CHAPTER 1

The Island of Skulls: a rocky knoll in the eastern ocean, far out of sight of the Chevakian mainland’s coast.

The dark, algae-covered cliffs rose out of the sea, inhabited only by thousands and thousands of seabirds. Waves crashed at the foot of the cliffs. If anyone were to define inhospitable, this island would be it.

A small sailing boat drifted around the treacherous point of the island into the only bay along its shores. In the shelter of the foreboding cliffs, the wind dropped out of the sails.

Standing on the deck, Tylve tightened the mainsail, and loosened the front sail, which billowed out to catch the gentler breeze.

The fabric flapped, and with the flapping, fragments of lightstream oozed down the sail. Her father’s spirit travelling with her.

They fell from the beam like rain made from light, onto the deck, where they disappeared. Lightstream could not survive in wood. It was attracted by metal and glass.

Now that the boat was in calmer water, the roar of the wind and the slapping of waves against the hull died, to be replaced with the screeching of the thousands of birds that lived on the cliffs of the island.

They flew overhead and circled in the sky. They squawked to each other on the cliffs, where the thousands of young sat on every flat space of the rocks, fluffy white and grey puff balls that were almost invisible until they moved. The young were not so small anymore. Most of them sported an untidy assortment of adult feathers and would be ready to leave the nest very soon.

Tylve’s sailing boat drifted in between the rocky outcrops. Her experienced gaze went over the surface, taking in the flow of the waves as shaped by the treacherous currents underneath. Many ships had come to grief on the sharp rocky points.

This was not called the Island of Skulls for nothing.

A narrow beach of white sand sheltered right in the secluded part of the bay against the cliffs that rose like a foreboding wall out of the sand.

Tylve steered the boat in that direction. Every second week when she came here to read the barygraph and replace the paper in the machine, the wind was just strong enough to take the ship to the beach on wind power, but she held the oar ready, just in case.

There were no tusked lions on the beach today. Good. Although their recent presence had left tracks in the sand, rounded depressions of their bellies, sharp gouges of their flippers and deep holes of the long tusks of the males.

When the boat drifted close to the beach, she loosened the ropes on all the sails so that they flapped and discarded the last bit of lightstream. She ran to the bow with the oar and stuck it in the water to hold off the bottom from crashing into the sand. It looked safe, but the currents moved the sand around a lot and there were rocks underneath.

Tylve had been coming here for most of her life, first with her father, and then by herself to honour the family tradition. They’d always been weather reporters for Tiverius, the faraway capital.

She jumped into the water when the boat was almost at the beach and pulled the bow onto the sand. A rope hung off the end, which she ran up the beach to a rusty metal loop in the rock face where she tied it up.

Well, that was done.

She then went back into the boat and collected her barygraph kit. A sturdy leather satchel that contained new sheets of paper, spare parts for the machine, and any tools she would need to replace them.

She checked them and found that the pliers had attracted some lightstream glow.

Yes, it was often quite bad on this insignificant speck of an island. This island was as far East as people could travel, and judging by the old stories of sick and dying crew marooned on this island, not everyone could travel this far as this.

But her family had come here for generations, and rumours went that they could do so because they had southern blood, which made them somewhat resistant to the deadly effects of too much exposure to lightstream. As child, Tylve had loved playing with the sparks.

Tylve shouldered the bag and ploughed through the sand. The beach only looked inaccessible from the sea, but you had to be on the beach to see the small narrow stairway hewn into the rock. It was difficult to spot if you didn’t know where it was, because the metal railing that used to run along the entire track had rusted off and fallen into the ocean many years ago.

The bottom steps were very rough, eaten away by the force of the ocean, encrusted with barnacles and slippery seaweed. You needed to know where to put your feet.

Tylve climbed with the birds circling overhead, squawking their alarm. Their nests were on the rocky shelves, little more than collections of driftwood, on which they laid speckled eggs and where the fluffy little chicks hatched. After a favourable spring with many successful broods, the cliffs were bursting with young, testing their fluffy wings and their neighbour’s defenses of their territory. They were noisy and highly alarmed at the sight of this visitor.

She climbed and reached the rusty remains of the railing and the path that snaked its way up the cliff face.

For the next while, she was too puffed to think much about anything else except climbing. The path was steep, the steps uneven, and in the places where the sea water didn’t reach, moss grew on the stone, making the steps slippery.

Every now and then, she checked instinctively over her shoulder, but from this position you couldn’t see the beach, and you couldn’t even see the bay, only the vast and empty ocean.

After a while, she reached her destination, a flat piece of land on a ridge from where you could see out to the east and well as the west.

It was not the highest point of the island, but a little plateau where some tufts of grass hung on for dear life and where it was flat enough to put up a tent.

