she went back!”
Infidel shouted down, “Would someone tell me what the hell is going on?”
Relic cleared his throat. Infidel spun around. He was standing right behind her. I never saw him climb the rigging, though, admittedly, my attention had been focused elsewhere. His rags were drenched; steam rose from them as if they’d been soaked in boiling wash-water rather than the tepid waters of the bay. He smelled vaguely of brimstone as he said, “On the day that the Black Swan was to be married, her groom was killed in a horseback accident. It was a senseless, pointless, random tragedy; the world is full of such moments. Unknown to her fiance, the Black Swan was a Weaver, a member of a secret sect of witches with the power to rend the fabric of reality and knit it back into something more to their liking. Yet, even Weavers lack the power to restore life to the dead. In
