Of Sea and Shadow (The Elder Empire: Sea Book 1) (8 page)

She looked up at him with a girlish smile. “I think we’d be missing out if we
didn’t
get to fight assassins tonight.”

Calder laughed as he sat down on the bunk next to her. With a twist of the wrist, he pulled open a latched drawer, checking that his pistol was loaded and ready inside. He would have preferred to set the pistol out in the open next to the bunk, but he wasn’t enough of a fool to leave a loaded weapon sitting next to his wife’s head. Not when they were on a ship that gently tossed with the motion of the waves, even if it was relatively calm here compared to the open ocean.

“If you’re looking forward to a fight that much, then you should want to stay here.”

“I said I wanted to see them coming so that we can prepare a real fight. It’s not like I want to be assassinated.” She grimaced, tugging at a snarl in her brown hair.

Next, Calder found his sword-belt and hung it from a peg above the bunk. If he had to wake up in the middle of the night and fight, he wanted his weapons close to hand. “Even Naberius said it would be okay to spend the night here. We’re not in a hurry yet.”

“Hmmmm. I wonder why not.”

Calder opened a porthole, emptying the used water from his bath into the bay. “What do you mean?”

“Well, Cheska rushed to send us the message, and then the two of them certainly scurried to get onboard, without even bothering to meet us first. But now they don’t mind if we sit in the harbor all night.”

He shrugged. “We’ll be leaving in the morning. That should be enough hurry for anyone.”

“Maybe.” She calmly brushed her hair for a few more seconds. “What kind of treasure are they after, do you think?”

That very topic had been very much on Calder’s mind ever since Naberius explained their mission. He had a hard time thinking about the Chronicler’s supposed treasure without finding himself blinded by greed. “It’s got to be an Imperial artifact, doesn’t it? It must be a good one, if he’s willing to spend ten thousand goldmarks on it.”

Jerri’s arms snaked around his, and she rested her chin on his shoulder. “A good one, maybe. But it can’t be the
best
one. How much do you think he’d pay for that?”

Calder rested his foot on his secret lockbox, chained beneath the bed. He wanted to remind himself that it was there. He turned his head a few inches and gave his wife a smile. “Too bad it’s not for sale.”

“I bet he’d kill for it.”

Inside its darkened cage in the corner, Shuffles murmured, “Kill for it....”

Jerri laughed. “Awww, it’s talking in its sleep.”

With her face so close to his, he couldn’t help but notice her emerald earrings, still shining in the light of the quicklamp. “Aren’t you going to take those off?” He reached up to her ear.

Casually she leaned back, bringing her own hand up to thumb her earrings. “These? Oh, it’s too much trouble taking them out. We’re going to be up early, so I thought I’d save a step and leave them in.”

In his memory, she’d never left her earrings in to sleep before. It seemed uncomfortable to him, but it wasn’t like he made a practice of wearing jewelry. What did he know?

Minutes later, Calder lay on his bunk, staring at the wooden planks above him and wondering about assassins. The gentle lull of the waves eventually lured him into sleep, as he felt every inch of the ship settling into the rhythm of the water.

