Of Sea and Shadow (The Elder Empire: Sea Book 1) (17 page)

So he started off by investing a nail binding two boards together, fine. Then he invested the two boards for strength, which made them too rigid and brittle. The nail driving them together wouldn’t break, because of his Intent, but neither did the boards bend. Given a single tap, the whole thing exploded into splinters.

Next, he tried investing the boards for durability rather than strength. It took hours of focus and all his mental energy, but he eventually got them how he wanted them. However, he ended up with a pair of boards that would bend like rubber without breaking. Anyone who stepped on them would sink inches down into the deck.

When he finally gave up, Alsa showed him how it was done: you had to invest the two boards and the nail together, as a whole, as well as separately. It required him to focus his Intent three ways at once, which gave him such a headache that he was useless for almost two days afterward.

He returned to work with a renewed vigor. Now he could finally understand why Alsa could do so quickly what took him hours—if he practiced like this all day, he would be more skilled than a Magister by the time he’d finished the ship.

Then he saw the suicides, and they woke him as if from a dream.

He was moving his way down the railing of
The Testament,
laying his Intent into every inch of the starboard rail. He needed to focus, but he didn’t necessarily need to see what he was doing, so he often found his eyes wandering up to the west side of the harbor.

To Candle Bay Imperial Prison.

Somewhere up there, his father was locked in a cell. He imagined the prison cells as dank and lined with stone, but he didn’t know for sure. He’d never been able to visit.

For eighteen months now, the receptionist had turned him away.

“I’m sorry, that prisoner is under delicate medical care.”

“That prisoner is being held in special confinement today.”

“That prisoner is under disciplinary review, and cannot receive visitors at this time.”

At first he’d tried every week, then every month, and now he was considering sending a strongly worded letter to the Candle Bay warden. From the deck of
The Testament,
he glared up at the distant windows, imagining he could see his father’s red hair within.

Then one of the windows slid open, and a woman crawled out headfirst.

At this distance, she looked like a stick-figure more than a woman, but the sight was enough to destroy his concentration and ruin his Reading. What was she doing? Was she trying to climb down the wall and escape?

His questions were answered a moment later when she plunged headfirst, landing among the rocks below.

Calder’s involuntary shout startled the nearby workers and Watchmen, who all turned to look at him.

He pointed straight at the prison. “That woman jumped!”

And then a second figure crawled out the same figure, falling to his death on the rocks.

A murmur went up among the workers, and there was a general shaking of heads. “Bad business,” someone said, but then they all went back to work.

When a third and a fourth prisoner jumped out the window, Calder rushed around the deck looking for someone to help. He finally found a grizzled old Watchman sitting on a barrel, munching on a sandwich.

“Four people have jumped from that window in the last thirty seconds,” Calder said, trying to sound calm. He pointed as another man fell. “Five, now.”

The old man shook his head, letting out a sigh. “Bad business, that is. Bad business.” He took another bite of his sandwich. “That’s an Imperial Prison, isn’t it?”

“Candle Bay Imperial Prison.”

He kept shaking his head, brushing crumbs from his mustache. “I wouldn’t even keep an Elder locked up in an Imperial Prison. Not in the Capital, at any rate. Emperor only knows what they do to the prisoners in there.”

