It gets worse.

I’ll tell you a secret—one of those big, terrible secrets that deserves to be spilled. It might be the biggest secret of this whole tragedy, which makes it very terrible indeed.

But you have to keep it to yourself. Don’t make the mistake of thinking I’m doing you a favor. I just want someone to suffer with me as we watch these damned fools run in circles around each other.

Here is my bittersweet gift to you: from the beginning, Felix Marchetti had the bone knife.

Now this is a story about Felix the weaver, too. Despite all his faults, he deserves a fair trial, so I’ll give you the truth and spare the judgments. Draw your own conclusions.

From Caasi, Felix took the knife and the samovar. He returned the samovar to the Institute—he had no fondness for tea or antiques—but the knife he kept secret and safe. It was delivered straight to his workshop, a gift from the universe, and he knew it was meant to be his.

He intended to use it, once he worked up the nerve. It scared him a little.

Still, merely owning it was the best kind of distraction. For the first time, his concentration at the loom started to slip. While his hands wove automatically, his brain lost track of the fabric and wandered back to the knife. He had to stop and go back every few minutes, fixing mistakes he hadn’t made in years.

Even in his lab, it was always at the forefront of his mind. He found himself sitting down to sketch the fractalized film and instead doodling a variety of blades. Can you blame him? He’d never held something perfect before.

When he picked up the knife, his fingers fit perfectly into the curved grooves along the handle. The asymmetrical off-white blade was just long enough to act like an extension of his arm.

And the edge! It was even sharper than Felix. Imagine that.

He obsessed over it until he found the courage to test it. Of course he had no idea where it came from, beyond Caasi’s bloody hand. He didn’t even know what it was.

I could spend the rest of my life chronicling the journeys of the bone knife and die before I finished the story. Suffice it to say, this was no ordinary knife.

It cut through everything.

Felix’s workshop had a single desk, wide enough for his sprawl of research materials and notes. He cleared them all away, stole a thick cutting board from Natalia’s kitchen, and started with the most basic test: butter.

The bone knife cut through butter like butter. That was no surprise.

He moved on to a thick stack of paper. To his dismay, the knife sliced right through, chopped off a piece of the cutting board and even nicked the surface of his desk. He’d applied no pressure at all; he simply moved the handle. The blade took care of the rest.

It divided an orange so cleanly that not a single drop of juice escaped. Each pearly cell was intact. The two halves formed a sealed and flawless cross-section.

At this point Felix began to go a little wild. In one of his drawers, he discovered a pair of broken weaving glasses. He pried the lenses out of the frames and cut them into pieces. The glass didn’t even splinter. The knife made it seem soft.

Felix picked up the shards with tweezers and dropped them into his trash can.

He found a dusty copy of Endless Jape, a book he’d never read and could not remember buying. It went under the knife. The old hiking boots sitting in his closet; a collection of blunt, stubby pencils; a brass ring of dubious origin; they all fell to pieces.

His frenzy might have continued all night if he hadn’t dropped the knife.

His hand, coated in sweat, slipped right off the smooth handle. He watched in gaping horror as it fell. It took enormous restraint to keep himself from reaching out and trying to catch it.

The bone knife landed blade-down in the floor with a thunk, quivering.

He’d known it was dangerous, of course, but had only just realized the true extent of the danger. If it fell onto his shoe, it would’ve cut straight through his foot. If he’d tried to grab it in midair with his clumsy, grasping hands, he would have easily lost a finger. Or worse.

Now he eyed it like a snake that had slithered into his room. Of course he wanted to test it on the fabric of reality. It was impossible, or so he’d been told, but he had the feeling the normal rules of possibility did not apply to the bone knife. He’d seen the strange, square rift in Boston and felt its fraying edges.

A prismatic loom sat in the corner of his workshop; he’d smuggled it out of the Institute ages ago. It would have been simple enough to sit down and isolate a thread, as he’d done ten thousand times before. If he brought the knife down upon the fabric, he suspected it would divide as easily as the butter.

