Chapter Twenty-Three. Eban
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
EBAN
“Gin, you all right?” I ask. She doesn’t move, and I look over to what she’s staring at. It’s a young Laconian lord, surrounded by street urchins, handing out coins and candy. He’s laughing and joking with the kids, who leap and catch the copper pieces and wrapped sweets.
“That’s him, isn’t it?” I whisper. What was his name again? Then I remember. “Rollo.”
She nods, still unable to speak.
“Gin,” I say gently. “We have to go. You can’t stand here, people will notice. He’ll notice.”
Sure enough, the pompous lordling looks up and catches Gin’s gaze. There’s a brief flash of recognition, and his smile fades. But he collects himself and turns away. “I believe that’s all I have today, young ones.” He turns on his heel and leaves with his guards.
“That bastard,” Gin says, tears in her eyes. “I thought … I thought…”
“That he loved you?”
She squeezes her eyes shut. “Yeah.” She opens them again. “But it turns out I was just one of those kids to him, right? Someone who hung on his every word, just thankful for a piece of candy, a sliver of brass. I’m pathetic.”
I take her by her shoulders and shake her a bit.
“Gin. You’re one of the bravest and strongest people I’ve met.
I’m sad to tell you you’re an excellent thief and a great fighter.
I know you don’t want to be, but you are.
And that guy—he’s nothing. He hasn’t had to work a day in his life, he knows nothing, he’ll die knowing nothing. ”
She sniffs. “Yeah.”
I let her go and she wipes her eyes and nose on her sleeve. “I’m okay. Let’s go.”
We make our way to the docks—my plan is to find an unsecured fishing boat similar to the one that took us to the Lashing that we can use to make our way to the cliffside entrance from the shore to House Dominant.
After we’d spent just a few days in the Lashing, walking through the Sleeve again, where I’ve lived my entire life, feels foreign and strange.
Not only is it sad and ugly, but now I see what Lacon has done to us.
The Ophir work as one, as a community of equals, but here we’re estranged from each other, distrustful, wary.
We don’t work together—we work against each other.
Lacon has taken a lot from us, but this, I think, is the worst.
As if reading my mind, Gin asks if I’ve ever heard of the Chronicles.
“I think so—they were lost in the fall,” I say. “They were supposed to contain all the world’s knowledge of magic.”
“Tadhana says that Ophir was made of magic, that its people were magic,” she tells me.
“That would make sense. The city floated on water. It wasn’t an island—which are pieces of earth that broke off from the mainland, and are part of the earth’s core. Ophir wasn’t part of the earth.”
“But if we are magic, why are we like this now?” she asks, motioning to the run-down shacks and dirty slums.
“Lacon defeated us. Liberation Day, remember?”
“That’s another thing, Eban. Did you ever wonder why it’s called Liberation Day? They taught us that Lacon conquered us. That’s what we call them—the conquerors. That they came to Ophir with their cannons and guns and defeated us, a backward civilization, and set us to rights.”
“Okay … yeah. What are you getting at?”
“So why do they call it Liberation Day? I always thought it meant they liberated us. But from what? Now I think they call it that because they were the ones being liberated. But what were they being liberated from?” she asks.
“And you know what else? Tadhana doesn’t call Lacon the conquerors. You know what she calls them?”
“Tell me.”
“Rebels.”
The fishing boats are a leaky, shabby bunch, but I find one that looks seafaring enough. “I can work with this,” I tell Gin. “And I don’t have to row all the way to the Lashing.” I worry the boat will be secured with a lock, but it’s merely tied to two posts.
“It’s luck. Or divine intervention,” Gin says. “Maybe the gods are looking out for us.”
“Did Tadhana do this?” I ask with a smile.
“I don’t know,” Gin says. “She’s sleeping. She does that a lot.”
“I notice you didn’t tell Darius you have a relic.”
“Or that you do, too,” she says.
“You trust him, though.”
“I do,” she sighs. “Maybe I shouldn’t. But he’s kept the Lashing together. That counts for something, doesn’t it? And he’s Ophir, not Lacon.”
