It was studded with shards of glowing crystals, the same type of stone that had illuminated Katryn’s secret port, and that she used for lights inside the Horizon Chaser. They were arranged in some kind of pattern, but it was too large to take in from close up, and from further back the island’s vegetation got in the way. Still, he thought that it looked a bit like the letters of some kind of a script… not that he could have read it even if he’d been able to take it all in.

“Hey, Kat… I think you’re going to want to see this,” Jace called.

“See what?”

“I found your mutineers,” he said, with perfect confidence.

Who else would have left a mysterious message on the cliff? They’d followed strange writing to get to this place and their only real hope of continuing the quest was to find something to point them onward. Katryn had said that any sign of habitation would be long gone, but the rock of the island had been there long before the mutineers and would continue long after.

“Do they look angry?” she asked.

“Just come see.”

He could make out the tune of her grumbling if not the words. She skirted the edge of the dense greenery and so her first view of the exposed message was at an angle.

“Glowstone,” she said, grasping the truth at once. “Serpent’s sails! It’s glowstone.”

“Can you read it?”

“Read it?” she repeated, then stepped around closer, between Jace and the wall. “Oh, you’re right… it is writing.” She turned her head from left to right, then followed to the right at eye level until the glow stopped. “Oh, this is no good… part of the message is gone.”

“What do you mean, gone?”

She turned around to face him, pointing at the thicket of trees.

“The trees that grew up here sheltered part of the message,” she said. “The wind from the edge wiped out the rest. It would have taken ages… but there was plenty of time before we go here.”

“But at least we know the mutineers were here,” Jace said.

“That’s not all we know,” Katryn said.

“What else, then?”

“Glowstone only forms underground.”

For not the first time, Jace reflected on how much and how little had changed since he had left Keeper’s Cove. Sailing around the rim with Kat definitely differed quite a bit from his daily routine at old Prit’s tavern. The tasks he was sent to do were far more varied and… he had to admit… exciting.

But there was still much of the same sense of drudgery about everything he did. He was no longer a slave, he figured, but he couldn’t say that his position had actually improved. He was the one sent to chase after ghosts in the dark. Sure, Katryn had said it was because he was the expert, but the warm glow of flattery had lasted exactly as long as it took him to plumb the depths of his knowledge on the subject, which hadn’t been long at all.

Back at the campsite, all of ten feet behind him, Katryn hissed for him to get a move on. Jace crawled one cautious step forward. His hand touched a large rock, and a thought occurred to him. Creeping into the midst of ghosts was possibly not the best idea. If he had to disturb ancient and possibly vengeful spirits, it would be better to do it from a distance.

He picked up the rock and righted himself. Hefting it in hand, he judged the distance to the trees. They were, he judged, uncomfortably close. But Katryn and the Horizon Chaser were closer. He cocked back his arm and then let the rock fly in a high arc.

It clattered off the trunk of one of the trees. The eerie glow moved not at all in response.

In fact, now that he was looking at it, the glow seemed to be extremely… inert. Where the leaves and fronds of the greenery blew in the wind it gave the appearance of movement, but in other places it seemed very uniform. Either he was dealing with very still ghosts, or the glow had some other explanation.

And as soon as he thought of that, he remembered.

“By all the seas,” she said.

She blinked her eyes, rubbing and squinting to make sure she wasn’t afflicted with an afterimage of the fire… not that the fire was burning all that high or bright. Certianly not brightly enough to explain the glow, which now that she was looking at it seemed quite bright… bright enough that it was reflected on the face of the natural rock wall behind the trees.

The seasoned sailor stretched out her leg and nudged Jace with her toe. He, no stranger to being kicked awake, yelped and started up at the lightest touch.

“Hush, you fool boy!” she said.

“Sorry! Sorry,” he said, much more quietly the second time. “What is it?”

“I don’t know,” Katryn said. “I need you to look over there, in the trees, and tell me what you see.”

He turned, confused… and then stared, no less confused.

“You see that, too?” Katryn asked him.

“What is it?” he asked. “Ghosts?”

“Of course not,” she said.

