Snake Heart (Chains of Honor #2) -Lindsay Buroker Page 0,12

lit a lantern, and rummaged through his belongings. He walked over with the light and crouched, holding out a faded newspaper clipping.

Yanko tried to turn the portrait into an image of a person in his mind, then shared it with the tortoise. He could feel the minutes tick past and the stars come out as the creature thought about it.

Finally, the tortoise shared another image, and Yanko saw it, a younger and spryer tortoise hustling down a forest path that led toward the interior of the island. It passed rocks and trees, and skirted a ravine before slipping into a pool with a waterfall pouring into it. The tortoise paddled sedately across it, enjoying the sun warming its shell.

As Yanko started to think that his divinely provided guide was distracted as easily as Kei, the tortoise noticed a human picking his way along the thick foliage at the pool’s edge. The man’s face was identical to the one from the Kyattese newspaper article, and he carried a bulging sack over his shoulder.

Tomokosis tripped and slipped on the damp rocks surrounding the pool, stepping over thick bushes and vining plants. When he reached the waterfall, he kept going, ducking behind the curtain of water. After he disappeared, the tortoise continued to paddle about, enjoying the sun. It climbed out on the far side and munched on leaves. Yanko resisted the urge to groan or try to rush things along. He doubted tortoises knew how to rush. Besides, if Tomokosis hadn’t come out of the cave yet, this indicated he was doing something that took a while. Finally, the tortoise turned its head toward the waterfall as the human exited, this time with an empty bag hanging over his shoulder.

Yanko wished the tortoise had followed him back to his ship, so that he might see where it had set anchor in order to access the waterfall, but of course his guide had no interest in the happenings of humans. It was mere chance that it had chosen that moment to cool itself in the pool. Chance... or divine intervention.

Lowering his hand and breaking contact, Yanko leaned away from the creature. He wondered if the turtle god had left this representative here to watch over the island. He supposed the gods would never speak to him directly, so he would never know for certain. Still, this was the most interest they had shown in him, at least that he was aware of, and he murmured the closing to the Song of Prayer before standing up. The creature must have understood that they were done, for it shuffled back into the trees, disappearing from sight.

Dozens of stars had come out in the deep night sky. How long had Yanko been communicating with the tortoise? For a moment, he worried that Dak had disappeared and that he would have to spend the night on this island full of death by himself. More than a night, if the ship left without him.

“Dak?” Yanko took a few steps toward the path back down the hill.

The tiny flame of Dak’s lantern came into view between two columns.

“Here,” Dak said. He sat with his back to one of the columns, his pack resting so that it would block his light from anyone coming up the trail. A book lay open in his lap. “Find anything?”

“The tortoise remembers Tomokosis stashing some items behind a waterfall somewhere in the interior.” Yanko waved in the direction opposite of the beach. “I have no way of knowing if the lodestone was in the bag, but this island didn’t seem very large when we were sailing up to it. I’m sure we can find the waterfall.”

“Huh.” Dak closed his book and put it away. “I guess it’s good that I bumped this up from the sixth spot on my list of places to check to the third. I almost made it the first, but those other islands were on the way.”

“What made you bump it up?” Yanko wondered if the Nurian gods might be influencing his atheistic Turgonian.

“I did it when I learned Tomokosis had a woman here. Wouldn’t you return often to a port where you could get your snake greased?”

“My, er, snake?” Yanko decided that pretending not to understand the euphemism would be better than admitting he lacked snake greasing experience.

“Never mind. Let’s—”

A crash in the brush came from down the trail. Dak grabbed his rifle and cut out the lantern.

“Gods cursed trees everywhere,” came a snarl and a thump from farther