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

by Will Wight

  Too late he realized that saying his life had been dangerous might be calling his father irresponsible or abusive. “I had Father to look out for me, of course. But I have faced my share of dangers.”

  She pulled the pistol down, cocked it, and pointed it at him.

  “How would you face this one, then?” she asked.

  He didn’t believe she would pull the trigger, not really, but staring down the barrel of a gun still turned his backbone to dust.

  Unconsciously, he raised his hands like a hostage during a stickup. “I would do my best to avoid situations like this.”

  Alsa nodded, expression serious. “Very wise. And if, despite every precaution, you found yourself in this scenario? What would you do then?”

  He tried to look as confident as possible without lowering his hands. “I do have other talents, you know.”

  “Please elaborate.”

  Now he had her. Laymen tended to be superstitious about Readers, ascribing them abilities they did not actually possess. When the Emperor flaunted his overwhelming powers publicly, it went a long way toward establishing Readers as superhuman.

  They were not, of course. Only the Emperor could display that level of obscene control, levitating wagons or creating doors in blank walls. But most people did not know that.

  Calder cast his glance around him for something he could use, spying a small decorative pillow on the edge of his chair. He picked it up, smiling.

  “If I were so inclined, I could invest this with enough Intent to stop a pistol-shot. If I had some more time and the proper equipment, I could even Awaken it, but that...” He shuddered theatrically. “Who knows what powers that could unleash?”

  Alsa’s eyes widened. “Really? You could make this pillow bulletproof?”

  She lowered her pistol and moved a few steps closer, running a hand along the pillow. “This right here? Without changing a thing?”

  He had her. “I would need a little time, of course, but in an actual situation of—”

  She pushed the pillow against his chest, pressed the barrel of her pistol against it, and squeezed the trigger.

  A noise burst in his ears as though a horse had kicked him on either side of the head, and a flare of light and smoke blinded him. The cloud of gun smoke filled his nose, choking him, and for a moment he was torn between a gasp and a hacking cough. He was afraid it came out more like a wail.

  He was shot! She’d shot him! His own mother!

  Desperately he shoved the pillow out of his lap, scrambling to locate the wound. If it was a gut-shot, he might live until they got him to a doctor, but he would need something to staunch the bleeding. The pillow! He shouldn’t have dropped it after all, now where...

  It occurred to him after a few seconds that he was not actually wounded, and that his mother was giggling.

  He flushed again, until he was afraid that the whole top half of his body glowed bright red. “Unloaded, of course.”

  Alsa slowly got the laughter under control. “What? Oh, no, all the weapons in my house are loaded.”

  She bent over, plucked a misshapen lead ball from the floor, and tossed it into his lap.

  He examined the pillow, but other than a small black smudge from the barrel, it was pristine. “Then...how...”

  “When you’re bragging, make sure you know who you’re talking to.”

  Calder placed his hand against the pillow and focused his mind, Reading it.

  His mother’s voice smothered his mind, You cannot be punctured. Every one of your fibers is a cord of steel. You only have to stop one shot. You cannot be punctured.

  She had actually invested the pillow with enough Intent to stop a bullet? With that brief of a touch?

  Calder straightened himself, striving to look as dignified as he could with a burning face. And without looking his mother in the eye. “You’re a Reader yourself, then.”

  Alsa folded her arms, still holding the smoking gun. “I’m surprised your father didn’t tell you. What did you think I did for the Blackwatch?”

  He had imagined her as a clerk or some kind of administrator, but he wasn’t about to say that out loud.

  “You’re very fortunate,” Alsa went on, her voice softening. “Readers are very much in demand among all the Guilds. You speak well for your age, you’re obviously perceptive and intelligent, and if your talent is anything like mine...well, when I was only a little older than you, I had Guilds lining up to bid for me. Literally bidding.”

  “That doesn’t sound so bad,” he admitted.

  “There’s quite a bit of variety in the ten Guilds. I’m sure you’ll find a place where you fit in.” She straightened and set the pistol back on the table, presumably to be reloaded later. “In the meantime, I’ll have a tutor here for you before the end of the week.”

