An eagle, wings back, holding lightning bolts in each talon.

He held it a moment, and then put it gently back near the bony hands of his fellow men.

I will never know.

He got back on Ariosto.

Can you get us back?

Sure, boss, Ariosto said. But don’t we still need to get back past the sea monsters?

One thing at a time, Gabriel said.

*

They landed at the gate, and Sauce was there, and a dozen greens, prowling through the bones and making a pile of finds. There was more evidence of men: an ivory-hilted dagger, a gold medallion, an ivory shield boss, the ivory warped and mangled by time, grey with age and ash.

And a comb. The comb was magnificent, solid gold, with the figures of a soldier or knight on horseback fighting a footman, each figure as perfectly realized as a statue. Wha’hae handed it to Gabriel; he held it for a while.

“She must ha’e been something, eh, Cap’n?” Wha’hae said.

“What do you want for it?” Sauce asked.

Wha’hae looked at it a moment. “Fifty leopards,” he said. “Gold.” He smiled. “An’ that’s for a friend.”

Sauce laughed, but she snapped it out of his hands and put it in her long black hair.

“Like it were made for ye,” Wha’hae said.

Gabriel looked at her a moment. “I’m not sure I’d recommend wearing ornaments until a magister . . .” He shook his head.

She grinned her crooked grin. “My brain’s too tough to get fried by some sorcerous claptrap, and I’m wearing a fortune in Magister Petrarcha’s amulets, and a few by the Mighty Mortirmir hisself. I’ll be fine.”

Daud the Red produced a small silver mirror. Sauce preened a little.

Gabriel laughed. He drank some of Wha’hae’s water and laughed again.

“We’re surrounded by horror and you lot are busy looting,” he said.

Wha’hae shrugged. “And?” he asked. “There’s a fortune out there, Cap’n. I say we bring the whole company here and comb through it for days . . .”

“I say we get our arses back past the sea monsters and march on,” Gabriel said. He smiled.

The greens hastily pocketed their finds.

“Who were they, Cap’n?” asked an archer.

Gabriel shook his head.

Sauce appeared by him, the gold comb magnificent in her hair.

“Isn’t that going to hurt under a helmet?” he asked.

She shrugged. “When did you last eat?” she asked.

Gabriel tried to think.

She handed him a whole sausage and an apple and a chunk of cheese. “The boys and girls are happy finding a fortune in old crap,” she said. “Eat this and rest.”

Gabriel ate while walking across the mosaic floor to the watch post at the outer gate. There, the smell of the sea was omnipresent, and the men-at-arms and archers were alert.