He was only held at bay by a combination of doubt, fear, and a crippling awareness of his own ignorance. Felix liked to experiment, but he knew there had to be consequences for chopping up reality. On some level he realized that once he started, he could never go back.

So he bided his time. He kept the bone knife hidden under a loose floorboard, wrapped in a paper towel. He never took it out of his workshop, where everything was safe, secure, and controlled. The rest of the world posed too much of a risk.

While he was away the knife sat in darkness, keeping itself sharp and waiting patiently for the fulfillment of its true purpose. As much as Felix delayed, he was drawn toward it like a meteor pulled toward some distant planet’s gravity. Sooner or later, his resistance would burn out.

***

While Felix tested and double-guessed and delayed, Isaac Skinner stood on the cusp of wizardry, ready to fling himself head-first into the worst danger he could find.

Isaac had that kind of cheerful, optimistic self-destruction that was so hard to deny, even as the consequences went from bad to worse. He pursued his goals with the single-minded recklessness most people reserved for suicide.

Success was all the more precious to him for its rarity. Now he stood on the brink of triumph, with all his misgivings wiped out by excitement as Miriam Oleander led him into the heart of the Wizards Guild.

The wizards were always glad for a chance to break out the ceremonial robes and ceremonial wine and ceremonial chanting. They gathered in the hollow stone basin in the center of the island, where they had a little bit of ceremonial chit-chat and then settled in for the ceremonial waiting.

The cave around them was full of candles. Hundreds of them sprouted from the stony ground and climbed the sloping walls. Wax melted and ran down in hot rivers, collecting in pale puddles on the floor.

When Isaac and Miriam arrived, the circle began to sing. The roof over their heads was winged with shadow, and their chanting bounced off it in a resonant chorus. In the flickering darkness and the reverberating noise, the two dozen wizards seemed to multiply indefinitely.

Isaac could not understand the words of their song, but he understood the rich and wild sentiment behind it. He was caught between awe and laughter as Miriam broke through the loose circle of wizards and ushered him forward into the middle of the room.

As Isaac entered the circle, their voices cut out. Their beady eyes and shadowed faces were unreadable. In the silence, he felt his plummeting anticipation twist into something else.

“Here,” Miriam said in a dry, cracked voice, beckoning. “Look.”

There was a hole in the floor.

It stretched ten feet across, a patch of darkness that passed straight through the stone. Isaac looked down, and then at Miriam. He dared not speak his question into reality.

She said, “You have to jump.”

“Fuck that,” Isaac said.

A small murmur passed around the circle. He turned, but there was no gap for him to escape. The wizards surrounded him, their wooden staffs forming a circle of vertical bars.

“Isaac.”

“I’m not throwing myself in—in there.”

“Do you want to join the Guild?”

He nodded, keeping his eyes averted from the floor.

“Then you must listen well,” she intoned, “and fear not.” She leaned forward. Her teeth gleamed yellow in the candlelight. “If you listen well, you have nothing to fear. I swear it.”

Isaac swallowed.

As he knew all too well, he could talk himself into anything. He was all leap and no look. Even now, as he swore up and down that he wouldn’t go into the ground like this, he was already inching toward the edge.

His toes dangled off the sheer drop, silhouetted against the void. With his eyes on the fathomless pit, he almost felt as if he were already falling. Or as if the hole was falling toward him.

“Now,” Miriam said. “Jump.”

I would love to say he thought twice, but he didn’t even have time to think once. He simply inhaled and flung himself forward.

Regret caught up just a half-second too late. In his tumbling, viscera rising, he could do nothing but flail. Mid-drop, it occurred to him that he’d made a mistake.

Then he hit the water. It slapped him across the soles of his feet and the back of his calves. He plunged into the pool, his head sliding under the surface as cold liquid shot up his nose.

His descent slowed until he was floating. He opened his eyes to utter darkness.

