Skykeeper (The Drowning Empire Book 1)

by S. M. Gaither

  “Let’s just keep moving,” I suggest again. “Quickly.”

  He nods, but we don’t move. I don’t think either of us wants to turn our eyes away from the sound.

  Because it is getting even louder.

  Scratch.

  Drip.

  Scratchscratch.

  Drip.

  Scratchscratchscratch—

  I curl my fingers into a throwing position on the knife. Gently, quietly lean forward. Inhale the frigid air of the cave and hold it in my lungs, ignoring the way it cuts like shards of glass down my throat.

  I look up.

  And I find myself eye to eye with a pair of gleaming eyes attached to a small, scaly blue head.

  I release my breath.

  “Atlas.” At the sound of his name, the dragon makes a happy sort of chirping noise and drops from the ceiling and onto my head.

  West snatches angrily for him, but the nimble creature spins out of his reach—painfully tangling his claws in my hair in the process—and then darts back into the darkness with a flick of his barbed tail.

  West sighs and puts his weapon away. “See? No ghosts. Only annoying little dragons.”

  “Oh, you’re really one to talk about annoying things, aren’t you?” a familiar voice replies, and a moment later, Coralind rounds the corner in a haze of blue lantern light. Atlas is nestled in the folds of her cloak’s hood, looking pleased with himself. “And, annoying or not, he’s the only reason I found you two. So you should thank him.”

  "How about I refrain from skinning him into a new wallet, and we'll call it even?"

  Coralind only snorts in response. Her eyes drift toward the knife in my hand. “You okay?” she asks.

  I nod without hesitating, although she can probably hear my fearful heart, as hard and loud as it’s still pounding.

  “How did we not find you?” West asks. “We just came from where you did. We must have walked right past you.”

  “I was on my way out”—she pauses, nods at Atlas—“but he must have heard you two, because he made me turn around.”

  “There’s a way out back there?”

  “Yes,” she says, “there’s a small tunnel off in a corner, but…”

  “But what?”

  “But it might be better if we kept going in here. If we found another way out.”

  “We need to get out of here and find the horses,” I say. “And then get back on the main path. I’ve had enough of wandering aimlessly through this cave. It could dead-end up ahead, for all we know.”

  “Something was happening outside,” Coralind says, still looking hesitant. “I didn’t get close enough to see much, but I just have a bad feeling, and I don’t—”

  “It can’t be worse than all the things we’ve already seen, can it?”

  She bites her lip and glances at West for help. But he remains silent for once, and I thank the gods for small miracles.

  “Please,” I say. “Just show me the way out.”

  And finally, with a heavy sigh and not another word, she turns and leads us back toward the exit.

  The path out is so cramped in spots that we have to crawl on our hands and knees, or press flat on our stomachs and slide along the slick limestone. It’s a freezing, dirty, gritty slog. But finally, I feel it: a breeze of fresh air tunneling down, floating across my face. And then I see it: an opening, and the faint glow of the night shining through it.

  I shimmy my way through the last of the rocky tunnel, and emerge to find myself overlooking a small meadow, the lower-lying parts of it flooded and glistening in the evening dromlight.

  All around it are patches of that black, dead mist, rolling with strangely quick and definite movements into clusters that rise like solid, permanent fixtures on the landscape.

  “I was afraid we’d see more of this,” Coralind says.

  West crawls out behind her a moment later, and I suddenly remember the way our conversation about this mist was cut off earlier. “You never finished your explanation before,” I say. “About why we don’t have this in Garda.”

  “Because,” he says, standing and wiping the mud from his knees, “dead fog only rises when blood—a lot of it—is violently spilled, and it mixes with moving water.”

  “A lot of it?” My vision spins as I look again at those massive black clouds billowing around. “Like in the case of the drowning-walkers, you mean?”

  He shakes his head.

  “Fresh blood,” Coralind says, pulling her crossbow from her back.

  And then a chorus of shouts echoes through the meadow, just before a a young girl stumbles out of the fog and runs toward us, carrying a body.

  Chapter 18

  There are more shouts rising through the fog in the distance.

  Shouts from people I can’t see, mixed with the clash and clang of steel on steel, and the frenzied splashing of what sounds like dozens of feet moving across the soggy ground.

  The young girl looks back toward the noise and trips, and the boy she’d been carrying tumbles from her arms.

  I take several dazed steps in their direction, transfixed on the panic-stricken look on both of their faces. On their eyes, too wide and too full of the sort of horror that no one as young as they are should know anything about. They don’t look much older than my sisters. And suddenly I am running to them as if they were my sisters, my head reeling and my heart seizing and my steps numbing with dread.

  I am not fast enough.

  West cuts me off. And Coralind, with her bow held at the ready, is only a few seconds behind.

  “We need to get out of here,” West says. “We don’t know what might be coming through that fog.”

  “We can’t just ignore them!”

  He still doesn’t move out of my way, but he averts his gaze, and it’s obvious he is fighting to keep his back turned on the ones below.

  “You can’t fight every battle you come across.” Coralind’s voice is quiet as she shifts to my side, both her eyes and her weapon still trained on the space behind the girl.