If anything does happen tonight,
he thought,
I’ll be ready.

~~~

Through his eyes, he thought he saw a green flash.

Once, he might have jumped to his feet at any sign of the unusual, but these days he rarely had to fight for his life. Sleepily, he wondered why someone had opened a quicklamp at this hour.

It took him a handful of seconds to slide up to a seated position, looking around him. Everything in the cabin seemed normal. His sword still hung above the bunk, his chest sat right where he’d left it, and moonlight streamed in from the porthole.

Though his wife was missing.

He listened for a moment, trying to pick out anything wrong.
Maybe the assassins took her,
he thought, and then chuckled a little nervously. Killers would have no need to kidnap a woman from her bed. They would simply slit Naberius and Tristania’s throats, maybe with Calder’s thrown in for good measure, and then melt away into the night.

Still, on a night like tonight, he had a right to be nervous. He shrugged on a shirt and picked up his pistol. With the gun in one hand and his sheathed cutlass in the other, he creeped up and out of the cabin.

“Jerri?” he called, though he still made an effort to keep his voice down. Foster had a tendency to shoot people who woke him up in the middle of the night.

No one answered. The ship drifted gently with the water as the pale light of the moon slid over its deck.

That was when he realized something was really wrong.

Urzaia should still be on watch, and the man was incapable of remaining silent. If he didn’t respond, that meant he had either fallen asleep on the job, or...

A huge body lay sprawled on the deck, hatchets inches from his hand. Calder scarcely had time to let the sight register when a flash of green fire silently exploded at the corner of his vision. He spun, pistol leveled, to see two figures locked in combat on the stern deck.
 

Only feet above where he had been sleeping moments before, a figure in black brandished a large-bladed bronze knife. Calder assumed it was a woman from the slight build and the hair, though it was hard to get a glimpse of her figure. She fought like a shadow, flickering forward and slashing at her opponent, dodging counterattacks by dipping impossibly low in an instant. Sparks of silver flew from her off hand: tiny daggers weighted for throwing, or perhaps needles.

Her opponent...Calder’s mind tried to reject it for a moment, but truth quickly burned through his reluctance.

Her opponent was
Jerri.
Lit by the moon as if she stood in a spotlight, Jyrine Tessella Marten wore nothing more than a white nightgown, her brown hair blowing loose in the wind.

And her hands were filled with acid-green flame.

That wasn’t possible. It
couldn’t
be possible. No one could use powers like that except Elders and Kameira...and those humans who borrowed their powers. Soulbound.

But his wife wasn’t a Soulbound. She couldn’t be. He was a Reader, he would have sensed it.

Light and life, I’m married to her.
There were only a handful of Soulbound on the continent, and the Empire had them all officially registered. There was no way Jerri could have kept something like that a secret.

No way.

Calder stood frozen for a long moment as Jerri struck at her opponent with a lash of flame. He would have expected any opponent of a Soulbound to die in seconds, especially one that could apparently hurl bolts of fire, but the assassin in black simply sidestepped, as though dodging a ball.

“I’m not here for you,” the killer said. Her voice was low, but not a whisper. She sounded businesslike, almost bored. “I don’t suppose I can convince you to go back to sleep.”

Jerri kept her voice even softer than the assassin’s, as though she had more to hide. “I won’t let you get what you want. Time’s almost up. That which sleeps will soon wake.”

The assassin jerked as though Jerri had kicked her, but the words couldn’t have hit her any harder than they hit Calder.

That which sleeps will soon wake.

He’d heard those words before, but he’d never expected to hear them from his wife.

Calder must have made a sound, because Jerri’s eyes caught him for the first time: standing there, pistol raised, his mouth hanging open. Her burning hands froze, her eyes widened. She stared at him for a stretched instant, as though he’d caught her cheating on him with another man.

The woman in black sighed and reached down to something at her waist.

Jerri whipped back to her attacker, blazing hands coming up, but the other woman struck like a snake. One instant she was keeping her distance, and then she was pulling a needle out of Jerri’s neck.

Calder shouted, his hand clenching involuntarily. His pistol sent out a crack of thunder and a cloud of black smoke, but the assassin was already out of his line of fire.

She held Jerri by the throat, pressing Calder’s wife against the railing. With an almost casual gesture, the killer shoved her overboard.

Pain and shock blasted through Calder as though he’d been struck by lightning, and he reacted with the instinct of the wounded.

Through his bare feet, he plunged his mind into the ship.

The Testament
came to life around the assassin. A line of rope swung at her neck, trying to catch her in a noose, but she was too quick.

