Of Sea and Shadow (The Elder Empire: Sea Book 1) (44 page)

Calder couldn’t help the smile that started to spread across his face. “Your mercy is as limitless as the breadth of your rule, my Emperor.”

The Emperor did not smile. “Bring in the prisoner.”

Doors opened at the end of the hall, and two Imperial Guards marched Rojric Marten inside. He was gagged, his prison jumpsuit rumpled, his hair matted with sweat. When he caught sight of Calder, he struggled forward to try and reach his son.

But one of the Guards had an arm that looked as though it was sheathed in steel. Rojric might as well have been anchored in place. The other, whose eyes glowed a solid red, bowed before the Emperor.

From his throne, the ruler of the Aurelian Empire looked at no one but Calder. “I told you: beware of deals that seem too favorable. I do not reward criminals, Calder, not even when circumstances force me to.”

The Emperor tossed something at Calder’s feet, something that clinked and rang like a tiny bell. The silver coin. But now it was warped and deformed, as if under great pressure.

“Jarelys,” the Emperor said.

The General stepped forward, pulling her sword out from behind her back.

Its blade was rough-forged black iron, with a core of some substance that flowed a bright, glowing red down the center of the metal. But Calder hardly saw it. His senses were overwhelmed: the smell of ash and rot, the taste of blood in his mouth, the screams of the dying, the desperately lonely fear that comes from a nightmare. All of it blasted out from the sword in a silent wind.

The Emperor stood. “Rojric Marten, citizen of my Empire, I hereby sentence you to die.”

Rojric strained against his captors, pushing away, trying to escape. His eyes locked with Calder’s.

Then Jarelys Teach brushed Rojric’s shoulder with the flat of her blade. That done, she returned her weapon to its sheath.

With an audible shriek that emanated from nowhere and seemed to tear the world in half, the life left Rojric Marten’s body. He simply sagged, his eyes suddenly glassy.

The two Imperial Guards withdrew, dragging Rojric’s body behind them.

Through his tears, Calder screamed. He shouted at the Emperor, at Jarelys Teach, at his own ridiculously naive idea to break a man out of prison.

He surged forward, focused on tearing the Emperor’s flesh with his bare hands.
 

He’s a man!
Calder shouted to himself.
Just a man! Like me, like my father! He will die like one!

Jarelys Teach didn’t bother with him, returning to her post behind the throne.

Instead, he was tackled by three black-clad shadows.

A blond girl held a bronze knife to Calder’s throat, while a Heartlander boy about his age held his arms locked behind his back. A pale, black-haired girl—perhaps a year or two younger than he—stood in front of him, hands empty and spread in front of her.

“Relax,” she said soothingly.

The boy spoke over his shoulder. “Release your Intent.”

And Calder could feel the other boy’s Intent smothering his own, countering the rage and lethal Intent that Calder was pouring into everything: into the stone at his feet, into every fiber of his clothes, into the weapons of these three children who dared to stop him.

But the other boy, the other Reader, was canceling it all out, smoothing the hostility like a maid smoothing sheets.

The black-haired girl yawned and scratched the back of her neck with a dagger. “Did you know that man?”

“He was my father!” Calder shouted.

She shrugged. “Then he’d probably tell you to be quiet, so that we don’t kill you.”

Calder glared at the Emperor, desperate to hurt the man somehow, even in the smallest way. “You keep
children
around to protect you?”

“As I said before, you’re all children to me.” The Emperor rummaged through his pockets, pulled out a gold coin, and flipped it. “Besides, they need their exercise. Return to your ship, Calder. You and your Vessel are now property of the Aurelian Empire.”

The three black-clad children vanished, the dark-haired girl yawning as she scurried off. How did they disappear so quickly? Except for the occasional pillar, the chamber was nothing but empty, open space.

As Calder was dragged away by the Guard with the metal arm, he took one last look at the Emperor, sitting on his throne and idly toying with his gold coin.

The only one who can change the Empire is sitting right there,
he thought.
So far removed from humanity that he might as well be Elderspawn himself.

The solution hit him like a shaft of blinding light.

As Sadesthenes once said: nothing lasts forever.

