Of Sea and Shadow (The Elder Empire: Sea Book 1) (43 page)

Booted feet clanked closer to him, and he looked up to see the stranger on his ship. She towered over him, a tall woman in full black-and-red plated armor. The crest on her breastplate almost made him sick: a shield bearing the sun-and-moon emblem of the Empire.

The Imperial Guard. They’d found him, even here.

Her blond hair was cut close to her skull, her blue eyes cold. A leather-wrapped sword hilt looked over her right shoulder, and as soon as he noticed the weapon, a falling star struck Calder’s skull. He screamed with the pain, clutching his head with both hands.

That weapon was older than the Empire, older than the Emperor, perhaps as old as the monster pulling this ship. And it killed. He could pilot
The Testament
through the oceans of blood that blade had spilled.

No, the blade hadn’t just taken lives. It
was
a taker of lives. That was its essence, its sole Intent. And if Calder had sensed that from this distance, without touching its hilt, and while trying
not
to Read...

He was surprised the sword hadn’t killed them all simply by being so close.

The armored woman spoke with the voice of an executioner. “By order of the Emperor, I have come to retrieve the criminal Calder Marten, who stands accused of destroying an Imperial prison, conspiring to set free a prisoner, and stealing a ship that is the rightful property of the Blackwatch Guild.”

Having recited her piece, she leaned forward and grabbed Calder, dragging him up by the wrist as if he were a child. “Come with me.”

Calder’s throat was rough, but there was one thing on his mind even more important than his impending arrest. “What is that thing on your back?”

“What, you’ve never seen a sword before?”

She whistled and the Kameira landed gracefully on the deck, dipping its swanlike neck in a bow. Calder couldn’t help but be impressed: through his bond with the ship, he could feel that its talons hadn’t even gouged the wood.

Rojric hurried up the ladder to the deck, anger and fear radiating from his every movement. “Stop! I’m the one you want.”

The woman glared at him. Calder felt a force pass by him, the shadow of something huge and unseen, and his father collapsed.

“No,” she said. “You’re not.”

She bundled Calder under one arm, tossing him onto the bird’s back. It was surprisingly soft, cushioned by a thick layer of glimmering feathers. The woman followed him, sliding easily onto a perch at the base of the Kameira’s neck and gently patting the creature’s feathers.

With a trill of birdsong, the bird soared from the deck into the air.

Calder watched
The Testament
fall away beneath him, surrounded by the vast blue of the ocean.

At last he struggled, though not very hard. A fall from this height would break his bones to gravel. “You can’t just leave them there! They can’t steer the ship!”

“A crew will be along shortly to retrieve
The Testament
and remove its passengers.”

Calder glanced around and saw that she was right: a loose half-circle of ships drifted toward his, all flying Imperial flags.

He should have been afraid. He shouldn’t have been able to think through his terror and anger and guilt.

But all he felt was his splitting headache.

“Who are you?” he asked, weakly. “Where are you taking me?”

