An Account is Settled

"Stand down." Greaves said it without turning, without raising his voice, and the tramp of boots behind him in the dark stilled at once. Whatever else eleven years had made of the boy she had known, it had made him a man others obeyed on the strength of a command. "Sir," a voice began, from beyond the arch. "The admiral's orders were-" "My orders," Greaves said, looking straight at Isabella, "are that you hold the tree line and you do not set one boot inside this place. Any man who does answers to me for it." Greaves took a few more steps into the room. Isabella watched him come, one hand loose at her hip where her cutlass hung, the other barely touching Lucian's arm, gently holding him at bay. She catalogued Greaves as he approached, the way she catalogued weather before a squall. He did not look at Lucian again. He did not look at her. He walked past both of them as though they were furniture, straight down the length of the cool stone chamber. He stopped before the niche and the pale figure standing in it, and he took off his hat a second time. It was clear that he recognised it. Not the way she had watched recognition move across Lucian's face moments before, slow and dawning and edged with grief. Greaves knew the statue the way a man knows a thing he has only ever studied on paper, drawn and redrawn until the lines are memory. His eyes went to the high planes of the carved face, to the moon-signs cut above it, and he nodded once as if confirming a sum. "Five generations," he said quietly. "My grandfather's grandfather carried a sketch of this place to his grave and never once laid eyes on it. The Admiralty has a room, Bella. A locked room, in a building most of the fleet never learns exists. It is full of accounts of your friend's kind, and of this place, and of what the islanders fed it to keep it sleeping." He turned. "We have been hunting this temple for longer than either of our families have had names worth writing down." "And now you've found it," Isabella said. "Congratulations. It's damp and it smells of graves. I hope it was worth the ship you sank to get here." A frown crossed Greaves's face. Then it was gone. "Come with me," he said, low, and only to her. "Come out of here now, and I will see you dealt with fairly. Not the noose they'd give you in a harbour court. A proper hearing. My word, spoken for you, and my word carries. I can protect you, Bella. I never stopped being able to." He hesitated, and the officer slid out of his voice for a heartbeat. "I went back for you. That morning. I know you think I ran the other way, but I turned back into the smoke, Bella, I fought my way to your father's door and it was already gone, the whole street gone, and I stood in it screaming your name until they dragged me off." The words landed somewhere below her ribs, in a room she had kept locked longer than the Admiralty had kept theirs. For eleven years she had built the whole of her grief on a single stone: that they had both chosen, in the smoke, and both chosen away. That he had run and not looked back. She had hated him for it in a clean, simple way that had cost her nothing. He had gone back. "You're lying," she said, and heard how thin it came out. "You know I'm not," he said. "You always knew when I was." She made herself set the thing down. There would be time to pick it up and be broken by it later, if there was a later, which there increasingly did not seem to be. "Treated fairly," she repeated. "And him?" Greaves did not so much as glance toward Lucian. "That," he said, "is not a man. I have read what it is. It does not get fair. It gets the sun, or it gets steel through the right place, and the world is cleaner for it either way." Isabella took one defiant step forward. "You'd have to get through me first." "I was rather hoping I wouldn't." His hand went to the hilt at his belt, and his cutlass came out of its sheath with a sound she felt behind her teeth. He took two quick steps in Isabella's direction. One instant Lucian was standing beside Isabella, watching them both with an easy interest. The next he'd covered the ground to stand between them, between the drawn blade and her. He had not put himself there to save his own skin. He had set his own body squarely across the line the steel would take to reach her, empty hands at his sides, offering the whole of himself to its razor edge. Greaves stopped. For one unguarded moment, before the officer's mask came back down, Isabella watched him understand it. She watched the certainty go out of his face. He looked at the creature standing between his blade and the woman he had sailed an ocean to find. He saw, plainly, without being told, exactly what this thing would do, without hesitation and without limit, to keep her from harm. It was written in every idle line of Lucian's body. Greaves had come here so sure of what a blood drinker was. Here was one making a shield of himself for a woman, and it did not fit the locked room and its careful accounts at all. He slowly