by Rachel Aaron
“Don’t be stupid,” Sara said with a puff from her pipe so vivid Sparrow could almost smell the smoke. “The job’s not done. This Empress situation is getting out of control. I need Slorn and the Spiritualist girl’s sea more than ever. Actually, Tesset, are you there?”
“Yes, Sara,” Tesset said, straightening up.
“I want you to come back to Zarin. I’m headed down to the desert for a few days and I need someone here whom I can trust to deal with Myron. ”
Tesset arched an eyebrow. “Myron?”
“The Whitefall in charge of the army,” Sara said, yawning. “He seems to think I’m made of Relay points. ”
“Isn’t there someone else?” Tesset said, scratching his stubbly chin. “It’s a long walk back to Zarin just to run interference on a Whitefall. ”
“No one he’ll like,” Sara said. “He’s a military man. He’ll like you. And that’s an order, so stop questioning it. ”
Tesset furrowed his brows, giving the matter careful consideration. “It will take me a few days,” he said at last. “I’m not as young as I used to be. ”
Sara sighed loudly. “Just do your best. ”
“And what am I supposed to do?” Sparrow said. “Surely you have more members of the Whitefall family who need corralling. ”
“I do,” Sara said. “But you’ve got your orders. ”
“Sara!” Sparrow cried. “The bear man I get, but Miranda? I understand she has fantastic powers or whatever, but you and I both know you only pulled her into this to make Banage steam. Why should I have to risk my neck just so you can stick it to your—”
“Sparrow. ”
Sparrow snapped his mouth shut. He knew that tone in her voice.
“That’s better,” Sara said. “Tesset, report to Zarin. Sparrow, your orders stand. Secure the Spiritualist and the Shaper and bring them to me. ”
“And how am I supposed to do that without Tesset?” Sparrow said. “In case you forgot, Miss Lyonette doesn’t feel too kindly toward our office at the moment. Even if I get to her, she’s not going to just come back. What do you want me to do, arm wrestle the ghosthound?”
“You’re charming,” Sara said. “Figure it out. ”
Sparrow flopped back against the icy rock in disgust, but the link’s light was already fading. Sara had severed the connection.
He shoved the orb into his pocket with an exasperated huff. “Can you believe this?”
“That Sara is being unreasonable?” Tesset said, buttoning his coat. “Of course. What Sara have you been working for that this behavior comes as a surprise?”
“And you’re just going to abandon me?” Sparrow said, his voice pathetic.
Tesset didn’t even have the decency to look hurt. “I’m going to do my job, as are you. I couldn’t help you in the Shaper Mountain anyway. It can see me, remember? Just make sure you get a good look around or Sara will never forgive you. ”
“Right, right,” Sparrow said, rubbing his eyes. “She must be distracted not to mention that angle. This Empress thing really has her on edge. ”
“If the Immortal Empress doesn’t put you on edge, you’re a fool,” Tesset said, lacing his boots tight. “Good luck. ”
Sparrow nodded, but when he looked up, the older man was already gone, jogging down the path and picking up speed with every tireless step. With a frustrated groan, Sparrow pushed himself up from the rock. He shrugged off what was left of his brocaded coat and tossed it on the ground. Then, dressed only in his drab pants and shirtsleeves, he began to walk along the ledge toward the Shaper Mountain, fading instantly into the gray landscape.
CHAPTER
4
Eli sat on the prow of the schooner, sulking at the blue ocean that spread out in all directions. Ahead of him, the shadowy peaks of the islands of Osera dominated the horizon. Eli sulked at them too. They’d made record time to the coast, thanks to him. Not an hour after Josef had announced they were suddenly and inexplicably going to Osera, Eli had found an express carriage. After a little excessive bribery, the driver somehow found time in his schedule to take them from just south of Zarin to the port at Sanche in a little over a day and a half. At the port, Eli had found a private fishing schooner willing to take them to Osera the very next morning, well before the commercial ferries. It was nothing short of a miracle that they were on the ocean at all right now, but Eli might as well have saved his miracle making for all the thanks he got.