Not that she had ever done that, but she could imagine that people would. They would have to eat sea birds, but they didn’t seem to be afraid of people, and would be easy to catch.

She had been told that in distant history, people had collected these birds and made oil out of them.

In the middle of the flat space sat the only bit of modern technology on the island. Inside a glass cage on a pedestal of stone stood a machine with a round barrel, paper strung around it, a little pen that moved up and down and a bellows that generated the movement.

This particular barygraph was quite new. Tylve had installed it here herself, hauling it up the cliff in its awkward box so it wouldn’t get damaged.

She had even picked the thing up all the way in Tiverius herself, travelling with it across the country on the train and on trucks.

She took a cloth from her bag and wiped the salt spray off the glass. This was not necessary, because the device would function well enough with dirty glass, but she liked her machine, for which she had done so much work, to be clean.

Then she opened the door, remembering how rusty and difficult it had been to open the door on the old machine that was literally falling apart with rust.

This machine was beautiful and clean, and she would make sure that it stayed that way. Every two weeks when she came here to change the paper, she wiped the outside with oil so that the corrosive salty water would not find purchase on the metal. She greased the seal to the door so it would stay watertight when rain came.

She took out the barrel and unclipped the strip of metal which held the paper in place. It fell into her hands. Judging by the readings, it had produced lots of spikes and valleys. It measured the strength of lightstream, and during her visit to Tiverius, and meeting up with the chief meteorologist, she had questioned whether she still needed to do this every two weeks. Sure Tiverius paid for her to do it, but she could probably make more money by simply catching more fish, because the price of fish had been high recently.

But the chief meteorologist had told her that hers was one of the most important measuring points in the country, and he’d shown her the maps he made of seasonal variations in lightstream. And he told her how they used these maps to calibrate the large machines along the coast that diverted lightstream from the continent. And he showed her that her data was even used on the other side of the continent in Arania, where she had never been and would probably never come, to calibrate their machines as well.

So, instead of letting her off the hook, he had provided her with a new machine.

And the machine continued to show her what it had shown for all her life, a track of regular spikes and valleys that had barely changed over the years, even if the rumours were that there had been changes in the strength of lightstream in the past twenty-five years since she had first come here.

She folded the paper up and tucked it away in the waterproof pocket in her bag.

Then she took out a clean sheet of paper, wrapped it around the barrel, slid the two ends under the strip, and tightened the strip with the wingnut bolt.

Then she put the cylinder back on the machine, making sure that the pencil sat against the paper, and that everything else was fine.

Great, that was that done.

She shut the door to the cabinet and picked up her stuff, ready to go back to her boat. It looked like the weather was on the verge of clearing up, and shafts of sunlight speared between the clouds. One such shaft hit a rock nearby, reflecting brightly off the white wings of a cluster of sea birds that seemed to be excited by something that lay on another patch of grass.

It was not far from where she was standing, and there was a kind of natural goat track along the cliff face. The track was purely coincidental, because there were no goats on this island.

Once, she had walked along this path, just to see where it ended up. It led to another point from where you had a far-reaching but empty view over the ocean.

The closer she came to the spot that the birds were interested in, the more uneasy she felt.

In her experience, bird flurries usually meant there was something to eat. And something to eat almost always meant something dead.

Sometimes dead legless lions would wash up on the beach, or dead fish would wash up after a particularly nasty storm. But that was on the beach.

The birds would carry dead fish up to their nests and squabble over the remains, but this was something much bigger, far too big to be carried by birds.

For something to have died up here, that meant something would have been able to climb up here. There were no goats on the island that she knew of and she had never seen a rabbit. There was not enough grass.

When she came closer, the birds flew off. She was left staring at what was clearly the skeleton of a human. A man, she thought.

The bones had been pecked clean by the birds, but bits of flesh still adhered. She had been here only two weeks ago, and she was sure that if this body had been here two weeks ago, it would have had more meat on it, so there would have been even more birds and she would have noticed them. In other words, this body was less than two weeks old.

In that time, he’d washed up on the beach, climbed up here and had died, and the birds had eaten most of him.

The man’s clothes had mostly been torn away by the birds. They were quite flimsy, made of blue fabric that was stained by the weather, decaying flesh and bird shit. He wore black shoes made from some kind of fabric, with long laces.

Around the neck of the skeleton lay a metal band with a thicker, stone-studded amulet on it. Its front face had two glass or gemstone beads.

Tylve pulled at the amulet, but the band’s fastening was firmly closed and the diameter of the band was smaller than the skull, which still had pieces of flesh stuck to the back.

She shuddered. No way she’d touch that.

Could she maybe turn the skeleton over?

She pulled at the fabric around the body and shoulders, but it upset a puddle of rancid fluid that had pooled within and—urgh, the stench.

