Of Sea and Shadow (The Elder Empire: Sea Book 1) (13 page)

Today, they had finally decided to do some hands-on investigation.

It was an unseasonably cold day in autumn, which gave them an excuse to wear hoods and heavy coats. Even if Alsa did spot them hovering around her workplace, she shouldn’t be able to see much of their faces.

Calder, after a moment’s hesitation, even belted a sword around his waist. There were so many around the Grayweather house that his mother would never notice a single one missing, and it was currently fashionable for men to wear blades in public. It made men who had grown up in the peaceful Capital look like they could handle themselves in a fight, and a swordsman could never cause too much trouble with all the Imperial troops carrying pistols.

The sword would make him look older, so no one would think to find a fourteen-year-old inside his hood. Besides, his mother had been training him. If they were caught, he might be able to fight his way free.

They snuck out of the house on the pretense of buying books down in the city, giving Artur and Vorus time to relax.

Of course, the tutors were under the impression that the children would be chaperoned by Alsa, and Alsa that they were still under the care of their tutors. That lie had taken a tricky bit of coordination, but between them, they’d managed it.

So it was that Calder found himself walking down the streets of the Capital toward the Candle Bay harbor, Jyrine on his arm and a sword at his belt.

He couldn’t recall anything better happening to him in his entire life.

Jyrine’s grip tightened on his arm as the harbor came into view. “Look at that,” she whispered, pointing.

She didn’t need to point—there was only one thing of interest happening in the harbor. A wooden scaffold covered most of the horizon, blocking off more than its share of the harbor. All the other ships were shoved off to one side, almost hull-to-hull with one another.

The scaffolding was so thick that it might as well have been a wooden wall between them and the water. Here and there he caught glimpses of rope lines, a stretch of mast, a few yards of sail.

“Are they building a ship?” Jyrine asked.

Calder stared at the scaffolding as though he could will it to disappear. “That must be a disguise. My mother hates the water. And she’s certainly not a shipwright.”

“But what else could they possibly be doing?”

Left with no other obvious alternative, the two of them kept walking closer and closer to the harbor. The Capital was vast, and Calder had never visited this particular harbor before. He had traveled to the Imperial prison several times, but that building was all the way across Candle Bay. This side of the bay was a total mystery to him.

Workers crawled all over the wooden frame, some shirtless and banging away with hammers, others wearing leather harnesses and dangling from climbing-ropes. A man who looked like a Magister stood on the dock, shouting something and waving a reddish staff over his head with both hands.

Jyrine squeezed his arm again. “Are you willing to get in trouble?”

They hadn’t discussed the plan this far, but there was only one thing they could possibly do. He gave her a grin. “You go left, I’ll go right.”

Without the slightest hesitation, Jyrine split off to the left, stuffing her hands into her coat pockets and walking down to the dock. Calder moved to the right, doing the same.

There was a reason they had chosen to wear coats of solid, unrelieved black.

The Blackwatch stood around the dock at the base of the scaffolding, but not standing guard. They probably didn’t need to—one could easily tell a Watchman by their black uniforms, and most people avoided the Blackwatch at all costs. They were supposed to have power over Elders, and no one wanted to risk that fate. Unsavory rumors suggested that, if you interfered with a Watchman in the course of her duties, you might find yourself face-to-face with the faceless.

All of which worked to Calder’s advantage.

A knot of black-clad men and women stood around a makeshift table of stacked crates, arguing over what looked like a map.

“We need more iron,” one of the women said.

“More iron? What, for ballast? Why should we keep building a trap if we can’t catch anything?”

“We never will, if we don’t get another Reader.”

“Are the bindings in place?”

“That’s Grayweather’s area, but good luck finding her.”

Calder’s ears perked up at the mention of his mother, but he didn’t show any reaction. He walked past the cluster of Watchmen, armed with confidence and a black coat. One of the men nodded to him as passed, and Calder nodded back.

Heart hammering, he ducked under the lowest wooden beam forming the box around the dock. No one tried to stop him. No one even seemed to notice.

