Spellbreaker by Blake Charlton

moved behind Nicodemus. “Raise your hands. I’ll cut you down.”
    Nicodemus obeyed and felt something jerk at his legs. He fell a half foot before landing on his hands and rolling easily up to a crouch. Being right-side up after so long was strange. The blood flowed out of his head and he felt as if he could think more clearly.
    Grateful, he turned to regard the River Thief and discovered a lithe female figure, wrapped in a white cloth that floated around all six of her graceful arms—one pair of arms from each of the goddesses that had fused to form her complex. The sight made him think of a different river goddess, one he had known long ago.
    In each of her six hands, the River Thief held a different kind of knife: a narrow dirk, a throwing dagger, a wavering kris, and so forth. Around her silhouette glowed an aura of blue-green light. Nicodemus was about to bow to the neodemon he hoped to convert, but then he saw her face and he froze.
    For the second time that night, Nicodemus could not make sense of what he was seeing. The neodemon’s face … it filled his mind with confusion and fear. A single, absurd question pressed itself into his every thought with undeniable urgency. Before he realized what he was doing, Nicodemus asked, “Goddess, why do you have my daughter’s face?”

 
    CHAPTER SIX
    From the catamaran’s forward center deck, Leandra regarded the broad limestone formation that was Keyway Island.
    Roughly circular and a mile in diameter, Keyway looked from the outside like the bay’s other large standing islands. However, wind and tide had hollowed out Keyway’s center, leaving a wide pool enclosed by a fortresslike formation and accessible only through a breach in the limestone on the island’s southern face. During high tide, the breach seemed nothing more than a sliver in the stone. Low tide, however, exposed a tunnel thirty feet wide and fifty feet long that led into Keyway Pool. At low tide, expert sailors could maneuver into Keyway Pool something as large as, say, a fifty-foot war catamaran. With Lieutenant Peleki bellowing orders, Leandra’s crew did just such a thing.
    During the careful maneuvering, Leandra again looked aft at the standing islands. As before, she saw tall moonlit limestone, but this time she glimpsed something dark disappearing behind one of the islands. It made her breath catch. Was this what Holokai had seen? It had happened so fast and seemed so small. The next moment something took flight from a nearby island, and Leandra let out a brief laugh. Some kind of seabird. Nothing more.
    Relieved, Leandra turned back as the catamaran coasted into Keyway Pool and looked up in satisfaction at her secret village.
    Scattered across the Bay of Standing Islands were several famous “sea villages”—small settlements carved into the limestone islands and adorned with bamboo decks, bridges, and palisades. The inhabitants were mostly fisherman, a few merchants. They were remarkable places.
    The sea village of Azure Strait had been built below the ruins of Sukrapor. On the island’s top stood ruined temples crowded with strangler fig trees—their grasping roots patiently tightened around temple facades and statues of the Lotus gods who had been killed in their war with the Sea gods.
    Another example of a sea village was Feather Island, the southernmost and largest of its kind. The houses there climbed two limestone formations that stood so close that they were linked by several rope bridges, which swung in a slight breeze. Leandra had no great fear of heights, but once she had crossed such a bridge and found that the disconcerting sway of the blue world—tropical sky above, churning tides below—had made her stomach lurch.
    Most every sea village was an exquisite sight at evening, when the inhabitants lit kakui nut lamps and the vertical villages lit up the rock faces like something from a dream.
    Keyway Pool,