Even when he clawed his way back to the air, gasping and snorting, he saw nothing at all. The room was black. Only a single dot of orange, far above, marked the gap where he’d fallen.

Isaac caught his breath and began to swim. He didn’t get far before his legs bumped against the submerged floor.

As he soon discovered, the water was deep in the center and shallow around the edges. There was no dry land.

He waded along the wall, following the perimeter of the room. As far as he could tell, it was an unbroken circle. There were no landmarks, and he was still disoriented by the fall. He could not tell exactly how big it was.

Shaking off his lingering adrenaline, Isaac began to shiver. He took off his soaking jacket and tied it around his waist. His curly hair was plastered to his skull, sending little rivulets down into his eyes. The tiny spot of orange light flickered and danced, but there was no sound from above.

It was a dreary trap. His legs stung from the impact of the fall, and his feet were almost numb. Escape seemed impossible. Fear began to well up in his stomach.

He might have been stuck there for a while longer if Miriam’s words were not so close in memory. She’d spoken fear not and listen well as if she were casting an incantation.

He closed his eyes against the dark. His view did not change, but his perception did.

Fear not was easy enough. He was not afraid, really. Just confused, wet, and cold. He could feel a nervous current bouncing up and down his limbs, but he did not have to respond to it. He knew that Miriam did not send him down here to die.

Listen well came naturally. As he held still and quieted his frantic mind, all the soft sounds of the deep underground revealed themselves. There was the ever-so-slight swishing of the water around his ankles, and the uneven sound of breath through his nose, and the drip-drip-drip from his hair to the pool below.

Now that he concentrated, there was another dripping noise, faint and distant. It had been too quiet to hear while he was sloshing around. He placed one hand against the curved wall and followed it, stopping every few seconds.

When the next drop of water landed on his ear, he knew he was in the right place.

Isaac stopped and turned toward the wall, reaching out. A few feet above the waterline, his hands skipped over a gap. The wall dropped back into a small passage, leading up and away.

Simple enough.

He hauled himself onto the ledge and began to climb through the narrow, black chute. It cut straight into the rock, curving upward at a shallow angle. He had to scramble on his hands and knees until the ceiling lifted and he could stand comfortably.

A dim blue glow reached him from up ahead. In the trickle of light, Isaac could see the faint stripes on the wall—layers upon layers of striated sediment. He was crushed under the sudden recognition of time. He felt like an intruder in this old place, a sunken remnant of eons below measure.

All of that fell away when he rounded the corner. The ceiling was dotted with tiny points of blue light, mock stars against dark stone. Translucent strings hung like a canopy over his head. It was a beautiful buried night sky, and it brought a sense of life to the lonely cavern.

The glow illuminated dozens of staffs lining the walls. They were propped up in a neat line, standing at attention, waiting for him.

As Isaac walked down the row, glancing between the staffs, he realized that he would have to choose his own.

No two were alike. Some were old and gnarled and twisted, with thick lines of bark and truncated branches. Some were perfectly smooth and straight. They ranged from short to tall, elaborately carved to plain. Each one had a leather grip wrapped around the middle, and a few of them had old stains or sooty fingerprints still pressed onto them.

Isaac was glad to have the choice. He liked the secrecy of this room and its unhurried silence. It almost made up for his burning sinuses and the cold water still dripping down his neck.

After picking up a few and twirling them idly, he gravitated toward a long staff of blue-black ironwood. It was a little crooked, with a slight hook at the end. It felt weighty enough to swing, but not too heavy for him to carry comfortably. His fingers fit nicely around the grip in the center.

It made him feel like a wizard, so he chose it.

The far end of the room peeled into another hallway. The roof lifted up and the walls split out until Isaac was walking through a spacious, rocky corridor. He swung the staff back and forth and whistled tunelessly.

The glowing blue dots continued along the ceiling, though there were less of them and the light was dim. He could barely see his own shoes moving across the floor.