The woman didn’t turn around. “I am Jarelys Teach, General of the Empire and Head of the Imperial Guard. I’m taking you to your trial.”

~~~

When Calder had pictured his trial, he’d never imagined the Emperor would be there.

The Imperial Palace was an order of magnitude more splendid than anything he’d ever seen or imagined in his life. He couldn’t price the smallest floor tile, and each panel of wood in the walls must have been worth a hundred goldmarks. Here, in the center of the Imperial Palace, they had taken him to some sort of audience hall.

The floor was a single block of polished stone bigger than a ballroom—he wondered if it had been Awakened. It was lacquered with a vast panorama, the image of a battle so detailed and complex you would have to fly up to the distant ceiling in order to take it in. He knelt on the image of a painted warrior in ancient armor, holding a bronze sword and locked in combat with a shadowy, shapeless creature.

Pillars sprouted from the floor in orderly rows, each designed with a unique spiral of flame that rose from the image of battle like the fires of war. Smoke from the painted flames gathered on the ceiling, capping the room with the visage of dark clouds.

At the top of the mural, in the center of the room, stood a single figure in white armor. He stood with the rising sun, holding a bronze sword in each hand and standing against a mountainous monster of grasping claws and flailing tentacles.

Above this image of the victorious Emperor rose the Imperial throne. And on that throne sat the Emperor himself.

He looked exactly as he did in the mural, as he had in Calder’s many visions: dark, tall, and hairless, with a gaze that suggested he knew your mind better than you did. He lounged on his throne wrapped in layers of pink and purple and lavender, tossing a coin in his right hand.

A simple gold circlet rested on his bare head, and this detail alone seemed off. He supposed it was natural for the Emperor to be wearing a crown in his own throne room, but none of Calder’s visions had included the man with a crown. Maybe he rarely wore it, or perhaps it just didn’t make much of an impression on the invested items around him. It didn’t matter, in any case.

The Emperor’s voice effortlessly filled the spacious room. “You found one artifact of mine. A pen. You must have found another.”

Calder widened his eyes, looking innocent and frightened. The
frightened
part wasn’t much of an exaggeration. “I’m sorry, Lord Emperor Most High! That was the only fragment of your greatness we ever found, though we did try. I am overcome with grief—”

“A key, was it?” the Emperor mused. He tossed a silver coin marked with his own face, snatching it out of the air. “There have not been many keys I carried personally. I can recall only a few.”

Sweat rolled into Calder’s eyes, but he didn’t dare to blink. “A key? I don’t have a key of any significance, O Lord of the Empire.”

The Emperor rolled the coin across the backs of his fingers. “Was it silver? Bone? Was the key made of living flesh?”

“Ah, I’m not—”

“You weren’t surprised by it, nor did you sell it. It must have been the copper key to my dungeon. I can see how you may have used it to open the cells in Candle Bay.” The Emperor closed one eye, examining the coin as though he expected to find some flaw. “I sense Kelarac upon you. Why did you trade him the key?”

Panic tightened Calder’s skin, froze his insides. How did the Emperor know? How did he
always know?
No one could Read minds.

“I see...with a Lyathatan to pull your ship, you could complete the binding and Awaken
The Testament.
A good bargain, for such a cheap price. Be wary of deals that seem too favorable, Calder.”

Jarelys Teach stood behind the throne, arms folded, eyes forever moving around the chamber. A few more squads of Imperial Guards waited in the distant corners of the room, ready to help should the Emperor require their assistance. Something stirred behind the throne itself; perhaps a hidden guard, wearing black.

They hadn’t even bothered to bind Calder’s hands. He couldn’t pose a danger to the Emperor with a saber in one hand and a gun in the other, even if the man had been completely unguarded.

What he didn’t understand was why they needed to try him at all. The Emperor could Read everything he wanted to know; Calder didn’t even need to be conscious. They could simply have taken him, put him to sleep, Read his guilt, and executed him before he woke up.

The absolute hopelessness of his situation made him bold. “My current situation seems a little too favorable, if I’m honest. I’m still alive.”

The Emperor gave a faint smile. “I do prefer honesty.”

“Why? It seems that you can hear the truth in any words of mine, honest or not.”

“Your honesty does not help me learn the truth,” the Emperor said. “The degree of your honesty, and your dishonesty, helps me to understand what kind of man you are.”

Calder switched tactics. “I am hardly a man at all, my Emperor. This endeavor was a crime of passion and youth, nothing more.”

The Emperor flipped his coin again. “Who is more than an infant in my presence? Should I rule with leniency on the basis of youth, even the wisest graybeard would receive clemency from me.” He gripped the silver coin in one fist, staring Calder straight in the eyes.