Calder had no doubt that the Emperor
did
know.

~~~

Back at home, in the Grayweather library, Calder recounted his story to Jyrine. With many whispers and glances over his shoulder, he told her about the Candle Bay suicides, about the receptionist never letting him see his father, and how he was
almost
sure that his father’s cell was overlooking the bay.

Jyrine looked over at their chaperone, Vorus, who was silently reading
The Adventures of Soulbound Silas.

“You know what you need to do,” she whispered back. “You have to rescue him.”

It wasn’t a new idea, of course. He had pondered and toyed with the idea of breaking his father free since the night Rojric was taken. Once every few weeks, he’d take out the Emperor’s key and roll it between his fingers, silently promising himself that his father wouldn’t have to tolerate prison much longer.

But between his studies with Jyrine, his job working on
The Testament,
and his sudden appointment to a Guild he’d known almost nothing about...well,
life
had gotten in the way. It was easy to tell himself that he’d use his invested key to free his father like some hero, but it was quite another thing to give up his comfortable routine and put in the long, hard, boring work. What door would he even unlock? How would he get his father out of an unlatched cell unseen?

All that had changed when he witnessed the bodies on the stones of Candle Bay. Who knew what cruel experiments that Emperor was running on his father?

He couldn’t tell Jyrine too much, though. He had to seem reluctant, as if he’d be giving this project a few more weeks of thought. “I don’t know anything about the prison’s layout. Maybe if they would let me in...”

“You’re a Watchman now, aren’t you? Why don’t you, you know—” She waved her hands in the air, vaguely. “—tell them it’s a Blackwatch issue. What will they know?”

Calder had considered it. There were only two problems with that plan.

“First of all, the receptionist knows what I look like. I’ve been trying to see my father almost since he was locked up. Second, even if I could walk straight in the door with a Blackwatch badge on, they’re not about to let me walk out with a prisoner.”

Jyrine nodded sagely. “I know what you need.”

In spite of himself, Calder was intrigued. Jyrine often came up with unexpected bits of knowledge; he wouldn’t have been surprised if she knew the exact right procedure for a jailbreak.

“A partner,” she whispered. “A confidante. You need me.”

Calder looked at her, in her turquoise sitting-dress and matching earrings, with her excited smile, and he almost couldn’t resist the urge to let her help with the plan. He needed more help, after all, and this was a chance to work on a project together. A
secret
project.

But this wasn’t a game. Failure would see them locked up in Candle Bay alongside his father, at the best. At worst, they could be killed in the attempt. Or...

An image came to his mind of Bliss, pushing a shard of bone back into her black coat. He didn’t know how she’d react to hearing that one of her newest Watchmen had been arrested trying to break his father out of prison, but he couldn’t imagine that she’d take it well. She might even take punishment into her own hands.

He’d rather face Imperial justice.

“I
do
need you,” Calder said. “I can’t plan something like this on my own. I need someone to help me gather information, to plot the escape, and to cover for me with Mother. But when it comes to the actual operation, it’s better if I go by myself.”

He pulled a line from a play he’d recently seen. “There are some things that a man has to do for himself,” he said solemnly.

Jyrine was quiet for a few seconds, staring at the back of her tattooed hand. “I don’t think my father’s dead. They say he is. But he came to me one night and said that he’d be going away on important work. And he told me that, no matter what I was told, he absolutely wasn’t dead.”

Her eyes rose, meeting his. “Three days later, the Blackwatch came to my door and told me he had been killed in the line of duty. That the means of his death was confidential. I don’t know what happened, or if he’s alive, or if he knew he was about to die and he told me so that I wouldn’t worry. But at this point, if I had any idea where he was, I’d go find him.”

And Calder had no idea how to respond. He sat looking into her eyes for far too long.

She finally broke the contact by tossing her braid back behind her shoulder. “And don’t give me that, ‘A man has to do things for himself’ line. I watched that play with you, remember.”

At this point, he didn’t know how to refuse her. He felt that he was teetering on a cliff, with the safety of home behind him and a deep unknown ahead. Until this point, his plans had remained firmly in the realm of fantasy. But if he told her he was going to free his father, he had the uncomfortable feeling she’d hold him to it.

With a deep breath, Calder took a step into the unknown.

“Let’s go for it, Jyrine.”

Her eyes sparkled, and she clapped him on the shoulder. “Jerri. That’s what my family calls me. Anyone who lets me in on their prison break conspiracies gets to call me Jerri.”

