Of Sea and Shadow (The Elder Empire: Sea Book 1) (40 page)

Rojric reached the ship first, and he simply stood around and shivered. Jerri climbed up next, heading straight for the ship’s wheel.

“I don’t know how to steer a ship!” she shouted, over the noise.

Neither did Calder. “Turn it! Turn it!”

She spun the wheel, and the ship turned slightly, but it couldn’t fight against the monstrous strength of the Lyathatan, who simply jerked
The Testament
back into place.

“We’ll need something better than that!”

Calder dropped to his knees, which felt surprisingly good. The cold and the exertion were sapping his strength, demanding that he relax, shouting at him to stay off his feet. He leaned over, which felt like collapsing, and pressed both his hands against the deck.

And, focusing his mind, he entered a Reader’s trance.

Sometimes, when he Read an object, he would see a clear vision of its creation or its lifetime of use. Other times, he would merely feel impressions: echoes of its Intent.

This time, his mind plunged through the ship and into a library of sensations. His mother, perusing the plans for the ship, pointing out potential problems. Laying its skeleton, putting her time and sweat and Intent into every beam.

He felt himself, like echoes of an old, familiar song. He’d paced every step of this deck a hundred times, pouring his focus and drops of his blood into the ship’s skin, its flesh, its heart. The chains, he and his mother had worked on together—turning each link into an addition to the whole rather than a separate entity, shaping the shackles until they could compel even an Elder creature to work for the good of the ship.

There were other minds here, of course. Every worker who had pounded a single nail or painted a yard of polish had invested his Intent into the ship’s memory. But there were two souls here, two voices in the chorus, that stood out among the rest.

His mother’s and his own.

In this moment, the wooden vessel felt more like a part of him than his own arm. He’d used drops of his blood when he worked on a particularly difficult piece of Reading, and now he could sense those pieces of him, tying the ship to him with a dozen knots of power.

And he could sense the true potential of
The Testament,
lurking beneath what he understood like a whale waiting to surface. He’d never Awakened anything before: the process was supposed to take days, even weeks of understanding the object, and even then you could never predict the full effects.

But with this ship, the project that he had helped create, it just seemed so easy.

Calder wrapped his Intent around the true significance of
The Testament,
its true power and purpose, and he pulled that power to the surface.

Around him, the ship changed.

Planks welded together as though the deck was made from a single, seamless plank of polished wood. Holes gouged by musket-balls filled in. The nails rippled and flowed until they melded with the planks, almost indistinguishable patches of iron strength. The hull merged smoothly until it looked like a green-black shell, the railings fusing together until the whole ship was made of a single piece. He could sense it all, the same way he could sense his own skin.

Sails unfurled from the yard like wings spreading from a dragon’s back. These weren’t made from canvas, but from a stretch of greenish skin, the material thin enough that the moon glowed through. Faintly, Calder could see veins pulsing in the sails, carrying the blood of the ship.

Through the shackles, Calder felt the Lyathatan. A being of indescribable age, vast hunger, and unknowable
strangeness
. It had its own goals, from those as simple as defending its territory to complex plots that Calder couldn’t comprehend. It did not resent its servitude: this was one subtle step in a long, intricate, delicate plan that would span centuries. If it stayed in thrall to Calder for the rest of his merely human life, the Lyathatan wouldn’t notice any more than a mountain noticed the dying of summer grasses. It would live on, having made another move in a game as slow and distant as the stars.

Equally, the Lyathatan felt Calder. It felt his Intent. And it obeyed.

With one clawed hand, the Elderspawn tore Candle Bay Imperial Prison open like a gutted fish.

It scraped the stone from the wall, shattering every window. Prisoners in their red jumpsuits cowered against the far wall, trapped in their tiny cells like dolls in a dollhouse. The basement was filled with one pure-white room, like a surgeon’s laboratory. Alchemists in their glass-eyed masks and long aprons ran around, shouting. At the distance of his vision, Calder saw a man, naked and strapped to a steel table. A woman pulled a syringe out of his arm and ran, screaming, from the sight of the Lyathatan.

