Of Sea and Shadow (The Elder Empire: Sea Book 1) (3 page)

Mister Dunwood had a seat at his desk and gestured for his two guests to do the same. He had to use his left hand, as his right had been replaced by a blunt silver hook. An accident at sea, they’d been told.

“Before we begin, can I offer you anything by way of refreshment?” Mister Dunwood asked, his smile revealing several gold teeth. “I received six bottles of the Shiftapple Ninety-six from Nathanael Bareius himself. You’ll never taste another like it, I assure you.”

Calder’s father, Rojric, chuckled politely. “Perhaps if my son weren’t with me, then I would accept, but he’s a bit too young. It would be rude of me to exclude him so.”

Their host gave Calder a gold-speckled grimace. “He is more than welcome to wait outside. Business meetings are no place for children, I’ve found.”

This was all part of the plan, and Calder had rehearsed his part. He drew himself up, indignant. “Excuse me! I am twelve years old, and I have been attending such meetings with my father since I was nine and a half. We are
partners
in this endeavor, sir!”

Mister Dunwood laughed, trying to appear amused, but he rubbed the base of his silver hook with his one remaining hand. His eyes shifted between the two of them.

They had selected their appearance carefully: two matching blue suits, immaculately tailored. Their red hair was slicked back with grease in precisely the same manner, and they even sat with the same affected posture.

After trying once to get the child out of the room, Mister Dunwood would realize that he could not separate the pair, and continue while ignoring Calder as much as possible. That was the plan.

And, indeed, matters proceeded as they expected.

“Of course, sirs,” he said. “I would not hope to separate the noble family of Fairstreet.”

‘Fairstreet’ was the name of an alley through which they had happened to pass a few weeks earlier.

“It’s unusual, I know,” Rojric allowed. “But where else would I send him? His mother, may her soul fly free, was taken by drink. I did what I could to save her from her fate, but when one is set on the road to self-destruction...alas, her liver failed her only two winters past. If he does not learn the family business, then where is he to go?”

Calder’s mother lived not an hour’s walk from this very building. He could barely remember her face.

Mister Dunwood bowed his head solemnly. “Fate can be cruel. But let us not linger too long on the past. It is the future that concerns us today, is it not?”

Rojric smiled beneath his orange mustache. “It is indeed, Mister Dunwood. I have a buyer who is willing to secure the future for
all
of us if you can produce what you claim. Pending the verification of a Reader, of course.”

“I have taken the liberty of securing such verification myself, in fact. The document will be provided along with the object itself.”

Calder shifted in his seat, letting his posture slacken, resuming his facade of boredom. In fact, he was scanning the decorative firearms mounted on racks behind Mister Dunwood’s head.
Fifty silvermarks, sixty silvermarks, thirty-five silvermarks...

Rojric cleared his throat and glanced from side to side, as though checking for observers in this windowless room. “Regarding the object, sir, would you be so kind...?”

Dipping his hook into his jacket pocket, Mister Dunwood withdrew a ring of keys. After fumbling one-handed at the metal for a moment, he found what he was looking for and leaned under his desk.

Surreptitiously, Calder brushed his hand against the heavy wood of the desk.

The tree is a little girl’s favorite hiding place. She tucks her favorite toys into its roots, where her brothers will never find them.

The lumber is solid, sturdy. The laborer thinks it will go to a fortress wall, maybe, or a vault door.

The carpenter places his hands on the desk, feeling the wood. He’s finished bolting metal plates to the inside of the wood; it has enough armor to stop a pistol-shot, and stands more than sturdy enough to hold a safe.

It took longer to sort through the impressions left in the desk than it had to Read them. This desk was not terribly significant—it hadn’t been through any momentous events, at least none that had made their mark in its wood—but it was invested with enough Intent to reinforce the grain, keeping it sturdy and solid. It would be hard to saw through and steal the safe; much easier to take the key.

Good thing that’s the plan, then.

From somewhere beneath the desk, a safe door squeaked open, and Mister Dunwood withdrew a polished wooden box. He set it carefully on the surface of the desk, as though it contained an explosive that would be set off by the slightest wrong movement.

