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

by Will Wight

  But the wounds had only been bandaged. They weren’t yet healed.

  The crime rate had quadrupled overnight, even to the point of pitched battle against Imperial Guards. So-called “street gangs” had been the darlings of the newssheets for five years, haunting the poorer quarters like roving bands of Elderspawn. Burglary, extortion, and recreational alchemy bloomed on the streets like mushrooms after a rain.

  Shera didn’t mind. The increase in crime had meant an increase in her contracts, at least for the first few years. The city had mostly stabilized by now, which meant boredom had returned. But she liked to think she understood these gangs now: they were desperate and scared, banding together for the illusion of control in a world gone mad.

  It was all she could do to stop herself from killing them all.

  Inside the darkened workshop, Shera knelt beside yet another paralyzed thief. He lay sprawled between two aisles of meticulously labeled formulas, glowing softly in a rainbow of colors. His musket lay inches from his hand, loaded but not fired.

  “…then I will enter your home through the window.” Every home had at least one window. “You know the one that creaks? The one with a crack in the corner? That window.” Every window in the poor quarters of the Capital creaked, and most of them had cracks.

  As one of her teachers, Zhen of the Masons, had taught her, specific details were the cornerstone of any threat. Lack of accurate information was no excuse for a lack of specificity.

  She kept up the threats, pressing the tip of her shear against the back of his neck until it drew blood. When he started crying, she knew her work here was done.

  Only one left, hiding in the back behind a table, which he’d pushed up like a wall between him and Shera. She took him to be the boss, since he was fat, and he’d continued eating while the men around him fought. At first.

  “I will double what they’re paying you!” he shouted angrily, from behind his barricade. “Why won’t you listen?”

  I doubt you can afford it, she thought, but she said nothing. In cases like this, silence was more intimidating.

  She walked up and kicked the table to the side. It was a cheap card table, and slid aside without resistance.

  The fat man sat against the wall, holding his pistol in two trembling hands. Pointed straight at Shera.

  The threat set her gut on fire, and she managed to drop before the muzzle barked and a bullet tore through the space where her head had been.

  He screamed with laughter, cheeks turning red in the dim light from the glowing potions nearby, and hurled the pistol in Shera’s direction. He spat threats, curses, and promises that he couldn’t keep.

  Shera had remained fairly distant from this whole mission. She was calm, cool, professional…but still concerned about keeping her targets alive. Still trying to treat them as if they mattered.

  But now, under the threat of death, her thoughts were growing colder.

  It would have been so much easier to simply kill everyone in the workshop and haul their bodies out for retrieval, but she had gone out of her way to paralyze and threaten them. This was her being nice.

  And she’d come close to dying for it.

  While the ice closed its grip around her heart, the fat man had pulled out a second pistol, cocking the hammer and swinging the muzzle in her direction.

  This time, Shera had no interest in playing nice.

  She seized the gun and his wrist in both hands, twisting in one sharp motion. The pistol came away in her grip, and something in his wrist snapped. He screamed, cradling his arm.

  Shera reversed the gun, pressing the business end into his belly.

  Briefly, a thought of her needles—each soaked in an alchemical solution designed to induce paralysis—flitted through her mind.

  Then she pulled the trigger.

  Blood spattered out behind him, and acrid smoke drifted into her face. She tossed the emptied weapon into the boss’s lap, walking away without a word.

  That was everyone she’d seen from above, present and accounted for. Her cleanup crew should be here soon, and the alchemist’s workshop would be spotless and back in working order before dawn.

  I almost made it without killing anyone. The thought came suddenly, unbidden, and it brought with it a surge of irritation.

  She was supposed to kill people. For many years, that had been her only job. Now she had other options, but the Architects—the ruling council of the Consultant’s Guild—wouldn’t hold a body count against her. They only cared about results.

  Shera didn’t feel guilty, exactly. She felt as though she’d failed. Like she’d broken some unwritten rule, and she should be ashamed.

