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I have a word for what that is. I learned it as a boy, from an aunt who told me it would find me when it wanted to and not before.

I decline, for now, to use it.

CHAPTER 7

CLARA

Edda comes at dusk with a pot of something and finds three artifacts laid out on Garrick's table like a place setting for a very strange guest.

She halts in the doorway. She says nothing for so long that I put down the pencil.

“He had one of those,” she says.

“What?”

“Not that one. Smaller. Flat, like a coin.” She sets the pot down without looking at it. “Twenty years ago. He was drunk, which he was twice in the time I knew him, and he put it on my counter and asked me what I made of it.”

“What did you say?”

“I said it was worth money and he should sell it and fix his roof.” Edda's mouth does something complicated. “He got angry. I'd never seen it before and I saw it once after. He said, Edda, it isn't treasure, and if I ever hear you call it that again we're finished. Then he picked it up and went home and we didn't speak for a season.”

I sit very still.

“Did he ever tell you what it was?”

“He said there was something under this marsh that people would take apart to sell, and that once it was apart it would be gone, and there'd be no putting it back.” She shrugs, but it's the wrong shrug, the kind that costs something. “I thought he was building it up. Forty years of mud will do that to any man. I thought, let him have his ghosts.”

“You weren't wrong to think that.”

“I was, though.” She looks at the table. “He wasn't chasing anything. He was standing over it.”

After she leaves I stay up with all three, and this time I don't pretend it's work.

Nine faces. Nine facets. Nine notches. And on the ring's reverse, so faint I need the lamp at an angle, nine dots in an arrangement I don't recognize, except that four of them are joined by a scratched line and the other five are not.

Garrick's sixth journal has that figure on the last written page. Under it he wrote a single word in plain script, which is so unlike him that I stare at it for ten minutes before I accept what I'm seeing.

Sky.

The sixth site is a shrine, and it's underwater, and that is apparently fine with everybody except me.

It sits in a basin south of the causeway where the marsh deepens into something that has earned the word lake. Four columns break the surface at the center, and they are only the top four meters of columns that go a long way further down, and between them, when the light is right, you can see the roof.

“It flooded,” Draeven says. “The basin subsided, probably during the same event that broke the causeway. Whatever your uncle wanted is under the roof, not on it.”

“And we get in how?”

“The stair. There'll be a stair. There always is.”

There is a stair. It's on the northern face, wide enough for six people abreast, and it goes down into brown water at an angle that makes my stomach explain its concerns to me at length.

We go down with rebreathers borrowed from Tilda Mire, who handed them over along with a lecture about seals and a bet with herself, stated openly, on which of us would come back annoyed.

Under the water the shrine is intact.

That's the thing I want to write down somewhere and keep. It's intact. There are benches. There's a floor of fitted stone with a channel cut around the edge for drainage that has had nothing to drain for four hundred years. There are alcoves in the walls where people put things down, and the things are gone, but the wear where they sat is still there, four centuries of hands making a shallow dish out of stone.

Precursor above. Human below. Somebody built a shrine out of a ruin they didn't understand and then the water came and took it, and both of those civilizations are equally silent about it now, and I am floating in the middle with a light strapped to my wrist, crying inside a mask, which is a genuinely terrible idea.