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Then I put the jars on the floor in the wrong order.

All of them. Every jar, shuffled, into a shape that means nothing whatsoever, while somebody kicks in a door two houses down. If they burn the place, I've lost nothing that isn't in my hand. If they take the jars, they take two hundred kilos of dirty water and a very expensive lesson.

I go out the back window into Joren's spare skiff with Pip already at the tiller, and we are forty meters into the reeds when the first man comes through the green door my uncle painted the year I was born.

Draeven arrives eleven minutes later.

I don't see the start of it. I see the end, from a reed bank, through Tilda's field glasses, and what I mostly see is that it stops.

Eleven men come to Mountmend. Two leave, and they leave swimming.

He doesn't chase them. That's the part the village talks about afterward, and the part I understand least until much later. He clears the walks, he checks every house, he hauls the three stranded ones off the mud and ties them to a mooring post, and then he takes up position at the head of the boardwalk in front of my uncle's ruined front door until the boats come back from the west.

Forty people come up that channel expecting to find their village gone.

He's still standing there when they land.

Elder Moss gets out of the first boat, walks the whole length of the walk, and stops in front of him. The staff is shaking. It takes him a moment.

“What's your full name, tracker?”

“Draeven of Ashkaal Tribe, Kalei.”

“Draeven of Ashkaal,” Elder Moss says, loudly enough for the whole walk. “Mountmend has stood four hundred years and never asked an outsider for anything. Ask for whatever you want.”

There's a silence.

“Boats,” Draeven says. “Six. And every person here who can hold a line and follow an order, at the south landing, at dawn the day after tomorrow.”

“For what?”

“For going down,” I say, from the back, because I've just got off the boat and my legs have finally started shaking. “Two-sixty, straight down. And I know the way.”

CHAPTER 16

DRAEVEN

They give us the house back in a day and a half.

That’s not a figure of speech. Joren rehangs the green door before the mercenaries are off the mooring post. Tilda rebuilds the workshop shelving with Pip fetching and dropping things. Four women I have never been introduced to arrive with a window, install it, and leave without telling me their names. By the second evening Garrick Marlow’s house is in better condition than it has been in twenty years, and the only thing anyone will accept in return is that Clara agrees to eat something.

She’s on the front step when I come up the walk at dusk with the last of the descent gear.

“They put a new latch on,” she says. “It’s a better latch than the old one. I’ve been sitting here for ten minutes having a completely disproportionate reaction to a latch.”

“It’s not about the latch.”

“It is absolutely not.”

We eat at Garrick’s table for want of anywhere else, with the eight artifacts pushed to one end and the single sheet weighted under a jar that has been returned to its shelf in the wrong place on purpose, as a joke only two of us find funny.

Tomorrow, before first light, forty people are going to take six boats forty kilometers south so that two of them can go a quarter of a kilometer straight down into something nobody has entered in ten thousand years, while an antiquities broker with a private army works out that we’ve solved it.

Tonight the house is warm and somebody in the village is playing an instrument badly.

“I want to say a thing,” I tell her, “and I’m going to say it badly, so let me get to the end.”

“That’s the most alarming opening you’ve ever managed.”