by Will Wight
All locked in battle with a great leviathan.
The same Kameira, she now realized, that had been pulling their ship.
Its serpentine head rose from the water like a lighthouse, towering over their mast. Its maw filled with hundreds of needle-fine teeth, its eyes orbs of solid blue. It reached out with long, webbed claws, slashing through legions of the dead until the water clouded with milk-pale blood.
The skull-tortoise howled again, and the leviathan’s jaws snapped it up, lifting it high into the air. Drops of seawater fell from the bruise-purple underside of the tortoise, pattering the ship’s deck like rain.
The leviathan closed its jaws, and the giant tortoise was sheared in half. A legion of skulls dropped from the sky, most plopping into the water. A few struck the deck with the sound of cannons, rolling back and forth across the planks.
“What is this?” Meia shouted, her voice full of horror.
For once, Shera knew how she felt. Killing men had never bothered her, but this…this was the stuff of nightmares.
The Emperor pointed his sword up at the sea serpent, which still chewed on the tortoise’s rubbery flesh. “That is called a Deepstrider. Once, they made long-distance sea travel impossible.”
A group of the corpse crabs had swarmed onto the Deepstrider’s tail, slicing off long bits of flesh and sending purplish blood dribbling back into the water. The Kameira howled in pain, tossing the remains of the skull-tortoise aside, and set about raking the enemies with its claws once more.
“Are these your defenses?” Shera yelled. “Is this how you protect the island?”
The Emperor gripped the hilt of his blade in both hands. “I have steered us through my own defenses. These are the children of the Dead Mother.”
He raised a small whistle to his lips and blew. It glinted blue in the predawn light; Shera found herself wondering if it was made from the same stuff as the Deepstrider’s scales.
The Kameira turned at the shrill sound of the whistle, clawing its way through waves of the dead. It circled their vessel once, shaking off unsavory passengers, and then drew to a stop parallel to the ship.
“This ship will no longer serve us,” the Emperor said. Calmly, he walked around the curve of the railing, and then hopped on to the undulating back of the sea serpent.
Meia followed without hesitation, though she didn’t bother to jump on to the rail first. She leaped clear over it, landing lightly on the Kameira’s scales. The benefits of an alchemically enhanced body.
Shera was somewhat less enthusiastic.
Lucan steeled himself, holding on to a fistful of the rigging while he waited for the right moment. When he finally jumped, he shouted, wheeling his arms in the air as he flew from ship to living creature.
He landed unsteadily, but Meia caught him and hauled him to a steadier perch.
For the first time in her life, Shera hesitated during a job.
It was one thing if she died in a fight, or because a target had more skill than she expected. When you played a game, you had to be prepared to lose.
But she knew ships. She was no sailor, but she understood how they worked, and that this ship had been assembled by a crew of men. It was solid, reliable. Now she was meant to leap onto the back of a sea serpent, fleeing a swimming army of the animate dead.
Not what she had ever expected.
Then the hosts of Nakothi boiled up the sides, hauling themselves up and over the railing using fleshy tails and claws of bone. When the first fanged skull showed itself, Shera’s hesitation shriveled and died.
She retreated, as she often did, into the cold.
Ice grew around her heart, and she took off toward the side in a running start.
At the last instant, when she pushed off into a jump, her foot slipped on the damp wood.
Shera fell.
The dark water rushed up to meet her, blue Deepstrider scales sliding past her nose. She scrabbled at the serpent with her hands, but she succeeded only in shredding the tips of her gloves.
Then she hit the water.
She spun around in a chaos of bubbles, foam, and wisps of cloudy blood. The rushing water choked her ears, leaving her deaf.
When she gathered enough of herself to wonder which way was up, she saw only an endless black sky. And, out of the distance, a dozen pale hands stretching out to meet her.
Then the rest of her brain reported for duty, and the picture clicked into place.
Not a black sky; the depths of the ocean. The hands weren’t reaching down, they were reaching up. For her.
Something’s down there.
Shera spun the opposite direction, kicking for the glimmer of the sky and the smear of blue that must be the Deepstrider. Now that she was facing the right direction, she could make out the Kameira’s webbed claws, paddling the water as its serpent body bobbed up and down in waves.
She pulled herself through the water, away from the hands.
They followed her, rushing through the water with the speed of launched harpoons. As they got closer, she saw that the all-too-human hands sprouted from the ends of long, worm-like tentacles stretching up from the deep. Twelve hands, all reaching for her, snatching blindly, flailing for an ankle or the heel of her shoe.
She looked back up, trying to gauge distance, and she found herself face-to-face with a wall of fangs.
And above that teeth, solid blue eyes.
The Deepstrider growled, so deep that it shook the water. It opened its mouth, giving Shera a dizzying view of its titanic gullet.
Then it snapped its teeth down on the corpse-white tentacles, severing them.
Something beneath Shera let out a sound like a screaming whale, and the disconnected hands still grabbed at nothing as they floated under the waves.
Finally, Shera’s head breached the surface, and she gasped for her life.
The Emperor sat on the Deepstrider’s neck, not three feet away. He extended one dark hand, wearing an amused smile.