“Then what?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I was hoping it was a figment of my imagination, brought on by your blathering about them earlier…”

“What’s going on?” Sheiral mumbled.

“Nothing,” Katryn said. “Go get inside the Horizon Chaser.”

“Now I know something’s going on,” the girl said, suddenly much more awake. There wasn’t much space on the little island for anything to be going on, so she soon spotted the phenomenon. “What’s that?”

“Probably ghosts,” Jace said.

“Probably nothing of the sort,” Katryn said. “But since you’re the resident expert on the subject, you can go take a look.”

“How comfortable could you be, sleeping on a tilted bunk?” Katryn asked.

“More comfortable than I’ll be on the ground,” Sheiral replied. “The last time I had anywhere truly comfortable to sleep, it was on Montaldo’s ship… and I was chained up! Anyway, I’d rather be uncomfortable and safe inside than uncomfortable and out here.”

“You’re perfectly safe right where you are,” Katryn assured her. “There’s nobody on the island but us, and probably nothing bigger than a rabbit.”

“There’s nothing bigger than a rabbit on the ship, either,” Sheiral said.

“Even still, I don’t want to leave you alone in there all night.”

“What about Loki?” Sheiral asked.

“That’s why I don’t want to leave you alone,” Katryn said. “At least out here, I can be sure there aren’t any malignant spirits whispering things in your ears.”

Jace had long since stopped paying attention to the exchange, which had been repetitive from the beginning, but at the word “spirits” his ears perked up. An idea popped into his head.

“You don’t suppose the island’s haunted, do you?” he asked suddenly. “I mean, if the mutineers all died here.”

“What?” Sheiral said. “You brought me to a haunted island?”

“No, Jace is just being silly,” Katryn said. “That happened hundreds and hundreds of years ago. Even if the mutineers had left behind some sort of ghosts, they’d be long gone by now.”

“Why?” Jace asked. “Ghosts don’t die of old age.”

“No, but I’m sure that after so long of haunting the same speck of rock and sand, they’d get fed up with the whole thing and just move on,” Kat said.

“That’s not how ghosts work,” Jace said, with a child-like certainty.

“How do they work?” Sheiral asked breathlessly.

“Now Jace is being stupid,” Kat said. “Or possibly he’s being marooned.”

Jace wasn’t paying attention to her, though. Sheiral’s interest in his words excited him and filled him with confidence, and so… even though he’d never given the subject much more than the sort of idle thoughts and imaginings that any young boy might have… he suddenly found himself an expert on ghosts.

“Well, ghosts hang around because they don’t want to let go of something, right?” Jace said. “If a spirit wants to keep something that badly, it’ll stick around forever, as long as that thing is still there to keep holding onto. And the ghost will try to stop anyone who tries to take it from them.”

“There you go,” Katryn said. “The mutineers were set down on this island with nothing but basic supplies. What would there be to keep them here?”

“Maybe the island itself,” Jace said. “Maybe they think it belongs to them. Maybe they’ll come after anyone who…”

“Well, we’re not trying to take the island,” Katryn said quickly, before Jace could lay down any lines they may have crossed. “We’re just here to look for their graves, which we’ll do very respectfully come first light. Don’t forget, until we find some proof, we don’t even know that the mutineers were even here.”

“But even if they weren’t, someone must have died here, at some point,” Jace said ghoulishly.

“Somebody still might,” Katryn said. “Let’s all just get some sleep. Come on, Sheiral. Goodnight, Jace.”

“Hey, before we go to bed, do you want you want to tell ghost stories?” Jace asked.

“Not even a little bit. Goodnight, Jace.”

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“There aren’t any buildings,” he said. “Not even tents or things.”

Kat laughed.

“Did you expect there would be?” she asked him.

“Well… you said the mutineers were left here,” he said. “They would have made shelters, right?”

“Yes, probably little more than canvas and wood, if they were lucky enough to have canvas,” she said. She gestured at the first of the two tents they had put together. “Do you think this would still be standing a week after we left? A month? Past the first really good storm?”

“Well, no, but it would still be there,” Jace said. “Unless it got completely swept out to sea, but something further back in the trees wouldn’t.”

“Everything falls apart eventually,” Kat said. “Everything rots.”

