Of Sea and Shadow (The Elder Empire: Sea Book 1) (36 page)

“Shera, I order you to put down the knife,” Calder said.

It might have been his imagination, but he thought he saw her hand tremble. She didn’t release the knife, though.

“There, you see?” Foster said. “That’s what I expected it to do. This absolute command thing is unnatural. It shouldn’t work so well.”

“Where did you get that?” Shera asked. Her voice had gone cold, and her eyes locked on his head.

Before he could answer, he was drawn to his left. To the cell in which the Heartlander man sat on a cot. He hadn’t noticed before, preoccupied as he was with Shera, but there was something in that cell.

It wants Calder dead. It wants to use his body as raw materials, to build him up into a monstrous slave. It wants to tear apart and remake him. It wants…

Calder tore his mind away, trying not to look at the box in that man’s hands. Though he was in a cage, he held the source of that malicious Intent.
 

The Heart of Nakothi had only grown stronger since Calder had last seen it. Now he was even more resolved to keep it away from anyone who wanted to use it—at this rate, no one would be able to resist Nakothi’s will for long.

The man in the prison held up the box in one hand. “What do you intend to do with this?” he asked.

Calder started to answer, but the other man didn’t wait.
 

He lobbed the box out between the bars.
 

Shera was there, snatching the box out of the air, and before Calder reacted, she had vanished into the shadows deeper in the tunnel.

“Get Shera, bring me the box,” he ordered.

Instantly, all the Consultants vanished down the tunnel after her.

Calder stepped up to the bars, flanked by Andel and Foster. “And who might you be, sir?”

The prisoner leaned back against the wall, pulling a glove on. “You can call me Lucan. You’re Calder Marten, I presume.”

“It seems I’m famous. You asked me a question a moment ago, and I thought I’d hear your answer first: what do
you
intend to do with the Heart?”

“An answer for an answer. You tell me where you got the crown, and I will tell you about the Heart.”

Sounded fair. Calder could give him just enough details to keep him interested, without giving him the actual truth. He couldn’t tell a stranger the full story, after all. There was too much to incriminate him.

But a woman called out from farther down the tunnel. “Calder? Are you there?”

Behind him, Andel drew in a sharp breath, and Foster muttered something unkind. Calder barely heard them. He drifted past Lucan’s cell to a second. This one was identical in construction if not in contents: one wall of bars with a door, three stone walls and a dirt floor, a cot and a small table visible from the hall. Lucan’s had overflowed with books, papers, and extra small possessions, as though he had been living there for years and had slowly made the place his own. By comparison, this cell was bare, stark.

And Jerri was in it.

She wore the standard red shirt and pants provided to Imperial prisoners—the same clothes Calder’s father had worn, the last time he’d seen the man. Seeing the clothes on Jerri felt like a scene out of a nightmare. Her hair was messy and unbraided, as though she’d just woken up, and she hurriedly brushed her fingers through it when she saw him.

Other than that, she was in better condition than he’d hoped. Unbroken skin. No wounds. No signs of deprivation or abuse. They must have questioned her, surely, but no one had forced any answers out of her.

Good. So she was in perfect condition to answer
him.

Or she would be, if he could figure out what to say. Every question died on his tongue:
Why didn’t you tell me? When did you become a Soulbound? If I get you out of here, will you tell me everything?

In the silence, Andel took over. “Jyrine. You’re looking better than I expected.”

“Andel. You look exactly the same. Foster, I see you’re still alive.”

Foster barked a laugh, but otherwise he kept silent. No doubt waiting for Calder to take the lead.

“I’m trying to decide whether I should take you with me, or just leave you here,” Calder said at last.

Andel and Foster must have taken that as their cue to exit. One of them moved down the tunnel and into the shadows, and the other back up by Lucan’s cell. Presumably they were doing it to keep watch, but Calder knew they were trying to give him some space to talk.

