Of Sea and Shadow (The Elder Empire: Sea Book 1) (34 page)

She hadn’t managed to persuade Calder to steal
The Testament,
and the Sleepless would want to see her punished, but she was past caring about their approval. This was far more fun.

Her coat bulged in the middle, rustling, but she pushed it back down before the receptionist turned around.

When the guards arrived, she didn’t bother explaining the situation to them. She just flashed her badge and walked straight through the door, to the back of the prisoners’ cells. The guards hurried to catch up, but they were too in awe of her to do anything else.

Every twenty or thirty seconds she would stop in the middle of an empty hallway, she would stop and close her eyes, waving her hands in front of her as though sensing arcane vibrations. “The energy here...” she said. “I can sense the residue of Elderspawn. It’s very close now.”

Covertly, she pushed her bulging coat back down.

The guards remained pale-faced and shaking, one of them drawing a circle in the air to ward off Elders. From what Jerri knew of the Elder races, an invisible circle wouldn’t do any more than it would against a hungry tiger. But if the gesture calmed them down, that very peace might actually protect them, so she didn’t bother correcting them.

Finally, they reached the cell that Calder had indicated. It looked no different than any of the others, but Jerri froze. The guards skidded to a halt around her, clearly on the verge of bolting.

Jerri spun and pointed down the hall to her right. “
There!
” she screamed.

They turned around so fast she thought their necks might snap. As they did, she reached into her coat, withdrew Shuffles, and tossed it down the hall to her left.

“No, behind you!” she called, pointing at Shuffles. The monstrosity had buzzed its wings to ease its fall, landing with a soft splat on the floor. It shuffled down the hall, surprisingly quick in its awkward gait.

One of the guards screamed, “It’s a monster!”

At the sound of his voice, Shuffles turned its nightmarish head around, staring at the guard over its shoulder and one stubby wing. The tentacles that served for its mouth writhed, and its eyes glared black hate.

“MONSTER!” Shuffles echoed, and hopped down the hall after them.

The guards could not wait to scramble away from the Elderspawn, pushing each other down and grabbing at the walls in their haste to escape. Shuffles let out a disturbingly deep and masculine laugh, shuffling along the tiles for a few feet before he hopped into the air and fluttered a few yards closer.

Shuffles had disturbed Jerri at first, but now she wanted one.

From her pocket, she withdrew the copper key that Calder had lent her. She was no Reader, so she didn’t need to keep it wrapped in a handkerchief. She simply pulled it out and tapped it on the cell’s lock, hoping it would work as easily as Calder said.

She didn’t hear anything happen, so she tapped it twice more. She still heard nothing, but when she tried the knob, the door swung open.

Rojric Marten had been sleeping, but his eyes snapped awake as she entered. He sat up with a smile just like the receptionist’s.

“Hello, young lady,” he said. “What can I do for you?”

He wasn’t exactly the mirror image of an older Calder that Jerri had expected—he was built heavier, for one thing, and he sported a close-trimmed beard that she couldn’t imagine polluting his son. But between the smile, the pale skin, and the red Izyrian hair, she had no doubt that this was Rojric Marten.

Jerri hurried inside, shutting the door behind her. Then she made straight for the window. “My name is Jyrine Tessella. I’m here to open the window.”

Rojric’s smile shook. “Are you going to let me jump?”

Not for the first time, Jerri wondered what they were doing to the prisoners in here. And if the Emperor knew what was happening under his nose.

He probably did. The Emperor had done a lot worse than this, in his time.

“You won’t need to jump,” Jerri said, in what she hoped was a soothing tone. “I’m a friend of your son’s.”

Like a newborn calf testing shaky legs, Rojric rose to his feet. “Calder? Is he...here?”

“He should be right outside,” Jerri assured him. “So make sure you don’t jump. You might land on him.”

She looked for a place to tap the Emperor’s key, but the window didn’t seem to have a latch. She tapped the copper all around the window frame, just in case, but the window remained sealed.

From the hallway behind her, she heard Shuffles’ deep, echoing laughter, and the boots of more guards hurrying her way.

It was time to improvise.