Another mental order from Calder, and the monster ripped the room to pieces.

When it was done, Calder’s sight fuzzed at the edges. He sent one last, hazy thought to the Elderspawn and muttered a single word to Jerri.

“Steer,” he said.

Then he collapsed.

~~~

He woke with a headache that felt like someone had tried to split his skull with an axe. Sunlight streamed in through the cabin window, and he rolled out of his bunk, clutching his head in both hands.

When he groaned and wished for something to stop the pain, he lost concentration. He got a brief glimpse of a woman stitching his blankets, hoping the pattern would please her daughter, and white-hot pain shot through his brain like a lance.

No Reading!
he silently begged.
No Reading, no Reading, no Reading!

After a few minutes, his pain subsided, and he realized that he felt something from the side of his face. Something like a snake crawling up his cheek. He raised a hand to brush it away, but the snakes only crawled onto the back of his hand.

Calder jerked his eyes over to his shoulder, desperate to see what was crawling all over him.

Shuffles stood halfway on his shoulder, halfway on his pillow, glaring at him above its tentacle-mouth. Its wings flared.

“Shuffles,” Calder said weakly. He was surprised to find himself smiling, and he rubbed the Elderspawn’s scaly head. “What are you doing here?”

“HEEEEERE!” the monstrosity said, and flared its wings. It shuffled down to the bottom of the bed and turned, glaring at him over its shoulder.

Calder took that to mean he was supposed to get up.

A second later, someone pushed open his door, letting in a river of sunlight. He flinched back, raising his hand to cover the sight.

Rojric Marten crossed his arms over his red prison jumpsuit and smiled. “How you feeling, son?”

“Headache,” Calder grunted.

Rojric nodded reasonably. “Reader’s burn. After Alsa Awakened her saber, she couldn’t see straight for a week.”

Calder had heard of Reader’s burn, but it only happened to Readers who pushed their limits. Since he’d never felt it before, he’d always assumed that he had fewer limitations than most.

Now, his pride pounded on the inside of his skull with a five-pound hammer.

But even that couldn’t dent his satisfaction. He’d freed his father! He’d actually done it!

Calder forced a smile. “You’re out.”

Tears welled in his father’s eyes. “Yes I am, son. And I’m not going back. I keep thinking I’m going to wake up and find myself…” He took a deep breath. “You saved me.
Thank you.”

Calder’s chest puffed up like a balloon, and he felt as though he could wrestle an army. Once his headache went away, anyway.

Then Jerri shouted from above, and something landed on the surface of the deck.

No, not something.
Someone
. Someone he could feel, even through the Reader’s burn, even through the ship’s deck. And his heart quaked with a pure, instinctive fear.

“Hide,” he whispered, and staggered out of bed.

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY
-F
IVE

This time, Kelarac met him on a frozen battlefield.

Calder stood in the midst of a battle locked in a single instant, as though he had stepped into a painting. Men stood behind him, rushing forward with armor and spears to meet the charge of the monsters ahead. The humans were sweating, panting, desperate; their teeth bared in defiance, boots set against the ground. Many of them had bled through their bandages, or tried to hold their armor together with nails and bits of rope.

They faced an army of nightmares. Elderspawn of every stripe; not just the Children of Nakothi, stitched and blended together from the corpses of men, but monsters of all kinds. The giant worms of Kthanikahr, stuck emerging from their burrows as though time had stopped. The shadow-men of Urg’naut, the ever-shifting soldiers of Tharlos, the amphibious hordes of Othaghor. The monstrosities filled the earth and sky, frozen in the middle of crawling toward the men like dogs to a feast.

Black smoke hung in the sky like pillars, and the sky glowed an unnatural red.

Directly in front of Calder, Kelarac lounged on his version of a throne. Two human soldiers carried a third man, injured, on their shoulders. The injured had snatched up a spear from nearby and was beginning to turn around, as though he meant to fight with a bleeding wound in his stomach.

Kelarac sat on the wounded man’s injured belly, the spearhead propping up his back. It should never have supported him, but everything in this frozen tableau was as solid as stone. He rested his feet on the helmet of one of the nearby soldiers, leaning back against the spear, and let out a satisfied sigh.