Calder watched Jerri as she switched expressions between pleading, angry, proud, and troubled in the space of an instant. She was trying to decide which face to show him. Trying to decide which emotion she felt the strongest, maybe.

Finally, she settled on tired. “I would very much like to get out of here.”

“Good. Then you can answer my questions, and perhaps we can leave together. How long have you been a Soulbound?”

Her eyes fixed on the wall behind him. “Virtually my entire life. My father made me help slaughter an Elder-tainted baby Kameira when I was little more than four years old. Its alchemically preserved heart became the jewel in one of the earrings. The other is a copy. I wore those earrings for years before I had enough of a bond to Awaken them.”

That was more or less what he’d expected, though it still burned him worse than he’d thought to be hearing a
new
story out of a woman he’d known for more than ten years. A woman who knew everything about
him.

He stopped himself before he went too far down that path and left her here out of spite. “And the…cult.”

“It’s not a cult. My father was one of the Sleepless leaders. He had to leave the Blackwatch because some of his fellow Guild members were getting too suspicious. We think he was eventually killed on a mission in the Aion, but we don’t know for sure.”

He was getting closer to the answers he really wanted and feared, as though he were circling the edges of a hungry whirlpool. “And what did they have you do?”

“Practically nothing. We were barely in contact.”

Calder reached through the bars. It was hard to Read a living human being, as their Intent shifted so quickly, but he should be able to learn something about her motivations. More importantly, he’d be able to hear a lie before it formed.

She recoiled as though he’d extended a weapon.

“Tell me the truth, Jerri.”

She hesitated, looking around for a way out. After a few seconds of stalling, she hesitantly clasped his hand.

From here, he could Read her current Intent. She was frightened, focused on escape, tired, and surprisingly…overjoyed to see him again. When he felt that, he almost decided to forgive her then and there.

But there was more. She also felt an old, worn guilt, and something else. She was focused on hiding something here, now. Something that she desperately hoped he didn’t notice.

“My mother was worthless after my father disappeared,” she went on. “The Sleepless raised me. They saw to my training and to my education. When I was old enough, they started sending me places.”

“Where?” he asked, though he thought he knew.

“Alsa Grayweather’s home. They wanted me to study with the Blackwatch.”

Her Intent was pure, straightforward. At the moment, she intended nothing but the truth.

He closed his eyes against the seething anger. So everything, from the first day, had been engineered.

Andel warned me,
he reminded himself.
‘You don’t really know her,’ he said. ‘Don’t marry her.’ I told him he didn’t know what he was talking about.

Yet another time he’d gotten himself into trouble by ignoring Andel’s advice.

“You have to understand, Calder. We’re not trying to ‘destroy the world,’ or whatever the Emperor told everyone. The Elders have so much
wisdom
to share, so much power. If we can establish a working relationship with them, like you have with Shuffles and the Lyathatan, then we can’t even imagine everything we could learn! This world is only—”

It was too painful to listen to her. She actually
believed
everything she was saying. So he cut her off with another question.

“What was the next assignment?”

For a moment she intended to refuse him an answer, simply out of irritated anger. But then she smoothed it out and looked at him openly. “They wanted me to help you break your father out of prison.”

True.

“But it wasn’t just them. I—”

“And
The Testament?
Was that their idea?”

She hesitated, but he felt the truth. “They wanted the ship out of Blackwatch hands. I said we could steal it.”

Calder remembered Jerri pushing for him to steal
The Testament.
He had wanted to try breaking his father out without the ship, but it had been Jerri who talked him into the theft in the first place. He’d thought it was because she wanted a more exciting story.

Now he knew.

She rushed to explain. “They wanted to take it from you, but I wouldn’t tell them where we were. And when they found out you’d made a bargain with Kelarac, they worshiped you. Someone with a link to a Bellowing Horror, a Lyathatan, and the Soul Collector himself? They couldn’t have
begged
for anyone more perfect. Some of them wanted to make you Emperor, Calder.”

