He buried Brannock before it came.
There was no time to do it properly. The wall of cloud was already halfway up the western sky, and the light had gone a strange, bruised yellow, and the air was so heavy and still that every breath felt like drinking warm water. He dug the grave at the end of the first row, beside Wren, as quickly as he could, and laid the commodore in it in his long dark coat, and folded his hands on his chest.
He thought about pushing a stick into the soil at the head of the grave, and didn't. He pushed in the old pistol instead, the one with the worn wooden grip, barrel down, so that only the handle showed.
Then he ran for the cave.
* * *
The storm hit a little after noon.
It came across the sea like something alive. He watched it from the cave mouth: a gray curtain of rain sweeping toward the island from the west, and in front of it a white line of wind tearing the surface of the water into spray. When it reached the reef, the sea exploded upward in a wall of foam taller than the cliff. When it reached the beach, the whole world went white.
The noise was indescribable. It was not wind. It was a single continuous roar, so loud and so deep that he felt it in his teeth, in the bones of his skull, and under it, like a drumbeat, the boom of the waves hitting the foot of the cliff.
The woven wall across the cave mouth lasted about a minute. Then it was gone, torn away into the white, and the rain was driving straight into the cave, horizontal, and the fire went out in a hiss of steam.
Jason retreated to the back of the cave with the rifle and a gourd of water and waited.
By the middle of the afternoon, the sea was coming in.
He saw it first as foam, blowing in through the cave mouth in great white clots, sliding across the floor. Then it was water, a thin sheet of it running in over the lip of the cave with every big wave and draining away again. Then it was more. The waves were climbing the cliff. They were reaching a height he had never seen in thirty-five years, a height he would not have believed possible, and every seventh wave or so came in over the lip of the cave in a knee-deep surge that tore the drying racks off the wall and filled the cistern with salt and swept the gourds and the pots and the chessboard across the floor in a tumbling, clattering mass.
He caught the board as it went past him, and saved it, and most of the pieces. He never found the black knight that looked like a dog.
When the water reached his waist and didn't drain away again, he understood that he couldn't stay.
He looked at the coat hanging on its spur of rock, high on the wall, above the water. It would be all right there. He hoped it would be all right there.
Then he took the rifle and the gourd of water and the board, wrapped in a strip of sailcloth, and went out along the back of the cave to the hidden path he had cut along the cliff, and began to climb toward the grotto.
* * *
He never remembered the climb clearly afterward. He remembered the wind trying to tear him off the rock, and the rain like thrown gravel, and clinging to the cliff face with his fingers jammed into cracks while the whole world screamed around him. He remembered the path along the ledge half gone, washed away, and crawling across the gap on his belly. He remembered the rifle going, torn off his shoulder by the wind and whirled away into the white, and not caring.
He remembered the grotto. The sea had reached it too. It was pouring in through the mouth in great surges, and the pond in the middle of the floor was heaving and churning, gray and white, as if something beneath it were trying to breathe.
He knelt on the edge of it, and breathed, slowly, from the bottom up. Five times. He couldn't hear his own breath over the roar.
Then he went in.
The tunnel was full of moving water, pulling at him, pushing him back, and for one long, terrible moment in the middle of it, where it bent downward, he was sure he wasn't going to make it. He was fifty-five years old. His lungs were not what they had been. His knees ached, and his arm burned where Brannock's bullet had grazed it, and the current was dragging him backward along the rock.
He thought about Alexander in the dark with the rope between them. If you stop, I'll feel it.
He pulled.
His hand struck open water, and he kicked upward, and broke the surface, gasping, into darkness and cold, still air.
* * *
The mausoleum was the only quiet place left in the world.
He could still hear the storm. It came down through the cracks in the rock high above him, far away and strangely muffled, a deep, endless groaning like the whole island straining against something. But in here, the air was still. The water lay flat in its channels along the base of the walls. Nothing moved.
He lay on the stone floor for a long time, shaking, before he could sit up.
The gourd of water had survived. He drank a little, very carefully, and stopped himself.
The pawn was still in his pocket. He closed his hand around it, and held on.
Then, because there was nothing else to do, he waited.
* * *
He waited three days.
He knew it was three days only because of the light. Now and then, through the storm, a faint gray glow came down through the cracks in the roof and lay across the floor, and then went away again. Three times. The rest was darkness.
The storm didn't stop. It rose and fell, and rose again, but it never stopped. On the second day, he heard a sound through the rock so deep and so enormous that he thought at first the cliff had fallen. Maybe it had. He didn't know.
