Skykeeper (The Drowning Empire Book 1)

by S. M. Gaither

  Even then, he focuses only on moving forward, his hands walking along the walls that press close on either side of our narrow path of rock and ice.

  It seems to take forever, but that path eventually widens, and soon after, I don’t find myself having to duck to avoid the stalactites and the dripping, partially formed icicles hanging from the ceiling. The air thins, expanding with the space.

  And then it happens: the last of the dead fog weaving its way around us rolls away, and the light of my magic suddenly stretches much further, much brighter. It seems that we’ve found our way into one of the more massive rooms of these caves; I can’t see the walls or ceilings anymore, even with the extra light.

  West doesn’t turn around until long after we’ve stepped out of the last wisps of fog. When he does, I steal cautiously past him, putting several feet between us before I turn back around myself. I release my grip on my knife; I need both hands so I can cup them around my mouth and breathe, bring them down and rub them furiously back to some sort of warmth.

  Once my fingers have stopped tingling, I pull my sphere of magic back to me. I let it hover over my outstretched palms while I summon more, strand after strand of brighter, bolder magic that wraps around the dim sphere and sets it spinning, sending light refracting off walls that are shiny with moisture and fragments of translucent gypsum crystal.

  Behind us, the fog is still reaching, twisting black fingers pulling away from the main cloud, drifting into this larger cave. Watching them makes my pulse quicken, even with all the space now between myself and that cloud.

  I keep summoning.

  I want to be able to see any other fog ahead of us. I want to be able to see everything—every possible path, every possible threat—so I summon until the magic’s light is wide and bright enough to stretch all around us. Until I can’t take the stabbing in my skin, and until blood has started to collect in the creases of my palms and I am blinking back tears.

  I don’t remember it ever hurting this much, even as far back as the first time I ever summoned it.

  The crystal walls glisten in the light like cold fire, bright and beautiful and mesmerizing. It dulls that pain, in a way.

  Or at least distracts from it.

  The sound of splashing water makes West and me both jump.

  “Just a big wave rushing in from the Atesian somewhere, probably,” West whispers. “The sound probably echoes on forever in here.”

  I nod.

  But I’ve already started sweeping my magic’s glow over the cave again. Searching.

  I keep thinking I see shadowy, impossible shapes against the walls.

  I keep hoping that one of those shadows might turn out to be Coralind.

  There is no sign of her, though. And after lingering as long as we dare to see if she emerges from the mist, we decide to move, hoping that she is already waiting somewhere ahead.

  Because we can’t stay still. That fog is still pressing in behind us, and for once, West and I agree on something: we don’t want to take another one-way trip through it, to go back the way we came. We could turn around now, but there is really still nowhere to go except forward.

  So that’s what we do.

  Every few minutes, we hear more sounds of what I can only assume is that water sliding into the cave, in hushed rumbles and hissing echoes that make my skin crawl. It sounds as if this cave is alive, inhaling and exhaling with slow, groaning breaths and the occasional sputtering cough.

  The further we walk, the more complex the crystal formations in the walls become, and the wider the space swells and spins and shimmers around us. “How does something as huge as this even form?” I wonder aloud.

  “Good question,” West says. “I’ve heard stories since I’ve been on the mainland, but they’re just that: stories. Don’t know the actual reason.”

  Our hushed voices are less disturbing than the cave’s moaning and shifting, so I talk him into going on, even after he warns me that the tale likely won’t make this place seem much more inviting.

  “Well,” he begins, still looking hesitant, “they say there were people, of course, living in the land that used to stretch between the western lands and what’s now this main part of the empire. Not many, but some. And they were still there when the river began to flood for whatever reason, rising too quickly for anyone to escape. If you believe the story, the people’s determination to reach the Endlands’ evil supposedly so upset the goddess that she drowned hundreds of them without thinking, leaving a dark curse on their spirits that would prevent them from ever rising out of that water. The places where they tried became the foundations of caves like these, and of the tunnels all underneath the miles of shoreline. All of them, the places where they attempted to dig and scratch their way back to the daylight.”

  “Their ghosts attempted it, you mean?” I ask, studying the cracks and crevices in the walls. Looking for claw marks, however silly that seems.

  “Ghosts, or some of the stories gave them a more specific name: the dredge. The drowning-walkers. Because they’re more like physical, solid beings than spirits. Supposedly.”

  I remember my nightmare from a few days ago, the bloated and shriveling skin of that creature that looked entirely too much like myself. The way she turned to water, and then to nothing.

  Is this what we’re all in danger of becoming? If the sky broke completely apart, and the gods let it drown and curse all the people below? Would some part of us still survive, desperate and blind and clawing for a surface that we were never going to find?

  “Supposedly?” I repeat, still studying the walls around us. “So, you don’t believe any of it?”

  “Not especially, no.”

  “What do you believe, then?”

  He gives me that I-am-finished-with-this-conversation look that he does so well.

  But my gaze is insistent, and soon he surprises me with an actual answer.

  “For starters,” he says, “I believe that people who are dead are just that: dead. They don’t come back. Not as spirits or anything else.”