She ducked, unbelievably limber, and dropped from the stern deck.

The woman in black landed in a crouch, inches in front of him. For a moment Calder looked straight at her, though half of his attention was still buried in the ship beneath him. Black hair hung down around her like a hood, and a piece of dark cloth covered her mouth. Her skin was pale, maybe Erinin, and her eyes...

As black as her hair and clothes, her eyes were flat and unconcerned. The ice-cold eyes of a woman who didn’t care if she lived or died.

For some reason, that made Calder even angrier.

He tossed his pistol aside and pulled his cutlass, so similar to the dueling saber he’d trained with as a child. He’d spent even longer hours with this blade, though not recently. But a lack of practice was the furthest thing from his mind.

He attacked with a speed and fury that would have made at least one of his tutors very proud, but he didn’t fight with muscle alone. He kept his Intent fixed, focused on the sword, pouring all of his anger and fear and desperation into the weapon.
You can kill her. You cannot be stopped.

Slowly, steadily, the weapon grew stronger. Not enough to notice over the course of one fight, perhaps, but maybe enough to tip the scales.

The killer flicked her knife, knocking his sword aside, but he stepped forward, pressing her against the door of his cabin, abusing his reach. He felt a savage satisfaction flaring up as he scored a hit against the flesh of her arm. She couldn’t block everything. He was overwhelming her!

More importantly, the noise had given the rest of the crew precious seconds to emerge. Foster called out behind him, and Andel’s boots pounded across the deck as he ran over. He thought he even heard Urzaia groaning, but he didn’t have the space to turn around and check. A little closer, and he’d have skewered this murderer through the heart. Then he’d dive into the bay, save Jerri before she drowned...

His mind had already moved on without him when the woman batted his blade aside, brought her hand up, and jabbed a needle into his upper arm.

Calder fought on for a moment more, but the strength trickled away from his arm, and she simply stepped past him.

He spun, and the motion was almost enough to send him tumbling to the deck. He grabbed at a nearby railing for support, leaning against it as he watched the rest of the fight unfold.

Andel, still impeccably dressed in a full white suit and hat, fired his pistol point-blank at the assassin.
 

Got her!
Calder silently screamed, but the bullet tore out a crater in the wood of the deck, and the woman in black kicked in Andel’s knees. How had she gotten away? It was impossible. Purely impossible.

Urzaia had indeed recovered from whatever the woman had done to him, rising up to his full height and looming like an enraged bear. He took a black hatchet in either hand and roared, charging with the force of a warhorse. The entire ship seemed to shake under his weight.

The killer didn’t wait around. She turned and ran the opposite direction, toward the bow of the ship.

No. She’s not running.
Calder tried to shout a warning to his crew, but a strange warmth was spreading through his veins, and he was finding it harder and harder to stay conscious. Speaking seemed beyond him.

But he still clearly saw that she wasn’t trying to get away—she was trying to get to her real target.

Naberius.

The man stood in the shadow of the mast, wrapped in a blanket, holding pistols in both hands. With the blinding white of his grin, and his dark hair blowing behind him, he looked more and more like an actor in a heroic play.

The assassin charged him, but he didn’t even raise his gun. He only raised his eyes: up to the sails looming over his head.

“Too late,” he said.

Then Tristania fell from the mast. Her coat settled around her as she landed, her bandages glowing in the white light. A dark whip unfurled from her fist, curling around her feet.

She cracked the whip once, and the woman in black hurled herself to one side.

An instant later, Calder understood why.

The tip of the whip was pointed like an arrowhead. In the air, where the point of the whip struck, a pale light exploded in a crackle of lightning.

He had seen explosions like that before, if he could only remember...

A memory drifted up, of a Stormwing gliding over choppy waves, snapping its tail to create bright explosions. For some reason, he couldn’t seem to connect that thought to anything else.

Naberius’ voice drifted over to Calder. He was speaking to the killer in black. “I can promise you safe conduct if you are willing to have a civilized discussion. Whatever your contract is, I can beat it.”

Calder could only see the black-clad woman from the back, but she was slowly reaching one hand behind her back to grab something from her belt. A hilt. A second knife.

Once more, he tried to call a warning.

This time, he fell onto his stomach. Shadows swallowed him.

His last thought was an image of Jerri, kicking and panicking as she slowly drowned in an icy sea.

~~~

Calder woke in his own bed, with golden morning sunlight flowing in from the porthole. His arm ached from strain, and his cheeks and ribs had several bruises from where he’d collapsed, but he ignored his body’s distress as he jumped out of the bunk.