The old ship had a sharp prow and dual anchors still tucked tight against their hawseholes. Her entire skin was of a uniform rust color, not a fleck of her original paint remained. Juan reached the edge of the ravine and looked down. Her single funnel rose out of the sand ten feet from where her hull disappeared into it, the metal flakey from erosion. Using the funnel as a reference, Cabrillo guessed she was about seventy feet long in total. She had the straight vertical lines of a ship much older than the nearby fishing boat. She reminded him of a turn-of-the-century luxury cruiser, something out of the end of the Victorian age.

This wasn’t the workboat of the local fishing industry or a ferry to bustle peasants across the Aral. This was a rich man’s toy, perhaps belonging to a member of the old royal family who vacationed along the inland sea’s shores. But that made little sense. Why would the tsar and tsarina want to vacation in this backwater of their kingdom?

A local oligarch? Someone from before the revolution who made a pile of money and had the ship built on the Aral? The boat was much too big to have been transported here whole, even by rail, and there were no oligarchs left after the Bolsheviks were finished.

Juan suddenly saw this ship as an anomaly. There was something to her presence here that had piqued Karl Petrovski’s interest, and he felt it too. This wasn’t the type of vessel to be plying these waters. He looked around at his surroundings. She shouldn’t be here in a desert either, he thought.

The ship’s bow was undamaged, so he had to assume that whatever had sunk her showed up in the parts of the hull that the sands had swallowed.

Yusuf finally shuffled up and tapped Cabrillo on the arm to guide him around the prow to where someone, presumably Petrovski, had piled stones up against the hull high enough for him to climb over the gunwale. Juan scaled the cairn and gripped the metal skeleton that was all that remained of the rail and pulled himself up, twisting his fists as he pivoted and leaving skin behind as he managed to throw a leg over and gain the deck.

There was little left of the original wood—teak, he supposed—so he was forced to step across the metal ribs that had survived the ravages of time. Below him he could see an empty space that had once carried cargo, or it could have been a forward cabin. Now it was a mound of windblown dust.