  I might have listened to her, too; because that girl has regained both her footing and her hold on the boy, and the two of them are moving again, steadily and surely away from that dark haze they emerged from.

  But then the girl turns, and I get a clear look at the upper half of her right arm.

  There is a ribbon tied there.

  The boy she is carrying has one, too.

  My hand closes over the ribbon tied around my own bicep. “Their arms,” I whisper to Coralind and West. “Look at their arms.”

  But I don’t know if either of them does, if either of them sees what I am seeing, because a second later I am already running.

  Things move too quickly and too slowly all at once. I am in slow motion, but the bodies that next emerge from the fog—three of them—are far too fast as they close in on the running, ribbon-armed girl.

  And they are closer to her than I am.

  The quickest of the three has his sword drawn.

  I slow just long enough to pull out a knife, and I let it fly.

  My aim is too low. I mean to hit him in the side, but it lodges in his thigh instead. Still, it’s enough to slow him down, and to distract the other two long enough for me to sprint closer to the girl.

  She stumbles again as the ground slopes, as the muddy water standing on it reaches well past her ankles. I reach her at almost the exact moment she turns those panicked eyes on her pursuers. And as I dive between them, I do the only thing I can think of: I summon.

  It sends pain rocking through my body and black dots dancing to the fronts of my eyes.

  But still I let the magic rip through me, even though I know it won’t be enough to stop anything completely.

  I want to create a shield, to call magic strong enough to wrap around these two—this girl who trudges defiantly through the mud, and the boy who has gone so still in her arms once more—but I am not strong enough for that. The wall my magic forms is only partially solid. And th
e blade that manages to cut through it is slowed, but it still falls fast enough to hit my shoulder. I collapse back onto the flooded ground, forgetting my balance in favor of focusing on weaving the scattered threads of my magic back into something like a barrier.

  But the blood soaking my shoulder makes true focus impossible.

  I wince, biting back tears, and the distracted magic separates. I have a perfectly clear view of a woman with wild green eyes just before she swings her sword at me a second time.

  It never reaches me.

  Because Coralind’s arrow is faster.

  It sinks deep into the woman’s skin, just below her collarbone, and she stumbles backward and falls to the ground. Her two startled companions drop beside her. Coralind swings her bow back and forth between the two of them, a warning that freezes them in place and gives me a moment to turn to the ribbon girl, who is on her knees with the boy hauled up into her lap. Her face is streaked with blood and dirt. She stares and stares at me, and then, though I didn’t think it was possible, her eyes widen even more.

  “It’s you,” she says in a hushed voice.

  And she lifts a clumsy, shaking hand and presses her thumb to her forehead.

  “Don’t do that.” The pain makes my voice sharp. “There’s no time for that.”

  West reaches us in the next instant, and I have never been happier that he decided to follow me. “The boy,” I say in between painful gasps, “take him and go.”

  He hesitates, his eyes darting to the hand I have braced against my shoulder. But then we hear the splash and thunder of more footsteps, and suddenly there are more and more people spilling out of the nearby fog. Others like this girl and this boy—who wear the same ribbon tied around their arms—but still far more who don’t. And all of them are armed, their blades slicing, arrows flying in a flurry of destruction storming across the landscape.

  “Go,” I hiss at West.

  He finally listens. He crouches down beside the girl and, after a bit of coaxing, manages to get her to transfer the boy to his arms. As he sprints away in search of someplace safe, I turn back and find that more are running to the aid of the three we stopped.

  Too many more to fight.

  The tip of Coralind’s bow dips uncertainly as she backs away, and I try again to pull the scattered bits of my power back into a shield of some kind.

  It isn’t much more successful than last time.

  Not at first.

  But then more magic drifts from someplace behind me, wraps around mine and laces it into something more solid. I glance back, and I am surprised to see that girl still standing there.

  I expected her to run away behind West.

  I wanted her to run away.

  Instead, she steps to my side, her movements still shaky, still clumsy, but her magic surprisingly steady as it holds on to mine. Coralind’s eyes dart toward the girl, too. Green light twists up and around her soon after, and with one hand still pointing her bow, she uses the other to direct that light toward ours.

  Together it is solid enough—bright enough—that it attracts attention. And then suddenly, people are running to our side, more and more of them falling behind the wall we are building, the magic bleeding out of them, blending together with ours until a barrier that would be strong enough to hold up the Sea-Above stretches and shimmers in front of us.

  But unlike when we seal the sky, down here there is nothing to readily attach this barrier to.

  There is nothing except us and our strength, however long we can hold it in place, and however long we can hold off the ones trying to force their way to us, either by going around or cutting a path through.

  So I sense heads turning toward the center, toward me, moments later. Questioning eyes watching me, waiting to see what I will do. How I will finish what I’ve started. Just like the ones who watched me in Solvel.

  I step back and I look around, searching.

  My gaze falls in the direction West disappeared into: up a steep slope that rises into the cliffs, where he hopefully found someplace to hide. On either side of the path he took, more of that fog has collected, leaving only a narrow path to safely walk through.