lowered his cutlass, and that was when the temple awoke. The sound came up out of the buried passage as if drawn from the bottom of a well. A low grinding note Isabella felt in the soles of her feet before she heard it, and then above it, a thin keening that climbed and climbed until it scraped the inside of her skull. Dust sifted from the ceiling. The moonlight pooling through the broken stone seemed to shiver. Lucian's head turned toward the black mouth of the passage, any sense of ease he'd previously had draining out of him all at once. "Out," he said. "Both of you. Now." "I don't take my leave on the word of-" Greaves began. "There is no time for your pride, Captain." Lucian's voice dropped, cold and flat. "It has heard the door open. It has been hungry for a very long time. Go with him, Isabella. Do anything at all except stand here. Move!" In all the time she had known him, she had never heard Lucian raise his voice, and genuine fear rose in her stomach. She did not need to be told twice. Isabella placed her hand on Greaves's sleeve and began pulling. And Greaves planted his feet, because a woman he might still love was in danger in a place he had claimed, and to run from it in front of her was a thing his whole self refused. Isabella saw the refusal harden across his face, and she knew it would kill him. "James," she said, using his Christian name, hoping it might bring him back to his senses, "this is not the time to be stubborn-" The keening became a shriek, and it came out of the dark. It did not walk. It poured, the way smoke pours. A long ragged pale thing with too many joints and a face that was almost a face and eyes that were only holes where the moonlight went in and did not come back. It crossed the chamber faster than thought. It went past Lucian as though he were not there. It went straight for Greaves. Isabella only had time to shout no as the thing struck him full in the chest. Greaves left his feet and hit the entrance wall with a sound that emptied him, gold braid and all, and slid down into a heap. And Isabella, because there was a broken man behind her, a horror in front, and eleven years of grief she had never once been given the chance to mourn, stepped between them with her cutlass up. "Come on then," she said to it, teeth bared. "Come and see what this costs." The holes where its eyes should have been fixed on her. It gathered itself and launched. But it never reached her. Lucian took it out of the air. He hit it from the side with everything an afternoon of dying in the sun had left him. The two of them went over in a snarling tangle of pale limbs. The shriek it made turned into rage, personal and pure, all of it focussed on the one thing that had dared to touch it. "Isabella." Lucian did not look at her. He could not. "The account is settled. Go." Then he wrenched the thing sideways, hurled it down into the passage, and went in after it, and the dark swallowed them both. The sounds that came up out of that hole were not sounds she would ever be able to unhear. Grinding, tearing, the shriek rising and rising, and beneath it, a single low cry that she knew, that she had heard exactly once before on the deck of the Serpent near dawn. She went toward it. An arm closed around her waist, dragged her back, and it was Greaves, upright somehow, blood at his hairline, hauling her off her feet with the last of his strength. "You can't help him," he said into her ear, and he was not gloating, there was no victory in it at all, only a terrible flat truth. "Bella. You cannot. You go down there, you die in the dark for nothing, and I did not cross an ocean for that. Come. Come with me." Isabella tried to fight him but she was empty, and the passage was screaming. In the end he got her up the steps and out into the moonlit ruin of the temple's face, where forty men stood in a ragged half-circle with their weapons raised in fear, staring past her at the doorway she had come out of. Behind her, below her, deep in the island's oldest throat, the sounds went on for a moment longer. And then it stopped. She stood very still in the ring of Naval steel and moonlight and she waited for a sound. Any sound, a footstep, that sardonic voice remarking on the poor manners of the recently dead. There was nothing. The jungle ticked and breathed around her exactly as it had in the clearing several hours earlier, and the great dark hole in the stone gave back not one thing. Isabella did not weep. She was aware that she wanted to, in some distant clinical way, the way one is aware of a wound before it begins to hurt. She simply stood there while something inside her went white and quiet and enormous. She did not let a single line of it reach her face, because Greaves was watching, and because forty men she did not know were watching, and because grief, like a ship's true position, was hers and no one else's to read. "Bind her hands," Greaves said. "Do it gently. If any man is rough with her, I will know." And they took her out of the jungle in the dark.