“Keeper’s Cove was started by marooned sailors,” Jace countered. “Some of the stuff they built is still there.”

“I’m sure it is, if people kept using it, building it up, making repairs,” Katryn said. “But Keeper’s Cove hasn’t even been there a hundred years, and whole cities have vanished in less time than it’s been since the mutineers were left here.”

“How does a city vanish?”

“Wood rots, mortar crumbles, stones erode,” Kat said. “The wind shifts sands, and plants reclaim the land we’ve cleared. That’s what happened to a good deal of the world in the time since the Great Empire fell. Whatever shelters the mutineers build wouldn’t have taken long at all to collapse after they died.”

“What if they were rescued?” Jace asked.

“Then we’d be out of luck,” Kat said. “But the account we’re following meshes with another account, one left by survivors of the treasure fleet disaster who went back seven years later to try to rescue the mutineers, out of guilt or camaraderie. They found no survivors, so they left behind a memorial or marker of some kind and then moved on. That account didn’t contain a location, but everything else matches with the one that Sheiral translated.”

“So… how does any of this help us find where the fleet went down?”

“If we can find some trace of the memorial, some sign of the mutineers… something to confirm that this was the location, then that gives us a dot on the map… a place the treasure fleet definitely passed,” Katryn said. “We find enough of those dots and we can maybe start drawing some lines.”

“And what if there’s no trace left? What if it’s like those cities?” Jace asked.

“Then this is still sadly one of the better leads… we proceed like we think the fleet might have stopped by here, but we keep our eyes and our minds open to other possibilities,” Katryn said. “The worst thing you can do when you’re hunting a treasure is to be too certain of something you’re not certain of. You can follow the directions exactly from step two to the end, but if you don’t have step one right you’re as likely to follow them off the edge of the world as anything else.”

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At the same time, while Kat was a strong swimmer, she wasn’t a natural at it on the same order as Jace, and she didn’t think that Sheiral could swim at all. She also didn’t relish trying to get a book or parchment from ship to shore, if it came to that.

So, after a careful study of the northern shore, she picked the shallowest approach she could find and beached the tiny ship. Loki groaned and protested the decision, but she knew the enchanted timbers could take a little scraping.

She had kept one eye on the boy even as she dealt with the problem of location. She didn’t think the atoll harbored any large or dangerous beasts, but she couldn’t be sure… she’d seen some manner of goats and large rabbit-like rodents that she had assumed were the legacies of past sailors, but if the island could support them, it could support things that hunted them, too.

She had visited the Fingernails before during “rim-runs” done to avoid pursuit, but she’d never put in for an extended spell at them. Alone, she was more comfortable staying on the ship at night, and she’d never had need to go back into the trees when she could get kindling and fruit from the edges of the small wood.

“The boy’s not my worry,” she said to herself as she watched him slipping in and out of sight around tree trunks. “If he gets himself eaten by snakes, that’s his own lookout… on the other hand, he has been a bit of a good luck charm for me, hasn’t he? But then, how lucky can he be if he gets eaten by snakes?”

She became aware of a looming presence just behind her left shoulder. She turned to see Loki there, looking past her at Jace.

“Do you have something to say?” she asked.

“No, no, I think you’re doing a good enough job on your own,” he said. “In fact, I’m in danger of feeling superfluous… although I would point out that you do have a stake in whether the boy lives or dies. If he lives, he’s going to want to share in your prize.”

“So? I think I’ll be able to afford to let a runaway slave boy walk away with enough gold to satisfy his wildest dreams,” Katryn said. “I think the money I gave him for paper was probably more tetrae than he’d ever clapped eyes on before.”

“As a slave,” Loki said. “What if he gets it into his head that he’s entitled to more? What if he wants half? What if he wants it all?”

“Then we’ll have a problem,” Kat said. “But a small one… not one worth worrying about now.”

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“Land’s on the other side of the rock,” Katryn explained to him. “That’s what makes it a good shelter for us… any ship that wants to land is going to have to come closer to the edge than most captains like.”

“Why can’t we see the edge?” Jace asked.