A shape loomed out of the dark ahead. It might have been a short wall, or a ridge, or a log. Isaac would have walked up to it, oblivious, in the span of a few seconds, if it weren’t for the sound.

It was a low, deep, throaty rumble that bypassed his conscious mind in a shot of primal fear. He scrambled backward, feet sliding over the rock, eyes locked on the shadow as it began to move.

Its jaw creaked open. The growl was loud enough to vibrate through the air and down his spine. Its wedge-shaped head was only a block of dark against dark, but Isaac could feel its eyes lock onto him.

He froze. The absurd urge to laugh caught him off-guard. This had to be a joke.

How could there be a crocodile down here? It was impossible.

His breath became shallow as he waited for reality to kick in. In a moment the shadow would condense into something normal.

It started moving toward him, slow and steady, its head swaying back and forth. It didn’t look imaginary.

The urge to run seized him, but he held his ground. If he went back down the tunnel, and the creature followed, he would be cornered in the pool where he’d fallen. There was no other way out. He had a sickening premonition of that panicked, swift death, alone in the water.

He sucked a breath in through his clenched teeth. Again he thought of Miriam’s brief advice. So long as he listened well, he had nothing to fear.

All of this was a test. Isaac held that certainty like a torch against the dark.

He steeled his courage and untied his jacket from around his waist. The crocodile’s head jerked toward him.

Isaac flung the jacket off to the left, in the direction of its mouth.

The beast lunged forward in a blur. As its jaws snapped shut, Isaac started to run, veering toward the tail.

When he was only a few feet away, he planted his staff against the ground and vaulted himself into the air. In a brief, glorious arc he shot forward. The dark scales passed under him, inches below his feet.

He landed and broke into a dead sprint. There was a scraping behind him, a sinuous slithering sound, and it spurred him onward with visions of those sharp rows of teeth clamping around his ankle.

The tunnel grew narrower until it stopped abruptly at the foot of a spiral staircase. Isaac scaled it on all fours, dragging the staff alongside him. It bumped against the stone, clattering loudly, and he strained to hear anything over the racket.

His breath became rough and ragged. He didn’t know if crocodiles could climb stairs. He wasn’t willing to stake his life on it, one way or another.

The steps twisted up and up. Eventually he had to slow down for lack of air. He heaved and gasped, still clawing his way up. There was no sound from below him.

Now he was almost certain he was not being chased. He took his breath back and stood up, leaning against the staff. A dizzy grin slid onto his face.

He kept going. The air was getting warmer.

After a long and arduous ascent, Isaac emerged under a stone archway. The heart of the island was cupped like a bowl before him. The circle of wizards clustered at the bottom, murmuring to each other, bathed in candlelight.

A bell hung from the arch over his head, with a rope dangling before his face. The wizards had not seen him yet; he could announce his own arrival.

He took a moment to comb out his hair with his fingers, and straighten his back, and pose dramatically with the staff. When he was ready, he reached up and yanked on the rope.

The bell rang out a high, clear note and all the wizards turned toward him.

A roar of celebration rose up, and Isaac descended to applause and warm greetings. With Miriam beaming at him and the clamor of voices in his ear, the crocodile seemed like a figment of the mind.

Isaac would forget the shape of it, and even his own sick terror, but he could not forget the sound. That first growl would haunt him for a long time.

But for now he could ignore that. He was a wizard, after all, and drenched in that newfound title he drank long and deep from the cup they passed around—a sweet, heady wine that reminded him of Basil’s mead.

This, he figured, was worth it. A full justification for the madness and confusion and SEIDR and Caasi and everything else. He was a wizard now. His only regret was losing his favorite jacket to the jaws of the crocodile.

***

After the ceremony, Miriam brought Isaac down to the shipyard to meet the Albatross.

As he followed her over the gangplank, he was struck by a faint echo of recognition. Little details stuck out—the striped shadows of the pergola, the subtle rolling motion of the deck, the boards worn smooth by time and footsteps.