Well, there was only one way to solve this.

She set down her satchel and dug out her hammer. It had a blunt end for hammering nails and a pointed end to use as a crowbar to remove nails. You could also use this end to prise open the door to the barygraph cabinet if it was stuck.

She hefted the hammer above her head and brought it down, pointy end first. She had to close her eyes before the hammer hit the neck.

It landed with a sickening crunch that didn’t have the desired effect, and she had to hit it twice more, this time more precisely and with her eyes open. Ew, ew.

The last blow separated the skull from the neck. It went rolling down the slope, followed by the birds that were watching her from a distance.

It came to rest against a rock and birds fought over the slimy bits that had fallen out on the way through the grass.

Ew.

Somehow chopping the head off a fish was much easier than this.

How had this person ended up here?

She hadn’t seen any sign of recent visitors on the beach.

But maybe this person had made the mistake of leaving their boat untied, which meant the current had probably carried it off. Then again, it rained a lot and there was a bit of food on the island in the form of birds and eggs, so why would this person have died so soon after arriving?

Lightstream?

She picked up the metal band which had fallen in the grass. It was heavy, and made of a non-corroding metal. It was well made, but gave no clues about its function. A piece of jewellery, no doubt, but it could help identify the person to those who had known him.

She put it in her bag. Underneath the ripped fabric of his shirt, she found another gadget, like a compass with a window and a needle set in a metal receptacle with one pointed end on one side and a handle on the other. She put that in her bag, too, and then scoured the dead person’s clothing or whatever was left of it, but found nothing else.

It was very strange.

Since there was nothing else left to do, she picked up her bag and made her way back down to the boat.

Little about this affair made sense. If this person had travelled here alone, then there would have been a boat. The beach was the only place to access the shore. If the person had not been alone, then where were his companions?

On the way down, Tylve had an extra close look to see if she could find any signs of people having visited the island.

The path was mostly rock. People could climb up without leaving a trace, and she saw nothing out of the ordinary. She also felt that if he had left traces, she would have seen them on the way up.

Most of the beach was swallowed up by the sea at high tide twice a day. On the far end of the beach, she had noticed the impressions made by the tusked lions, which would often sleep on the sand.

The males were dangerous and could kill a person. Maybe he’d washed up, had been attacked by the tusked lions, and had climbed up to get out of their way, after which he’d died from his injuries. Yes, that could have happened.

But then, where was his boat?

The ocean would reclaim anything that washed up on the beach, but it was rare for an entire boat to disappear without a trace.

So she walked the length of the beach once again.

She found bits of wood, but they were old and all looked different, so she didn’t think they had belonged to the same boat, or even any boat that had come to grief recently.

She also found a few fragments of long tubes of a see-through material like glass. Glass didn’t float, but this material did. They were well and truly smashed against the rocks, so it was hard to see what they would have been for.

Some contained a dark, foul-smelling residue.

Tylve found no other signs of human activity.

Maybe he’d washed up around the point and had swum here?

That would be dangerous on most days, but it was a possibility.

This was truly the only beach where you could access the island, but maybe these people been stupid enough to try to climb up from the other side.

After pushing off her boat, she steered around the point. The island was only small, and she might just as well check on all sides.

The sea was a lot rougher on the exposed eastern side. A thin strip of treacherous rocks lay at the bottom of the cliff. The boulders were huge and waves crashed between them. Many of the crevices were big enough for a person—or wreckage—to disappear into, but Tylve couldn’t check.

It was too rough to get close. Trying to access the island from here would be insane. But she studied the rocks and waves, and around the next point, she noticed a light coloured object strung between the rocks.

She was still a bit far away, so she went as close as she dared and loosened the sails.

Once the boat was stable, she pulled out her spyglass.

Items of debris lay between the rocks. There were several smashed up boxes, a large piece of material that looked like a sail, but was ripped and scattered over a number of rocks, probably by the waves. The material was dark in colour on one side and white on the other. It looked quite thick. Quite heavy for a sail.

Come to think of it, a sail would sink, so there was probably a mast or a boom attached, even if she couldn’t see one.

There was also a large crate smashed against a rock lower on the shore. One side hung open, showing the inside with a metal plate with many tiny holes in rows. Most of them were empty, but some held broken transparent tubes like the ones she’d found on the beach. It was too far away to see if they also contained foul liquid.

So this was where those things had come from. They’d been taken around the corner by the current, but not the sail and the other debris—because those things lay too high on the shore.

Those rocks only got wet when the sea was extremely rough. But the weather hadn’t been bad enough recently.

So did this mean the man had washed up on the rocks, dragged the remains of the boat out of the influence of the waves and had gone to look for help?

