Chapter 255: A Spot of Rain

The rhythm swallowed everything else. The stone throbbed, the gold beneath the mask kept rising, and the two acted with a life of their own.

James was the only living thing in the room who seemed to have any say in the matter.

"Cap’n! Cap’n, sir! Cap’n... oi!" Kit’s voice reached him first, thin and distant.

Bran came next, sharper, closer to fear than she would ever admit to while sober. "Duw, Duw, what’s the matter with him, mun? Cap’n! CAP’N BACH, answer me!"

Then Jim’s voice, nothing but a burst of dread all through it.

James heard every one of them clearly enough, but his mind couldn’t keep hold of any of it. The words arrived and vanished at once, like cannon fire heard through fog.

Mary’s fingers closed tighter around his sleeve. She said his name again, and even that came to him as iron against his skin.

Well, now. That is interesting.

The voice came through all of it clean as a gunshot on a lazy day, and every other shout in the chambers seemed to step aside and wait.

I have been cataloguing this stone and that gold for the better part of a twelvemonth. I have furnished them with headings, subheadings, and a number of increasingly mortifying addenda.

And in all that time, neither has done a single thing half so promising as what they are attempting this very instant. I confess I haven’t the faintest notion what it means. And more astonishing still, I find I am positively dying to know.

James was still caught between the pulse and the light when he forced one thought out. Did the voice know what would happen if he let the thing run its course?

No. And that, I own, is the most interesting part. You have spent the better part of a year to proof, beyond any reasonable dispute, that prudence has never once slowed you down, so I see no cause to suppose it will begin now.

Whatever it is this thing asks of you, I recommend you give it. Purely in the interest of the experiment, you understand.

The voice had hardly told him information he hadn’t already seen for himself. The hollow in the stone woman’s face was exactly the shape of the thing tucked beneath his arm, its rim worn smooth by a hand dead for centuries.

James looked from the hollow to the mask, then to Mary.

His decision was already made.

She tightened her grip on his sleeve.

"James, ye great daft bastard, don’t ye dare..."

"Mind’s made, Mary."

"Did I ask, ye stubborn old goat?"

"Never needed to."

Mary kept hold for one heartbeat more, then released him. She had sailed with James enough to know that once he had made up his mind to be foolish, fighting with him merely wasted the good time before the foolishness began.

He set the mask against her face.

It dropped into the hollow neatly. The worn stone took the mask without a gap, and beneath James’s hands, deep inside the coffin, some entity shifted.

The noise was like a gun breech around a fresh charge, stone against stone.

Across the hall, a voice, whose he couldn’t have said, stopped halfway through a word he never caught.

Then the light beneath his palms released all at once, and the whole world turned white in a single stroke, sudden and complete.

The white remained for what felt like a while, then vanished.

Where his sight ought to have been there was nothing. No chamber, sarcophagus, crew, not even the sound of his own breathing.

Then, before his sight had properly returned, he smelled rain.

Plain and ordinary rain.

He had told Kit he had seen all this in a dream, and it seemed he had been nearer the truth than he knew.

There were no words in what followed. James could only watch it, like a spectator from the future.

When his sight found her, her wrist was already caught, black fingers locked around it.

Behind her, the ground where she had stood was drying into hard, cracked earth. Exactly as the mural promised it, whole fields withered behind her, spreading out like a wake behind a ship, and the low green mainland carved into the temple wall turned to dust.

The abductor brought her away across open water on a raft.

Behind them came the feathered serpent on a raft of its own, made from living snakes lashed together. It cut through swells that ought to have wrecked any ship built by human hands.

The chase went on across the. They passed a long, crooked coastline that could only be Cuba, then a small round island that, if he had been forced to swear on it, looked remarkably like Barbados.

Still the distance between hunter and hunted never quite disappeared.

At last a ragged ridge of land rose from the water, the reef spreading down its eastern side, and a bay cut deep into the lee.

James had crossed that reef drunk, half-drowned, and under fire more times than he cared to remember. He would have known it blind.

The shore was packed with kneeling natives when the raft reached the sand. Torches stood in ranks, and the whole procession bowed as it opened a path from the water to the doors of a temple.

These were the same doors James and his crew had climbed down through less than an hour earlier. Here they were new, freshly cut, their pale stone untouched by the centuries that had yet to come.

The abductor brought her through the kneeling crowd and into the temple.

James went with him, unable to stop even one step, down through a chamber built like the one where his body was waiting somewhere else entirely.

Down they went into a place so low that the torches of the vision barely reached it.

There the abductor fastened chains around her ankles. They looked like iron, though they might have been colder, and they were put on without ceremony.

Far above, the doors sealed shut behind him as he left.

The serpent found no way inside. It circled the sealed temple once, then again, searching for an entrance.

After that came the grief, pouring from it with nowhere to go and no door left for it to break.

The sky above the bay turned like an old bruise while the sea rose close to shore, and thunder crashed across the vision.

James understood it simply enough. This whole people’s fields were stripped bare, their shore towns swallowed, their civilization’s peace broken in one night that none of them had asked for and none of them had earned.

Through it all, the temple remained untouched, exactly as it still stood.

James understood then why nothing else of that world remained anywhere near it.

The vision narrowed until there was only one small point of black, so dark that James’s eyes could find none to hold.

Then a single thread of light revealed her.

She stood chained at the ankles in water no deeper than a boot. It had gone stale and still with however long she had been left there.

Then, in the last instant before the darkness swallowed everything, she raised her head.

Every other figure in that vision had passed through James as though he were not there at all. He was nothing but a ghost watching a story centuries after it had ended.

She saw him.

Her eyes found his exactly where he stood.