“And fall into that water? If it is water? No. We climb.”
* * *
As she’d told Marcus, Toinette had never learned to climb masts, any more than she’d learned to climb trees or anything else taller than a garden wall. She’d the advantage of havingseena number of men climbing in the rigging, though, and hearing a fair bit about it.Grip the shrouds, put your feet on the ratlines, and hope your arms don’t give outwas the sum of the advice, and she went quickly to work, conscious both of their precarious position and of Erik watching her.
The desire to show off, or to not look a damned fool, hadn’t passed either after bedding the man or admitting her past. Even in the middle of an evil temple, probably due to die soon, she felt his eyes on her as she gripped the vertically running shrouds, got her feet up on the first of the ratlines running between them, and began to climb.
Most sailors learned to climb in port or just out of it, ideally on a calm day. Toinette had rain blowing horizontally into her face, the ship pitching back and forth beneath her, and the ropes slippery beneath the soles of her boots. Wet hemp had taken most of the skin off her palms by the time she made it midway up, and she’d almost exhausted her supply of profanity.
She kept glancing behind her as she climbed, making sure Erik was still there and whole. For a man who hadn’t spent much time at sea, he kept up well—and kept his spirits. Every so often he’d meet her eyes through the rain-swept darkness and nod reassurance:Don’t worry about me.
Once, when Toinette looked back at her handholds, she saw a faint red light shimmering around them. It lasted through two blinks that time, but not long enough for her to get breath and call out a warning—and then nothing happened. The ship’s swaying grew no more violent, nor did the rain get any worse.
No point wasting breath, then, when the storm and the exertion made conversation impossible. She didn’t speak of the glow until they reached the top of the mast, where the light glimmered like a trapdoor in the sky.
Then they caught their breaths and hesitated, pure instinct not to tamper with the obviously nonsensical briefly overcoming the knowledge that there was nowhere else to go.
“I wonder,” Erik panted, “that there’s any way at all to climb. Or a door.”
“I saw red around the ropes,” Toinette said then. She glanced down and didn’t see it again. “Any ideas? As to why, I mean?”
“Aye. But not here. We’re only putting off the moment.”
Toinette had to admit that. Having admitted it, she had to pry her own fingers off the rope and stick one arm through the phantom trapdoor, which didn’t burn it off but rather let her put her palm on a flat stone surface. It was only slightly reassuring, but that was as reassuring as the temple would get.
She closed her eyes when she hauled herself through the portal, fearing the passage and the light more than she did emerging blind on the other side.
* * *
“What ideas?”
Briefly Erik was at a loss to know what Toinette spoke of, having been recently preoccupied with sitting down, catching his breath, and wringing a wet substance that he hoped would be harmless out of his hair and tunic. The portal had cast them into another featureless hallway, which he welcomed.
“Oh,” he replied, when his thoughts had caught up to the conversation. “I can think of four possibilities. It may be that this place, uncanny as it is, must follow certain rules. Rooms must connect to other rooms as much as they do in a real building, and a room must have most of the qualities of what it imitates. And so on. Or the…being…behind it hasn’t the wit to change very much.”
“Are those two notions, or one in two parts?”
“Only the one, if you’re keeping a list.”
“Just trying to follow your speech.” Toinette got slowly to her feet. “Argh. And we should start walking again, before my muscles all lock up. Go on.”
While Erik couldn’t argue her logic, his legs disliked greatly that she’d made the argument. “Second,” he added on a groan, “though we don’t know what’s at work here, if we assume that either this place has its own will or it responds to another’s, we may be influencing it with our own minds. Third, there may be another party, one besides our foe and us.”
“Or it may all be a trap,” Toinette said. Their wet boots squished as they walked. “Could be meat tastes better for the struggle.”
“That was the fourth possibility, aye.”
Toinette looked at the blank walls around them. “We don’t know that this place thinks,” she said slowly, “or that its creator is yet around to do the thinking. But we keep talking as though that’s the case.”
“That we do,” said Erik. “It has that quality.”
“Or we do.” Toinette shrugged, and grimaced as her soaked gown shifted on her back. “Every sailor speaks of his ship as a woman. I’ve never come across one that was more than wood and canvas, mortal-built. We make people out of things.”
Soldiers in France named cannons, Erik had heard, and his father praised his manor, during storms, as a man speaking of a faithful dog. He nodded. “You think this—”
“I don’t know,” said Toinette. “But itmightjust be a place men used, and the remnants of that use. Ungodly use, and ungodly men, likely, and made accordingly.” She glanced back at the glowing portal they’d come through. “More than likely. Doesn’t mean we’re walking through more than a ruin. So that’s your fifth path.”
“That it is,” said Erik. “And I’m glad you thought of it. I’d best be careful of assumptions here.”