Jerri spoke in the tone she had learned from her father and his colleagues when dealing with civilians. “Mr. Marten, please turn and face the wall.”

Obediently, Rojric turned and stared at the featureless wood of his cell wall. He didn’t even ask questions.

Jerri took a deep breath and reached up, massaging the emerald gem of her left earring. She was no Reader, so she couldn’t feel the power building in both matching pieces of jewelry as they woke for the first time in months. But she could feel them when they finally flared to life.

After all, every Soulbound could feel her Vessel.

She drew a finger down the edge of the window frame, her touch trailing green flame. Where the blaze touched, it drilled straight through the wall.

If she couldn’t open the window, she would simply cut it free.

Burn it all down,
her instincts whispered.
Cut loose! Be free! There are bed sheets behind you; they will burn. There is a quicklamp on the wall; shatter its glass, loose the burning fluid. The man behind you, he will burn!

Her Vessel didn’t speak to her in words, but in impressions. In impulses. In pressure to do things she had no desire to do, to use all of her power and burn the world to the ground.

But it was no more difficult to resist than hunger, or anger. Her Soulbound Vessel was part of her, and its desires were welded to her own.

The window came free, and she had to grab it with both hands to prevent it from pitching out the wall and potentially landing on Calder’s head.

As she strained under the pressing weight of the window, scrambling to keep it from crashing to the ground or unbalancing her, she realized that she had never before appreciated just how
heavy
a pane of glass could be.

“Mister Marten,” she grunted. “Help me.”

Now under orders, he turned swiftly from the wall and gathered up the severed window in his hands, awkwardly avoiding the red-hot edges.

As the first guards pounded on the door, demanding to know what was going on inside, the two of them set the glass carefully against the wall.

Rojric leaned out of the hole where the window used to be, precariously close to the edge. The wind smelled of salt and icy winter weather, but he drew in a long, slow breath.

Jerri laid a hand on his shoulder and guided him back from the edge, just in case. “Don’t worry, Mister Marten. Calder will have our ride here in just a moment.”

