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

by Will Wight

  Taking the opening, she plunged the blade into Urzaia Woodsman’s chest.

  The knife let out a contented sigh, flaring green, the hands pressed against the inside of the blade freezing in place. Emerald lights sparked to life and floated like ball lightning around his chest, running all over his body, spinning around the gold hide wrapped around his upper arm.

  Urzaia’s mouth hung open in surprise. He started to say something but coughed instead, toppling over backwards.

  Shera kept her grip on her shear, letting the gladiator’s falling body pull the knife free. For an instant, the blade was covered in thin smears of blood, but then those evaporated.

  Such strength... the knife whispered.

  And somehow, perhaps because of her connection to the weapon, Shera felt stronger. As though Urzaia’s death was a breath of new life, rejuvenating her and bringing her new focus.

  It steals strength, she realized. The voice of the knife was familiar to her; it was the blade she’d carried for years, strengthened by the significance of her own actions, invested by Lucan and by the Emperor...and by Shera herself.

  She’d always wanted a blade that couldn’t be turned. Now she had a weapon that would tear through any defense, turning the target’s own power against them.

  Now she needed to ask Lucan its name. She was sure he’d have named it; it was something he’d do.

  Lucan walked up beside her, standing next to her without saying a word. Meia rose to her knees, blue scales gathering around the torn flesh at her shoulder. Her face was pale and pained, but she focused her gaze on Calder Marten.

  The Navigator was nearby, scrambling in the sand and rocks. After a moment, he pulled the Emperor’s crown free, cramming it on his head. He lifted his orange-and-black sword a second later, pointing it at the three Consultants.

  Shera readied both of her shears—bronze in her right, green in her left.

  The Awakened blade whispered drowsily, beneath hearing, as though it were simply murmuring in its sleep.

  Calder drew himself up on shaky legs, feigning a strength he obviously didn’t feel. “Let’s get to it, then,” he said.

  Beside Shera, Meia let out a snort that might have been a laugh.

  And then the Handmaiden of Nakothi tore off the roof.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Ten Years Ago

  As soon as he’d set foot on the moist gray floor of the cavern, Lucan felt something wrong. It was more than the persistent aura of death that surrounded the whole land—he had caught flickers of death and wisps of deadly Intent ever since they’d landed on the beach, as though the entire island wanted them to die.

  Down here in the bowels of the beast, he sensed something even worse. Birth and death twisted in on one another, a perversion that filled his mind with visions of dying as an infant and being reborn as a withered corpse. Ordinarily he had to touch an object to Read anything, but here it was taking all of his concentration to avoid being carried away on tides of madness. He wouldn’t remove his gloves for all the goldmarks in the Gray Island vaults.

  And that aura, that madness, was pouring from the Emperor of the Aurelian Empire like waves of heat from a fire.

  Lucan stood, mute and frozen, as the Emperor dragged the treacherous Watchman to the center of the room and put him to sleep with an invested pillow. Only when the Emperor began muttering to himself, and the visions of murder and mutilated corpses whirled around his head like leaves in a high wind, did Lucan finally force his paralyzed hands into action.

  From a pouch at his belt, he pulled a black cloth mask.

  For once, he had brought the right tool for the job.

  The mask had been created to his exact specifications, months earlier: woven out of wool sheared from sleeping sheep, by a seamstress who thought she was weaving a sleep-mask for an insomniac Magister. Then he had invested it in his free time, rubbing it through his hands and meditating on a very simple Intent: bring me peace. Calm. Stability.

  Many Readers had been driven mad by their powers, and he didn’t intend to be one of them.

  He pulled the mask down, over his face.

  The wool was soft, though it still felt strange against his skin, and some of the seams tugged at his hair. But none of that mattered in the rush of cool, dry relief.

  The visions vanished, the gibbering whispers of insanity silenced. His fear died away, leaving only peaceful focus. He wouldn’t be able to Read a thing through this mask: Reading required a degree of openness and emotional empathy that this deadening of sensation would not allow.

