The brass compass had been heavier when Ira first picked it up — heavy with the weight of seawater and the memory of the man who'd given it to him. That was before the vault, before the flooded streets and the screaming hinges of the world's edge.
It had started three weeks earlier.
The first time Ira heard about the Drowned City, it was from a man with no teeth and too many rings.
They were in the back room of the Red Lantern, a tavern so damp the ceiling beams were furred with mold, and the air smelled like brine and lamp oil. Ira had been hunched over a roll of smuggled coastal charts, trying to separate the forgeries from the ones worth reselling, when the man slid into the opposite chair without asking.
"You like maps," the man rasped, voice brittle from years of salt air and cheap smoke.
"I like money," Ira replied without looking up.
The man grinned — or at least, his gums pulled back far enough to suggest he meant to grin. "Then you'll like this."
From the folds of his coat, he produced a scrap of oilskin, no bigger than a handkerchief. When he smoothed it out on the table, Ira saw a patch of coastline he didn't recognize — jagged teeth of rock rising from shallow water, with a single spire drawn in the middle like a candle on a cake.
"It's a ruin," Ira said, dismissive. "We've got plenty of those."
"Not like this one." The man leaned forward, lowering his voice to a hoarse whisper. "It wasn't always under the sea. Some say the Swap put it there. Some say it was built knowing the Swap would come, so it'd be hidden from the rest of the world."
Ira tapped the spire with a fingertip. "And you think this is where the treasure's buried?"
"Not treasure." The man's eyes gleamed in the lamplight. "A vault. Sealed tighter than a miser's purse. But I know a way in."
By the time Ira left the Red Lantern, the rain had started again, thin needles against the brim of his hat. He pulled his coat tighter and walked the crooked lane back to his rented room above a fishmonger's shop.
The map fragment weighed heavily in his pocket, though it was nothing but oilskin and rumor. He should have ignored it. He'd chased whispers before, and all they'd done was leave him poorer and wetter. But this was different. This was… tempting.
The Swap was coming. In thirty days, half the world would wake up somewhere else. Cities would vanish, mountains would sink, and ports like Kellanport would tear themselves apart in the scramble to prepare.
Every map would be worthless.Every trade route, every coastline — gone.
Unless you had a map of what came next.
Ira's room was a coffin-shaped space with a cot, a chipped desk, and a single porthole crusted with salt. He lit the oil lamp, sat at the desk, and laid the fragment down. The spire in the center stared back at him, simple lines on worn cloth.
He took out his brass compass and turned it over. On the underside, scratched faintly into the metal, were coordinates. His father's coordinates. The last location he'd charted before the Swap took his ship.
The spire lay less than thirty miles from that mark.
At dawn, he went to the harbor.
The air was heavy with the smell of fish and pitch, the gulls screaming overhead as if warning him to stay on shore. A few ships were loading for long journeys — heading north, mostly, toward safer trade waters before the world shifted. But Ira wasn't looking for a ship.
He found what he needed at the far end of the dock — a narrow, double-oared skiff pulled up against the pier, its paint flaking like old skin. The woman mending nets beside it looked up as he approached.
"You taking her out?" she asked.
"That depends," Ira said. "You know the waters south of here?"
"Better than my own floorboards." She tied off the net, eyed him, then spat into the sea. "If the sea takes you, it's not my fault."
Ira paid her in advance.
By the time the skiff slipped out of the harbor, the sun was climbing, turning the water to hammered copper. The tide carried him south, past shoals and lonely outcrops, toward the faint, jagged shadow on the horizon.
The Drowned City.
He didn't yet know about the tides that would fight him, the climb that would nearly drop him onto the rocks, or the vault that would hum under his hand like a living thing.
All he knew was that the world was about to change — and if the stories were true, this place might hold the only map worth a damn when it did.