  I don’t think I agree with him, but his words sound strangely, quietly angry, so I don’t push him any further.

  The conversation is pulling away what little bit of focus I still had on my magic, and now the main sphere of it is bouncing more dazzling patterns across the cave around us. I let my attention follow those patterns, and West does the same, and after a minute he remarks, in a lighter tone, “However it got here, it’s a nice view, isn’t it? No caves like this back where I come from. Not any that I know of, anyway.”

  I nod. And instead of death and ghosts, we move on to talking about life—to where he lived before, to be exact. We start walking again while he tells me about the parts of Bastian that I’ve never heard of. Not the poor slum towns, but the rolling volcanic fields around them, and the hidden coves and massive waterfalls he swam beneath as a child.

  Several times he has to stop, or correct himself about details. Not the way a person telling lies or being guarded does; it’s more as if he has never spoken about these things aloud before. As if he isn’t sure he’s doing them justice.

  The entire time, his voice is veiled in longing, and his hand is clenched tightly and jammed into his pocket.

  Holding on to something, it looks like.

  “Do you ever miss it? Being home, I mean?” I ask.

  He glances over and sees me staring at his clenched fist, and he withdraws it slowly and holds his hand open to me. In the center of his palm is the same ring he took from his bag that night, the one he stayed awake studying after I healed his reopened scars.

  “I carry pieces of it with me,” he says. “So I get by. What about you?”

  My immediate reaction is to keep walking, to keep what I have left of my home to myself.

  But then it happens exactly as it did that night by the River Skadi, when I wanted to lie about my dreams, but I ended up telling the truth instead. Something swelling inside of me, pushing the words from my mouth. Ma
king my hands move, first to point out the tattered strip of cloth tied around my arm, and the symbol stitched on its end. Then it makes me reach into my pocket, retrieve my brother’s funeral stone and hold it up between my thumb and index finger for West to see. I have to explain what it is to him, but then he extends his free hand to me and indicates for me to drop it into his palm.

  And I do.

  He holds the ring in one hand, the stone in the other, and moves them up and down as if comparing them on a scale. “They weigh more or less the same,” he says. “So you understand what I mean.”

  Actually, I’m not sure what he means at all. But he seems lost in thoughts that I don’t want to interrupt. So I simply nod and hold my hand back out to reclaim the stone.

  “That has to be killing you.” He deposits the stone in my hand, and I glance up from it to see him studying the blood in the creases of my palm. His fingers linger against my skin, tracing those lines with a gentle, uncertain touch that makes my face feel hot. “Does it ever stop? It seems like it should, with enough practice.”

  “It looks worse than it really is.”

  For every scar that summoning has ever left on my skin, I’ve always, always said that.

  And for some reason, this is the first time those words don’t feel completely true.

  I lift my gaze to his, and our eyes meet for a fraction of a searing moment before I quickly turn away.

  How we ended up so close to each other, I don’t know. I don’t understand. Nor do I understand why, exactly, I suddenly have to fight so hard to stay turned away. There is a strange feeling in my lungs, my heart, my stomach—like a warm, solid weight settling in them.

  I can’t tell whether it’s securing me or sinking me.

  “And with enough practice,” I add, the words fumbling out of my mouth now, “most of the pain goes away, at least.”

  “Or do you just become numb to it?”

  His tone is more thoughtful than argumentative, but I am tired of him making me question everything even more than I already had been, and so it takes an incredible amount of willpower for me to bite back my snappish response.

  He probably wouldn’t have heard it, anyway; he’s suddenly much more interested in digging through the contents of his bag than in having this conversation with me.

  When he straightens up a few moments later, he is holding yet another of those sham magic artifacts.

  “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “Call your magic back,” he says. “Or just let it go, or whatever you need to do to save your strength.”

  “My strength is fine, thank you.”

  “Don’t you ever get tired of being so stubborn?”

  “Not really, no.”

  He shakes his head at me, a phantom of a smile on his lips. “Right,” he says. “But if we encounter more of that fog, then no spell I have is going to do us any good. So for now…” He flicks his wrist. There’s a sharp crack of the spell opening, and white flames twist to life above his open palm. “Let me light the way for a while, how about?”

  I don’t want to agree, but my skin is already crawling from the memory of black mist on it. And the thought of not being able to repel that mist is worse than his spells, maybe.

  So I breathe in deeply through my nose. Attempt to relax. Attempt to ignore his strange fire that gives off so much light with so little warmth.

  Another breath. In my nose, out my mouth. The cave air tastes like the mud pie Eamon tricked me into eating when I was little, only a bit saltier.

  “How many of those stupid spells do you have, anyway?” I ask.

  “Lots.”

  He starts to walk again, and I decide, likely against my better judgment, to take his suggestion and release my magic before I jog after him.

  “Do you even think about what you’re giving up to make those spells?” I ask as I reach his side. “About what you can’t get back?”

  About the marks they leave behind?

  Because all magic, like all powerful things, leaves a mark.

  It has a cost.