  This time, those rolling, suffocating black clouds fill me with an odd sort of hope.

  Because it looks as though they sink all the way back into the mountains—a dead end, hopefully, for anyone who might venture into them.

  To my left is a woman who had dozens follow in her wake when she came to my side. And that, coupled with the way people are looking to her almost as much as they are to me, makes me believe she is a leader among them.

  “Make for the cliffs,” I say, walking over to her without taking my eyes off the wall we’ve created, “funnel into that path, and use the fog on either side as an extension of our barrier, so we aren’t stretched so thin, and some of us can tend to the wounded. And then we’ll hold them if we can. Try to outlast them.”

  I am surprised when she actually listens to me. I shouldn’t be, maybe—not after the way so many have fallen into line beside me, or after I have seen my ribbon on their arms and watched that girl marking her words to me as if she was speaking of the Creators.

  But even after all of it, I can hardly swallow my disbelief when this woman starts calling out orders—my orders—and people start to follow them.

  I take the girl I came to rescue by the arm, either to steady her or myself—I am not sure which, really—and I start to walk. The others fold back around us, pulling the barrier into more of a semicircle that further blocks the ones trying to work their way around to reach us.

  By the time we finally reach that path that I hope will be our sanctuary, I am certainly not the one steadying anybody; the pain in my shoulder has become excruciating, and soon my grip falls away from the girl’s arm. She stands silently beside me for a moment, moving to help when my balance sways. But her eyes keep darting up that twisting path ahead.

  “Who is he?” I ask.

  She looks as if I’ve startled her all over again, just by speaking to her. “My younger brother,” she manages to answer, after several false starts.

  “Go to him,” I say. “Take someone with you, and don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine.”

  Then I turn away, because I can’t stand to look at her blood-streaked face and that ribbon tied around her arm anymore. I feel her hesitating, still watching me for a moment before she races away.

  Coralind eventually takes her place, once the first keepers of the barrier have been decided on, and she is able to release her own magic from it. She pulls me against her while the other relieved keepers fall back to rest, huddling together and stretching as far up the path as they have to in order to avoid getting too close to that mist on either side. She gives up more of her own evaporating strength to pull my wound closed, even though I protest.

  “I don’t want you passing out from blood loss,” she says, “because I don’t especially feel like carrying you up this mountain.”

  We don’t have to go far up it, at least, before we find West. The girl we saved has a hand on his arm, and she is squeezing it as if her life depended on it. There is a small crowd of people gathered around the two of them—or around the boy they are crouched next to, rather, whose head is resting on West’s folded up cloak.

  West catches sight of Coralind and me, turns to the girl and says something in the most soothing tone I have ever heard him use, and then he gently pries her fingers off his arm and comes to meet us.

  “The tax on my services has just tripled,” he says to me.

  I manage a weak smile just before the crowd stirs, their attention turning to the woman walking up the path behind us. It’s the same woman who was giving orders down below. Now that we are here within something like calm, I can fully take in her appearance, from her dark brown complexion—a few shades darker than West’s tan skin—to her sharp chin, and clever eyes the same dark blue color as the ribbon tied around her arm. Her hair falls in the same sort of coarse black curls tha
t the girl we rescued has, and I wonder if the two might be related.

  “Taryn Linwood,” she says, extending her hand to me. “And it’s an honor to meet you, Pure Daughter.” She doesn’t touch her brow the way the younger girl did, but she does dip her head in a reverent sort of way that makes me almost as uncomfortable.

  Eager to take the subject away from me, I move to where I have a better view of the destruction we climbed out of. West and Coralind follow. Together we peer down at the billows of dead fog lingering, at the river that runs through the mountain meadow, its banks swollen and crashing over, and more vapors of black mist floating up from its rough surface even as we watch.

  There must be blood below, I think.

  How much?

  How much blood must it have taken, if it was concentrated enough to form that mist even once the river had wound all the way down to the cave entrance we found?

  “What exactly happened here?” I ask Taryn. “How did it happen?”

  “This has been several days in the making,” she replies, her eyes shifting from sky to river, and her arms folding across her chest. “The Pure assigned to feel for rifts in these parts abandoned us several weeks ago. This location has always been a particularly active one for rift formation, and yet the number of keepers we have has continued to dwindle in the past decade. Too much pressure on the only Pure for hundreds of miles around to begin with, and here lately…”

  “Things have gotten worse?”

  She nods. “We’ve been playing a desperate game of seeking the increasing rifts out ourselves ever since our Pure left. And we aren’t always reaching them fast enough, of course.”

  Is that why the burning in my blood has been so terrible this past week?

  If I had given in and followed the calling rifts, could I have led them here soon enough to stop this?

  “Too much broken sky,” Taryn continues, “is leading to too much anger, too much confusion. We found some of this latest group revolting in the wake of that latest rift’s destruction, and we confronted them, of course. Tried to calm them.” She moves to my side, as if she wanted to survey the scene below, but her eyes remain on the Sea-Above instead. “I don’t even remember who swung the first sword.”