Sand: Omnibus Edition Read Free

Brock’s sausage fingers traced the very constellation Palmer had been staring at dizzily just moments before.
    “The belt of the great warrior, Colorado.” The men around the table stopped their chattering and drinking. Their boss was speaking. His finger found a star every boy knew. “Low-Pub,” he said, his voice as rough as the sand-studded wind. But that wasn’t the name of the star, as Palmer could tell him. Low-Pub was a lawless town to the south of Springston, an upstart town recently in conflict with its neighbor, as the two wrestled over wells of water and oil. Palmer watched as Brock traced a line up the belt, his fingertip like a sarfer sailing the winds between the two towns and across all that contested land. It was a drawn-out gesture, as though he was trying to show them some hidden meaning.
    “Springston,” he announced, pausing at the middle star. Palmer’s thought was Home . His gaze drifted over the rest of the map, this maze of lines and familiar clusters of stars, of arrows and hatch marks, of meticulous writing built up over the years in various fades of ink, countless voices marked down, arguing in the margins.
    The fat finger resumed its passage due north—if those stars really might be taken to represent Low-Pub and Springston.
    “Danvar,” Brock announced, thumping the table with his finger. He indicated the third star in the belt of great Colorado. The map seemed to suggest that that the buried world of the gods was laid out in accordance with their heavenly stars. As if man were trapped between mirrored worlds above and below. The tent swayed as Palmer considered this.
    “You’ve found it?” Hap asked.
    “Aye,” someone said, and the drinking and smoking resumed. The curled hide of a map threatened to roll shut with the rise of a mug.
    “We have a good guess,” Brock said in that strange accent of his. “You boys will tell us for sure.”
    “Danvar is said to be a mile down,” Palmer muttered. When the table fell silent, he glanced up. “Nobody’s ever dove half of that.”
    “Nobody?” someone asked. “Not even your sister?”
    Laughter tumbled out of beards. Palmer had been waiting for her to come up.
    “It’s no mile down,” Brock told them, waving his thick hand. “Forget the legends. Danvar is here. More plunder than in all of Springston. Here lies the ancient metropolis. The three buried towns of this land are laid out according to the stars of Colorado’s belt.” He narrowed his eyes at Hap and then Palmer. “We just need you boys to confirm it. We need a real map, not this skin.”
    “How deep are we talking?” Hap asked.
    Palmer turned to his friend. He had assumed this had already been discussed. He wondered if the wage he’d been promised had been arrived at, or if his friend had just been blowing smoke. They weren’t here for a big scavenge; they were here to dive for ghosts, to dig for legends.
    “Eight hundred meters.”
    The answer quieted all but the moaning wind.
    Palmer shook his head. “I think you vastly overestimate what a diver can—”
    “We dug the first two hundred meters,” Brock said. He tapped the map again. “And it says here on this map that the tallest structures rise up another two hundred fifty.”
    “That leaves …” Hap hesitated, waiting no doubt for someone else to do the math.
    The swinging lamp seemed to dim, and the edges of the map went out of focus as Palmer arrived at the answer. “Three hundred fifty meters,” he said, feeling dizzy. He’d been down to two fifty a few times on twin bottles. He knew people who’d gone down to three. His sister, a few others, could do four—some claimed five. Palmer hadn’t been warned they were diving so deep, nor that they were helping more gold-diggers waste their time looking for Danvar. He had feared for a moment there that they were working for rebels, but this was worse. This was a delusion of wealth rather than power.
    “Three fifty is no problem,” Hap said. He