Of Sea and Shadow (The Elder Empire: Sea Book 1) (29 page)

With that boost, he was able to make it onto the dark red deck of Cheska Bennett’s ship.

The Imperial Guard reacted, but they were torn between facing Urzaia, defending against Calder, and defending themselves from what they assumed was an attack by a giant Elderspawn. Some of them rushed to the rail, some of them lowered guns at Urzaia, and only a few of them took a menacing step toward Calder.

Only two of them stood in front of Naberius, defending him with a scorpion’s tail and with ominous metal claws. So they weren’t prepared when Urzaia barreled straight through the first layer of Guards, smashing his way straight to Naberius. Calder simply ran through the highway he cleared, panting and desperately hoping that none of the Guards would snatch him up before he reached the Chronicler.

Naberius had managed to pull out a pistol by the time Urzaia had him in hand, one hatchet pressed to his throat. Simply for the sake of redundancy, Calder pulled his own gun, pressing it to the future Emperor’s head.

“Good evening...ladies...and gentlemen,” Calder panted, trying to catch his breath and still speak as loudly as possible. “If you want him...alive...I suggest...you let us speak with the Guild Heads.”

Shuffles descended back onto Calder’s shoulder, having taken to the air during his jump. “IF YOU WANT HIM ALIVE,” it echoed.

A bleak wind passed over the deck, and everyone shivered. Goosebumps rose on Calder’s skin, and he shook as though he saw his own death approaching. It was a nauseating feeling that made him want to run and hide and vomit all at the same time.

He had sensed this before, and suddenly he wondered if he’d made a grave miscalculation.

Armor clanked as General Jarelys Teach marched slowly up to them, one hand on the hilt over her shoulder. Her pale, close-shaved head almost looked bald in the moonlight, and with her eyes so cold, Calder felt as though he were staring down an Empress.

“Release Lord Clayborn and step back,” Teach ordered.

Calder pressed the gun harder against Naberius’ temple. “General Teach! Excellent. We’d like to speak with you. It seems that you tried to have us killed, and I’d like to know what we can do to...make that go away.”

The General didn’t twitch. “Your death has been ordered by the future Emperor. Threatening him will only increase your sentence.”

Calder turned to Naberius. “I think I can get him to revoke that order. What do you think, my friend?”

“This is unwise, Captain,” Naberius said, unruffled.

“And I’m sure allowing you to kill me and dump my body in the ocean would be the epitome of wisdom. General Teach, as you can see, I have a gun to this man’s head. If you attack, I will pull the trigger. Urzaia and I will have to fight our way out, which I’m not eager to try, but trust me when I say that I can take this entire ship down with me. I have a giant Elderspawn chained up over there, and it’s not happy.”

“NOT HAPPY,” Shuffles chuckled.

If anything, the General’s grip tightened on her sword. “Captain, I could kill you and your friend from here. You’d have no chance to pull the trigger or to contact your Lyathatan. I haven’t done it already because my Guards would be in danger, but the longer this discussion goes, the more I’m reconsidering the risk.”

A standoff. Great. Calder
hated
standoffs. He always felt that he could talk his way out, but it somehow never worked out that way.

Before he could come up with any other ideas, a girl’s voice piped up from behind him.

“You’ve forgotten me again, Jarelys.”

Calder pulled Naberius back, keeping his gun in place, so that he could see both General Teach and the woman who’d spoken.

It was Bliss. She stood in a clear space on the deck, black coat brushing the wood, pale hair drifting behind her. Some of the Guards edged away from her.

“Bliss,
step away,”
the General said. “This does not need to involve you.”

Calder had another concern. “You were just aboard my ship.”

“That’s true.”

“How did you get over here?”

She unbuttoned two of her coat buttons and reached inside. “No one likes a man who asks too many questions.”

“That actually doesn’t explain anything.”

From her coat pocket, the Guild Head pulled a bone about the length of Calder’s forearm. A chorus of ominous cackling sounded from high up in the crow’s nest, as though a coven of dark spirits had started to mock him from above. In spite of himself, Calder glanced up. Nothing up there.

When he returned his gaze to Bliss, the bone was a full-sized spear of one piece, its haft yellowed bone, its head flattened and sharpened. She leaned forward onto the balls of her feet, holding the spear with one hand near the head and one farther back on the haft.