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Josef had been in high dudgeon since they’d left the bounty office. He hadn’t said more than a syllable at a time the whole trip. This wasn’t remarkable in and of itself, but considering that Eli was bending over backward to get them to Osera for as yet unknown reasons, the swordsman’s silence irked him more than usual.
Eli sighed and fought the urge to scratch under his wig. They were deep in civilized lands now, where people actually read bounty posters, and he didn’t have the luxury of running around like he usually did. The golden wig wasn’t enough to fool anyone who was actually looking for him, but it was fine at throwing off the casual glances. It was also unbearably hot. Even sitting on the prow with the sea wind in his face and the slightly fishy shade provided by the lofted nets, Eli could feel the sweat crawling down his scalp. But no matter how bad it got, he kept his hands on the railing. The ship wasn’t big, and the sailors had enough to talk about with Josef’s swords. The last thing they needed was for bored, curious fishermen to start wondering why the blade-covered man’s business partner was wearing a wig.
He was just starting to work himself into a really foul mood when something soft touched his arm. Eli jumped and nearly fell off the boat. He grabbed the railing and turned to see Nico standing beside him.
“Don’t do that!”
“I said hello,” Nico said, sounding a little hurt.
Eli took a deep breath. “Sorry. What can I do for you?”
Nico shrugged and sat down beside him. Eli shifted uncomfortably. They’d never really talked about what had happened in the valley, but he liked to think that he and Nico were square these days. Still, it was hard to tell where you stood when the other party in the relationship never said more than five words together under the best of circumstances. After several awkward moments, he tried again. “I don’t suppose Josef has told you why we’re rushing to Osera?”
“No,” Nico said, looking down at the water. “He hasn’t said anything. ”
Eli was immediately sorry he’d asked. The girl looked heartbroken. He glanced over his shoulder toward the back of the boat where Josef was standing with the Heart in his hands, practicing his stances. He looked so calm as he brought the enormous sword around (narrowly missing a tied-off line, much to the crew’s displeasure) that Eli wanted to strangle him.
“Who does he think he is?” Eli growled, turning back around. “We’re supposed to have a plan when we enter a new country. We would have had a plan three days ago if I’d had my way, but no. I don’t know what he expects us to do when we land in Osera. Powers forbid he actually tell us anything. ”
Nico shifted uncomfortably. “I’m sure he has his reasons. ”
“Oh, I’m sure he does,” Eli said. “I just wish he’d share them. We’re supposed to be a team. ”
For the first time in days, Nico smiled a little. “Well, we were the ones who decided to come along. I suppose we can’t complain if he doesn’t share plans that he didn’t want us along for in the first place. ”
“I can complain about anything,” Eli said, straightening up. “And if you ever quote that back at me, I’m never speaking to you again. ”
Grinning at her arched eyebrows, Eli spun on his heel and walked off to find the captain to ask, yet again, how much longer this unbearably long boat ride was going to take.
Nico listened to Eli’s light footsteps until they were lost in the crashing waves. Fifteen steps, she noted to herself. Fifteen steps from a
famously light-footed thief on a rocking ship in the middle of the sea. She gripped the railing until her already-white fingers were the color of bleached bone. It wasn’t her imagination. Her hearing was getting better.
And it wasn’t just her hearing. Ever since she’d taken back her body from the demon, her strength had grown as well. Her night vision was now better than her normal sight, and she could smell the tiniest traces of scents lingering days after whatever had made them was gone. She could hear the turning of the sleeping spirits and the laughter of the winds as they rushed overhead. But all this she could accept. It was reasonable that her senses would get better now that she was her own master. What didn’t make sense, what she couldn’t accept, was that she wasn’t just seeing the world more clearly. She was seeing things she’d never seen before, things that were not there.
