“She wasn’t foreign,” Izza said. “Foreign gods couldn’t make it onto the island without setting off your wards. My Lady came from the sand, from the mountain. She’s as Kavekanese as you are.”

“There are no gods on Kavekana.”

Izza didn’t respond. Kai felt the heat of her silence, of her anger. Kai wasn’t listening. She hadn’t listened to Izza all evening. Or to Margot, this morning, when he tried to explain. How much had she heard and failed to understand?

Jalai’iz. Talbeg female diminutives took the given name, added a long vowel. Izza.

This isn’t your dream.

“You had a goddess,” Kai said. “And she spoke to you.”

Izza nodded.

“But she hasn’t in a while.”

No response.

“Not for a couple months now, I guess.”

Izza’s eyes glittered black ice. She did not move. Storm tossed, Kai thought, by Edmond Margot’s death. By a life of secrecy, of flight, all exposed at once. She waited for a prompt from some higher power, a voice that would not come.

“I want to help,” Kai said. “But first I have to understand.”

Izza hesitated, but at last she held out her hand. “Follow me.”

Chapter 45

45

“Can you swim?” Izza asked when they neared the warehouse.

“Yes,” Kai said. “Though not well since I was hurt.”

“You don’t need to swim well. Just deep.”

Slick stairs led down the wharf into water. Izza took a coil of thin rope from her belt pouch, and tied one end around her ankle. “Hold this, in case we’re separated.”

Kai began to tie the rope around her wrist, but Izza stopped her. “No. You tie it, and we might drown together. Hold, and follow.”

Kai looked from the water, to her clothes, to Izza, and said, “Okay.”

Water’s embrace was the best Izza had ever known: smothering, slimy, and sharp with seaweed, but it never held you hard enough to bruise. The line on her ankle went taut, and she waited for Kai to catch up. Izza skimmed the surface until they reached the warehouse wall. Then she dove into murk.

Groping blind she found the gap in the wall, and slid between decaying struts. She rose from the depths, lungs aching.

Izza broke free of the black and pulled herself up onto the planks that ringed the hidden chapel’s entrance. She wiped water from her eyes and breathed air sweet with old incense and rotten wood. Checked the waterproof pouch where she’d slipped Margot’s notebook: still secure.

Then she realized that the rope hung slack in the water. When she pulled, it came up without resistance, all the way to the frayed far end.

Kai must have let go, and run to her friend the watchman. Or else she was caught in the hole, in the water, drowning.