“Clear the deck!” General Teach shouted. “For your lives, get below!”

The Imperial Guards scrambled out of the way. One shaggy-furred man popped his dripping head up over the side, having climbed out of the ocean and up to
The Eternal.
When he heard the order, his eyes widened, and he leaped back into the sea.

“Go back to your ship, Calder Marten,” Bliss said calmly. “Take Naberius Clayborn with you.”

Urzaia didn’t need to hear anything else. He plucked the pistols from the Witness, tossing each of them onto the deck, and then threw Naberius over his shoulder like a sack of grain.

Teach bared an inch of her sword, and the force of its sheer bloodlust actually made Calder stagger backwards a step. He had to bend all his focus to close his senses, to
not
Read, simply to keep from screaming and hiding like a child.
“Stay where you are!”
she demanded.

Bliss closed her eyes briefly. When she snapped them open again, they shone with a pale light.

Roots twisted up from the boards, as though the wood had suddenly decided to bloom. The stalks flowered into leaves, then instantly burst into flame like a thousand candles flaring to life. The sudden heat flashed against Calder’s skin. They burned with impossible speed, ash and smoke rising into the air, twisting around Bliss in a double helix.

The power coming off of Bliss was, in its own way, even more frightening. She radiated an eternal Intent, an insatiable hunger for
change
, a hatred of the physical world and all its restrictive laws. If it had its way, that power would shred the rules of nature and scatter them like confetti, until the world flexed and moved and changed like the sea in storm...

Calder shook it off, focusing once more on keeping his senses shut. If the two Guild Heads clashed, death and madness meeting head on, he wouldn’t want to be anywhere inside a mile.

And this was the Aion, where unspeakable creatures were lured by power, conflict, and blood.

So maybe a mile wasn’t far enough. Say ten miles.

He turned to Urzaia. “Time to leave.”

The Izyrian didn’t need to be told twice. He also didn’t, as Calder had expected, immediately leap from one ship to the other.

Instead, he picked up Calder and tossed him over his other shoulder.

It was undignified and surprisingly painful, dangling with his face in Urzaia’s back. The man’s shoulder jabbed him in the stomach like a club, and when he got a running start along the deck, it was like being beaten in the torso with a sack of bricks.

The Head of the Imperial Guard shouted after them, but they were already in the air, Shuffles laughing as it flew alongside them.

Calder winced in anticipation of landing, clenching his stomach. This was going to hurt worse than any wound he had taken in the actual battle.