“Five prison guards were killed by your chained Elderspawn. Ten more were injured. From the wreckage of the Candle Bay facility, we pulled a further fifteen corpses. Guards, alchemists, prisoners, clerical staff. Prisoners escaped by the score, and many of them had been imprisoned for crimes greater than your fathers. Now we have murderers, rapists, dangerous Soulbound, and black alchemists walking the streets of the Capital thanks to your reckless actions.”

There was no anger in the Emperor’s voice, but there was enough sheer
force
to drive Calder down into the ground. His ancient Intent filled the air so thick that Calder was sure he would feel it even without his abilities as a Reader.

Under normal circumstances, Calder would have done whatever the Emperor commanded him, bound by such pressure. He would have likely wet himself.

But today, he carried some anger of his own. “I witnessed five men and women gladly fall to their deaths on the rocks of Candle Bay. I don’t know what experiments your alchemists ran on my father, but he begged me to push him out of a window. My father, Rojric Marten. He carried such pain with him that I could feel it pouring from him like heat from a bonfire. He had tried to strangle himself with his bed sheets, to shatter the window with his chair so that he could leap from his cell. And he was imprisoned for
stealing a pen.
”

By the end of the speech, Calder was on his feet and shouting at the ruler of the Aurelian Empire. A ruler who seemed more interested in idly flipping his coin than in the fate of Calder’s father.

“He did not just steal a pen, Calder, as you know better than most. He stole
my
pen. I once knew a man who killed thirty-two innocent people with a knife that I had used to spread butter. When I use an object, even for the briefest period, it is cleansed by the Luminians and then incinerated. But every once in a while, some fragment of refuse evades my notice and escapes.”

The Emperor waved his hand. “But we are not here to discuss your father’s crimes. We’re here to discuss yours.”

Standing was awkward, in this room of featureless stone, but Calder refused to kneel again. He walked over to a pillar and sat, leaning his back against the base of the stone column. “Candle Bay was a house of torture,” he said. “It was better off destroyed.”

He believed that. He
had
to believe that, or else confront the fact that he had been responsible for the deaths of twenty real, live, breathing men and women.

“Despite what you may believe, my Guild of Alchemists is not on trial today either. However, there is another Guild involved.” He tossed the coin from one hand to the other. “Tell me, Calder, what do you know about the Navigators?”

This abrupt shift in subject took Calder by surprise. He had only ever met one Navigator, and he suspected Cheska Bennett was not a representative sample of her Guild. “Very little.”

“You know that they are the only ones who can safely cross the Aion. I founded them for that purpose. What do you think makes their ships able to navigate those waters? Superior carpentry?”

“I don’t—”

“
Think
, Calder!”

The Intent behind the command was enough to make the room seem to shake, and Calder rattled his brain, trying to shake something loose. “It...must have to do with Reading, somehow. The ships are invested in a particular way? Treated with a blend of alchemy?”

The Emperor tapped the edge of his coin against the throne, waiting for him to continue.

“Ah, they must navigate differently from ordinary sailors in some way. Hence the name. Invested navigational equipment?”

The Emperor leaned forward. “They have guides, Calder.”

The puzzle came apart in Calder’s mind. Sure, the Navigators had to be guided through the threats of the Aion, which were often caused by Elders. That was what the Blackwatch had been trying to do with
The Testament:
summon a bigger, stronger guide.

“Elders,” he said. “They all have Elders bound to their ships.”

“Only one ship has that distinction. The others simply have the power of an Elder bound into their ship, through bone or blood or a particular artifact. Then the ships themselves are Awakened, bound to their captains. Soulbound.”

Calder’s breath caught. Soulbound were the greatest warriors of the Empire, possessing powers that came from the pinnacle of Reading. It was from them that the truly miraculous feats of history had come: Estyr Six flying over the ranks of a thousand Elderspawn to reach Othaghor, Baldezar Kern destroying the armies of the South Sea Revolution. They could call on the seemingly magical powers of Kameira, as long as they held their Vessel.

“Me? Is that what I did?”

“The Blackwatch ship known as
The Testament
is now your Soulbound Vessel, Calder. We didn’t need to tow it back; the Lyathatan dragged it into the nearby harbor on its own.” The Emperor leaned back in his throne. “That’s why you haven’t been executed.”

Involuntarily, Calder’s hand went to his throat.

“You’re surprised. How else did you think I would deal with someone who committed thousands of goldmarks of property damage, murdered twenty citizens, and stole a ten-thousand-mark ship? You deserve execution, Calder, if anyone in my Empire does.”

A small candle-flame of hope lit in Calder’s chest. “But you won’t execute me?”

“I will turn you over to the custody of the Navigator’s Guild, who will put you to work in my service until your debt to me is cleared. Your bonds and responsibilities to the Blackwatch are hereby abolished.”