City of Islands Read online

  Dedication

  For my classmates from Clarion 2010,

  who have offered encouragement and

  support at every step of this journey

  Map

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Map

  1. Mara the Fish Girl

  2. The Singing Bones

  3. The Lady of the Tides

  4. Fish Hook

  5. The Laboratory in the Tower

  6. Night on the Water

  7. The Winter Blade

  8. Weeping Stone

  9. The Sorcerer’s Library

  10. The Lord of the Muck

  11. Voices in the Dark

  12. The Hall of Glass

  13. Sea Above and Sea Below

  14. The Graveyard Island

  15. The Bone-Mage

  16. Partings and Plans

  17. The Worm on the Hook

  18. Into the Fortress Again

  19. Rescue

  20. The Truth and the Lies

  21. The Battle of Water and Bone

  22. A Song for a Stone

  23. The Waking Island

  24. Mara the Stone-Mage

  25. Season’s Change

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Books by Kali Wallace

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  1

  Mara the Fish Girl

  Mara found the bones on a cold, gray morning.

  Fog shrouded the City of Islands. The air stank of fish and salt and smoke, and underneath it all was the rich green scent of low tide. Somewhere across the water a woman was singing a cheerful spell-song for good weather, and fishermen shouted greetings between boats. Throughout the city, buoy bells rang, marking the places where ships had to navigate carefully to avoid running aground on the abandoned spires beneath the water. The sea was calm.

  Mara sat in the prow of Driftwood’s boat. Her legs were drawn up to her chest, her arms wrapped around her knees. She wore only a thin linen shift over the shorts and sleeveless top of her swimming clothes, but she didn’t mind the cold. Beside her, Izzy was dressed much the same. Like most people born in the city, they both had brown skin, brown eyes, and curly black hair; sometimes people mistook them for sisters, which always made Izzy smile. On mornings like this, they both liked to get used to the chill before it was time to dive. Summer was nearly over, and the sea was barely warmer than the air.

  “I think this is where the Fool’s Girl sank,” said Izzy, peering into the water.

  “I don’t remember that one,” Mara said. Hundreds of ships sailed into the city every season, carrying people and goods from all over the world. Not all of them sailed away again. In some places forests of wooden masts jutted from the water; in others bubbles rose in sporadic gulps, as though the ghosts of trapped sailors were gasping and gurgling still.

  “There was a fire,” Izzy said. “It was terrible. You could see it glowing all across the city.”

  Izzy was eighteen, six years older than Mara. Like Mara she worked for the Lady of the Tides as a diver. The Lady was the head of one of the city’s wealthy ruling families. She was also an eccentric mage who collected ancient artifacts left behind by the founders, the magical people who had built the city a thousand years ago.

  The founders had lived under the sea, with scales rather than skin, long tails instead of legs, fingers that ended in long fins, huge round eyes, and pointed spines forming a fan across their shoulders. Of course nobody alive had ever seen a founder, but their images were everywhere in the city, in fountains and statues and mosaics. The founders, when they lived, had been in command of magic so powerful they had lifted entire islands from the sea, carved fortresses and towers from solid stone, called storms to rage on clear days, and raced through the water in sea chariots pulled by swift black sea serpents.

  The founders were gone now, vanished forever into legends and myths, but the city’s mages still studied the founders’ artifacts, always hoping to find a bit of magic nobody else had found before. The founders had never written anything down, so their discarded belongings were all that remained. It was Izzy and Mara’s job to retrieve objects from beneath the sea for the Lady’s collection.

  But Izzy was planning to leave the Lady’s employ soon. She had been saving her wages to marry a pretty candlemaker’s apprentice on Summer Island.

  Mara told herself she wished Izzy well. She liked the way Izzy’s eyes lit up with happiness when she spoke about her fiancée, Nila, or when she joked about taking Mara with her so they could work together in the candlemaker’s shop. Mara laughed along with Izzy’s jokes to hide her true feelings, which were part jealousy, part fear. Izzy was the closest thing Mara had to a friend in the Lady’s household. When she was gone Mara would be alone.