  Lucan would have wanted her to let the man live.

  He had killed his fair share of people himself, to be sure. But he liked to weigh the possibilities, to give the target every chance of redemption. To Shera, that had always sounded like an unnecessary amount of extra work.

  “Their lives are worth just as much as ours,” he’d say.

  It was hard for her to believe that.

  A noise echoed through the workshop, like a rabbit scuffling in underbrush, and Shera faded back into deeper shadows. She’d taken care of everyone she had observed from the roof of the warehouse next door, but there was always the chance that someone had escaped her notice.

  She crept around a shelf of tanks, each containing some sort of water-dwelling creature. Some of them were ordinary animals, containing starfish or eels. Others carried juvenile Kameira—she saw a baby Deepstrider create a miniature waterspout in its tank, bearing its fangs at her in a silent hiss. Its blue scales rippled in the dim light as it undulated against the glass, trying to find a way through.

  There were other creatures that she thought might have been Elderspawn. A tank full of black worms stood up in the sand, waving in time to a silent tune…music that, after a few seconds, Shera was sure she could almost hear, in the corner of her mind…

  She shook her head and avoided looking at the tanks any longer.

  Another sound broke the quiet: a soft whimper, followed by the scrape of cloth over stone.

  Shera rounded the corner, bronze shear gripped in her right hand.

  A round-faced man, a little older than she was, huddled in an apron, surrounded by food that looked as though it had fallen down around him. He clutched a bundle of fruit to his chest as if he meant to protect the produce with his life.

  As soon as she appeared, he squeezed his eyes shut tight and whimpered again, waiting for death to come.

  Shera reached to her side for a paralyzing needle, but she came up empty. Everything she had left in her arsenal was lethal.

  Maybe he was right to be afraid.

  Shera took a second to put the picture together. He was the cook, or the errand boy, or whatever this gang called the guy who carried food to the boss. Tonight, he was in charge of preparing food for his superior. He would spend most of his time in the kitchens at the back of the workshop, which was why she hadn’t seen him from next door.

  Her attack must have caught him in the middle of running for more ingredients.

  Upon seeing him, Shera felt…indifferent. From one perspective, he was an innocent man who had been forced into serving a stronger master. He could be innocent. She hadn’t seen him commit any crimes in particular, besides loitering in an alchemical workshop owned by another.

  Then again, she had no reason to think this man was any less culpable than the others. As far as she knew, he had murdered someone for a bushel of apples. It was pointless to speculate, which was one problem she’d always had with Lucan’s philosophy.

  It was all well and good for him to investigate the guilt and innocence of his targets. He was a Reader. He could probably touch this guy’s apron and tell what the man had eaten for breakfast three days ago. Shera had no such power.

  And as a general rule, she felt no pity. It would make her night easier if she killed him and moved on.

  But…

  The
Emperor himself had once given her a piece of advice. It was out of character for him, which was why she’d paid attention.

  “I need you in a team because no one’s judgment is correct all of the time. Not even mine. We all need other eyes to see in our blind spots.”

  So she made a conscious effort to consider what her old teammates would have told her in a situation like this.

  Lucan wouldn’t like it. It cost me nothing to leave this man alive. Meia would say I should kill him to be sure—the mission is more important than his life.

  Then again, she’d never seen eye-to-eye with Meia either. She had a tendency to elevate the will of the Architects to the same level as an Imperial mandate.

  An unwelcome memory bubbled to the surface, accompanied by a face she hadn’t thought of in years: a little girl in a blue ribbon.

  Mari would have wanted me to leave him alive. And Maxwell…

  Maxwell would have told her she’d already wasted precious seconds by leaving him alive.

  So, as always, it boiled down to this. She could listen to Lucan, or she could listen to Maxwell.

  When she put it like that, it wasn’t such a hard decision.

  Shera leaned closer, making the man in the apron whimper again. After a moment of indecision, she plucked a single ripe-looking green apple from the bundle on his chest.

