Excerpt: Magic at Dawn

She saw the lizards ahead, dark silver. The way they moved, the shape of them, still made her shudder. But it was partly a happy shudder at how brave she felt.

The lizards let her catch up and smiled their lizardy smiles at her- then shot down into the golden depths. Mali followed, wondering how long she would be able to hold her breath. She didn’t feel the need to breathe yet.

They went down for a long time. Mali hadn’t thought the lake would be this deep. The water had started to feel different. Less thick, colder. It felt like the air did, in dreams Mali had about flying. The gold looked like clouds, now. She pushed wisps of it aside with her claws, following the lizards still, following their song: ‘Come down, come down, swim the silver streets of our sunken town.’ And there, below, were the rooftops of a city, and the domes, and the tall bridges and raised roads. Things like scaly trees grew atop some of the houses. Drifting things were tied to their branches. ‘Down, come down, swim down.’ The things tied to the reptile trees were bones, all shapes and sizes, on long silver strings. They passed a dome made from the skull of some great demon, silver bars set across its eye sockets. Behind the bars Mali thought she could make of an eddying flock of drowned crows. ‘Down, down, down.’ The buildings were high and shining above them. They snaked downwards into a glittering murk. Far below the stilted golden roads were shadowed silver ones clogged with debris. The lizards stopped.

‘Here sink all the treasures lost up above,’ said one.
‘Here seek your fortune.’