Miriam inhaled deeply, placing her hands on the railing and looking down into the red reflections of the lanterns on the water.

“Well, congratulations,” she said. “You made it. I reckoned you might. Welcome to the Guild.”

“Thank you,” Isaac said. His head was still buzzing from the ceremony. “Where do I start?”

“The ship.” Miriam knocked on the railing. “Wizard and ship go together like barnacle and rock. Take a look at this.”

A square timber cage hung from the back of the ship. It was about ten feet across, covered in plants with long, spindly arms. They were woven through the sides of the cage, sprouting off it, covering the whole frame with a tangle of green.

“That’s the anchor,” Miriam said. “And it’ll be your job to take care of it. You’ve got to keep the plants alive.”

Isaac stared at it. “What’s the point?”

“That’s hard to explain. It’ll be easier for you to see for yourself, next time we’re in Oshun.”

“Are we going soon?”

“Soon enough. Normally I’d wait a while, test your capabilities and all that, but you’ve been there before. I assume you won’t make any stupid mistakes.” She gave him a quizzical look.

“No,” Isaac said. “Absolutely no stupid mistakes. I swear.” It was a promise he could not possibly keep, nor keep himself from making.

“Good. Help me with this.”

At Miriam’s direction, Isaac grabbed the anchor’s winch and began to unwind it. The cage gradually slid down the back of the ship until it dropped into the water. It floated out, bobbing up and down on the lagoon.

“You have to submerge the plants for a couple of hours,” Miriam said. “Don’t forget to take them back out. If they die off, you’ll have to replace the whole canopy, and it’s a pain to get them all threaded through the bars just right.”

With the amount of plants covering the anchor, Isaac could imagine what a hassle that would be. “How often do I have to dunk them?”

“Every week. You’ll be taking care of the Albatross until you get a ship of your own.”

A ship of my own, Isaac thought, and the whole world harmonized around that phrase. He grinned. “When can I get a ship?”

“When you finish your training and catch a core with your hands. It’ll be a while yet, so don’t get too excited. You need to work on your listening.”

“What?”

“The ceremony isn’t just for the hell of it. It’s a test. Nothing fancy, but it works pretty well. Traditionally, they estimate bravery by how long it takes you to jump in, and listening by how long it takes you to get back out.” Miriam pointed at him. “You went in fast, I’ll give you that. No knock against your courage. But you took your sweet time getting out.”

“I went as fast as I could,” Isaac protested.

“Four hours and three minutes is one of the longest times we’ve had. Spelder is the only wizard who broke four and a half.”

Isaac frowned. He didn’t know exactly how long he’d been in the hole, but he would have guessed less than thirty minutes. Maybe forty-five at the most, if he’d gotten disoriented. Four hours made no sense at all.

“That doesn’t sound right,” he said. “I got out of the water in a few minutes. And I practically ran the whole way after the crocodile.”

“The crocodile? What do you mean?”

“What do you mean? I barely got past it—I had to throw my … my …”

Isaac realized he was wearing his jacket.

His brain skidded to a halt. He struggled to reconcile everything Miriam had told him with everything he remembered—the time, the darkness, the beast. The guttural sound, so fresh in his mind, warred against the jacket resting easily on his shoulders.

“Isaac?”

Had he really seen a crocodile?

How long was he in that tunnel?

His mouth opened, but no answer was forthcoming. Finally he stuttered out, “Forget it. Maybe—I don’t know. Maybe the dark was playing tricks on my eyes.”

The look Miriam gave him was full of questions, but she accepted this explanation without comment. She did not want to press him. He looked as if he’d seen a ghost.

That night, Isaac took off his jacket and examined it closely. There were two small holes just below the collar, where a few sharp teeth might have pierced the fabric, but they could have been there the whole time.

He had no way of knowing, and that infuriated him. He would’ve preferred the clarity of sheer madness over this muddled, meaningless imitation. His dreams were full of warnings in a language he could not speak.