Stone pushed away from the wall. Moon tensed all over, but Stone only said, “I’m going out to talk to some groundlings, see what they know about this mortuary place.”
It wasn’t a bad idea. In fact, it was such a good idea, Moon wished he had thought of it. There was Theri, Rith, and Enad to ask, if they were back from their daily work, or the woman who ran the wine bar. But it was a much touchier subject than how strangers found work in the city. Moon asked, “How are you going to work ‘What do you do with your dead?’ casually into a conversation?” Tension made the words come out sharper than he meant.
Everyone seemed to tense in apprehension. But Stone just said, “I thought I’d ask somebody who won’t notice. Like Dari.”
As soon as the sun sank out of the cloudy sky, Moon and Jade left the tower, flying toward the coastline near the leviathan’s head.
All through the afternoon, the warriors had taken turns surreptitiously searching the empty buildings in this area, looking for passages down to the underground space. Root, Song, and Floret had been left back at their tower to keep watch over Rift and the two groundlings.
The mortuary temple lay in a shallow valley between the leviathan’s shoulders, surrounded by crowded, crumbling stone structures only a few stories high. There weren’t many vapor-lights and the empty streets were deeply shadowed, except for the gleam of water. The sea must wash up over the leviathan’s head whenever it moved, flooding the streets and leaving puddles behind. Moon could pick out only a few lit windows here and there. This was obviously not a highly prized neighborhood, if it had ever been one.
To the northwest, he could see where the creature’s body dipped down, just below the ridge formed by its right arm. The roofs and top stories of flooded buildings were just visible above the dark water.
They banked in to land on the peak of a roof, and Jade climbed down to the alley. Moon paused to watch a groundling lamp-tender make his way across the open plaza in front of the temple’s entrance. It was a big, round structure, at least four stories tall, topped by an octagonal dome. A wall formed a roofless court before the entrance, and inside it several blue-pearl guards, probably Ardan’s men, stood in front of the metalbound double doors. The night was cool, and they had gathered around a waist-high brazier. From their postures, they were very bored.
The lamp-tender reached the stand at the far end of the plaza. He filled the well in its base from the heavy canister he carried, closed it, and went on his way. The sputtering vapor-light in its glass cage at the top of the stand brightened noticeably.
“Moon,” Jade whispered from below.
Moon climbed down the pitched roof to a ledge where Chime and Balm waited. Chime reported quietly, “Stone just got here. He said he thinks there’s something over in that part that’s underwater.”
“We hadn’t looked there yet,” Balm said, frustrated. “We thought if there was an open passage, the water would have drained away.”
They took flight again, Chime following them toward the flooded section. Balm went to gather the others back from their fruitless search.
They circled down to the flooded street, and Moon landed on a roof and crept to the edge. The street formed a dark passage below, lined with empty stone houses, their doors long ago washed away. Stone was in groundling form, standing balanced on top of a low wall just below this house. The water was as dark as obsidian and gleamed in the moonlight. The place smelled of dead fish and silt and… “Do you smell that?” Moon whispered.
Jade answered, “Yes, it’s water traveler. There must have been one through here at some point.”
Moon hooked his claws into chinks in the mortar and climbed down the wall. “I saw some yesterday, heading toward the city. But why is the scent here, and not at the harbor?”
Following Moon and Jade, Chime said, “This must be where they do their trading, to keep them away from the groundlings in the harbor. After all, Nobent wanted to eat you when he thought you were a groundling.”
Then from below Stone said, “The rumor I heard from Dari is that the city trades the dead bodies of the poor to the water travelers in exchange for edilvine.”
“They trade their dead?” Moon stepped cautiously into the water and his claws