  His eyes rose to the other display of weaponry, the pair of swords lying below the tusk. “Will he teach me to use those, too?”

  In the first genuine sign of affection she’d given him since he stepped into this house, she placed a hand on his head. “You’ll learn all three of them, son. But he won’t be teaching you.”

  He looked up at her, confused.

  “I will.”

  In the space of a day, he had traded thieving lessons with his father for fencing lessons with his mother. His father was still missing, and Rojric’s absence was like a burning hole in his chest. He would have to find a way to bring all three of them together.

  He was a Reader; he could do it.

  He could do anything.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Calder had spent so long cleaning out the cabin for his passengers that it felt strange to be using it himself. Everything was tucked neatly away instead of lying conveniently within reach, and even the chest at the foot of his bunk had been rearranged and organized.

  He dipped his sponge in the bucket of soapy water, then scrubbed at his bare chest. Jyrine had taken the time for a full bath at her parents’ house that afternoon, but Calder hadn’t gotten the same chance. He sponged himself off while cloth ruffled behind him: the sounds of her changing for bed.

  “We could still make it out of the bay,” Jerri said lightly.

  “It’ll be easier if we wait until dawn.” He leaned to one side as she reached past him for her hairbrush. At first, it had been difficult to move around each other in such a confined space, but now they were both used to it.

  “If we move out of the bay and into the Aion, the Lyathatan can keep us anchored, and we’ll be farther out of the reach of any attackers. The longer we sit here, the greater the risk.”

  Calder stood in a wide basin, squeezing the sponge over his head to unleash a waterfall of soap and water. “I’m tired, Jerri. You’re tired. Andel’s tired. Even the Witnesses are tired. If I make the Lyathatan drag us out of the bay—” he paused for a moment to dump fresh water on his head— “then he’s likely to leave us there. I’ll be the first captain to have his literal ship mutiny on him.”

  Soft, regular strokes came from behind him: Jerri brushing out her hair. “You’ll persuade it. I have every confidence in you.”

  Calder shook out his hair, wiping water from his eyes with one hand before he reached for a towel. “Besides, we won’t be any safer until we get to deep water. Even normal ships can sail the shallow Aion; they won’t even have to go through the inconvenience of hiring a Navigator. If we’re not going any farther than the shallows, we might as well stay here.”

  “We’d still have more warning if someone comes.”

  He sighed and stepped past her, pulling on a pair of soft shorts. He’d learned in his mother’s house that Heartlanders wore such shorts to bed, and he’d quickly grown used to them. “You really expect the assassins tonight, then?”

  Jerri sat on the bed with her legs curled under her, wearing a simple white nightgown. She pulled the brush through her unbraided hair one stroke at a time. The pose exposed more of her tattoos: lines of script crawling up her left ankle, emerging over her sho
ulder and sneaking up her neck.

  She looked up at him with a girlish smile. “I think we’d be missing out if we didn’t get to fight assassins tonight.”

  Calder laughed as he sat down on the bunk next to her. With a twist of the wrist, he pulled open a latched drawer, checking that his pistol was loaded and ready inside. He would have preferred to set the pistol out in the open next to the bunk, but he wasn’t enough of a fool to leave a loaded weapon sitting next to his wife’s head. Not when they were on a ship that gently tossed with the motion of the waves, even if it was relatively calm here compared to the open ocean.

  “If you’re looking forward to a fight that much, then you should want to stay here.”

  “I said I wanted to see them coming so that we can prepare a real fight. It’s not like I want to be assassinated.” She grimaced, tugging at a snarl in her brown hair.

  Next, Calder found his sword-belt and hung it from a peg above the bunk. If he had to wake up in the middle of the night and fight, he wanted his weapons close to hand. “Even Naberius said it would be okay to spend the night here. We’re not in a hurry yet.”

  “Hmmmm. I wonder why not.”