  “I’m taking this,” she said, tossing the apple up and idly catching it. “Now leave. Don’t come back.”

  Fighting a battle didn’t faze her, but enduring an internal debate made her feel like she’d run ten miles. She leaned back against the wall, pulling the cloth shroud down from her mouth to take a bite of apple.

  As she chewed, she gestured to the black cloth now hanging from her neck. “You know, I’ve never understood why we wear the masks at all,” she said to the shadows. “They only cover us from the nose down. It’s not like they’re not going to recognize me because they can’t see my chin.”

  Ayana seemed to materialize next to her, watching the fleeing man with disapproval. “The shroud is a symbol of the Am’haranai dating back over two thousand years. It represents our anonymity, our denial of the individual self, our dedication to a life of service in the shadows…”

  She trailed off, seeing that Shera had closed her eyes.

  “No, no, keep talking. I’m still sleepy.”

  Ayana clashed her fingernails together in lieu of impaling Shera on them, for which Shera was grateful.

  “What’s the body count?” her mentor asked.

  “One dead. Twelve immobile. One mobile and growing increasingly distant.”

  “Only one dead?” Ayana sounded surprised. “You were done so quickly, I assumed you’d killed them.”

  Shera cracked one eye. “Come to think of it, what are you doing here? I didn’t expect you’d see to cleanup personally.” She took another bite of the crisp green apple.

  With the tips of two long, iron nails, Ayana reached down to her belt and withdrew an envelope. She tossed it to Shera, who snatched it from the air without thinking.

  “This arrived at the chapter house a few hours ago,” Ayana explained.

  The front of the letter had Shera’s name written in clear, simple handwriting. Nothing else. She flipped it over and saw that the envelope had been sealed in wax, pressed with the crest of the Consultant’s Guild: a simple pair of gardening shears.

  “Who seals a letter in wax anymore?” Shera wondered aloud, breaking the seal with her thumb.

  “Gives Yala the excuse to use her signet ring.”

  As Shera continued munching on her apple, she scanned the letter. Its contents were mercifully brief:

  Shera,

  We have found a garden that requires your shears. Head northeast, where a bricklayer will give you a fish. Have no fear: a shepherd watches your flock.

  Yala

  “Since you can explain everything,” Shera said, “perhaps you can tell me why Yala insists on writing a secret letter in code. Anyone who is capable of intercepting a Consultant’s private communication has enough knowledge to break the code. If they can steal it, they can read it. And even if they do read it, it’s not like there’s any sensitive information here! She just wants me back on the Island.”

  Black shadows flitted around Shera and Ayana—Shepherds, with maybe a Mason or two, hauling paralyzed bodies away and generally cleaning up. Shera saw a Shepherd descend from the ceiling on a line, sweep a pile of broken glass into a dustpan, and then climb back up.

  Ayana let out a sigh. With her rough voice, it sounded like the wind screeching through jagged rocks. “Yala has always been fascinated with the mystery of the Consultants. It would never occur to her that she could simply write what she meant to say. Besides, a little extra caution never hurt anyone.”

  “You know, when I was a girl, you would never have given me a straight answer. You would have told me to figure it out on my own. You’ve gotten soft.”

  Shera tossed her apple core in Ayana’s direction. The other woman didn’t catch it; she simply leaned to one side and let the garbage fly over her shoulder.

  A Shepherd caught the core before it hit the ground.

  “Soft,” Ayana repeated, and poked her gently in the stomach with one of her sharpened iron nails. ‘Gently’ here meaning that it didn’t draw blood, but it still made Shera wince. “Who’s gone soft, Madam ‘One Dead Body’?”

  Shera pulled the shroud over her mouth to conceal her smile, waving good-bye as she left the workshop. She preferred Ayana like this, as she was at the chapter house: relaxed, casual, even good-natured. As a child, Shera had seen Ayana as more of a monster mixed with a demanding stepmother.

  Retirement had been good to her.

  Briefly, Shera wondered if that applied to herself as well. But she wasn’t retired—not at the moment. Yala had a mission for her.

