Of Sea and Shadow (The Elder Empire: Sea Book 1) (20 page)

Calder had to trust Urzaia to handle that fight, because there wasn’t much he could do to help.

He hurried over to his mother, trying not to think about his growing shame and irritation. He rarely felt weak—even though he knew Urzaia was a Soulbound and an experienced fighter, the difference between them never seemed so stark. Calder was Soulbound himself, after all, and when he stood on
The Testament,
none of his crew could match his power. But seeing Urzaia here, off the ship, made him feel ordinary and useless.

As he ran past Naberius, still scrambling to crawl away, he had a sudden thought that made him stop in his tracks.
“Do not let yourself be distracted by violence. Battle is a game men play to reach an objective, but the battle itself does not matter. Only the objective matters.”
Not Sadesthenes; one of the classical strategists. Loreli, maybe.

He dropped to his knees in front of Naberius and grabbed the Heart of Nakothi.

The Witness resisted—perhaps he didn’t trust Calder, or perhaps he had been fighting to hold on to the Heart for so long that he couldn’t comprehend releasing it to anyone. The organ squirted gray-green blood over their hands, but neither man let go.

“Naberius!” Calder yelled, trying to shock the man back to his senses. “Let go! I’m trying to help! If I can get it back to the ship, the Consultants might follow me.”

The Chronicler snarled until his face twisted. If he hadn’t known better, Calder might not have recognized the man. “It’s
mine!”

What was this? Was this the real Naberius, or had attempting to Read the Elder artifact done something to his mind? Calder had grown up on stories of Readers being driven insane by accidentally contacting the Elder powers, and he’d seen the results of such insanity firsthand. If this was Elder madness, then Calder had little chance of ever seeing his fee.

The thought put him in a bad enough mood that he acted on his first instinct: he punched Naberius in the nose.

Not
too
hard, but enough to startle the man into releasing the Heart. Calder ran away, ignoring Naberius and his rage, running back to the rope. If he could make it to
The Testament,
then maybe he could hold off the Consultants himself. He had no doubt that the Lyathatan would be more than a match for the Children of the Dead Mother.

He wasn’t making an intentional effort to Read anything, but some hunch made him turn and raise his cutlass. It saved his life.

Shera’s bronze blade scraped along the edge of his cutlass, raising sparks.

A sort of manic cheer rose up in Calder, and he lifted the Heart. “How about a trade?”

She pulled a two-inch blade from a pouch on her thigh, throwing it at him sidearm. At this distance he couldn’t even try to knock it away with his sword, but he jerked to one side, catching it on the thick fabric of his coat. It still hit him with more force than he’d expected, but he managed to avoid having an artery opened, so he wasn’t complaining.

Then Shera was on him, and he fought for his life.

Not for the first time, he regretted not taking the time to reload his pistol. Her eyes were dead over her black half-mask, bronze blade striking like lightning. Only fear and desperation made him fast enough to meet her strikes, and he kept back-stepping, trying to get far enough that his extra reach with the sword would matter. But if he put
too
much distance between them, then she would have free reign with her throwing blades.

He lived long enough to back up a few steps, and then he asked the important question. “Where’s my wife?”

She swept a kick at his ankles, and he jumped. Somehow he managed to prick her just above the hip with the point of his sword as he dodged her strike, which filled him with confidence. Bold now, he stepped up and kicked her in the ribs.
“Where
is my
wife?”

The Consultant took the kick with a grunt, then took advantage of his proximity to drive a knife into his leg. He jerked back quick enough to avoid a crippling strike, but she still sliced across his shin.

The pain flashed through his whole leg as though a shark had taken a bite from his limb, and he screamed. Form forgotten, he slashed blindly with his cutlass, trying to score a cut wherever he could.

She stood just outside the reach of his blade, crouching, her left hand behind her back as though she was hiding something from him.

He gritted his teeth against the pain, holding his sword up to defend. If she threw something, he would have just enough time to knock it out of the air and catch her as she tried to move closer. This was his chance, and he couldn’t let pain slow him down.

He would take this Consultant back to the ship, even if he had to sew her back together.