He found himself squeezing her hand painfully hard before he realized it. So he’d made an Elder cult happy, had he?

“Did they ask you to marry me?” he asked, finally.

She hesitated. “I wanted to,” she said.

Her Intent was off. Not entirely straight. It was true, but missing details.

“Did they
ask?”

“…yes. They wanted me to, but only so I could
teach
you, so I could show you the truth. They hated the Emperor too, and they wanted you to get the crown!”

He had released her already, and started walking out. “Foster, Andel,” he called.

They hurried behind him, neither of them saying a word.

“Don’t leave me here!” Jerri shouted.

He stopped in his tracks for a second, letting everything he wanted to say run through his head in an incomprehensible jumble.
 

Finally, he just left.

~~~

Jerri fought back the tears, not for her own sake, but because she didn’t want Lucan to hear her crying. It was a strange sort of vanity, and she knew it didn’t make any sense—he had just heard their whole discussion, after all. And they were both prisoners. But she couldn’t bear the thought that he, a stranger, would listen to her weeping in her cell.

There was one good thing that had come of Calder’s visit, she reminded herself. He had been so focused on his questions, and on their relationship, that he hadn’t even noticed her poorly fitting alien bracelet.

The iron band didn’t even feel strange anymore, but she was confident that if Calder had Read it, he would have known far more about its purpose than she did. And he would have likely interfered, somehow.

Not that she would have particularly minded. She was beginning to realize that doing what the Sleepless told her to do typically ended with her in a more miserable situation than before.

Jerri gripped the metal. She had to break out of here before
The Testament
left the island. If she forced her way onboard, she was sure that she could explain herself. She had done everything with pure motives, after all. Calder couldn’t deny that.

She looked forward to seeing him realize that she was in the right all along, and that he had actually abandoned
her
, not the other way around. No matter how it had turned out, she was still glad that the truth was out there after so many years. She didn’t need to hide anymore—she could openly persuade him to her cause.

But part of her just wanted him to forget everything. Wanted to forget everything herself, so that the two of them could live as Navigators and let the Elders do whatever they wanted.

She shook herself back to reality. No matter how it turned out, she had to break out of here before Calder’s ship left the dock.

So she would count to five hundred, slowly. It would take Calder at least that long to get back to his ship, even if he headed straight there, and she was sure he would waste time looking for the Heart.

If the signal didn’t come before she was done counting, she was sending the summons anyway.

It was past time that she checked out.

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY
-T
HREE

When the whispered song of the Heart led Naberius to an abandoned meadow, he wondered if he’d misheard. There was nothing here but grass, flowers, and boulders that littered the meadow as though they’d been scattered by a giant child playing with a handful of marbles.

He stood there for over fifteen minutes, waiting by the boulder and listening to the reassuring sound of the Heart’s whispers, before he noticed the battle.

A black-clad shape darted from one boulder to another, holding a steel blade in its hand.

He moved to investigate, then he saw a fleeing figure carrying a bronze knife. Shera.

She disappeared behind a tree, and he heard nothing. Maybe the occasional scuffle, but no clang of metal on metal, no grunt as of a man suffering a stab wound. He hurried over, checking behind the tree, and saw nothing but a few broken branches on a bush.

Maybe they had moved on…

Stay, stay, stay and be reborn,
the song crooned.

So he stayed where he was. Only a moment later, a box tumbled out from between two boulders. Blood had splattered one corner of the box, and it was open slightly.

The song leaked from within.

A joyous smile spread over Naberius’ face, and he reached into the box, cradling the Heart like an infant.

Run,
said Nakothi’s Heart.
While you sing back to me, run.

He stumbled through the undergrowth, focusing all his attention on the Heart in his hands. Trying to get the barest sliver of a grasp on its infinite, ancient Intent. It was made for a purpose far beyond anything he could comprehend, but he had to understand at least a fraction of its significance.