Nico tilted her head back, squinting up at the clear sky overhead. At first, she saw nothing but the sky, deep blue and cloudless. Then her eyes adjusted, and she saw them. High overhead, great things—she had no other name for them—streaked through the air. They were as faint as shadows, but they were always there, swimming through the sky in great colorless coils, turning and flashing so quickly it made her nauseous.
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The snakes in the sky weren’t all she saw, the strange things were everywhere: in the boat, in the sails, in the nets. Unlike the things in the sky, these were stationary, twitching only slightly, mostly when Eli walked by. The sea, however, was roiling with half-seen shapes. They flowed with the waves, thousands of millions of little sparks swimming in and out of each other.
The first time she’d seen the shapes was the day after she’d beaten the demon. They were so dim then, barely more than shadows, that she’d dismissed them as a trick of the light. But the trick never went away. Day and night she saw them like a second world over the real one. As the days passed and it was clear the things weren’t going away, she’d finally decided to talk to Eli. Other than Slorn, he was the only person who might know what they were. But just when she’d finally worked up the courage to ask him, Josef had declared they were going to Osera. Nico decided to keep her mouth shut after that. Whatever Josef needed to do in Osera, he had enough to worry about without her adding more.
Nico closed her eyes. When she woke up on the valley floor, it hadn’t occurred to her that she might be different. How stupid. You couldn’t be torn apart and rebuilt and expect to still be what you were. What had happened in Izo’s valley had changed her. Was still changing her. But whatever was different, whatever changed, she was still the master of herself. The demon was still buried. She could feel the rock in her mind keeping him down as clearly as she felt her own arms. The shadows weren’t his doing, but that almost made things worse. The demon she could deal with, but these new visions were alien and frightening. Every time she saw them, which was all the time now, she couldn’t help thinking that maybe she hadn’t been truly rebuilt that day. Maybe something was still missing, something important.
Maybe she really had gone mad.
Against her better judgment, Nico opened her eyes and looked up again, past the coiling snake creatures that streaked through the air and up to the sky itself. It was hard to make out under all the movement, but if she stood very still and focused on one spot, there was no mistaking it. There, at the very top of the world, something was moving. Something enormous, something sharp, dragging across the other side of the sky’s dome.
Fear closed over her like ice, and she slammed her eyes shut. It made little difference. From the moment she’d first seen the things clawing the sky, she could not unsee them. The dread followed her waking and sleeping, eyes open or closed, and through it all a thought went round and round and round her head, like a marble rolling around the inside of a bowl.
Only mad people saw shapes against the sky.
She stayed like that for several minutes, eyes shut, forcing her breath to remain calm. Finally, when she’d worked up the courage to open her eyes again, Nico looked over her shoulder at Josef. He was standing at the back of the boat with the Heart in his hands, moving through his stances. His face was blank, eyes half closed. To an outsider, he probably looked bored, a man going through a routine, but Nico had been watching him all her life that she cared to remember. She could tell he was upset as well as if he’d screamed it. It was written all over him: in the tenseness of his footing, the way his hands folded white-knuckled around the Heart’s hilt, the clench of his jaw. Something about this trip to Osera bothered him deeply, and until she found out what, and why, she could not add her fears to that burden, no matter how desperate she got. Whatever had changed in her that day in the valley, nothing could change the fact that Josef was the center of her life. He was her partner, her savior, the one person who had never done her wrong, who had always believed in her even when there was nothing to believe in. Whatever he needed out here in the middle of the sea, she would help him reach it, and no madness, no bizarre other world that crept across the real one would keep her from being whatever he needed her to be.
That thought alone drove the fear back, and Nico gripped it like a lifeline as she turned again to face the islands rising like swords from the sea.
Seen on a map, the kingdom of Osera looked like a wall separating the Council’s eastern seaboard from the wild waters of the Unseen Sea. Though even those who lived there called their land “the island,” the kingdom of Osera was not one island, but dozens, a long line of mountaintops rising vertically from the ocean along the Council coast. Most of these islands were uninhabitable, their sloping sides too steep for anything other than sea birds, but at the center of the chain the islands grew wider, and there was room for people, especially on the island of Osera itself.