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY
-S
EVEN

The dome of earth rose away from the vast underground chamber, lifted by the bony hands and swarming tentacles of Nakothi’s Handmaiden. The roof over the arena was hundreds of yards across, and when the titanic Elderspawn tore it away, it looked like she was tearing an island in half. Clods of dirt and chunks of rock big enough to crush horses rained down all over the arena.

The three Consultants scrambled out of the way, helping each other to shelter. Calder’s first instinct told him to join them, but he had a more important task.

Urzaia.
The Soulbound warrior still lay on his back only feet away, staring up at the suddenly bare sky. Calder edged closer, ignoring the ground shuddering under repeated impacts.

His first view of Urzaia told him that the situation was hopeless. He was covered in injuries, but none compared to the hole in his chest, which oozed and throbbed with blood as though his heart were trying to escape. He stared sightlessly without blinking, even as clouds of dirt fell into his open eyes.

“Captain,” he said, just as Calder had convinced himself the man was already dead.

Calder fell to his knees, ignoring the pain in his leg and fighting down a sudden hope. Maybe he could still be saved…

But no, he could sense the residual Intent that Shera’s Awakened blade had left behind. It stole the power Urzaia had drawn from his Vessel, turning it against his body.

Calder couldn’t imagine how the man had held on this long.

“I’m with you, Urzaia. We’ll see you fixed up and back on duty before next week.”

The gladiator choked out a laugh. “Still undefeated.”

He wanted to let it go, just to comfort the man until the end, but these were the last words of a friend. He owed it to Urzaia to understand them. “What do you mean?”

“I got her, Captain. They took Jerri, so I took…” He gasped in pain, then set his mouth into a grin. “…one of them. Meia. Her name was Meia. I took her with me.”

Calder looked over to the shelter where the three Consultants huddled together. Shera kept an eye on him, working her Awakened knife in her hands, but Lucan was binding the blind Consultant’s—Meia’s—shoulder. She didn’t look like a woman about to die; she looked angry.

“They won’t be able to replace her,” Calder said. “The Consultants won’t recover from this so easily. You’ve done me proud, Urzaia Woodsman.”

Urzaia laughed again, more weakly. “I told you. Never lost a fight in the arena. Not one.”

Calder knelt at his cook’s side, listening to the Handmaiden howling above him. Kelarac’s gift, the mark on his arm, let him
feel
the Intent behind her fury: she sought the presence of something new, something deadly, something that posed a threat to her.

And she was waiting for reinforcements before she faced it.

He remained absolutely still until Urzaia stopped breathing. It didn’t take long.

Then he scooped up Urzaia’s Awakened hatchets, shoving them into his belt. He tried to minimize contact with the weapons, but a vision bubbled up unbidden.

Urzaia hefts his hatchets, watching the five enemies surround him. Not a Soulbound among them; this is just a warm-up match, to get the crowd in the mood. He mourns them already, but he can’t allow himself to die here.

“End this quickly,” he silently begs his weapons. “For them, there will be no pain—”

Calder cut off the vision before the grief and rage drowned out his reason. With the hatchets secure, he walked over to the Consultants.

Children of Nakothi surrounded them, guided by the call of the Handmaiden, waiting for their opportune moment to strike.

Good. It just so happened that he needed to kill something.

The other two stared at him suspiciously, but Shera rose to meet him, her face devoid of any human expression. Not that he expected anything else.

“It seems we have a common obstacle,” Calder said. He didn’t bother to hide his bitterness, in his expression or his voice.

Shera didn’t react. But she didn’t stab him, which he took to mean she agreed.

He pointed to her shining, shifting green blade. “Can you kill it?” He wanted to do it himself, but Kelarac had specifically cautioned him against using the blade against a Handmaiden. He’d prefer to risk Shera’s life than his own, anyway.

Shera turned to Lucan, who nodded. “If we can get you close enough,” he said.

Calder rubbed absently at the burning mark on his right forearm, looking up at the Handmaiden. He realized he was looking into her face, and his entire body shivered as he jerked away. It seemed less like a physical appendage, and more like a nightmare made flesh. “It’s planning on attacking soon. When it does, I’ll hit it as hard as I can. You’ll have to find your own opening.”