He’d managed to pull off the incredible feat of swimming around the point to the beach, he’d clambered up the steps and had died of cold when realising he was on a tiny island in the middle of the ocean.

They didn’t call this the Island of Skulls for nothing.

She shuddered. What a horrible and lonely death. Had he been alone or were his companions still floating around, maybe on another island or on the bottom of the ocean?

She completed the loop around the island but saw nothing else unusual.

Tylve unfurled the large sail and set off home, tossing out the fishing net when she had put a good distance between herself and the island. Just in case any bodies floated in the water. She wanted to catch fish, not dead people.

Only when she was well on the open ocean did she stop feeling like someone was watching her, and did her nerves calm.

She took her bag to study the strange contraptions she had taken from the man’s body. Seated at the tiny table in the ship’s cabin, she wiped bits of dirt and adhering gunk off the metal and then wiped clean the glass. It looked like the ovals on the top were buttons and you could push them. They went down a little and then sprang back up. It was hard to figure out what they were for, though. Those buttons didn’t operate the band’s fastening, or didn’t open the lid on the case, if indeed it could be opened.

When she pressed one of them, a tiny flicker of light went through the glassy material of the button. She guessed this was the lingering effect of lighstream. When a piece of metal or glass became infected with lightstream and you held it against another piece of metal or glass, sparks would often arc from one to the other.

Well, she still had no idea what this was and would have to ask a few people in town.

But when she picked the thing up to put it away in the satchel, she accidentally pressed both glass buttons at the same time.

A flash went off. She gasped and almost dropped the thing.

What was that?

CHAPTER 2

Avehicle had stopped in front of the house.

Ravi couldn’t see it from the window of his room, which looked out into the yard of the house nextdoor, but he could hear the chugging and hissing of the engine echoing from the street in between the houses. The gate to the front yard creaked, and a door opened. Footsteps clacked on the paving from hard-heeled boots such as the doga guards wore. Men spoke to each other in the formal, military voices of the guards.

Ravi was sure this was the visitor his father said he was expecting. If so, he was late, and Ravi had been afraid he wouldn’t turn up at all, throwing all his own plans into disarray.

He abandoned his desk where he had been staring uselessly at his study books, and went out into the hallway. It was late afternoon, and the light streamed in through the windows at the front of the house.

He peeked over the balustrade, taking care not to poke his head too far out, because he didn’t want anyone to see him. There was only one thing his father wanted him to do more than study, and that was to mingle with the people in power to, as his father said, listen and learn.

If his father saw him—not studying—he would invite him down to attend, and besides the fact that those meetings were always insanely boring, that would throw his plan into disarray even more.

This had to be an important visitor, because his father had opened the door himself, and he stood waiting for the person to enter the house.

A flood of golden light streamed into the hall.

The visitor stepped in through the door, a silhouette backlit by the afternoon light.

Welcome, Proctor, his father said. I’m glad that you found my note important enough to grace me with a personal visit.

Ravi couldn’t believe his luck.

The proctor of the Chevakian doga, Calidius han Pasaki, visited often. His father was one of the proctor’s trusted advisors and needed no important note to have the proctor’s ear. It was all part of the formalities, but this visit meant that his father would stay in his study for quite some time.

I hope you are well, Gerinius, the proctor said.

And the proctor always used full names. Yes, his father’s name was Gerinius, but everyone knew him as Geri. Nobody ever called him Gerinius. The same as nobody ever called him Ravonius, which was his full name. It was Ravi.

Yet the proctor insisted on being called Calidius.

That just went to show how full of arrogance the proctor was, as were the rest of the senators in the doga, for that matter.

It encapsulated everything that Ravi’s new friends at his self-defence training told him was wrong about the current government: out of touch, weak, obsessed with procedure and pomp, and not with solving problems, of which Chevakia had many.

The proctor had stepped into the hall. His father shut the door, and then they went into his father’s study, under the overhang of the upstairs gallery where Ravi stood. They disappeared from sight. The door to his father’s study closed with a snick.

This was his chance.

Ravi ran back into his room, slipped out of his comfortable shorts and put on long trousers. He ran his fingers through his hair, which was soft and curly. He’d probably cop a few comments about baby hair from his friends, but let’s take things one step at a time, right? The meeting came first. The haircut and the appropriate clothes would follow later.

He left his room after shutting the door behind him. It was not that he kept any secrets in that room, but he just didn’t like it when his mother came in there to get this or that thing or to change the pillows on his couch. The servants already changed the bed and cleaned the floors, and that should be enough poking into his private safe space.

Ravi went down the stairs, passed his father's study, where he could hear the voices of both men, and into the downstairs hallway to the living room. His mother sat at her usual spot in the corner, on a high stool surrounded by tables overflowing