Aurelius.
I can hardly read, my heart is beating so quickly. My eyes keep trying to dart forward and I have to draw them back to read the note word by word. He has not minced words.
This offer comes but once and if ignored unleashes upon you the hatred of the heavens.It’s a dramatic opening.I have what you desire. Come to me in the way I detailed not long ago upon this very pier. I will await you until dark. Fail and I will consider your rejection of my hospitality a declaration of war and shall take from the flesh of your people an appropriate recompense.
He’s signed it with a dozen titles and then ended it with his name.Aurelius, God of the Air.
I stare at the note for a long moment, but there’s no ambiguity in what he’s said and no doubt in my mind that he can make my people suffer even more than they do already if I do not meet with him as he has laid out. And yet, I hate to go where he has the upper hand and I have only my own desperation and my wits to carry me.
Despite that, I dare not hesitate.
I kneel on the dock and rip the pouch from my belt with trembling hands.
The sea has gone dark, clouds rolling in. I hear a sound like squelching, but I pay it no mind. A sea creature, perhaps, working its way up the beach. I need to stop trying todistract myself from what I’m about to do and just get it over with.
I spill the contents of my belt pouch across the dock and fumble past the flint and the black pearl to where the sharp belt knife lies.
I pick it up with trembling hands and look from it to the sea and back again.
I wonder if it matters which finger I pick.
I place the edge of my knife against the joint of my smallest finger on my left hand. I’m sweating, but my mouth is dry.
Behind me, I hear the same slippery sound. This time, nerves frayed, I twist to look.
A familiar figure is hunched over the dock, caught in the act of reaching for the single black pearl lying on the weatherworn boards. It’s a man with six tentacles and two stumps where the others ought to be.
We both freeze.
“Going somewhere?” he asks me, eyes wary.
He must know that I know he wasn’t in the pearl—that when I tried to draw him out, he didn’t appear. He must see that I realize what this means—that when I thought he’d retreated into it, he’d somehow slipped away instead into the shadows of the island and hid there, likely waiting for a moment just like this where he could catch me unawares.
“Stealing something?” I reply.
“It’s not stealing if it belongs to you.” His words are bold, but he is trembling.
We’re both silent a long moment. What do I care if he takes the pearl? Without him inside it, it is useless to me.
“Take it, then,” I tell him.
For what use is his ghost to me? He’s done nothing but betray me and lie to me and lead me into traps. He’s welcome to his pearl and welcome to leave my life forever. He snatches it up and then retreats, and I wait until he has slipped back into the shadows before I turn back to my task, press my left hand firmly to the dock, and with my right hand carve the last finger away and throw it into the sea.
Pain makes me blink and sputter as I fight to control the shaking of my hands. I fumble and manage to wad cloth around the wound as the wind around me whips up, spinning like it means to form a hurricane with me at the center. Back on shore the trees bow down and the ocean at my dock depresses until it nearly touches the land. My little boat bucks and thrashes on the end of its tether and then I’m swept up into the fury of the wind, spun around, and spit out again. It’s just like when I move from place to place using the bowl of my hand, but this time I have no control over the movement and no sense of where I’m going.
I crash onto the stone steps of a temple.
It’s a temple I know very well—the temple of Okeanos on the island of Talasa, and I know who I will find inside it without having to be told—Aurelius, God of the Air, who by his power, and by the sacrifice of my own flesh to his will, has brought me here.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Take your breath for Aurelius,
Drink your drop for Okeanos.
The lines of the song run through my head as the great wind deposits me in a heap on the steps of the temple of Okeanos. Aurelius will be here somewhere.
Hard spikes of pain wash from my hand, leaving me gasping with nausea. But I don’t have time for pain.