To Calder’s surprise, Shera’s expression cracked. Instead of a passionless killer, she simply looked…tired. “What are the odds that it will stay dead?”

“Based on my experience with the Elders? Abandon that hope right now.”

Her shoulders slumped and she rubbed at her face with one hand, like a child up past her bedtime. “Maybe if I get wounded killing an Elder they’ll give me some time off. Meia, here’s your chance to stab me in the back.”

Their other partner, Meia, was turning pale. She leaned the back of her head against the wall of the shed, panting and holding onto her bandaged wound. Disturbing shapes twisted and moved underneath her skin.

She didn’t seem likely to rise to the bait.

Lucan patted Shera on the shoulder, consoling her. “Don’t worry. I’m sure she would stab you if she could.”

These
were the ruthless assassins who had pursued him since he’d left the Capital? They acted like…well, like his crew. For some reason, the thought seethed with anger. What right did they have to joke with each other? They could kill his friend and still play around?

“Just do your part,” he said roughly, and walked a short distance away. With his newfound sensitivity to Elders, thanks to Kelarac’s mark, he reached out his Intent, seeking out one Elderspawn in particular. A simple, unfathomable, alien mind. A Bellowing Horror.

“Shuffles!” he yelled.

A familiar silhouette flapped up on top of a half-collapsed stone column, tentacles writhing over its mouth.

Calder spoke directly to his pet Elderspawn, backing up his words with intent to reinforce their meaning. “I need you to repeat everything I say as loud as you can. Do you understand? We need to reach
The Testament.
”

“TESTAMENT,” Shuffles bellowed, and the entire cavern echoed with the force of his roar. Strangely, though Calder was standing next to it, Shuffles’ volume didn’t sound much greater than normal. By rights, a shout loud enough to reach
The Testament
should have shattered Calder’s eardrums. But he only knew it was louder than normal because of the way the dust vibrated all over the chamber, echoing from the walls.

Whatever the reason, he was grateful for it. Maybe he wouldn’t go deaf today.

“Foster,” Calder said.

“FOSTER!”

“Ready cannons.”

“READY CANNONS!”

Calder paused for a moment, giving Foster time to comply. Though the entire Gray Island seemed to shake under Shuffles’ announcement, he had no idea whether the gunner heard him. At this distance, he could barely sense his Vessel’s location; he had no chance of controlling the ship himself. And even though Kelarac had enhanced his ability to communicate with the Lyathatan, there was nothing the Lyathatan could do to fire a cannon.

The Handmaiden heard him and must have understood, because her Intent sharpened. Her pale tentacles, covered in hands, slithered closer, and she shrieked, pointing at him with one finger.

All the Children of Nakothi on the island swarmed down into the shattered arena, hungering for his blood. They sought Shera’s blade more than anything else, but they would dismantle him on the way as nothing more than a distraction.

He turned back to Shuffles, and he couldn’t help a smile.
Jerri would love this.

“Take aim!”

“AIM!”

He waited a moment longer, forcing himself to stare the Handmaiden in the face. He began to tear up, his eyes trying to force themselves away from the sight as a purely physical reaction, but he kept looking. He wanted to see this.

“Fire.”

“FIRE!”

The announcement echoed from every corner from the island.

An instant later, missiles slammed into the Handmaiden’s chest, sending up geysers of white blood. Seconds after that, the sound caught up, and every cannon on
The Testament
cracked at once.

Calder grinned straight up at the Elderspawn’s unfathomable face and shouted again. “Fire!”

“FIRE!”

A few seconds of delay, and two cannonballs crashed into the Handmaiden’s ribs, and a third snapped a tree in half.

That was all he had time to witness before Nakothi’s Children struck him like a cresting wave. He devoted himself to reading the flow of hostile Intent, lunging and dipping and dodging as he swept his cutlass through each of the dead Elderspawn.

Not one of them needed a second strike.

He kept limping along as he fought, Shuffles flapping along behind him, and occasionally shouted the order to fire.

Sword-first, he worked his way up the staircase.

He wished Shera the very best of luck, but he wasn’t going to stick around to see how the fight turned out. If his fortune had turned for the better, the Handmaiden and the Consultants would kill each other.