Once he was past the scaffolding, he saw what his mother had been working on for the better part of the past year.

The ship had a hull built of smooth wood, of a green so dark that it was almost black. There were no sails, leaving the mast sticking up like a tree with no leaves. Workmen bustled around the ship’s deck, nailing planks down or moving brushes over the railing. Shimmering gold leaf on the side of the hull proudly announced the vessel’s name:
The Testament.

But the most unusual aspect of the ship’s construction lay on the docks.

A pair of shackles, big enough to wrap around a whole house, sat unlatched on the docks. Each shackle was bolted to an enormous chain, which slithered down the dock and vanished under the water, terminating at some point under the ship.

Far from enlightening him, the sight raised a forest of new questions. What was the point of dragging two enormous chains behind the ship? Wouldn’t they anchor it in place? Were the shackles supposed to lock on to the ocean floor, or were they meant to hold something? A pair of Kameira, perhaps?

He had a sudden vision of this ship being pulled by two great sea serpents, the shackles wrapped around their necks like collars, and the idea seized his imagination. Perhaps there were no sails because this ship didn’t need sails: it would move across the Aion Sea solely under the propulsion of its captive beasts.

But it didn’t explain the greatest mystery.

Why does a ship like this need Blackwatch help?

He stood gazing at the vessel for a moment longer, hoping that Jyrine had managed to make it in here undetected, when he felt a metal point sticking through his coat on the back of his neck.

An unfamiliar woman’s voice spoke from behind him. “You’re carrying steel. You know how to use it?”

“Let me draw it, and I’ll show you,” he said, his mouth moving on its own.

The woman laughed and pulled the point away from his neck. “It’s a duel, then!”

Calder turned, drawing his saber.

Behind him, holding a curved saber almost identical to his own, stood a woman who looked nothing at all like a Watchman. She wore no black, for one thing: a bright blue vest over a loose white shirt, a checkered scarf, and gray pants covered in more patches than original fabric. Her long hair, which she wore tied back, was the exact same shade of red as Calder’s.

When she saw him, her face fell, and she lowered her blade. “Elder’s
bones
,” she spat. “I’m not picking on a boy. Get out of here, kid, before I put you in the water.”

Calder pushed back his hood, then raised the point of his own saber. “You have beautiful hair.”

Then he lunged, intending to prick her in the shoulder. That would teach her to underestimate an armed opponent.

She slapped his blade away with hers, now grinning. “I could say the same to you.” She stepped forward, testing him with a short strike.

Calder managed to turn it away. The woman was much,
much
faster than he’d expected. He needed to keep her talking. “What’s your name, young lady?”

Her eyebrows rose even as she cut off a slice of his coat sleeve. “Young lady? Kelarac’s balls, boy, I’ve got ten years on you at least.”

He feinted for her neck, and then ducked low, aiming for her leg. Her arm seemed to move independently of her body, turning his blade away without her reacting at all.

“I’m Calder,” he panted, already losing his breath.

“Cheska Bennett. Member of the proud Guild of Navigators, and recently made captain of
The Eternal.
” She didn’t bother going on the offensive, waiting for him to take the initiative.

“Calder Marten.” He took advantage of the space to give his breath to return.

A workman tried to edge his way around Cheska, but she pushed him off the dock without looking. “Who taught you to fence, your kid sister?”

“His mother, actually,” Alsa Grayweather said, peeling off her gloves as she hopped down from the ship.

Calder hurriedly shoved his sword back down into its sheath, though Cheska glanced from one of them to the other. “
Your
son? Really? But he seems like so much fun.”

“He takes after his father,” Alsa said flatly, resting her hand on the hilt of her own sword. On her, it didn’t look like a fashion statement. “I’m trying to teach him to act like an adult. By, for instance,
not
dueling strangers in public for no reason.”

Cheska finally slid her blade away, still grinning. “Aw, don’t be like that. I caught somebody sneaking in, and I was having a little fun with him before I sent him away. Seems like you’ve been slacking on the fencing lessons, though.”

Alsa’s grip tightened on her sword. “Would you like one of your own, then?”