  But he needed his senses closed now, not open. Reading would do nothing but make him vulnerable to Nakothi. And to the Emperor.

  Lucan had the feeling that the Emperor was no longer on their side.

  When a white-armored boot crashed down on the lantern and doused the room in darkness, Lucan was ready.

  He drew his shears and confronted his Emperor not as a Reader, but as a Gardener.

  ~~~

  Lucan may have been prepared, but Meia was not.

  When the Emperor spoke the words of Nakothi and the island echoed them, senses she didn’t understand screamed at her to run away.

  When the alchemists had taken her away on the Emperor’s orders, they had primarily focused on enhancing her natural abilities. Potions administered intravenously increased her reaction time, solutions injected into her major muscle groups increased strength.

  But they hadn’t stopped there. When the Guild of Alchemists received an assignment from the Emperor himself, they set about making a masterpiece.

  A formula derived from the Shadeshifters of the Heartland swamps gave her the ability to temporarily restructure her nails and bones. A potion of Deepstrider blood healed her wounds. Regular doses of Nightwyrm venom kept her immune to the vast majority of poisons.

  And a dozen other treatments strengthened her in ways she didn’t understand.

  She understood the pain. Pain like fire flowing along her bones, like her bones shifting and cracking all at once, like her body was trying to eat itself from the inside out. And the needles. All those needles.

  Every night, she woke in sweat from dreams about the needles.

  The worst of the treatments had ended, and Meia had been thankful more than once for their effects. She was faster, stronger, more capable than any other Consultant in the Guild. Best of all, she was finally better than Shera.

  But now, those very advantages worked against her.

  All the Kameira whose power rested inside her—the Nightwyrm, the Deepstrider, the Shadeshifter, the Duskwinder, the Sandborn Hydra, countless others—all of them begged her to run.

  Meia didn’t want to run. She wanted to stand, and fight beside her Emperor.

  The Kameira didn’t see an Emperor. They saw a predator.

  So when the light went out, Meia and her heightened reflexes stayed frozen, locked in an internal battle.

  When her eyes adjusted to the darkness, and she saw a blur moving toward her, she moved on instinct. She leaped backwards, pulling her shears into a defensive stance.

  Bronze met bronze as the Emperor’s swords crashed into Meia’s knives. But his weapons had more than one man’s strength driving them. They had been born in ancient war-forges, invested with a thousand years of rock-solid Intent. Those blades could carve the heart out of a mountain.

  Meia’s knives were just as old, and almost as heavy with Intent, but they had been carried by assassins. Not warriors. If a Gardener needed to block an opponent’s blade, she had already failed.

  When swords struck shears, Meia’s blades were knocked aside with enough force to drive her to her knees. If not for her alchemy-reinforced body, the bones in her wrists would have shattered.

  The Emperor’s eyes were fevered, his hair matted with sweat, but he did not slow. He pulled a blade back, and then a white sun exploded in the room, driving a spear through each of Meia’s dark-adjusted eyes.

  She shrieked and scrambled back, throwin
g up a hand. Even more than the Emperor’s ancient blades, at that point, she feared the light.

  But the back of her mind realized what had happened: Shera threw a flare.

  Meia’s eyes adjusted quickly, if painfully. The tube of alchemy blazed in the corner, lighting the chamber up like noonday. Creatures of bone and pale flesh, which had been invisible in the shadows, hissed and slithered back into the tunnels from which they had come.

  She expected to see a bronze sword plunging into her chest, but Lucan was there, a black cloth mask over his head. A spade flashed in the light, aiming for the Emperor’s neck, but the sweep of one sword knocked it aside.

  Lucan held a shear in one hand and kept the other open, throwing spades and needles and what seemed to be junk from his pouches at the Emperor to maintain distance as he backed away. Leading the enemy away from Meia.