“You can, a bit, from here… just a bit,” she said. “It’s just there’s not really much to see. Look beyond the islands. See the white foam where the waves are breaking like they’re hitting something? That’s them hitting nothing… the nothing at the edge of the world.”

“How far is it?” Jace asked.

“From here, it’s about three miles, maybe four,” she said. “You’ll have a good look from the islands. We’re making for the easternmost one.”

The edge did rapidly grow more apparent as they approached. Kat had been right that there wasn’t much to see… it was like the world was shrinking, the horizon getting closer. With nothing beyond it but empty sky, it was hard to get the sense that they were heading for a cliff, but there was something disquieting about the way the water just stopped, and Jace was glad when they rounded the rock and he had something else to look at.

The eastern island had the lowest and widest “nail”. The rock sheltered an atoll, with a clear blue lagoon taking up much of the island. The strip of beach that separated the stretch of water between land and void was very thin, especially at the point closest to the edge. Green plants grew on the other sides of the lagoon, especially the south end, in the shade of the great rock face.

“This is where the mutineers were most likely marooned,” Kat said, looking out across the island from the prow of the little ship. “Since it would have had the best chance of supporting them at all… the islands would have all been a bit bigger back then, but this one was always the biggest, and it has the lagoon.”

“Is that freshwater?”

“No, it’s not as salty as the sea, but you wouldn’t want to drink it,” Kat said. “There are ground springs in the back of the island, though. No, the lagoon’s important for food… fishing’s not good this near the edge, otherwise.”

“Why’s that?” Jace asked.

Katryn gestured off to the side.

“Would you want to live your life with that always visible out one of your eyes?” she asked.

“No,” Jace said.

“Neither do fish.”

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He also had a sense of purpose and a greater understanding of what it was that Kat and Sheiral were doing, and was receiving better treatment from Kat after bringing her the book.

He also knew what it was they were after now: the treasure of Targus. It had a very satisfactory ring in his head, or when he said it out loud… which he did, not infrequently.

Visions of an endless war and a vast, world-spanning empire and a fleet of ships laden with treasure going down in a storm and lying in wreckage at the bottom of a harbor filled his eyes with sights more interesting than the monotony of the waves.

Loki bothered him less often… the mysterious figure seemed sullen over Jace’s improved spirits, and spent the days withdrawn from the world in his peculiar fashion.

“Have you ever been to the edge of the world?” Kat asked him one night when it finally occurred to him to ask her exactly where they were headed.

“No,” Jace said. “Though, sometimes the men in the tavern said that Faresia was the edge.”

“No, they call it an edge island because it’s as close to the edge as anywhere that’s worth going is,” Kat said. “But there are specks of rock a good sight closer. The land actually slopes up, towards the edge.”

“Land?” Jace repeated. “I thought the Outer Sea went all the way out.”

“Oh, it does, but there’s solid ground under the water,” Kat said. “At least, in most places. And it slopes upwards, like a great bowl.”

“And that holds in the water at the edge?”

“Well, no,” Kat said. “The ‘bowl’ doesn’t quite come up that far. More like a saucer, I guess. The water at the utter edge is shallow enough for sounding. A ship could drop anchor there, though it would want to keep a nice, taut line or nothing would stop it from drifting up to the edge and tipping over.”

“So what keeps the water from spilling over?” Jace asked.

“The Terminus Equilibrium,” Kat said.

“What’s that?”

“The force that keeps the water from spilling over the edge,” Kat said.

“But what is it?” Jace asked.

“No one knows,” Kat said. “But clearly something does, and the philosophers call that something the Terminus Equilibrium.”

“So we’re going out to the edge?” Jace asked.

“Three quarters of a mile from it,” she said. “There’s a small island… four islands, really, called the Fingernails of the World. You could swim right up to the edge and look out if you wanted to. I don’t recommend it, though.”

“So, we’re going to be hiding again, then?”

“For a bit… it is remote, and a ship with sails doesn’t dare maneuver as close to the edge as we can, if we need to make an escape,” Kat said. “But your princess found us a starting point… a reference to the ‘Four Fingertips of the Divine Hand, where they grip the north of the world.’”

“The Fingernails?”