  And the price of sham magic is frighteningly high. It cannot fully exist without a human component, and so for any of the sort of spells he carries to be made, they first require a sacrifice from their purchasing users—blood, along with bits of their souls or memories—some part of them that they will never, ever get back.

  He has to know that.

  Everybody knows that.

  He doesn’t answer me. Our conversation from earlier suddenly springs back into my mind, and a new thought occurs to me: the way he kept stumbling over the details of his past, correcting himself and trying to get his words right, so what if...

  “What is your earliest memory, West?”

  “Why do you care?”

  There’s a softness to his voice that makes me quick to stammer, “I didn’t say I cared. I’m curious is all.”

  “Curiosity usually leads to trouble, you know.”

  “It’s not as if I’m a stranger to trouble.” I hesitate. “So. Tell me about the house you grew up in. Tell me everything about it.”

  He pauses for a half a step before glancing over at me.

  “You remember it, don’t you? At least some of it?”

  I lock my expectant gaze with his, but he only looks away.

  “It’s those spells you’re carrying,” I say quietly. “It’s true what I’ve heard about them, then. You’re losing parts of yourself—of your past—because of them. Aren’t you?”

  For a long time, the only sound between us is the soft hiss and crackle of the flames in his hand.

  “Sometimes,” he finally says, drawing in a slow, tired breath, “it’s easier to forget.”

  If you want to forget, then why carry pieces of it with you? I want to ask.

  “There are things you want to forget about, I bet,” he adds before I can get the question out.

  And I can’t stop the memories of my brother that rush forward and take their familiar place at the front of my mind.

  Just like every other time, I manage to push them back.

  Not away.

  Only back.

  I don’t know what he is trying to push back and away, but suddenly forcing him to talk feels almost cruel. So I stay quiet.

  There are other things demanding my attention, anyway.

  Things such as these cave walls that are squeezing more and more tightly toward us, giving me an up-close view of every inch of the glimmering, grey, ice-laced stone.

  Some of which is covered in strange grooves, deep scores etched in raking patterns through the rock.

  I start to reach for one of the particularly deep grooves, but a jolt of fear stops me.

  “Don’t those look a bit like claw marks?”

  “From some sort of animal, probably,” West says offhandedly.

  I walk on, more slowly now. But I keep looking back toward the marks I almost touched.

  And as I am staring at them, I feel cold fingers pressing against the back of my neck.

  Featherlight they press, and then they slide, cold and smooth, around to the hollow of my throat. My breathing freezes. My body tries to do the same, but I give it a little shake, refusing to let it.

  No. I am imagining this.

  I force myself to inhale, exhale. West’s hands are in plain sight. One still controlling the flame, the other in his pocket, both far away from me.

  I raise my hand, as casually as I can, to my neck. That ghostly, fingertip pressure lifts away almost instantly, but when my own fingers brush my skin, they feel something strange: Water.

  Beads of it start to trickle down along the curves of my neck.

  I jerk my hand away, and the feeling of moisture evaporates instantly.

  My breath hitches again, and a violent shiver rips through me. I fight the urge to break into a sprint. What would I be running into, anyway? I don’t know what lies ahead; only that this cave and all its phantoms—both the dead and the living—suddenly seem to
be pressing in from every side.

  “Are you really that afraid?” West asks.

  I touch my neck again.

  Still dry.

  Really afraid I might be losing my mind, I think. But I don’t let him hear that fear in my voice when I say, “Startled, more like. I just…I thought I felt something touching me.”

  His eyes slide to my hand, to where it is still pressed against the perfectly dry loose pieces of hair beneath my braid, and the corner of his mouth quirks. “You’re not afraid of death,” he muses, “but made-up things like ghosts, on the other hand…”

  The skin beneath my fingers tingles with heated irritation. “Well, you more or less said it yourself, didn’t you? Things that are dead should stay just that: dead.”

  I think I see something like pain flicker in his eyes, but he blinks it away so quickly that it’s hard to be sure. He reaches for my arm. “Come on,” he says quietly, pulling my hand away from my neck. “It’s only a story. It’s all in your head.”

  “And my nightmares are only in my head, too,” I mumble, a bit of that fear slipping into my words before I can stop it, “but that doesn’t make them feel any less real.”

  His grip on my arm grows lighter, but he doesn’t completely let it go.

  Keep moving, I think. I need to keep moving.

  Except I can’t.

  There is no weight but his against my skin now, but still this whole place feels heavy and haunted—with fingertip spirits of drowning-walkers, with the ruins of our pasts and all these other things that paralyze and leave us still and silent and unsure—and so neither of us seems able to move, now. The air fills with the solid beating of both our hearts and the dripping of water from the ceiling. Real water.

  Not like those watery handprints I imagined against my neck earlier.

  These drops are almost soothing. Rhythmic.

  Until the sound of scratching interrupts them.

  Every nerve ending in my body pulses to life.

  West spins toward the sound, too, and grabs a dagger from the sheath at his boot.

  I draw a knife of my own and take several steps backward, eyes wide and scanning the space we’ve just passed through.

  West’s light doesn’t reach far. Even as the sound of scratching seems to be catching up to us, I still can’t see anything in the darkness we left behind.