  “There’s not much as bad as a ship on fire,” said Driftwood. “You never forget that.”

  Driftwood sat in the stern of the boat, pulling the oars with smooth, strong strokes. He was broad shouldered and dark skinned, and his voice was as low and deep as a foghorn, with the smooth, rolling accent of faraway Sumant. Mara didn’t know his real name. He was called Driftwood because he had been swept from a Sumanti galleon during a storm, washed ashore at Greenwood Island, and decided to stay in the City of Islands.

  “You better not be bringing us to a boring old shipwreck,” Izzy said.

  “I’m not,” Mara promised.

  It was all she could do not to bounce with excitement, but Izzy’s words put a pinch of worry in her gut. Mara was hoping the same thing, more fervently than Izzy could imagine. The Lady of the Tides normally told them where to dive, but this morning Mara had wheedled and pleaded until Izzy and Driftwood agreed to ignore the Lady’s instructions and go to a spot of Mara’s choosing.

  It had been weeks since they’d recovered anything; their last find had been a brilliant blue glass window from a founders’ palace, nearly intact, with only a single crack, and still humming faintly with ancient magic. If they didn’t find something else soon, the Lady would spend the winter looking for divers to replace them.

  That wouldn’t be a problem for Izzy, who was leaving anyway. But for Mara it would mean having to go back to the fish market on Summer Island, where she had worked for a year before coming to work for the Lady. Mara would still be there if Izzy hadn’t come to Summer Island last year, offering a job at Tidewater Isle to a strong swimmer and fast diver. Mara had jumped at the chance to prove herself and leave the fish market; she never wanted to return. Work in the market meant endless days of dull knives and freezing water and stinking rotten fish, earning only a drafty attic room and a thin crust of bread for her wages. Even worse, if the cruel fishmonger with his snapping leather strap wouldn’t take Mara back, she would be on the streets again, alone and hungry and scared, as she had been for months after her old guardian, Bindy the bone-mage, had died.

  Mara closed her hands into fists. She wasn’t going to think about Bindy this morning. She wasn’t going to think about the cold winter she had spent begging on the streets of Quarantine Island. A fine, calm morning on the water was no place for sadness.

  She unfolded her legs and stood. Driftwood slowed his strokes. The boat bobbed gently.

  “What exactly are we looking for?” Izzy asked. “There aren’t any sea caves out here. It’s all sandy shallows and seaweed.”

  Mara didn’t want to explain. If she was wrong, she didn’t want to be scolded for chasing wild stories.

  A few days ago, when she had a rare afternoon free, Mara had gone to visit her best friend, Fish Hook, a boy who worked in the fish market. They had been sitting on the Summer Island docks, enjoying the late season sunshine. Ma
ra had been talking about how little she had found diving this summer, how worried she was that the city’s mages had already uncovered all the founders’ treasures. She hadn’t realized somebody was eavesdropping until a boy had interrupted them. He was a foreigner, with pale skin and freckles and a shock of orange hair. In a nervous Roughwater accent he told them he had seen something strange underwater, something she might be interested in. He had fallen from his master’s fishing boat, and beneath the water he found big, strange bones, the likes of which he had never seen before. He hadn’t told his master, as he was new to the city and afraid the fishermen would laugh at him.

  Fish Hook had rolled his eyes and said, “Next you’re going to tell us you found a lost tower of the founders too,” but Mara had shushed him. Strange bones were exactly the sort of thing the Lady of the Tides coveted for her collection. Her most prized possession was a sea serpent skull so massive it took six men to move it into the ballroom when she wanted to show it off at parties. Mara had demanded the Roughwater boy tell her exactly where he had fallen from his master’s boat.

  Now, out on the water, Mara turned in a slow circle to search for the right landmarks.

  To the south stood the elegant twin spires of Lady of the Gales Isle, the last island separating the city from the remote southern seas. Directly to the north Glassmaker Isle and the Hanging Garden looked like a single jut of rock melded together. From this distance, in this thick fog, Mara could see only the faintest suggestion of the towering glass statue that loomed over the southern flank of Glassmaker Isle; the writhing serpents, the gleaming sea chariot in the shape of a half shell, and the grim-faced founder driving them to battle all vanished completely as the mist drifted.