  Once again, Meia hesitated.

  We never abandon our brothers and sisters, her mother Yala said.

  And then, We obey the Emperor without question.

  If the Emperor wanted them dead, who was she to argue?

  Lucan launched a low kick, hitting only air, and a white-armored boot crashed down and shattered his shin. Lucan managed not to scream, hopping back on one foot and tossing a handful of glittering powder at the Emperor’s face.

  It landed in the Emperor’s eyes, but did nothing. He didn’t even blink. He drew one sword back for a fatal blow.

  And Meia hesitated no longer.

  She bunched strength in her legs and leaped across the chamber, her shears in each hand, driving them down toward the Emperor’s shoulders.

  He slipped aside and her knives bit only air. His foot met her forehead and she tumbled back, head and heels in a jumble, landing in a pile against the wall.

  The Emperor stomped on Lucan’s other leg, smashing it, and the young Gardener finally screamed. The sound broke Meia’s will.

  He’s the Emperor. Who are we to resist him?

  Then Shera joined the fight.

  Her black hair fell around her face like a hood, shrouding her expression as she knocked the Emperor’s legs out from under him.

  He caught himself with one hand against the ground, impossibly agile, and still managed to counterattack with a kick. Shera didn’t block it; she ducked her head aside and brought up her knife, scoring a cut along the back of his knee.

  For the thousandth time in the past five years, Meia watched from her back while Shera did what she could not.

  A steady stream of silver flowed from Shera, spades and needles and hidden daggers flashing through the air. The Emperor batted most of them aside, but each time he did, Shera was there to deliver a strike with her bronze blade.

  If he met that attack, she would simply move out of the way, flowing through a shadow like a shark through the depths. From every angle, with every weapon at her disposal, Shera kept up a furious attack.

  Most of them failed to land, but some did. A nick appeared high on the Emperor’s cheek, and on the backs of both knees, and at each joint in his armor.

  Meia couldn’t understand it. Shera was slower, and weaker, and less experienced than her opponent. But somehow she stayed unharmed, while the Emperor picked up a collection of injuries that would slowly cripple even him.

  Without looking, Shera hopped backwards, over the still-sleeping form of the Watchman. As she turned her head, eyes tracking her opponent, Meia finally got a clear look at her expression.

  It was absolutely blank. Like an anatomical sketch of a human girl, instead of an actual person. Her eyes were as dead as a snake’s, and she scarcely seemed to breathe. Even the Emperor, in the grip of madness, looked more human than she did at that moment.

  A sense of despair settled into Meia’s belly like a chip of ice. How am I supposed to compete with that?

  I’m only human.

  But she wasn’t. Not anymore.

  She gathered her strength, the power that a team of skilled alchemists had given her as a gift, and prepared to show Shera how a real killer took its prey.

  Shera stopped, like a dog reaching the end of its rope. For a second, her eyes flicked over the Emperor’s expression. Then her shoulders relaxed, and she wiped her shears clean on her black pants.

  “Don’t play games,” Shera said at last, her voice flat. “Either kill me, or tell me the truth.”

  The Emperor’s back was turned to Meia, so she couldn’t see his expression. He spun one sword through the air, idly, like a bored duelist.

  “Which truth would you like?” he asked, at last.

  Somehow, he didn’t sound nearly as insane as Meia had expected.

  Shera slammed her shears into place behind her back. “I like finishing my jobs quickly. I can’t do that if I don’t know what the job is.”

  He laughed, warm and rich, as though they were all enjoying a leisurely ride through the countryside. Then he plunged both his swords into the ground, sheathing them in the squishy gray floor.

  “Do you mind if I tend to him first?” the Emperor asked, with a nod toward Lucan.

  Shera said nothing.

  All Meia could think was, What happened?