As Children of Nakothi howled and screeched around them, she stayed in the same pose. Was she waiting for something? He couldn’t afford to move first—if he misstepped on his injured leg, she’d see him dead.

With one smooth motion, she pulled her hand back out, and Calder realized he hadn’t seen her second bronze blade. Now she held one in each hand, but his situation hadn’t changed. He still needed to wait…

There was something wrong with the second knife.

The pain in his leg didn’t matter—it was a shallow wound, only skin deep, though it hurt like fire. Even Jerri didn’t matter, for the moment, and the lethal threat of this assassin fled from his mind. He couldn’t seem to take his eyes from that battered bronze blade.

“What
is
that?” he asked, horrified. The weapon pressed on his senses from here, and he’d only seen a handful of items in his life with that much raw Intent.

An Imperial artifact?
Surely not. An ordinary object touched by the Emperor escaped the Imperial Guard here and there, but they would never have missed a weapon.

But he knew he couldn’t let that blade touch him.

Shera rushed him, leading with the ordinary knife in her right hand. He slapped it aside with the flat of his sword, eyes still on her left hand. Calder focused his Intent on his cutlass, chanting in his mind to focus his power.

Protect me. You can hold. You’re steel, solid steel, and you are an impenetrable barrier that will shield me from harm.

She swept in, driving her left-hand blade in an arc that would take him across the stomach. He shoved his sword in the way, focusing all his Intent on knocking her weapon aside.

The bronze knife met his steel, hit with an impact that shook him like a sail in high wind, and then sheared right through. The top half of his blade tumbled off, glowing orange at the severed end.

He hadn’t thought to dodge—he was only lucky that his cutlass had knocked her blow enough out of the way that he wasn’t eviscerated. As it was, he lost only a corner of his coat.

Instead of backing off, the assassin stepped closer, until she was all but pressed against him. Face-to-face, Shera looked him in the eyes and spoke.

“She’s dead,” she said.

His breath left him.

Then she struck him in the wrist. A shot of pain shattered his arm, and his hand spasmed open. The Heart of Nakothi fell out.

She snatched it from the air and spun away, heading back to her comrade.

Calder wanted to follow, but...he couldn’t. He just couldn’t. He let the pain of his wounds swallow him, let it burn until he sank to his knees. Hideous creatures born of bone and flesh loped closer, now that the Consultant was gone, hissing at the scent of his blood.

He wasn’t sure he cared.

Then his vision was swallowed up by smoke, and panic returned. There was something about losing his sight that struck something primal inside him, making him react even through the listless haze of depression. A pale-skinned hand reached out of the black cloud surrounding him, and he slashed it, running blindly in the other direction. A bone claw swept out, reaching for his legs, and he managed to stagger away.

The cloud of smoke cleared surprisingly quickly, and the Consultants were missing.

Just gone. As though they’d never been there.

“No!”
Urzaia roared, slamming his hatchet into a bone-crab so hard that the giant creature tumbled head-over-shell for yards until it cracked into the wall. “Not again!
Not again!”

Another tear opened up in the flesh at Urzaia’s feet, and another spine-like centipede crawled out. He crushed it under the heel of one boot without seeming to notice.

Calder hadn’t noticed during the fight, but now he finally realized: the Children of the Dead Mother had
never
stopped appearing. More and more crawled out of the sewer-sized tunnels in the crater, swarming closer to the humans.

A contingent of Blackwatch slid down the crater walls, many of them clutching black spikes in either hand. When an Elderspawn made contact with the Awakened iron, they fell to the ground in piles of limp bone and flesh.

His mother had told him once that it took seven spikes to immobilize an Elderspawn, but a single blow seemed to take care of these creatures well enough. Though the Watchmen hadn’t been much use against the Consultants,
this
was the fight they’d been trained for: men and women in black coats against the spawn of the Elders, no weapons forbidden, no quarter given.

Calder moved to his mother. She had taken command back, as soon as the smoke cleared. “Retreat!” she called. “Back to shelter!”

He was about to follow her orders when a hand seized his injured leg and he shouted again, lifting his other foot to kick at whatever creature had grabbed him.