The water in the gourd ran out on the evening of the second day.
He tried the water in the channels along the walls. He had always thought it was fresh, seeping down through the rock from the forest above. It wasn't, anymore. The storm had pushed the sea into the island, and the channels had turned brackish and salt, and when he tasted it he had to spit it out.
By the third day, his tongue had swollen in his mouth, and his head was pounding, and his thoughts had started to slide away from him at the edges, the way they had on the raft in the first week, before the stills.
He lay on the floor of the chamber in the dark and thought about the end.
It was strange. He had thought about it for so long. Sixty years of waiting, he had told himself, on the beach, on the thirtieth evening, and laughed until he cried. Twenty-one thousand, nine hundred sticks. He had thought about it on the cliff in the rain. He had thought about it every night for the last five years, waiting for the Free Fleet to come.
And now it was here, maybe. In the dark, under the island, with his tongue swollen and the storm roaring overhead.
It wasn't peaceful. It wasn't in his sleep. It was a stupid, slow, thirsty way to go, and he found that he was angry about it.
"Not like this," he said out loud. His voice was a cracked whisper. "You said peacefully. You promised."
Nobody answered.
He lay there a while longer. He waited for the numbness, the slow cold spreading up from his side, the way it had come on the rocks after he pulled Alexander out of the sea. He waited for the violet moon, and the black sand, and the white face turning toward him across an empty board.
None of it came.
Not yet, he thought. And then, a little later, with something that was almost relief: Not yet.
* * *
To keep from thinking, he started to explore.
He had never really looked at the mausoleum. He had come here a hundred times over the years, and sat in the first chamber in the gray light, but he had never gone into the room with the niches again, not since the first time, with Alexander pale in the doorway and rubbing his arms.
He went now, on his hands and knees, in the dark.
He found the low passage by feel, and crawled through it, and came out into the long room. He couldn't see anything. He put out his hand and found the edge of the first niche, cool and smooth and empty, and ran his fingers along it, and moved on to the next. And the next. All the way down the room, on one side, and back up the other. Twenty niches. Twenty long, shallow beds of stone, cut for twenty people lying down.
All empty. All perfectly clean. Not a grain of dust in any of them.
At the far end of the room, his hand found the other opening.
He had seen it on that first day, from the doorway: a darker patch in the back wall, where the light didn't reach. He had never gone near it. Neither of them had.
It was narrow, barely wider than his shoulders. He squeezed through it on his side, scraping his bad arm on the rock, and came out into a space so small that he could touch all its walls from the middle. A round room, like the inside of a well. The floor was smooth. The air was very old.
In the center of the floor, his hand found something.
It was round and flat and cold, about the size of his palm, and heavy for its size. Metal, he thought. He picked it up and turned it over in his fingers in the dark. One side was smooth. The other side was not. There was something raised on it, a shape in relief, worn smooth by time but still clear under his fingertips.
He traced it slowly, the way he had once traced the footprints in the sand.
A long body. Four short legs splayed out to the sides. A curling tail. A small, blunt head.
And around it, spaced evenly around the rim, three small points. Five-pointed.
Stars.
He sat there in the dark holding it. He didn't know what it was. He didn't know who had left it here, at the very back of a tomb with no dead in it, in a room at the end of a room at the end of a tunnel under a pond. He didn't know why his heart had started to beat so hard.
Then, through the crack in the rock high above, lightning flashed.
For one instant, a thin blade of white light fell down into the little round room, and lit it like day, and he saw the thing in his hand.
It was a crest. An old round crest of some dark, ancient metal, its surface dull and pitted. And on its face, raised and clear, a salamander coiled in a circle, its tail curling around to touch its own head. Around it, three stars.
Then the light was gone, and it was dark again.
Jason sat very still, with the crest in his hand, and waited for the thunder.
It didn't come the way thunder came. It came late, and wrong, and it didn't roll. It was a single hard, flat, heavy blow that he felt in the rock beneath him before he heard it. Then another. Then three more, close together, and a long, deep rumble that shook grit down from the roof onto his face.
Then more. Dozens more. A whole ragged chorus of them, far away and close at once, booming and slamming through the rock.
He had never heard that sound in his life. He knew it anyway. Alexander had described it to him a hundred times, by the fire, with his hands shaping the air: the great guns of the fleet, firing in broadsides, so loud that you felt them in your chest before you heard them.
It wasn't thunder. It was guns.