The Southern Ocean didn’t smell of salt water and fresh wind. At the edge of the world. There, the land-wide shelf plummeted twelve miles into the Hadal Trench, the water smelled of crushed shale, cold iron, and old rot.
Ren Vale stood upon the forward forecastle of The Iron Gall, his boots wedged against the copper-riveted coaming of the hatchway to keep from being thrown across the pitching deck. The salvage cutter was eighty feet of salt-bleached oak and rusted ballast iron, groaning under the onslaught of thirty-foot swells that rolled out of the southern squall. Spray broke over the bow in heavy, stinging sheets, freezing into grey crusts along the halyards.
Beneath the deck beams, the sea was fathomless.
According to the stela charts Ren had recovered from the Tomb hall of Unpaid Debts in the Stygian Vaults, the sea floor beneath their keel didn’t gently slope into sand. It ended in a deep pit—the Sunken Rift, a six-thousand-fathom oceanic deep gap known to ancient mapmakers as the Mariana Rift. At the bottom of that freezing, pitch-black slot rested the dark rock bones of the First High court of Khorat, swallowed four hundred years ago during the upheaval of the Schismatics.
