smelled of sweat and brine. “You brought on us luck, girl, you and your friend. You ever want to venture between spirals some more, we’re your men. We’ll take you.”
“Thank…thank you.”
He let her go and lifted his end of the crate again. To his partner as they carried it the rest of the way off the boat, he said, “We go back to Merjayzin and get him released first thing. We’ve committed a crime here, we have to make it right. Make it right with the avatar. Bring that poor sod back on board and let him talk all he likes…” They climbed onto the jetty, their words fading.
Diverus asked, “We saw an avatar?”
“Apparently.”
He stood still a moment before asking, “What is an avatar?”
“A spirit of the gods. Or a god made flesh.”
“Or snakeskin.” He smiled a little sheepishly and hefted his bundle of instruments.
“Yes, snakeskin.” With a final glance back at the mast, she followed him up and off the boat.
From right below, the stairs looked even more imposing than they had from the boat, impossibly steep. At least, she thought, they were wide.
Responding to the same view, Diverus drew a breath and started up. The sack of instruments rattled on his back.
As she ascended, the two sailors waved to her; they grinned as if the oyster girl, Reneleka, had arisen from the water and handed them her pearl. And, thought Leodora, perhaps she had. Perhaps the snake did indeed herald great good fortune.
Twice on the climb up the steps they had to stop. The second time they stood parallel to the pulleys that lifted the platform, still a dozen steps below the top. Turned around on the steps, they could see that the ropes securing the platform ran from the pulley in beneath the opening in the wall, and as they watched, hands reached out to grab the goods and drag them off the platform, out of sight into the darkness there. The workers remained ill defined in the shadows. Clearly a large space existed beneath the surface of the span—possibly nothing more than a place to store goods; but with the memory of their climb up Vijnagar still fresh, they both could well imagine a much more extensive underworld. The semicircle out of which the pulley beams projected was itself an ancient opening, the lip of pinkish stone grooved as from years of ropes cutting into the face of it as cargo was raised, perhaps from a time before beams and pulleys had been applied.
Down below, the sailors had become no bigger than gnats and the boat a toy in a crystalline harbor. Off to one side of the boat, something serpentine floated upon the surface. It might have been nothing more than the ridge of a reef. Farther out and to the south, a cluster of small islands rode the horizon. Leodora wondered if fishermen lived there.
Above them threadbare pennants snapped in a strong breeze, which buffeted them as they came up the final few steps.
If, as all the tales claimed, most ancient Colemaigne had once been made of spun sugar and other confections, then centuries of rain and wind had eroded the hard façade of the buildings, exposing and aging more traditional materials underneath—crumbling mortar and stone. The skinny buildings had lost their flat surfaces, their precise edges. Rooftops dipped, and tiles coexisted with thatchwork while the frameworks leaned askew. The roofs and the top floors had collapsed in most of them. It was as if monstrous claws had swung down from the sky and scoured them of their skins, leaving them to rot. The buildings were chalky ruins, their cracked beams like broken bones. The wounds looked old, and yet no one had repaired or rebuilt the houses. That seemed odder still.
The steps opened onto a wide square of broken flagstones, off which half a dozen streets branched. To the supplies being hauled in below, there was no apparent direct access.
Small ramps ringed the steps, wedges with their apexes facing in toward the square. At some time in the past carts would have met travelers here and whisked them away across the span in either direction. She could see them in her mind, the carts backed up to the little ramps, accepting trunks, crates, whatever people brought. She could hear them, too. The excitement of that time crackled up into her through the broken street. The sense of displacement lasted a few minutes, then evaporated as if blown apart by the wind; after that