  To the east of Glassmaker Isle, a bit farther away, smaller but steeper on all sides, was Mara’s current home: Tidewater Isle. The island had been carved into a single glorious palace centuries ago by the founders’ stone-mages, using magic no human mage could ever wield. They had crafted the great island fortresses as a gift for the humans in the city above the waves. That had all happened very long ago, when founders and humans had lived side by side, before they had fallen to fighting and the founders had gone away.

  Reluctance tugged at Mara as she turned again. To the northeast was the Winter Blade. It was a sliver of black, delicate as a needle, just barely visible through the heavy fog. Looking at that fortress of stone so dark and terrible brought back the churning, sour feeling of grief Mara had tried so hard to stamp down.

  For centuries the Winter Blade had been home to the city’s most infamous mages. Rather than staying in a single family or passing from parent to child, the island changed masters every time somebody more powerful ousted the previous inhabitant. The island’s current master was a man called the Lord of the Muck. He had held the Winter Blade for two years, since he had taken it from a Greenwooder mage named Gerrant. Mara remembered the night he had claimed it well, as it had been the second-worst night of her life. It was the night Bindy had died.

  Mara knew the Lord of the Muck was the reason Bindy was gone. Mara didn’t know why or how. She had no proof. All she knew was that Bindy and the Muck had known each other, and one stormy night Bindy had shoved a bunch of her magic journals into a satchel before going to meet the Muck on the docks. She had never come back. In the morning, when the storm calmed, a fisherman had found Bindy’s rowboat overturned east of Quarantine Island.

  In one terrible night, Bindy had drowned, Gerrant of Greenwood had disappeared, and the Winter Blade had passed into the hands of a new mage.

  And Mara, who had lived with Bindy since her parents had died when she was five, had been left with nowhere to go. She missed Bindy with an ache that had never faded, sometimes even more than she missed her parents. She hated the Lord of the Muck with a wild, helpless sort of anger. She still seethed to think of all the people who had refused to listen or care when Bindy died.

  But right now that wretched black tower and its mage were only a landmark. Mara turned deliberately away from the Winter Blade. Fog drifted to reveal tiny Starfish Isle to the east. A fragile bridge harnessed the uninhabited island to the Broken Tower, an abandoned lighthouse said to be haunted by the ghost of Old Greengill, a mage who had died centuries ago. According to legend, Greengill had hidden a vast treasure in secret caves all over the islands, then retreated with his treasure map to the very top of the lighthouse and smashed the steps so no one could follow. Adventurers and braggarts were always daring each other to climb the tower and retrieve the map, but the tower was too tall, its ruin too treacherous. Without wings nobody was ever going to make it to the top.

  “We’re almost there,” Mara said. The sea was brighter here, green and mottled thanks to the shallow, sandy bottom no more than four or five fathoms below. Izzy was right: it wasn’t the sort of undersea landscape that normally hid ancient treasures.

  “Here?” Izzy asked. “How can you tell?”

  “I just know,” said Mara, trying to sound nonchalant. She liked it when she knew things Izzy didn’t. It made her feel like less of a little kid trying to prove her worth and more like an equal diving partner. “This is the spot.”

  Driftwood stopped rowing. It was time to dive.

  “Where are the lights?” Mara asked.

  There was a scrape and a hiss as Izzy lit a match to ignite the murk-lights, a pair of magical lanterns enclosed in glass globes. She passed one to Mara and smiled crookedly. “I suppose you want to go first, just in case you find something special.”

  Mara’s face warmed and she ducked her head. “Maybe it’s nothing. I’ll come right back.”

  But in truth she was glad for Izzy’s offer. If there was a magnificent ancient creature in those shallows, Mara wanted to be the one to find it.

  “As long as you let me help bring up anything important,” Izzy said.

  Mara pretended not to hear. She didn’t make promises she had no intention of keeping.