“Gentlemen,” Mister Dunwood said, in a reverent whisper. “I give you the oldest Imperial artifact not currently in the Emperor’s possession.”

With the tips of his fingers, he levered open the lid of the box, revealing...a worn, and somewhat ragged, quill pen.

The feather itself must once have been beautiful, as a lustrous rainbow sheen still clung to the pen like a thin slick of oil. But the intervening years had worn it down until the feather looked sickly, bedraggled. More like a relic of a strangled chicken than a Kameira-quill pen wielded by the Emperor himself.

Rojric gave a low whistle. “I can practically see the aging. Five hundred years, you say?”

“You have a good eye, Mister Fairstreet. Yes, I had my Reader date it back at least that far. The Emperor used it to pen the documents that led to the end of the Scullery Wars.”

“Truly a shameful moment in our history.” Calder’s father rubbed his hands eagerly. “Well, whatever the provenance of this item, I can tell that you have some impressive contacts, Mister Dunwood. Where, for instance, did you manage to procure the head of a Nightwyrm?”

Mister Dunwood shifted to look behind him, at the black-scaled draconic head baring its teeth from the wall. He grew a proud smile as he started to launch into his story.

Calder’s moment had come.

He hopped up, snatching the pen from its case as soon as Dunwood’s attention was distracted. “It doesn’t look like much,” he said loudly.

The Windwatcher glides through the air, eyeing the currents that shift like rivers of blue smoke through the sky. It nudges an updraft of hot air closer, and the wind obeys, bending the warm column toward the Kameira. The Windwatcher catches the draft in its wings, letting the wind lift it higher. It needs all the help it can get, for its passengers are heavy and want nothing more than speed.

The craftsman works at the end of the feather with his penknife, desperate not to make a mistake. This quill should
never
spill ink,
never
smudge or break. It has to write flawlessly, smoothly. For all he knows, his life might depend on it.

The Emperor sighs, holding his quill over the inkwell. A servant-girl rushes forward, rubbing his shoulders, and he leaves her to it. Tonight, he needs anything that will help him relax. With one letter, he could condemn a group of merchants to poverty and probable starvation. With another, he might damn his loyal servants to execution. He needs to be eloquent now, to phrase the perfect message that will save them both.

Or else he might be tempted to kill them all, and let Kelarac sort out their souls...

The visions faded as Mister Dunwood grabbed the pen back, red-faced. “This is
priceless!
What do you think you are doing?”

“How do we know it’s even real?” Calder replied automatically, his mind still swirling in a spiral of Intent.

“I’m so sorry, Mister Dunwood,” Rojric apologized. “He’s been an Elder-spawned nightmare since his mother passed, that I can tell you.”

Mister Dunwood replaced the pen in its case as though lowering an infant into its cradle. “Then why don’t we let him be someone else’s nightmare for a time, hmm?”

Rojric sighed. “Would you wait outside for me for a while, son?”

Calder huffed and marched outside, slamming the door for good measure.

It was hard staying in character while still in the grip of a Reader’s trance, but he kept it up until he was safely outside the office. Then he slumped into a chair, gasping for breath, trying to separate his own thoughts from his alias, from an ancient craftsman, from the Emperor.

At least they had their answer: the artifact was real.

Rojric followed his son out only a few minutes later, wearing a broad smile. “We’ve finalized the sale. A bit more than I was hoping for, but he negotiates like Kelarac himself!”

The second reference to Kelarac, the Collector of Souls, almost sent Calder spiraling back into the trance. He shook off the visions, following his father out of the building.

Only when they were outside did Rojric mutter, “It was real, then?”