I grunt. I don’t really want to talk about Darius right now. What kind of business did he have to address? He seems to disappear a lot, but what do I know? I’m just a common thief. I push the boat from the river’s edge halfway into the water. “Ready?”
“As ready as I’ll ever be,” Gin says, helping me shove the boat into the water the rest of the way, and we both hop in. We hug the shoreline until we reach the rocky precipice.
Dark gray clouds roll in overhead, and the water is instantly ominous, murky and choppier. The boat sways around. “It’ll be all right, we just need to round the bend around Lacon City and then we’ll make it to shore.”
I tell Gin I can take over the oars, she doesn’t have to row. I steer the boat, but it’s foggy and hard to see. There’s nothing but gray haze in front of us. But there’s no going back, either, and so I row harder, faster. I’ve got to get us to shore before the storm rolls in.
“Almost there!” I tell Gin, even if I’m starting to lose steam and have to pause with every turn of the paddle.
“Wait! Stop rowing,” Gin says, grabbing the sides of the boat.
“What is it?”
“I think we’re going backward.”
I stop rowing and look around. There’s nothing to see, though. Just dense, gray fog, and worse, a smattering of rain.
“Can you feel it?” Gin asks.
I hope I’m imagining it; an illusion caused by the fog, perhaps. But I know what she means. “Yes.” My heart sinks. We’re being pulled farther out to sea. There’s no telling how far from shore we are.
Without another word, we each pick up an oar and paddle frantically, willing away the weakness in our arms, desperate to escape the force dragging us away.
Out of nowhere I hear a strange braying sound coming from within the mist. We work as hard as physically possible, pushing our bodies to the limit, but the braying gets louder and louder until finally it’s directly upon us.
“What is that?” I yell.
A wave rises from the sea and the boat overturns.
Gin screams. There’s an abrupt jolt when we hit the water, followed by the shock of cold.
I hold my breath as we sink, and swim frantically to her side.
But we keep falling, and even as I try to kick my way up, a force keeps pulling us downward.
Darkness envelops us. We continue to sink, only more slowly, as we descend deeper and deeper into the dark sea.
We’re lost. This is the end. I close my eyes and surrender to the void, waiting for the brutal end to come.
Except it doesn’t. I open my eyes. I should be dead. Except I’m not. I’m awake and I can breathe. I take another deep breath—it’s the same. Air. I must be delusional. Am I dying? Or already dead?
I attempt to speak. “Gin?” It works. “Gin!” I repeat, more frantically.
“Eban? What’s happening? Where are we?”
“I have no idea.”
“Look!” she cries.
I stretch to see where she’s pointing. I can just barely make out what appears to be ruins of towers in the shadowy distance. I take Gin’s hand and we stand up together. We’re on a sandy beach.
“What is this?” she says, voice shaking. “I don’t understand. Are we dead?”
“Somehow, we’re very much alive,” I assure her. As our eyes adjust to the dim light, I notice there are ruins all around us, and a crumbling stone walkway nearby that stretches toward a strange abandoned city. There’s no other option but to go that way.
So we walk, hands clasped together, swerving around large stones in our path, past piles of what used to be buildings.
There’s a headless statue lying on the seafloor, and a large decorative pot with a missing handle, bits of its once-vibrant paint still visible in spots.
Predatory eyes flicker in the darkness beyond.
The wreckage strewn across the sand gets denser as we near the heart of the mysterious city.
I squeeze Gin’s hand. As we get closer, I see that the buildings are pristine white, and not ruins at all—they’re actually in perfect condition, and appear to be lived in.
Their surfaces pulse with light and color.
They aren’t made of stone. They’re made of crystal, or some other kind of gem, like nothing I’ve ever seen.
Like the relics. Something made of pure magic.
A fairy-tale land. Except it’s real. All of it’s real, though I can hardly believe what I’m seeing.
Then faces peek out from behind windows and around corners.
As impossible as it is, I realize then where we are. We’ve come upon something that should not exist anymore. This can only be the lost city. The Drowned City. The fallen kingdom. Somehow, it has survived.
Ophir.