“Don’t know what else it could be,” Kat said. “And if we’re right, then it was the final resting place of a band of mutineers from the treasure fleet.”

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“Heard wizards say ‘words have power’,” Tauri said. “Never realized how much believe it.”

“As much as I am loathe to agree with the furred fiend, I must say that you are indeed needlessly and tiresomely verbose. In any event, with our lives in your hands, it would seem you need not offer us even a handful of gold,” Iskondra said. “Why hold this reward out?”

“Because I want you to be more motivated towards finding my treasure than trying to find ways to circumvent the runes,” he said. “Not that you’d be able to remove them, but without the promise of a reward, you could waste a lot of time in safe but fruitless activities that technically fulfilled the geas. Oh, yes, I could exert my power over you more directly if you were to dally too long, but… one does hate to second-guess such things. What if I decided you were taking too long and I inflicted a burst of excruciating pain on you, right as you reached some pivotal juncture? No, I want you to understand that you’re under my control… but I also want you moving forward on your own initiative.”

“Small problem,” Tauri said.

“Ah, yes, you don’t care about any amount of wealth,” Mauricio said. “Your incentive is that you get to stay close to your target, for the moment when you are once again free to pursue your own goals. The moment I no longer believe that this is enough to make you contribute to the search will be the last moment of your life. I would rather have two agents working for me than one… especially when one is under a compulsion not to kill… but I can trust that she will continue to bend every effort towards finding the treasure even if you’re not present. I can’t say that the reverse is true.”

“How about ‘especially’ if he is not present?” Iskondra said. “I’ll look even harder if I know that finding it won’t immediately result in an attempt on my life by an assassin to which I’ve been metaphorically and metaphysically shackled.”

“You’ll look as hard as you can regardless, because the only thing you value more than gold is your own life, and finding the former lets you keep the latter.”

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“Good pitch,” Tauri said. “Heard better, though. Okay if come back and try again.”

“Silence!” the wizard said. “I hold your very lives within my hands.”

“Washed first, Tauri hopes.”

“As if you would notice if he didn’t,” Iskondra said. “You’re filthy. I can smell you from here.”

“Way over there?” Tauri said, rocking his head back so that it hit the back of Iskondra’s head.

“Stop that!” she said. “Stop that at once! He’s touching me!”

“Silence!” the wizard roared again.

“Also, I am quite certain that I had a hat,” Iskondra said.

“While you were held in a state of unconsciousness, I inscribed runes upon your very souls,” the wizard said. “If I were to say the word… one single, very short word… you would find yourselves experiencing agonies beyond your worst imaginings, and then you would expire utterly.”

“Not just little bit?” Tauri asked.

“No, utterly,” the wizard said. He turned to the apprentice mage. “Artimaeus, leave us. See that my tea is ready.”

“But, my master…”

“Would you rather prepare my tea or stay here and serve as a demonstration of my powers?”

The mage scurried from the room as fast as he could.

“Now, then,” the wizard said. “As I was saying, I can activate the runes and cause you to die horribly. They can also be set to prompt you to act towards a specific set of goals, causing pain when you act against them in proportion to the level of transgression.”

“And how exactly are these runes supposed to judge that?” Iskondra asked. “You may look down your nose at my magical talents, but I am not uneducated in the mystic arts. To create something from magic and imbue it with that level of cogitation is far beyond the boundaries of known techniques.”

“Indeed,” the wizard said. “But as I said, these runes are bound to your own souls. You yourselves will be the judges of your progress. Should you choose to struggle against your leashes, to conspire against me, then it will be your own mind that condemns you.”

“And I suppose you want the book, then.”

“I have rooms full of books, rooms bigger than the houses most of the timid folk of this world live their whole lives in,” the wizard said. “I want the treasure… the assembled riches of a bygone age. When you’ve found it, the bond-runes will know and I will know… when that happens, you, swordswoman, will be free to fill your empty, threadbare pockets and you, assassin, will be free to gut her, but until that moment comes the two of you will never be free, not of each other and not of me, Mauricio of Montport. What do you think of that?”

“Maybe add ‘Magnificent’,” Tauri said. “Added alliterative appeal.”

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