The Navigator Captain backed away, hands empty and raised. “You’re a hothead, Grayweather. One day, that temper of yours’ll get somebody killed. See you again, Calder.”

With a cheery wave, she walked off.

Behind her, a grumbling workman hauled himself out of Candle Bay.

“
Navigators
,” Alsa spat. She turned to Calder, seemingly just as angry. “I’ll have you know that I caught Jyrine myself, and I have sent her straight back home. What do you suggest I do with you?”

Calder looked up hopefully. “Give me a job?”

~~~

Calder knew that, if he approached this situation carefully, he would end up locked at home under strict guard, with most of his privileges suspended.

So he decided to plunge recklessly forward.

“Surely there’s something I can do to help,” he said to his mother. She had escorted him some distance away from the harbor, and now the two of them sat at a small table in the shelter of a tea-shop.

Alsa pinched the bridge of her nose. “This is Guild business, Calder. Certainly, we can always use more Readers, but we haven’t fallen so low as to recruit...men as young as yourself.”

She sounded certain, but Calder had seen the way her eyes drooped and her shoulders fell when she came home, sometimes late at night. They were working her ragged, which meant they didn’t have many Readers to choose from. Why not Calder?

And if he was working on their special project, his mother couldn’t punish him for sneaking around.

“It looked to me like you can use every hand you can get. How many other Readers do they have working here?”

“The Guild is spread very thin lately. We were expected to have three more, but...”

A thought struck Calder that had never occurred to him before. “Are you the
only
Reader on this project?”

Loose strands of Alsa’s hair fell over her eyes as she slumped over the table. “Two others, to begin with. First one was called off, and then the other, and they kept promising—”

The fatigue blew away from Alsa like a hat in the wind, and she stood up, stock-still. All the other voices in the shop drifted off into silence.

Not knowing what else to do, Calder stood up too.
 

“Guild Head,” Alsa snapped, bowing crisply at the waist.

A young woman stood on the inside of the shop door as it closed behind her. Her long hair, which almost brushed the floor, was a shade of blond so white as to be almost silver. The color probably came straight from an alchemist’s bottle. She wore only a long black coat that covered her entirely from the neck down, with a line of silver buttons fastening down the front.

At first glance, Calder thought she was his own age. Then he wondered if perhaps she might be even younger. But as she walked closer to their table, she carried herself with the businesslike bearing of a much older woman.

She did not sit, nodding first to Alsa, and then to Calder.

“I spoke with Cheska,” she said, and her voice was high and clear, like a child’s. “We had a visitor, didn’t we?”

Alsa stared straight ahead, her back rigid. “Yes, ma’am. This is my son Calder, ma’am.”

The girl looked at him without any recognizable expression. “Calder Marten. I am Bliss.”

What kind of a name is Bliss?
he wondered. And it still bothered him that he couldn’t tell how old she was.

But his mother had called her ‘Guild Head.’

He bowed deeply at the waist. “I’m Calder Marten, Madam Bliss. I do apologize—”

“Just Bliss. If you like, you can call me Guild Head.” She squinted, as though she were having trouble seeing him properly. “Shouldn’t we sit, in an establishment like this?”

In such chill and windy weather, the tea-shop was somewhat packed. Over two dozen people had turned to watch the three people in black coats, standing stiffly instead of sitting with their tea.

Calder slid into a seat next to his mother, trying not to blush. Bliss considered her chair as though she’d never seen one before, then abruptly plopped herself down. “What has your mother told you of our project down at the harbor, Calder Marten?”

“Nothing, Bliss, but—”

“Guild Head,” she corrected.

He paused for a second. She had given him permission to call her by her name, hadn’t she? But he continued nonetheless.

“I’m sorry, Guild Head—”

“Bliss.”

“Bliss,” he repeated, confused.

“Guild Head.”

Now
he was getting frustrated. He forced a smile. “What would you like me to call you, ma’am?”

She shrugged. “I don’t care. I wanted to see how long you’d put up with it.” She poured herself a cup of tea, and Calder realized that not only had his tea arrived, but she had stolen his cup.