“Next time, jump sooner.”
Shera took his hand and let him haul her up.
~~~
Minutes after they abandoned the ship, the Deepstrider reached the island.
Shera couldn’t believe she hadn’t noticed it before.
The ground was a vast expanse of clammy skin, stretching upward like a distended belly into a huge hill. Towering over them were ten curved and pointed bone spires, as though the island had grown in the middle of a colossal rib cage. The sun rose red between the ribs, like a bleeding heart.
At the base of the bone spires grew small clusters of sickly green fungus, like bunches of seaweed bursting through the skin of the ground. Over all the island hung the pervasive stench of coppery blood and rotting fish.
And the strewn parts of a dozen dismembered monsters.
Lucan winced. “I can feel the battle from here. They must have fought their way up from the beach.”
“It seems I was right to worry,” the Emperor said. He clutched the Heart of Nakothi in one hand and a sword in the other, and Shera couldn’t tell which he held tighter.
The Deepstrider finally slowed, drawing near the vessel bobbing on the waves a few dozen yards from shore: a ship almost as strange and impressive as the island itself.
On the hull, in shining red alchemical paint, glowed the words, The Eternal.
Every inch of the ship was red. The Eternal’s sails were furled, but she could clearly tell that they were the color of bright, fresh blood. The hull was made of naturally red planks, and the quicklamps hanging from the bow and stern glowed like the rising sun. Most noticeably, The Eternal seemed to drift on a tide of flame rather than water.
Orange flames licked at the bottom of the ship, illuminating the surrounding water in sunset hues. The wooden belly had been charred black, but the flames neither died nor grew. They lapped patiently at the ship’s sides as though they would never run out of fuel.
At full speed, dragging a line of fire on the water behind it, The Eternal must be
a truly spectacular sight.
Sailors hurried around the ship’s deck, one of them raising a spyglass.
“Do we leave witnesses, Highness?” Meia asked, flexing her right hand. Bones shifted beneath her skin.
The Emperor’s gaze was locked on the shore. “The Navigator and owner of that ship is Cheska Bennett, a very promising young woman. I will not deprive the Empire of her service. It is not illegal for a Navigator to accept a contract. Besides, she’s the one who alerted me to this voyage in the first place.”
The Deepstrider slithered past the ship, pressing its chin against the soft skin of the beach so that they could depart. All four of them scrambled ashore before the Emperor blew his scaly whistle again.
With a hiss like escaping steam, the Kameira turned around and dove into the ocean. In a flick of its tail, it was gone.
“Will you call it again when we leave?” Shera asked.
The Emperor marched up the hill, looking neither left nor right, resting a hand on each of his sword hilts. “If we are successful, we will be departing with Captain Bennett. If we aren’t, then we will not be departing at all.”
The three Gardeners fanned out around their Emperor. As the one with the sharpest senses, Lucan took the lead, with Meia flanking to his left and Shera to his right. The Emperor was more likely to protect them than the other way around, but he did not protest.
In fact, he hardly seemed to notice them at all. Only when he spoke did he acknowledge them at all, and only to expand their education.
“There are wider implications to this than my individual survival. The Watchman in question, the one who betrayed his Guild, knows far more than the secret to my youth. He had to know exactly where Nakothi died, how to get here, and that the Dead Mother once had eleven other hearts. I’ve only shared that knowledge with one other soul.”
“Could he have given you up?” Lucan asked from higher up the hill.
“She is not capable of betrayal. I don’t know where this Watchman found his information, but before this day is out, I will.”
With all the secrets the Emperor had revealed to them, Shera almost didn’t notice the one crucial detail he hadn’t shared.
“This man who betrayed the Blackwatch. What’s his name?”
The Emperor stopped, holding up a circle of glass to one eye like a monocle. “He has none. I’ve had his name stricken from Imperial records. From this day forward, when he is spoken of, it will be as a traitor and nothing more.”
Through the glass, he peered over the crest of the hill, at the base of the towering ribs. Then he tucked the glass back into his pocket and drew one sword.
“I will engage the target first,” the Emperor said. “Once I have him secured, everything else dies.”
They made no sound of acknowledgement, but they didn’t need to. Shera’s Consultant training told her that she would obey the Emperor’s orders without question and to the death.
But her instincts whispered that something was wrong.
First he shares ancient Imperial secrets with us, and then he takes us on a secret mission to remove a target we know virtually nothing about. No one knows we’re here. There’s no record of this assignment. He’s rushing us forward, keeping us from asking questions.
Why?
And then another question bubbled to the surface, one she hadn’t considered in years. Why us? What did he need three Gardeners for in the first place?
The wind gusted over the ocean, parting another copse of fungus, and Shera saw what the Emperor had seen through his glass: an intricate mausoleum of red muscle and yellowed bone. A circle of men had gathered in front, clustering around a wide gray-green hole, a wound that burrowed into the living flesh of this island.
There was no cover between them and the gathering below, so they all reacted the same way: they sprinted forward, weapons drawn, relying on speed instead of stealth.
Weapons drawn, Shera dashed headlong into the Emperor’s mysterious plans.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
When space warped around her as though she were standing in a heat haze, and dust began drifting up from the ground in streams, Shera started to wonder if something had gone wrong.