She hoped.

~~~

When Calder’s raft sank, he knew he was going to die.

He’d been
sure
the raft would hold. He spent all afternoon investing it, meditating over each board with specific Intent. It shouldn’t have broken apart or dipped beneath the waves for anything short of a falling elephant. He’d even rubbed a drop of his blood on each board, to bind his Intent closer to the material.

He never figured out what he had done wrong, whether his Intent had conflicted too much, whether he hadn’t focused enough, whether the Intent in each invested board had fought the power in all the others. He didn’t have time to think when his raft drifted apart, leaving him to plunge into icy water.

Calder had no doubt that this was the night of his death.

First, Candle Bay was directly connected to the Aion Sea—that haunted ocean of a thousand different terrors. For every unfounded ghost story and sailor’s tale of the Aion, there were five hundred monsters and phantoms all too real. This was the sea where the Blackwatch fished for Elders. They’d spent the past year trying to summon Elderspawn into
this very bay.

He didn’t know what waited for him beneath the waves, but he knew it must hunger for his blood.

So that was his first concern. His second: the water was
cold.

When his head first dunked underwater, he almost gasped at the sheer, shocking, bone-stabbing cold of the winter water. He only avoided inhaling a chestful of icy seawater because his lungs were frozen in the grip of the frigid waves.

He pulled desperately at the waves, paddling with numb limbs, hauling his bag of invested tools along with him though it seemed to weigh as much as an anchor. All the while, visions of circling sharks and grasping Elder tentacles haunted his mind. In his imagination, the black bay beneath him was packed so full of terrors that they scarcely had room to swim.

Calder was somewhat puzzled when, five minutes later, he found himself alive and dripping on the rocks beneath Candle Bay Imperial Prison.

He raised his arms above his head in a kind of Champion’s salute, and he would have shouted had his mission not required stealth. He had conquered the freezing water, and the unnamed monsters of Othaghor and his brood.

Take that, Candle Bay! Bow before me!

Then he realized that the wind was blowing through him like a frozen spear, and his wet clothes clung to his body as close as his skin. He had to admit, this
might
not be the best time for celebration.

With shivering fingers, he undid his pack. All of his tools were still accounted for, and none the worse for their dunk in the bay. Water couldn’t wash away Intent, after all.

The first item, a rope made of knotted sheets stolen from the Grayweather residence, weighed the most. He wrung as much water out as he could, half-surprised that the moisture didn’t freeze to slush before it reached his feet.

When the knotted rope was somewhat dry, he swung it like a lasso over his head and slapped it against the wall of Candle Bay Imperial Prison.

Calder had spent the most time on this particular item, and it bore months of his Intent. As soon as the cloth struck the wall, he focused his Intent once more, pouring it into his makeshift cloth, reminding it of its new purpose: to
climb.

He had explained the disappearance of eight linen sheets on a particularly disastrous trip to the laundress. Alsa hadn’t trusted him with the laundry since.

The cloth rope slithered up the side of the wall, directly under his father’s window.

…which, he suddenly noticed, was a slightly smoking square-shaped hole in the wall. The Emperor’s key hadn’t done
that.
How had Jerri and his father managed to burn a hole through metal and stone? Had Jyrine gotten her hands on some weapons-grade alchemy without telling him?

The cloth crawled inside the cell, and a pair of tan, slender hands grabbed it. Jerri’s head poked out of the hole, her earrings swinging and glinting gently green in the moonlight.

“Imagine meeting you here!” she whispered down.

“Have you seen an older gentleman, about my height, with flaming red hair? I seem to have misplaced him.”

Jerri began climbing down the rope, which he assumed she had tied to something on her end, since she didn’t collapse to her death on the rocks below.

A moment later, his father followed.

Calder couldn’t help the grin that swallowed his face at that moment. They weren’t safe, not by a fair shot, but they’d still
done it.
His father was out.

Jerri jumped the last story, landing a little unsteadily on the rocks beside him. He seized her shoulders to steady her, but she didn’t seem to mind whether she fell or not.

“Calder, there’s a little problem I may not have mentioned.”

From above came the sounds of a heavy crash, followed by splintering wood. Seconds later, two heads poked their way out of the window.

“Stop! Hold it right there!”

The other man started shouting about a break.

Rojric stopped entirely. He turned to the guards, as though he wondered whether he ought to start climbing back up.

“Father!” Calder called, no longer trying to keep his voice down. “Come on!”

Rojric shook himself and started descending, recklessly fast, sliding so that he must have burned his hands, kicking the wall whenever he got too close.

As he reached the rocks below, one of the guards pulled out a pistol.

Most of Calder’s invested tools hadn’t proved useful, so he upended his bag over the bay and shook it out. Then he raised the last device he’d prepared that might prove somewhat helpful: the bag itself.

The pistol rang out. The ball struck the bag and rolled off, as ineffective as a thrown rock.

Instantly, the bag started to come apart with the seams. All Calder could do with his Intent was enhance the properties of the bag; the material itself was inherently weak. With another year, he might be able to make the bag permanently bulletproof, but for now it would unravel after another hit or two.

Jerri huddled under the spread bag with him. “Nice job! Where’s the boat?”

“At the bottom of the bay.”

She eyed his soaking clothes. “I see you’ve made a trip down there yourself.”

Rojric was only partially covered by the bag, sticking his head out to keep an eye on the guards above. “Maybe I should just go back.”

Calder ignored him, his mind churning.
A Reader’s weapons are all around him,
as Sadesthenes once said. He started to catalogue everything available to him. His rope was already unraveling, intended to last only a single use and then fall apart. So he had a few wet sheets, his own soaked clothes, an unraveling bulletproof bag, his Blackwatch coat, a bunch of rocks, and water. Lots of water.

Water was useless to a Reader. Intent was carried in the structure of an object, so liquids were notoriously poor repositories. Legends were still told of Jorin Maze-walker, who spent years of his life investing a bottle of water until a drop of it could cleanse a curse. That served as an illustration of exactly how uncommon the practice was: legends were still told of a legendary Reader who managed to invest a
single
bottle of water. After
years
of work.