  Calder opened a porthole, emptying the used water from his bath into the bay. “What do you mean?”

  “Well, Cheska rushed to send us the message, and then the two of them certainly scurried to get onboard, without even bothering to meet us first. But now they don’t mind if we sit in the harbor all night.”

  He shrugged. “We’ll be leaving in the morning. That should be enough hurry for anyone.”

  “Maybe.” She calmly brushed her hair for a few more seconds. “What kind of treasure are they after, do you think?”

  That very topic had been very much on Calder’s mind ever since Naberius explained their mission. He had a hard time thinking about the Chronicler’s supposed treasure without finding himself blinded by greed. “It’s got to be an Imperial artifact, doesn’t it? It must be a good one, if he’s willing to spend ten thousand goldmarks on it.”

  Jerri’s arms snaked around his, and she rested her chin on his shoulder. “A good one, maybe. But it can’t be the best one. How much do you think he’d pay for that?”

  Calder rested his foot on his secret lockbox, chained beneath the bed. He wanted to remind himself that it was there. He turned his head a few inches and gave his wife a smile. “Too bad it’s not for sale.”

  “I bet he’d kill for it.”

  Inside its darkened cage in the corner, Shuffles murmured, “Kill for it....”

  Jerri laughed. “Awww, it’s talking in its sleep.”

  With her face so close to his, he couldn’t help but notice her emerald earrings, still shining in the light of the quicklamp. “Aren’t you going to take those off?” He reached up to her ear.

  Casually she leaned back, bringing her own hand up to thumb her earrings. “These? Oh, it’s too much trouble taking them out. We’re going to be up early, so I thought I’d save a step and leave them in.”

  In his memory, she’d never left her earrings in to sleep before. It seemed uncomfortable to him, but it wasn’t like he made a practice of wearing jewelry. What did he know?

  Minutes later, Calder lay on his bunk, staring at the wooden planks above him and wondering about assassins. The gentle lull of the waves eventually lured him into sleep, as he felt every inch of the ship settling into the rhythm of the water.