In the corner, Vorus slapped his book down on the table.

He glared at them over his glasses, raising a finger to the front of his scarf. “Sssssshhh!”

For the moment, Jerri and Calder returned to their studies.

C
HAPTER
E
LEVEN

Calder stood in what passed for a hole on this nightmare of an island: an ugly, gaping wound the size of a crater. It looked as though the Blackwatch had gouged a warehouse-sized scoop out of the dead Elder’s flesh, leaving the edges oozing red and an infected-looking green. Holes dotted the wall like empty veins, from small enough to hold a fist to openings bigger than a Capital sewer pipe. Tendons crossed from wall to wall like pinkish wires, and they’d had to duck and dodge in order to walk down to the crater’s center.

There, at the center of a taut network of veins and tendons, pulsed a gray-green heart.

Six Watchmen with their black coats worn loose stood around the heart, sweating. They held pickaxes and shovels, and their clothes were covered in sickly ichor. Each of them had a haunted, dead look that Calder could well understand: he couldn’t imagine the stomach it would take to dig out a mine
by
hand
in a soil that looked like flesh.

Whatever his mother was paying them, it wasn’t enough.

Naberius fell to his knees in front of the heart, a picture of heroic awe. “Is this it?”

Alsa held out a hand as if to Read the heart, but she shuddered before she got anywhere close. “Check for yourself.”

Tristania had her back turned to Naberius, and she held the handle of her whip in one hand, though she kept the rest of it tucked into her coat. Her bandaged body was poised and alert, her eyes scanning the edges of the huge cauldron as though she expected to see a threat emerge at any second.

On instinct, Calder almost Read the crater wall to see if he could detect incoming threats, but he stopped himself before moving his hand. Alsa hadn’t moved within a foot of the heart, and she still looked vaguely sickened. He didn’t want to know what it would feel like if he directly Read the body of a Great Elder.

He’d seen men who were reduced to nothing more than drooling husks after Reading Elder artifacts. There were many ways he could imagine himself dying, but starving to death while lost in a hallucination was not one of them.

Naberius continued kneeling on the sticky ground as if heedless of the stains he was leaving on his knees. He cupped his hands around the heart, closing his eyes and inhaling deeply.

“It’s...vast and strange,” he said, in awe. “I can feel the unending life of the Dead Mother...”

Calder wondered if he noticed the contradiction. For his part, he didn’t want to be any closer to the heart than he had to. Immortality had its appeals, but if he had to shackle his soul to an Elder’s, he thought he would prefer death.

The white-haired Watchman had a quick, quiet word with Alsa. She turned sharply on Naberius, who was still kneeling over the heart in obvious ecstasy. “You’ve verified the Heart, then, Witness Clayborn. Our part here is done. Now, let’s cut this free and get to shelter.”

Calder eyed his mother and then Tristania, who had not relaxed her vigil. Alsa Grayweather was not prone to unjustified panic. If she wanted out of this crater, she had a good reason. “What’s the hurry, Mother?”

While the Watchmen went to work trying to sever the tendons—it must have been harder than it looked, as one man swung his pickaxe into the pinkish wire with no effect—Alsa walked over to her son.

She spoke in a low voice. “Ever since we set up camp on this island, we’ve been under constant attack from the Children of Nakothi. I’ve had twice as many men guarding as digging. But these past few days, it’s been slowing down. Hours before you got here, they
all
ran off. Vanished. We haven’t seen skull or claw of anything all day.”

That seemed like the opposite of a problem, to him. “When I land too close to an island in
The Testament,
we often find that the wildlife is too quiet. There are many things in the Aion that can sense the Lyathatan approaching.”

One of the Watchmen stood over an unbroken tendon, calling for a saw.

Alsa grimaced. “I hope that’s what it is. Your Lyathatan hails from Kelarac, and certain records indicate that he and Nakothi were anything but friendly. But if that’s not the case, then it means they’re gathering their strength.”

“They would need a leader for that.”

“Thus far, they haven’t shown any signs of one.” She shrugged. “But the more you learn about the Elders, you start to realize how little you actually know. One of the Elderspawn may have spontaneously developed the ability to command the others, or they may have established psychic contact with something higher up the ladder. Either way, I’d feel a lot safer if we were out of this crater.”

Calder looked up to the bleeding edge, toward the camp where he’d left his crew. They would be safer together than he would be down here, but he couldn’t help but worry. They were understaffed here, in the case of any attack. Just him, his mother, the two Witnesses, and half a dozen Watchmen with tools.