Even on its largest island, Osera was like a wall. Over fifty miles long, the main island Osera measured barely twenty miles at its widest point. Dominated by the peak at its center, the island was constantly sloping. This slope was long and gentle on the Council side, but steep and short on the side facing the Unseen Sea. Because of this quirk in geography, and the fact that the face the island turned to the open ocean had borne the brunt of the Empress’s attack, the eastern side of the island had been left to ruin. After the war, Osera had turned its back on the sea and the Empress, embracing the Council’s new prosperity by covering its gentle western slope in city.
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“Covering” was the right word. Buildings on the island’s western slope crowded every inch of land that was flat enough to lay a foundation. Tiny streets ran seemingly at random, following the flattest paths upward or sideways along the mountain and sometimes changing into stairs without notice when the island’s geography took a sudden turn for the vertical. The farther up the mountain the buildings climbed, the shorter and narrower they became, clinging to the mountain’s rising cliff like barnacles. But down by the water, the buildings were tall and broad, a busy tangle of workshops, warehouses, and shipyards spilling out onto Osera’s pride and greatest source of wealth: the marina.
The marina ran nearly unbroken for thirty miles along the island’s western edge. Docks jutted far into the calm water of the protected channel that ran between Osera and the Council coast. Endless lines of moored ships waited their turn to be unloaded and reloaded by the armies of barefoot dockworkers while captains did business on the large, permanently moored barges that served as mobile offices for the hundreds of trading companies that called Osera home.
Eli’s ship tied in at one of the long sloops jutting from the floating tangle of deepwater docks at the center of the marina. Josef hopped off the moment they stopped moving, and by the time Eli had worked out a payment for the schooner captain that was large enough to make sure the old man didn’t remember them should anyone ask, but not enough to send him bragging in the taverns and drawing unwanted attention, the swordsman was halfway to the island. Nico trailed behind him, a black blot in the bri
ght sun.
With a final, frustrated sigh, Eli pressed the gold coins into the captain’s hand and jogged down the planks after his companions.
“Well,” he said, raising his voice over the squawk of the sea birds. “Here we are. Do you have further directions to find your queen, Mr. Cryptic, or shall we just turn ourselves in at the local bounty office?”
Josef didn’t even honor that comment with a sneer. “We’re going to the palace,” he said, boots clattering on the wooden boards.
“The palace?” Eli fell in step beside him. “Of course. Brilliant. Where else do you find queens? Out of idle curiosity, what’s your plan for getting into said palace?”
“We’re going to walk up to the front gate and ask the guard. ”
Eli nearly tripped. “Are you out of your bleeding mind?”
He would have said more, but Nico elbowed him hard in the back. He grunted and gave her a hurt look over his shoulder. She didn’t even have the good grace to look apologetic, just pressed her finger to her lips and glanced pointedly at the sailors crowded on the dock beside theirs, most of whom were now unloading their cargo suspiciously slowly with their ears turned toward Eli.
Eli shoved his hands in his pockets. “The question still stands,” he said, albeit more quietly. “All you had to do was say, ‘Eli, I need to get into a castle’ and I could have done it in a heartbeat, but no. You’ve apparently taken too many hits to the head to remember that you’re traveling with a master thief. And since you never thought to share any of your magnificent plans, I don’t have anything ready. No false papers, no aliases, no nothing. That kind of throws a kink in the whole front door plan. ”
“Really,” Josef grumbled.
“Really,” Eli grumbled back. “I never saw a palace that just let random people in off the street, especially not when one of them was carrying enough blades to open his own armory, but maybe I’m just being negative. ”
Josef stopped and turned to face the thief. “Are you done?”
Eli opened his mouth and then snapped it shut and threw out his arms for Josef to lead the way. Shaking his head, Josef resumed his march down the wooden dock and into the packed, tangled streets of the city itself.