blackness where the stars had hung expanded and engulfed her. Then it was as if she passed through a membrane.
Her feet touched and she bent her knees to take the compression of landing, even though it was gentle. She settled in a crouch like a tumbler, coiled to spring and roll if need be. Rising up, she found herself inside a small room with a low ceiling through which it seemed she must have passed without any sign. A pad lay on the floor for a bed, and upon it were empty shackles. These were a prisoner’s quarters, then.
Light spilled in from a small porthole in the wall, and that combined with a sense of motion told her she was on board a ship.
The view through the porthole was of a shifting gray fog behind which towered sheer walls, so high that she couldn’t see the crest from there.
In turning, she kicked something that clittered across the floor. She picked it up—a flat reed set in a piece of wood that penetrated the center of a thin disk. She turned it in her hands, not recognizing it immediately. The reed had been scraped unevenly, and the whole piece had obviously broken off something larger. She realized then that she held part of the shawm that Diverus played. It looked as if someone had stepped on it.
She glanced at the bed again, imagining him shackled there. They had kept him a prisoner in here, and the mouthpiece of the shawm had acted as a magnet to her, even though Diverus was no longer here. She had arrived too late.
She opened the door and entered a corridor leading past other small rooms and out into a galley strewn with clay pots and jugs, bottles and cups. Curiously none of these things looked used. The bottles, full of wine, were corked and wax-sealed; the uneven darkness of the pots suggested use, but it must have been long ago. They were dusty now. The door on the far side of the galley led her onto the deck of the ship.
The rails and masts were lacquered black. At the stern, red bulbous lanterns hung like two extinguished eyes off a wing-shaped taffrail. The place she had just emerged from was a foredeck house. A ladder ran up the side of it. She climbed high enough to look across the top. A curious waist-high cylinder protruded from the center of the foredeck, looking something like a capstan, but at a location that made no sense.
She climbed the rest of the way up and went to it. Recessed in the top was an elaborately etched brass plate. She traced a finger across the black lines in it, which fanned out from a second, smaller pocket in the lower half of the plate. Other, curving lines intersected the rays, and at the top of the circle was a kind of gnomon on a swiveling needle. The small niche at the bottom was empty, but it seemed intended to hold some object smaller than her palm. She rubbed her finger on the projecting gnomon, then pushed at it. The ship abruptly canted, and she pulled her hand back. The ship settled against the jetty again, and its lines went slack. Whatever it was, the device exercised control over the ship. She left it and walked to the prow.
The ship had sailed into a channel of some sort. The high walls loomed everywhere, curving out of sight in both directions, suggesting that they’d sailed into a giant’s labyrinth. The ship was moored at the end of a jetty, one of three that lay like huge fingers upon the glass-like surface of the water. Two additional boats were tied up at the others, and the three jetties led to a single pier running along another stretch of wall. She could make out the zigzag of steps leading up, up into the fog.
She reached into her tunic, clutched the Brazen Head. “Where are we?” she asked.
The head yawned, showing its fangs. “At an end,” it replied, as cryptic as ever.
“Might you unravel that?”
“All spirals,” it told her, “come to an end. This is one such. Called Calcaria once upon a time, but no longer.”
“The end of a spiral,” she said in wonderment. Soter had told her that all the spirals on Shadowbridge began or ended in a helical span, which was why they were called spirals in the first place, but she had never reached one before. Spirals stretched far across the