the ninth. Two Blood Gods were squirming through the mud and debris, vague forms in the haze, heading toward the sea. I stopped Clarissa and we stood motionless until the things had passed.
A crash echoed from far off—yet another building tumbling to the ground.
“By heavens!” I exclaimed. “The magnitude of destruction is incredible! The city is deteriorating as fast as it was built!”
Clarissa pointed to our right. “The emanation is coming from over there.”
We reached the lowest part of New Yatsillat and found it half-buried by rubble from above. Abandoned boats floated aimlessly in the bay. Thousands of Yatsill had taken to the water and were feeding much as seals do, diving from view and bobbing up a few minutes later with fish in their mouths. It was hard to believe these creatures possessed a language, let alone that they’d been capable of creating a civilisation.
“Look!” my companion cried out. “What is that?”
I followed her pointing finger and saw an orange light sliding along beneath the surface of the water. We watched until the fog swallowed the illumination.
“Some sort of machine?” I speculated. “How many more mysteries can we deal with?”
We moved on.
Clarissa led me northward, steering past some heaps of fallen masonry and clambering over others. She put her fingers to her temples. “This telepathic transmission is strong, but it does at least drown out my obsessing over those blessed blueprints.”
“I thought you’d stopped thinking about them.”
“Maybe. I can’t tell. I suspect they’re still knocking around inside my skull, but their racket has been thoroughly muffled.” She pointed ahead to where the terrace abutted the high cliff face. “If Yissil Froon is the source of the psychic protection, we’re very close to him.”
We continued on until, finally, we came to a row of warehouses—mostly still standing—that had been erected against the cliff. Clarissa entered a narrow gap between two of them.
“I’m blind as a bat,” I grumbled a few moments later as we were engulfed by pitch darkness.
Clarissa took my arm. “I can see clearly. There’s a cave just ahead.”
Beneath my feet, I felt the cobbles give way to bare rock.
“It’s a natural tunnel,” my companion murmured. “Put a hand on the wall to your left. Let it guide you.”
The passage wound from side to side, gradually sloping upward.
After many minutes had passed, Clarissa said, “It looks like it opens onto a large space. Not far to go now.”
I squinted into the blackness but saw nothing.
A few paces later I heard trickling water and jumped as a quavering voice, speaking Koluwaian, called to us from somewhere ahead. “Welcome. I’m glad to meet you at last. Come sit with me.”
“Who is it?” I hissed.
“An elderly woman,” Clarissa answered softly.
“Please,” the voice said. “Come! Come!”
Clarissa tugged my arm and whispered, “She’s sitting in the centre of a cave. There are mushrooms and some sort of lichen growing all around the place. The water you can hear is a stream falling from a niche in one of the walls. My goodness! The woman is very old! She’s emaciated, and—and she has yellow eyes!”
We moved a little further forward then stopped and Clarissa pulled me down to the floor. I sat cross-legged and waited patiently.
Just in front of us, the thin reedy voice said, “I greet you, Clarissa Stark, Aiden Fleischer. Heh! Heh! My name is Pretty Wahine. The Yatsill call me the Saviour.”
8. GODS
I uttered a cry of astonishment. The Yatsills’ god was alive!
“You’ve been made an Aristocrat,” Clarissa observed, then said to me, “She has the little bumps over her eyes.”
I squinted and strained to see but couldn’t make out a single thing. The lack of light was total.
“Yes, my child. As have you. Life on Ptallaya is strange! Heh! Heh!”
My friend asked, “You came here from Koluwai?”
Pretty Wahine didn’t respond immediately. She wheezed in the darkness—the respiration of an ailing, ancient body.
She said, “There is a hole over the island. We know that to be true—don’t we?—for we fell through it!”
“We did,” Clarissa agreed.
“I was a young woman when it took me—walking in the hills with my husband, Yaku—dear Yaku! How I loved him all that time ago! How he changed!”
“He was transported with you?”
“He was. We were sucked into the sky and awoke in a forest. Oh! We were afraid to move—we didn’t understand where we were—but I became thirsty, and saw fruit around us, so I cut into one and drank its juice. Yaku warned me not to. He said it might be poisonous. But I did it