  And she was looking forward to it.

  ~~~

  Ulrich Fletcher returned to his workshop the next day, shortly after dawn. Hope and disbelief warred in his heart; surely, one night hadn’t been enough time for the Consultants to do their work. He couldn’t help but believe that everything would be the same as it had been before.

  So when he opened the door to the workshop, he was in for a surprise.

  The door itself used to creak, its hinges crowded with rust. Now it swung open smoothly. His legal inventory, stocking the nearby shelves, shone with unprecedented clarity: every bottle, flask, case, and tank in the building had been dusted and polished.

  He walked back to the office in a daze, lured by the scent of fresh pine. Pine. In the Capital.

  His office, which he’d always kept in a state of cheery disarray, now looked as though it belonged to a particularly stuffy Imperial clerk. The files on his desk were organized and sorted into different piles—arranged by urgency, he realized, after a moment of inspection. The books on his bookshelves were rearranged and alphabetized, and his old chair had its stuffing replaced. Even the spare suit, which he kept hanging on a hook from the corner of his bookshelf, had been laundered and pressed.

  He felt as though he’d stumbled into a dream. Where had they found the time to do any of this? He hadn’t hired a cleaning service, he’d hired a private security team. Or so he’d thought.

  In the very center of his newly cleaned desk rested a wooden case, secured by a pair of bronze clasps. With a little hesitation, he flipped open the lid of the case.

  Inside, pressed into a velvet lining, rested a loop of thick chain, a padlock, and a key.

  And sitting on top of the chain was a single card with a few lines scribbled on it.

  ‘These contents have been invested by our private Readers,’ the card said. ‘Trash should no longer blow in your door so easily. Please enjoy, compliments of our Guild.’

  The back of the card was blank, except for a single picture: a simple pair of gardening shears.

  ~~~

  Shera met with the “fisherman” on the docks only half an hour after
she left the workshop. He was a Mason who worked for the Greenwardens training Kameira, and one of his charges was splashing around in the harbor: a dull brown creature as big as a horse that looked something like a flattened catfish. Its fins spread out atop the surface of the water, and its tail was flattened horizontally instead of vertically, slapping down on top of the water like a beaver’s.

  Waveriders, like this one, were one of the mounts the Am’haranai had used for centuries to reach their destinations in speed and stealth. Waveriders were bred for quick journeys, using their natural powers over water to skim the tips of the waves. They were not, however, bred for comfort.

  Shera spent the remainder of the night clutching the Waverider’s back as water tore at her skin, the fish gleefully hopping from one wave or another. Every time it plunged back down, Shera was soaked with bathtubs full of icy water.

  This wasn’t her first time riding out to the Gray Island on a Kameira, but this time she found herself longing for the relative comfort of a Navigator’s ship. Even being dragged behind the hull on a rope would be more relaxing than this.

  Worst of all, she couldn’t go to sleep.

  An hour or two after dawn, the Waverider slid to a stop on a tiny island. It was more of a sandbar than anything that qualified as an island in the Aion Sea, but a few scrubby plants and a single hardy tree sprouted from its surface. Shera collapsed against the base of the tree, shivering.

  It wasn’t wise to sleep in the middle of the Aion, even if by an experienced sailor’s standards she was still close to shore. The deep Aion was where the true dangers lurked—ancient Elders, wild Kameira, hungry sharks, prowling pirates. If any one of those hazards happened to be taking a holiday close to shore, Shera could easily be dragged under and devoured as she slept.

  She knew all that, but her body came up with an easy counterpoint: it was tired.

  Shera woke after only an hour or two, ears filled with the true sound of terror: the rapid hiss of another Waverider approaching on the water’s surface.

  The second Mason dismounted, smiling, telling her that this Kameira would take her straight to the Gray Island. He would wait for a ship to pick him up here, but she was meant to meet with the High Council of Architects with all speed. He had offered his personal Waverider for her service.