It was Naberius. Instead of panicked he looked desperate, as though someone had taken his child from his arms.

“Where is it?” he pleaded. “Do you have it?”

Calder tried to think of some excuse, but he was far too tired. “She has it, Naberius. She’s gone.”

The Chronicler’s wail sounded like a man on the verge of tears.

Alsa grabbed her son by the shoulder, moving him toward the rope. “I’ll have two men take him out.” He looked around and saw that two black-coated Watchmen were already carrying Tristania between them, her own bloodstained coat dragging behind.

“I talked to her, Mother,” Calder said listlessly. “She said Jerri’s dead.”

Alsa Grayweather shook him, her saber gripped tight in her other hand. “This is not the time for this, Calder. We have to move.”

She was right, and he knew it.

So he moved.

~~~

It turns out the Blackwatch did have a shelter worth the name—almost a fort, it had been constructed in obvious haste by lashing thousands of logs together for walls, fences, and supports. With his leg and other, lesser wounds bandaged, Calder sat in a creaking chair next to a table piled high with weapons.

Watchmen bustled here and there, and his crew gathered around him. They were all relatively unharmed, he was glad to see. Andel had a new sword that didn’t quite fit in his sheath, and his white suit bore a few new stains. Petal shivered more than usual, clutching a case of potions to her chest. Foster grumbled as he peered through his reading-glasses, inspecting the barrel of a musket.

Urzaia sat with his back to a wall, eyes closed, breathing deep and even. His hatchets were bare on his lap, and Calder hadn’t gathered the courage to speak to him yet. No one had; even the Watchmen avoided him.

Outside the shelter, a thousand inhuman voices raised in a chorus of howls. The walls shuddered constantly under the force of so many blows, as though they suffered through an earthquake.

They didn’t have long. Calder didn’t know much about the Children of Nakothi specifically, but he knew that
The Testament
couldn’t hold everyone on the island. And the ship was their only chance of escaping with their lives.

Alsa pushed hair out of her eyes, addressing the whole assembly. “We don’t have long. We do have allies, and they should be coming to reinforce us soon...but if they’re not here in a matter of minutes, nothing of us will remain to reinforce. I have never seen such a gathering of Elderspawn at one time.”

“That which sleeps,” one Watchman muttered, before the woman beside him elbowed him in the ribs.

Alsa glanced at him but didn’t make a comment. “We cannot defend this location for long, but most of the Children seem to be gathered here. If we gather everything we can and punch through their formation at a single location, we should be able to make it down the beach to
The Testament.
Calder, can the Lyathatan help us?”

The Elderspawn that pulled his ship was notoriously unwilling to fight unless something specifically disturbed its rest. He had already begged it to fight the Stormwing scarcely a month past, and to a creature that existed on the scale of eons, a month may as well have been five minutes ago.

“I’ll make sure of it,” he said, projecting confidence. He wasn’t sure he could do it, but if need be, he would appeal to the Lyathatan’s master. He shuddered to think what such a meeting would cost him, but surely not as much as his life. Anything short of that was a bargain, at this point.

She nodded sharply. “Then that settles it. We need to gather—”

Naberius strode into the room, his Silent One limping along at his side. His suit was still as stained and ruined as ever, but he must have found time to comb his hair, because his dark locks tumbled down to his shoulders. Once more, he had the look of a battered hero who had survived a terrible battle.

But Calder remembered the Chronicler’s face as he’d begged for the Heart. He remembered, and clutched the grip of his pistol.

But Naberius seemed in control of himself this time, waiting to be seated until Tristania pulled out a chair for him. She slid it under the table after he sat, like one of his mother’s servants back in the Grayweather house. Once he was seated properly, she lifted the case of polished wood from back on the ship, placing it gently on the table.

Naberius flipped the latches and pulled open the lid.

Inside, in settings of velvet, sat eight white candles. Seven of them were whole and pristine, the eighth burned halfway down.

At last he spoke, his voice as cool and composed as ever. “What are our chances of making it out of this enclosure and all the way to the ship, do you think?”