  ~~~

  As the ice shrank back from Shera’s heart, anger took its place.

  She didn’t get angry often. Most things, she could shrug off. But if the Emperor was going to string her along like a puppet, she at least wanted to know her part in the show.

  Besides, he broke Lucan’s legs.

  The Emperor held out his hand to Meia, who looked as though she wasn’t sure whether to run, fight, or throw up. “Lord Bareius gave you a canister with a pink cap. Give it to me.”

  Meia fumbled at her belt before she found the canister he was looking for. She tossed it to him underhand, and he snatched it out of the air.

  Lucan drifted in and out of consciousness, the cloth of his mask moving up and down as he tried to speak.

  “When did you realize?” the Emperor asked, dumping a pill from the canister into his open palm. After a moment’s thought, he added a second.

  “You fought like anyone else would have,” Shera responded. “Not like you.” She’d seen the Emperor jump from a hundred feet up in the air and land safely, catch a falling girl in his sleeve, Awaken a sea of gravel, and dissolve a teacup with nothing but his will. Any one of those feats, a normal Reader would call fundamentally impossible.

  Yet, when he fought her, he relied entirely on the power of his invested blades.

  The Emperor nodded, absorbing the information. He rolled up the bottom of Lucan’s mask, giving him enough room to force the pills into the boy’s mouth.

  The room rumbled again, wind hissing between the wires.

  “REBIRTH!” Nakothi shouted. Cold fingers brushed Shera’s skin, and she shivered.

  Facing into the shadows, the Emperor stood. He laughed loudly, defiantly, into the dark. “This is my world! Take your whispers back to the dead!”

  The wind howled away, like breath leaving a dying throat.

  But Shera noticed that his hands were shaking.

  “Were you…faking, then?” Meia asked hesitantly. “We thought…”

  He turned a smile on her. “Nakothi has no hold on me yet.”

  It was a lie. Something had laid its hand on him at the beginning. Maybe he had allowed it, for whatever reason, and had shaken the spell away later. But for a moment there, he had changed into a different person.

  “Yet?” Shera asked.

  He leaned forward on the hilts of his swords, which stood up like twin flagpoles from the gray floor. “That was the bargain I made, a thousand years ago. While the Dead Mother sleeps, I can use her power freely. But death will not hold her forever. When she begins to rise, her authority over me will be greater than mine over her. She will control me. And I will need to be stopped.”

  With an audible crackle, Lucan’s legs pulled themselves together. He gasped, like a scream in reverse, and Shera felt a sympathetic pain shoot through her own body. The Em
peror placed a hand on his knee, and Lucan’s cries eased.

  “Why do you think they allowed Lucan into the Gardeners?” he asked.

  Meia and Shera looked at each other, uncertain.

  “His disposition is clearly unsuitable,” the Emperor continued. “He’s empathetic, clear-headed, has a strong moral compass, and he questions everything. He’s far from the template of an ideal Gardener, and under normal circumstances they would have inducted him straight in the Architects. So why did they raise him with you?”

  “Because you told them to,” Shera realized aloud.

  “I needed a Reader that fit several criteria, including age. His disposition as a killer was not one of those criteria. I don’t need him to be ruthless, I need you to be ruthless.” He pointed at Shera. Then he turned his finger to Meia. “I need you to be strong. And I need him to be skilled.”

  The Emperor swept a hand to encompass all of them. “Today was meant to be a practice game. We have years more before the main event, and before that time, I hope to come up with an alternate solution. But in case I fail, I will not let the Elders win.

  “You three have one task, and one alone.

  “When Nakothi rises, you will kill me.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Do Soulbound Vessels have their own consciousness? My sword says yes, but it’s a liar.

  -Jorin Curse-breaker

  The Handmaiden pulled the dome of earth away from the arena like a child lifting the roof off her dollhouse. Pieces of earth and stone rained down, shaking the ground.

  Shera leaned on Lucan’s shoulder, limping to shelter. Meia crawled behind them as the three of them limped to the broken wooden shed. It wouldn’t offer much cover, not from the rocks falling from the ceiling, but it was overshadowed by a stone chunk of the arena that loomed overhead. Hopefully, that would break up the bigger rocks and pieces of earth, while the shed’s crumbling roof kept the dirt and smaller stones away.