the girl’s tent. “I need you now!” As soon as he heard her grumbling approach, he clapped his first mate on the back. “Now! Let’s see if we can find enough gold so you won’t have to tell those lies anymore.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Across the narrow valley floor, a towering cliff face glowed almost golden in the desert sun. The soft stone was carved with nearly human figures that towered hundreds of paces high. Iryana grumbled disapproval as she caught up with Corin beneath the timeworn faces’ demanding gazes.
The air felt hot as a blacksmith’s forge, but Corin did his best to ignore it as he hurried ahead of his first mate across the narrow valley. There a path had been dug into the settled sand and stone of the valley’s floor, and Corin followed the path down until the loose walls of excavated earth loomed on either side.
Then suddenly the wall on his right opened out onto a wide pit, taller than a man and nearly forty paces across as it crawled along the base of the huge cliffs. The air might have been cooler here, trapped in a little box of shade, but it was crowded with the stink of men at work.
Corin saw Blake’s lip curl at the smell. The pirate captain shook his head. An end of their arduous journey, and the man could still object to the stench. Corin sighed and fixed his eyes on the sandstone doors now revealed at the far end of the excavation. Thrice as tall as a man, they curled in a wide, pointed arch that looked more like an ironwork gate than a door into a mountainside.
That thought dragged his eyes back left, along the wide strip of rock his men had needlessly unearthed. The same pattern marked the stone all the way down and plunged behind the soft earth embankment to the left—not a gateway here, but a barred wall, a huge iron gate etched in solid stone. And it was not the crude work of ancients, as it should have been. It looked light and delicate, almost living, like the finest masterwork outside one of the great houses in rich Ithale. Corin chewed his lip as he considered it. So many mysteries, even after all these years of searching. Excitement burned within him at the thought of all the answers he might find behind these timeworn cliffs.
At his side, Blake was evaluating the stonework, too. “Huh,” he said. His sharp chin stabbed toward one of the carved figures high above the uncovered gateway. “So this is truly your Oberon after all?”
For just a moment, Corin clenched his jaw to still a sarcastic response. He took a long, slow breath, then forced a smile. “So it would seem.”
Blake shook his head. “I thought the slave girl was only humoring you. I’ve certainly never heard of him or seen his likeness.”
Iryana shook her head. “The Godlanders have truly forgotten Oberon?”
Blake shrugged. “Little worth remembering. Stooped and old. He looks a fool to me.”
Friendly, Corin thought. Not foolish. Friendly. There was no room for the distinction in the first mate’s head, but Corin had learned his trade at the feet of Old Grim. There was no sailor on the sea more vicious, more brutal, more feared than dark Old Grim. But to his friends, there was no one more friendly, more measured, more insightful.
The face that both men considered now was barely more than a shadow on the stone, ten paces wide and fifty paces up a sheer cliff. But they had been here for weeks now, living beneath the unblinking eyes of those faded faces, and now they were all familiar.
There were others with their own features. Hundreds, probably, stretching far to the left and right. This was near the center of the range, if not the precise center, and there to the left, where the excavation had begun, was another towering figure, his feet carved in and eroded away some short distance above the delicate tracery of the long-buried gate.
That figure did look familiar. Carved in crude lines far more fitting to their age and worn thin by the sleeting sand that blew on the sun-scorched wind, still, it was recognizable. Familiar. It was the towering, powerful figure of the mighty Ephitel, tyrant god of all Ithale. Corin didn’t like to look at him.
“It just seemed so unlikely,” Blake said. Corin caught the motion as his first mate glanced sideways at him. “This far from the world. Buried under a