Calder grinned.

~~~

Later that night, Calder and his father returned, but without the props.

They were dressed in the simple clothes and apron they had stolen from a local delivery company, and carried empty boxes over their shoulders. If they were caught, they could claim that they had received a late-night delivery that required a signature, and had found the door unlocked.

They wouldn’t be caught, though. This was the Capital: the city that night could not conquer. No one would even notice a couple of deliverymen and their packages.

Rojric set his crate down with a huff, knuckling his back as if he’d been freed of a great load. His mustache and glasses were gone, his red hair loose and hidden behind a cap. Calder had adopted the bulk of the disguise this time, having dyed his hair black and slipped a bandage over his left eye like an eyepatch.

He put down his own burden, a box of flowers, and placed a hand to the door. Nothing but a faint echo; the door held no Intent or significance enough to bother them.

“No traps on the door,” he whispered.

His father jiggled the doorknob as if testing it. His left hand slipped into his pocket and pulled out the greatest treasure they’d ever found.

An old, dented, corroded copper key.

He palmed it, tapping it once against the knob.

Instantly, Calder heard the tumblers unlock. The door swung open.

“They left it open for us,” Rojric said loudly. “Must want us to leave it inside.”

The house was less impressive at night, and more frightening. The mounted heads seemed to be trying to shoulder their way through the walls to get him. The guns on their racks pointed straight at him, their muzzles yawning like bottomless pits.

All that Calder noticed with half his mind, while the rest was focused on all the riches they were leaving behind.

They had a schedule to keep, so they were passing up the fifty-goldmark urns and hundred-silvermark watches, even though they could easily stuff enough into their flower-box to keep them for a year.

But the quill could see them in silk suits and cigars for a decade.

They rushed to the back office, where another tap of the key let them right in. The ordinary-looking copper key was the only genuine Imperial artifact they’d found to this point, and the only bounty they’d kept for themselves. It was too valuable to sell, Calder’s father had said, and Calder believed him.

When they reached down for the safe, they found it already empty, the door hanging open.

That was when Calder knew they were caught.

He bolted for the door while his father stepped up to the wall, as though trying to find the quill’s new hiding-place. Both of them were too late.

A squad of monsters marched through the door.

One of the men looked ordinary except for his arms, which were covered in fur like a bear’s. Claws tipped each of his fingers. Another, a woman, grabbed Rojric and forced him against the desk. She hissed in his face, revealing fangs like a snake’s.

The parade of horrors spread out over the room, a display of human and Kameira melding. One of the men lashed a tail, and another stared straight at Calder with the too-wide eyes of a giant owl.

That was when Calder realized what they all had in common: they wore the same uniform. A red-and-black pressed uniform, tailored to meet their unique anatomical requirements, and marked with a crest.

The crest stood proudly on the breast of each uniform, the size of a man’s spread hand. It was a golden shield, marked with the Imperial Seal: a crescent moon tucked inside a blazing sun, to represent the breadth of the Empire. “My dominion shall stretch from the sun to the moon,” the Emperor had once said, and he had proven himself right.

Only one Guild had the right to bear the Seal. And if the Imperial Guard were here, that meant the game was well and truly over.

As everyone in the Capital knew, no one escaped the Emperor’s Guard.

When the Guardsmen had Rojric secure, with his arms tied behind his back and a pistol to his head, one of them let out an unnaturally high whistle.

On cue, their leader entered the room. He looked like a strict grandfather—bone-thin, with only a brush of white hair on his head, and the pinched look of someone who consumed food only as fuel for his body. He wore his Imperial Guard uniform as though it had been glued to his skin.

And a set of gills rode on either side of his neck, flapping in the air as though gasping.

“Mr. Marten,” the Guardsman said, nodding to Rojric. “Mr. Marten.” He nodded to Calder. “I am Watch-leader Fitch. You are hereby under arrest for attempting to purchase the stolen personal property of the Emperor.”

It did not escape Calder’s notice that the Watch-leader had not called them ‘Fairstreet.’

Rojric panted in the chair where the Guardsmen had shoved him, glancing around the room and soaking himself in sweat. “You have to understand! We thought it was a Windwatcher feather! There’s a big market for them overseas, and we had no idea the Emperor had ever touched it!”

Fitch flourished a piece of paper, gills flaring. “That’s not what this bill of sale says. We received it from Mister Dunwood not an hour ago.”

“A bill of
sale?”
Rojric repeated, incredulous. Calder understood his confusion.

Who wrote out a bill of sale for stolen goods?