When they landed, he found that he was right.

~~~

The second void transmission caught Jerri while she slept.

She woke to an icy wind, and a feeling like thousands of ants crawling over her skin. Her eyes flew to the back wall, and for an instant, another pair of eyes stared straight into hers.

Jerri threw a fist forward, hitting nothing, flailing like a child in the darkness. She cast her mind out to her Soulbound Vessel, trying to contact her earrings. They would be in the drawer next to the bunk.

But this wasn’t
The Testament
’s cabin, it was a prison cell. And her earrings remained where they always were: locked on the other side of the island, out of her reach.

The eyes vanished, replaced by the familiar gaping darkness, as though the world ended in the back of her cell. If she walked back there and didn’t stop, she got the feeling that she would fall off a cliff and never hit the bottom. Faint lights writhed and twisted in the shadows like tortured stars.

She rolled from the bed and tried to collect herself, prepared for the voices. They were different each time. Sometimes she heard spidery whispers, but other times...

“HAS THE HEART ARRIVED?” the voice roared from the void.

She flinched back, hoping that no one outside the prison would hear. That could lead to awkward questions. “I’m doing just fine, thank you for asking. And yes, the Heart arrived just recently.” Anyone with any sensitivity to Elder forces would have felt the Heart the instant it landed on the island. In this case, that meant she was likely the only one who’d noticed.

“WE ARE PLEASED.” A shadow whipped out within the void, snuffing out a lone light. It looked like a frog’s tongue taking a fly. “FORCES CONVERGE. WHEN YOU FEEL THE HEART’S POWER WAX, USE OUR GIFT.”

Jerri glanced around her cell, but saw nothing out of the ordinary. “Gift?”

Something about the size of a fist hurtled out of the void like a comet, forcing Jerri to duck. It crashed into the bars with a clang of metal on metal, falling to the ground.

She leaned over, afraid to touch it. On closer inspection, it looked like a tight collar of braided black metal.

“HOLD IT AND CALL OUT FOR HELP, BUT ONLY WHEN THE TIME IS RIGHT.”

Jerri brushed the back of her fingers across the dark metal, testing it. It was such a bitter cold that it stung her skin, but she’d heard that was normal for objects transferred through the void. She tucked it into a corner of her blankets, hoping it would warm up with time.

“Will this free me?” she asked.

“POTENTIALLY.” The void began to shrink back into itself, dragging the unnatural chill with it. “WAIT FOR THE POWER OF THE MOTHER’S HEART. WAIT.”

Then the void finally closed to one black point and winked away.

After she had collected herself, Jerri called out. “I expect you heard that.”

“I can’t believe the guards haven’t shown up already,” Lucan responded, from the other side of the wall.

“I expect the voice only sounded loud to us,” she said. “Out of this room, they would have likely heard nothing.”

“That makes no sense. If a voice sounds loud to us, then it’s loud to everyone.”

Though he couldn’t see it, she smiled into the darkness of her cell. “Only one of the many mysteries the Elders have shared with us. Imagine if our Readers could craft messages that only certain people could hear.”

“That doesn’t appear to be the case,” he pointed out. “I could hear most of it clearly. If you could actually tailor it to a specific listener, then why didn’t they make it so that only you could hear the message? Or did they specify a radius...”

Lucan trailed off, murmuring to himself. That was fine with her—she left him to it. Her own father had taken advantage of her curiosity to induct her into the Sleepless in the first place, and if she could pique the interest of a few others, then she would have repaid him well. Especially if one of those others was a Consultant.

She laid back on her cot, but her mind rushed too fast to let her get back to sleep. What would happen if she tried to use the gift now? Would it do nothing, or would it simply allow her to break free and fail to fulfill whatever purpose the Sleepless had intended? Shouldn’t she test it? What if she needed to use it at the appropriate time, but it didn’t work?

More importantly,
when
would the Heart’s power rise? If it wasn’t in the next day or two, then the Consultants would inevitably find the black metal stashed in her blankets. They didn’t inspect her possessions every day, but when they did, they were surprisingly thorough. She had hid a few innocuous items—a handful of splinters from her meal tray, a napkin, the broken tine of a fork—all over her cell, just to test, and they were always gone after inspection. There was no way she could hide something as obvious as the iron gift for long.

After a few minutes, Lucan called her name. “Jyrine, something’s coming. Do not say a word. You won’t hear anything, but your life may be in danger.”

“Are
you
communing with Elders?”

“Not a word, I said. This is bad. She may just kill you on principle.”

“Who—”

“
Quiet
. She’s here.”

Jerri heard nothing, but she felt another wave of cold crawl over her skin. This wasn’t the same sharp, bitter cold as the void transmission, but the clammy, shivering cold of lifeless flesh. She felt it in her mind, in her connection to the Elders that she’d had since she was a little girl. It was cold loneliness, followed by the warm promise of rebirth.

The Heart of the Dead Mother. It was coming here.

~~~

As they traveled toward the Gray Island, they kept Naberius gagged and tied to the mast.

Calder found it very entertaining, though Andel didn’t approve and Petal kept a safe distance. It didn’t pay off in anything except personal satisfaction until the second day, when a column of slate-gray cloud appeared on the horizon.

It looked almost like a hurricane locked into place: a swirling wall of dark gray fog and cloud, raised like a barrier between them and the rest of the sea. Even after years of sailing the Aion, he’d never seen anything like it.

“What is
that?
” he asked no one in particular.

Surprisingly, it was Petal who answered, inching her way closer to him as she spoke. “That’s, ah, that’s the Gray Island. It’s why they call it that. Gray, I mean. It’s a wall of mist, or maybe fog, and it stays up all year-round. Surrounds the whole island. Nobody knows how it was done, and some alchemists…in the Guild, I mean…some alchemists try to duplicate it in their labs, and they can’t.”