“How many?” I whisper.
“Too many.” His voice is barely audible. “They’re guarding the final passage. Oreth knows we’re coming.”
“The wards?—”
“Masked our approach, but they couldn’t hide us completely. The curse knows its own.” He glances down at the pouch at my belt. “And those coins have been calling since we entered the water.”
I touch the pouch. Feel the hungry pulse of the gold inside, the way it strains toward the hoard ahead. The curse knows we’re here because I led it here. Every step of the way, the coins have been singing our position to their master.
“Then we fight through.”
“There are at least a dozen of them. Maybe more.”
“Then we fight through a dozen. Or more.” I meet his gaze. “Unless you have a better idea.”
He doesn’t. I can see him searching for one—running through options, calculating odds, coming up empty. The only path to the hoard runs through Oreth’s guards, and the only way past those guards is violence.
“Stay close.” He shifts his grip on his blade. “When we engage, go for the spines. They fall faster when you sever that.”
“Noted.”
We dive again.
TWELVE
AVIORA
The wraiths see us immediately—their luminous eyes tracking our approach, their bodies turning with that horrible fluid grace. They’re different down here than they were on the surface. Faster. More coordinated. The curse is stronger in these waters, feeding them power that makes them lethal.
Zoric hits the first one before it can react. His blade arcs through the water in a slow, powerful stroke that takes the creature’s head from its shoulders. The body drifts aside. The next wraith is already closing.
I find my own target—a thing that might have been a sailor once, its clothes rotted to shreds, its face frozen in an expression of endless hunger. My knife finds its spine, and I feel the jolt as whatever animates it loses cohesion. It goes limp. I push it aside and move to the next.
The fight is chaos. Underwater combat strips away everything I know about movement, about timing, about the careful footwork that’s kept me alive through a hundred dockside brawls. Every stroke is too slow. Every dodge comes a heartbeat late. The cold saps my strength, and the pressure builds in my lungs, and the whispers keep rising?—
Give up. Let go. Join us.
A wraith grabs my ankle.
I twist, slash down, feel my blade bite into the arm holding me. The grip loosens but doesn’t release—dead fingers tightening on instinct, on hunger, on the curse’s relentless need to claim. I slash again, and again, and finally the thing lets go. But I’ve lost my orientation. Lost sight of Zoric. Lost?—
A hand closes on my arm. Not cold this time. Warm, even through the water. Zoric pulls me toward him, his body shielding mine as he cuts through the wraiths that have closed around us.
I can’t see how many we’ve killed. Can’t see how many remain. My lungs are screaming, my vision narrowing, and somewhere in the back of my mind, I’m calculating how much longer I can stay under before I have to surface or die.
Not long. Not nearly long enough.
Zoric points toward a gap in the cavern wall, a passage barely visible in the phosphorescent light. The final stretch. If we can reach it, if we can break through?—
We swim. Not fighting now, just fleeing—bodies pressed close, blades clearing a path, the wraiths falling behind as we push through waters they’re too slow to follow. My lungs are bursting. My arms are failing. Every stroke is agony, every second an eternity.
And then?—
Air.
We surface in the hoard chamber, gasping, choking, clinging to each other in water that’s chest-deep and cold enough to kill. Around us, the cursed gold gleams in piles that reach toward the cavern ceiling—coins and ingots and stolen treasures from centuries of ships, all of it glowing with that sickly phosphorescence, all of it pulsing with hunger.
We made it.