“So you come to me again, Reader of Memory,” Kelarac said. “Not so young as before, but a child still.”

Calder swept a bow. “Lord Kelarac. Your wisdom is matched only by your generosity, in deigning to appear before me.”

The Great Elder smiled his gold-capped smile. “I have been called many things, but never ‘generous.’ I was compelled to appear before one of my…competitors should take your gift from me.”

“You should know by now that you’re my favorite customer, My Lord.”

“As you are starting to become mine.” Kelarac lifted the gray-green Heart in his fist, twisting it as though staring into a prism. “I tend to begin any negotiation by questioning my opponent’s goods, but I suspect you know exactly how valuable this is, don’t you?”

Modestly, Calder looked down. “I wouldn’t disturb you for anything less than the best.”

The Elder drew a sharp breath in through his nose, tilting his steel-shrouded head back. “I taste my sister’s agony in this. For one whose trade was death and rebirth, she’s having quite the trouble coming back to life, is she not?”

Calder and Kelarac laughed together, though the human suspected that he was missing out on quite a bit of context. One of the many things his father had taught him: people grow suspicious if you don’t laugh when they do.

“On that topic, My Lord, I seem to find myself in a bit of trouble once again.”

“Found out your wife was raised in a pacification sect, did you?” He managed to pull off a knowing look, even with his eyes hidden behind a band of steel. “Born and bred a slave to the
wisdom
of our race. Reminds me of an age long past, when not a one of you could start a fire without prostrating yourself before your betters for three days and nights.”

Anger flared up, matched almost instantly by fear. He spoke of Calder like he was worth
nothing;
like he was a blind, stupid dog that Kelarac enjoyed tormenting for his squeals.

That was the anger. On the other hand, there was the fear—that Kelarac could do exactly that.

“That’s not quite what I meant,” Calder said.

“I think you’ll be surprised with my perspective on pacification sects, boy.” Kelarac reached out and scooped up a handful of nuts from a bowl that rested on a soldier’s helmet. “What they seek is a world of harmony between our kind and yours. Admirable, if it weren’t
entirely
misguided. We require totally different conditions in which to flourish. The only place for a human is not beside me, it is
beneath
me. Reaching up. Giving me gifts, in exchange for the occasional favor.” He raised a fistful of the nuts to his mouth and crunched, crumbs raining down from between his ringed fingers.

While Calder searched for an appropriate response, Kelarac grinned. “That would be an excellent place for my brothers and sisters as well. I like this world, former Watchman. Slaves do not bargain. Free men do.” He held up the Heart again. “And they bring
such
treasures.”

Calder cleared his throat. “As I said, I came for help. Someone has summoned what I believe to be—”

“One of Nakothi’s Handmaidens. And it was your wife that did the summoning, though you knew that already, didn’t you? It was quite a surprise for her, I can assure you.”

He was sure that he was walking straight into a trap, but Calder had to ask. “What do you mean?”

Kelarac tossed a peanut into his mouth. “The device she used was intended to summon a lesser spawn of Othaghor, one that could lead her out of captivity and to her Soulbound Vessel. From there, she was meant to recapture Nakothi’s Heart and deliver it to her sect.”

The Elder leaned forward on his throne of frozen men. “But your kind understands nothing of the universe, and less of the powers you think you can use. She sent a call out while in the presence of one of Nakothi’s hearts…and during the Awakening of a blade that once pierced a
different
Heart of the Dead Mother. Nakothi held so much sway over that island at that place, in that moment, that she and she alone determined what answered that call into the void.

“That she sent one of her Handmaidens means that she wants everything destroyed. The island, the blade, her missing heart, and everyone involved in the whole event. She thinks she has a better chance of victory if she resets the board.”

He cackled while staring at the Heart in his hands. “Only you and I know that she’s already lost.”

“I need to escape the Handmaiden,” Calder said, when he finally thought he could get some space to speak.

“If you want to save your wife,” Kelarac went on, “you’ll need to hurry. The Handmaiden will seek her out soon.”