When she heard a malicious, inhuman voice shrieking with laughter from everywhere at once, and when she saw what looked like a newborn star hovering over the center of the Island, she wondered if she was about to die.
The light split at the bottom, cracking and releasing a mass of writhing blue-white tentacles, as though a pale squid had crammed its way into a chicken egg and was now oozing out. From this distance, it was hard to be sure, but what looked like little feelers on the tentacles might actually be human hands, covering the waving limbs like patches of fur.
When the tentacles were all the way through, instead of a squid’s head, the bony upper torso of a long-dead woman squeezed out of the light. It looked like the dead Consultants she had fought in the crypt: as if someone had taken a human corpse and sucked all the moisture out, leaving only tight skin, shriveled muscle, and bone.
But this body was ten times bigger than any human. The creature would stand over the trees of the Gray Island.
Its arms were long and bony, like a skeleton wrapped in pale skin, and it seemed to have two elbows. Its long, pointed fingers curled into claws. The monster’s neck was long and flexible, bending almost like a tentacle itself, but when its head finally emerged from the white light, Shera was forced to look away.
The face looked wrong, as though someone had crammed a bulb of mismatched organs onto the creatures neck with no order or reason. The rest of its body looked somewhat like a woman, albeit a titanic, hideous woman—with tentacles instead of legs—that had drowned a week before. But the head didn’t belong on anything natural. Most Children of Nakothi were made out of human parts, but the head was a shifting, seething mass of pulp and madness.
Unfortunately, this was not a Child of Nakothi. It was what every Child aspired to be.
The Emperor had prepared her for it, as he’d prepared her to deal with all of Nakothi’s tricks, if necessary.
This was not one of the Great Elder’s “children,” but one of her attendants.
A Handmaiden of the Dead Mother.
The Emperor rarely told stories of the days before the Empire, when Elders ruled the world, but once he had spoken of the Handmaidens.
“To look in their faces was to court madness, and I knew many who had been driven insane by exposure to a Handmaiden’s gaze, day after day. Unlike Nakothi’s children, a Handmaiden has a cruel intelligence, and they often worked as overseers or managers, supervising the Dead Mother’s ‘harvests.’ When the Dead Mother needed to build something out of specific human pieces, the Handmaidens were the ones who picked out the parts.”
Shera had never expected to see one, so long as Nakothi herself remained dead. Or asleep. With the Great Elders, those two seemed to be somehow interchangeable.
This Handmaiden stood head and shoulders over the trees around her, and upon first landing on the Gray Island, she took a look around as though gauging her surroundings.
After a moment, she let out a gurgling whistle that sounded like a teapot caught in the grip of hysterical laughter. The white light above her swelled from a star to a moon, and then it cracked like glass.
After a single frozen instant, it shattered, flinging specks of dust all over the island. The pieces were dark and tiny, as though it had scattered a handful of sand over the land, but after a moment the specks grew larger, and Shera understood.
The Handmaiden brought an entourage.
Shera went down into a crouch as, with a series of crashes, Children of Nakothi landed all around her.
She waited an instant to make sure that no monsters were going to land on her head, but she didn’t wait long enough for the Children to get their bearings. She launched herself forward, leading with her shear.
The first she encountered looked something like an anemone with waving limbs instead of te
ndrils. Something like a hand, but not quite the shape of a human hand, clasped down on her upper arm, and she sheared its limb off with a sweep of bronze.
A moment later she slashed the Child in half, and she was through and into the woods.
Many of the trees around here had been toppled by impacts, with dead monstrosities unfolding all around her. A spider of bone and sinew clambered down a nearby trunk, bones clattering like a rattlesnake, but Shera simply kept running. They might chase her, but she couldn’t afford to fight each one. If she did, she would soon be overwhelmed.
A hideous bear, wrapped tightly in greasy hair, roared and charged her, lashing a spiked tail behind it. She couldn’t avoid this one, so she matched the bear’s charge, ducking under at the last second and slicing across its belly as she slid on her knees over the forest floor.
From the stench and the splatter of liquid, she knew she’d struck a blow, but she didn’t stop and see if it was vital. She kept running, putting as much distance as she could between her and the rotten, stinking bear-creature. Not to mention the other hungry monstrosities ready to kill her.
How much running have I done today? she wondered. The stitch in her side was beginning to pain her as much as her wounds.
She kept running, headed for Meia. Or at least, where she hoped Meia would be. She had planned to fight Urzaia in the underground arena, so that’s where Shera was headed. If she got there and found the tunnel packed with Children of Nakothi instead...well, she would likely die.
Hopefully it wouldn’t come to that.
Two or three times, she caught glimpses of Consultants doing battle with monsters in and around the trees. Steel flashed, monsters screamed, and men and women called to one another, stealth forgotten.
Shera longed to go and help, which surprised her. She had spent most of her time as a Consultant away from the Gray Island, so she had few friends here. She likely didn’t know those people personally. So why did she want to help them so badly? Why did it pain her to leave them behind?
Lucan would probably call it progress, but she wished it would go away. It was distracting her.