  If anything does happen tonight, he thought, I’ll be ready.

  ~~~

  Through his eyes, he thought he saw a green flash.

  Once, he might have jumped to his feet at any sign of the unusual, but these days he rarely had to fight for his life. Sleepily, he wondered why someone had opened a quicklamp at this hour.

  It took him a handful of seconds to slide up to a seated position, looking around him. Everything in the cabin seemed normal. His sword still hung above the bunk, his chest sat right where he’d left it, and moonlight streamed in from the porthole.

  Though his wife was missing.

  He listened for a moment, trying to pick out anything wrong. Maybe the assassins took her, he thought, and then chuckled a little nervously. Killers would have no need to kidnap a woman from her bed. They would simply slit Naberius and Tristania’s throats, maybe with Calder’s thrown in for good measure, and then melt away into the night.

  Still, on a night like tonight, he had a right to be nervous. He shrugged on a shirt and picked up his pistol. With the gun in one hand and his sheathed cutlass in the other, he creeped up and out of the cabin.

  “Jerri?” he called, though he still made an effort to keep his voice down. Foster had a tendency to shoot people who woke him up in the middle of the night.

  No one answered. The ship drifted gently with the water as the pale light of the moon slid over its deck.

  That was when he realized something was really wrong.

  Urzaia should still be on watch, and the man was incapable of remaining silent. If he didn’t respond, that meant he had either fallen asleep on the job, or...

  A huge body lay sprawled on the deck, hatchets inches from his hand. Calder scarcely had time to let the sight register when a flash of green fire silently exploded at the corner of his vision. He spun, pistol leveled, to see two figures locked in combat on the stern deck.

  Only feet above where he had been sleeping moments before, a figure in black brandished a large-bladed bronze knife. Calder assumed it was a woman from the slight build and the hair, though it was hard to get a glimpse of her figure. She fought like a shadow, flickering forward and slashing at her opponent, dodging counterattacks by dipping impossibly low in an instant. Sparks of silver flew from her off hand: tiny daggers weighted for throwing, or perhaps needles.

  Her opponent...Calder’s mind tried to reject it for a moment, but truth quickly burned through his reluctance.

  Her opponent was Jerri. Lit by the moon as if she stood in a spotlight, Jyrine Tessella Marten wore nothing more than a white nightgown, her brown hair blowing loose in the wind.

  And her hands were filled with acid-green flame.

  That wasn’t possible. It couldn’t be possible. No one could use powers like that except Elders and Kameira...and those humans who borrowed their powers. Soulbound.

  But his wife wasn’t a Soulbound. She couldn’t be. He was a Reader, he would have sensed it.

  Light and life, I’m married to her. There were only a handful of Soulbound on the continent, and the Empire had them all officially registered. There was no way Jerri could have kept something like that a secret.

  No way.

  Calder stood frozen for a long moment as Jerri struck at her opponent with a lash of flame. He would have expected any opponent of a Soulbound to die in seconds, especially one that could apparently hurl bolts of fire, but the assassin in black simply sidestepped, as though dodging a ball.

  “I’m not here for you,” the killer said. Her voice was low, but not a whisper. She sounded businesslike, almost bored. “I don’t suppose I can convince you to go back to sleep.”

  Jerri kept her voice even softer than the assassin’s, as though she had more to hide. “I won’t let you get what you want. Time’s almost up. That which sleeps will soon wake.”

  The assassin jerked as though Jerri had kicked her, but the words couldn’t have hit her any harder than they hit Calder.

  That which sleeps will soon wake.

  He’d heard those words before, but he’d never expected to hear them from his wife.

  Calder must have made a sound, because Jerri’s eyes caught him for the first time: standing there, pistol raised, his mouth hanging open. Her burning hands froze, her eyes widened. She stared at him for a stretched instant, as though he’d caught her cheating on him with another man.

  The woman in black sighed and reached down to something at her waist.

  Jerri whipped back to her attacker, blazing hands coming up, but the other woman struck like a snake. One instant she was
keeping her distance, and then she was pulling a needle out of Jerri’s neck.

  Calder shouted, his hand clenching involuntarily. His pistol sent out a crack of thunder and a cloud of black smoke, but the assassin was already out of his line of fire.

  She held Jerri by the throat, pressing Calder’s wife against the railing. With an almost casual gesture, the killer shoved her overboard.

  Pain and shock blasted through Calder as though he’d been struck by lightning, and he reacted with the instinct of the wounded.

  Through his bare feet, he plunged his mind into the ship.

  The Testament came to life around the assassin. A line of rope swung at her neck, trying to catch her in a noose, but she was too quick.

  She ducked, unbelievably limber, and dropped from the stern deck.

  The woman in black landed in a crouch, inches in front of him. For a moment Calder looked straight at her, though half of his attention was still buried in the ship beneath him. Black hair hung down around her like a hood, and a piece of dark cloth covered her mouth. Her skin was pale, maybe Erinin, and her eyes...

  As black as her hair and clothes, her eyes were flat and unconcerned. The ice-cold eyes of a woman who didn’t care if she lived or died.

  For some reason, that made Calder even angrier.

  He tossed his pistol aside and pulled his cutlass, so similar to the dueling saber he’d trained with as a child. He’d spent even longer hours with this blade, though not recently. But a lack of practice was the furthest thing from his mind.

  He attacked with a speed and fury that would have made at least one of his tutors very proud, but he didn’t fight with muscle alone. He kept his Intent fixed, focused on the sword, pouring all of his anger and fear and desperation into the weapon. You can kill her. You cannot be stopped.

  Slowly, steadily, the weapon grew stronger. Not enough to notice over the course of one fight, perhaps, but maybe enough to tip the scales.

  The killer flicked her knife, knocking his sword aside, but he stepped forward, pressing her against the door of his cabin, abusing his reach. He felt a savage satisfaction flaring up as he scored a hit against the flesh of her arm. She couldn’t block everything. He was overwhelming her!