  She dropped the murk-light overboard. It sank slowly, a golden glow descending into the dark. She stripped off her shift and smoothed down the front of her swimming clothes. She took a deep breath, let it out, then another, and another, until she felt a calm come over her. Mara couldn’t remember a time when she didn’t know how to swim. Her earliest memories were of splashing happily with her parents on the black-sand beaches of Greenwood Island. Swimming was as natural to her as walking. Even on gray mornings like this, the sea was welcoming and familiar.

  She was ready. She dove into the water.

  She kicked toward the murk-light, grabbed it with one hand, and aimed herself downward. She exhaled as she dove, but carefully. She needed to save her strength and swim with a clear mind.

  The bottom was only three fathoms down. The murk-light’s glow didn’t waver as Mara descended, but she felt it draw in on itself, as though it knew that fire, even magic-stoked fire, had no place in this underwater world. The water was clear, the current weak, the conditions perfect. Small green fish darted about, startled by her passage. Beyond them she saw a great shadow. Her heart leapt, but it was only a bulge-eyed bayfish. They were huge and ugly but gentle. Mara silently wished it a good day as she swam past.

  The seafloor was lumpy and overgrown with seaweed. Mara spotted ribs of rotten wood and broken barrels, the trunk of a charred mast, and the sloping remains of a deck. The ship’s figurehead, a carved image of a founder with its spiny fins splayed around its head like a crown, was jutting from the silt.

  She had found the Fool’s Girl, but she wasn’t looking for a sunken ship. She returned to the surface for air before diving again.

  And again, and again, growing more and more frustrated.

  Her third time up for air, Izzy called out, “All right, Mara?”

  Mara waved to indicate she was fine, but she didn’t head back to the boat. She wasn’t giving up yet.

  She treaded water slowly, conserving her energy. The Roughwater boy had been very clear: the bones were right on the seafloor, there for a
nybody to see. She had to be looking in the wrong place.

  Mara wished she knew some of Bindy’s spell-songs. Bindy had been a bone-mage, which meant she could use her magical songs on any kind of bone. Most of the mages in the city thought Bindy’s kind of magic was a joke, no better than soothsaying or fortune-telling, more fraud and trickery than real magic. Mara knew they were wrong. She had seen Bindy sing to the bones of dead mages in the Ossuary, chanting in mysterious languages to coax the bones into revealing long-lost secrets. Every time Mara had asked to learn those songs, Bindy had said, later, later, there would be time later.

  There had been no later for Bindy, and Mara remembered only a little of her magic.

  It was worth a try. Driftwood’s boat was far enough away that he and Izzy wouldn’t hear Mara if she sang a spell, just a little one. She racked her mind for one of Bindy’s songs, and all she could come up with were a few random spell-notes. She felt silly singing them, a babbling melody of la-la-la and oh-ah-oh. She didn’t even know what she was singing. While some spells were based on ordinary songs anybody could learn, others were sung in the language of the founders, with words whose meaning had been lost centuries ago. When Mara was very little, before her parents died, she used to make up songs and pretend they were spells, because so often that’s what spells sounded like to an observer: mere gibberish.

  For all she knew she could be casting a shark-summoning spell, and wouldn’t that be an unfortunate way to start her day?

  Mara hummed softly to herself as she considered her next move. Not a spell this time, just a song her mother used to sing as she sharpened her chisels. Mara’s mother had been a stonemason in Gravetown. Every morning she had filled their little house with warm cheerful songs as rain lashed the windows and the gray sea roiled outside. Mum had had no talent for magic—stone magic had been impossible since the time of the founders—but she had loved to sing.

  Mara often sang her mother’s favorite song to herself when she was scared or lonely, as a way of remembering those peaceful mornings. She knew every word: Over the sea and under the sky, my island home it waits for me. It was an old sailors’ song about missing Greenwood Island from far away, which had always made Dad laugh when Mum sung it, because Mum had never left the city, didn’t even like to visit the other islands. She always said she had everything she needed right there in Gravetown. Over the waves and under the storms, my heart is bound but my dreams are free. A cool breeze slid over the sea surface, a gentle warning of the changing seasons. Mara ducked her head underwater to dispel the chill. Older I grow and farther I roam, and my green island I yearn to see.