by Will Wight
“You won’t need to jump,” Jerri said, in what she hoped was a soothing tone. “I’m a friend of your son’s.”
Like a newborn calf testing shaky legs, Rojric rose to his feet. “Calder? Is he...here?”
“He should be right outside,” Jerri assured him. “So make sure you don’t jump. You might land on him.”
She looked for a place to tap the Emperor’s key, but the window didn’t seem to have a latch. She tapped the copper all around the window frame, just in case, but the window remained sealed.
From the hallway behind her, she heard Shuffles’ deep, echoing laughter, and the boots of more guards hurrying her way.
It was time to improvise.
Jerri spoke in the tone she had learned from her father and his colleagues when dealing with civilians. “Mr. Marten, please turn and face the wall.”
Obediently, Rojric turned and stared at the featureless wood of his cell wall. He didn’t even ask questions.
Jerri took a deep breath and reached up, massaging the emerald gem of her left earring. She was no Reader, so she couldn’t feel the power building in both matching pieces of jewelry as they woke for the first time in months. But she could feel them when they finally flared to life.
After all, every Soulbound could feel her Vessel.
She drew a finger down the edge of the window frame, her touch trailing green flame. Where the blaze touched, it drilled straight through the wall.
If she couldn’t open the window, she would simply cut it free.
Burn it all down, her instincts whispered. Cut loose! Be free! There are bed sheets behind you; they will burn. There is a quicklamp on the wall; shatter its glass, loose the burning fluid. The man behind you, he will burn!
Her Vessel didn’t speak to her in words, but in impressions. In impulses. In pressure to do things she had no desire to do, to use all of her power and burn the world to the ground.
But it was no more difficult to resist than hunger, or anger. Her Soulbound Vessel was part of her, and its desires were welded to her own.
The window came free, and she had to grab it with both hands to prevent it from pitching out the wall and potentially landing on Calder’s head.
As she strained under the pressing weight of the window, scrambling to keep it from crashing to the ground or unbalancing her, she realized that she had never before appreciated just how heavy a pane of glass could be.
“Mister Marten,” she grunted. “Help me.”
Now under orders, he turned swiftly from the wall and gathered up the severed window in his hands, awkwardly avoiding the red-hot edges.
As the first guards pounded on the door, demanding to know what was going on inside, the two of them set the glass carefully against the wall.
Rojric leaned out of the hole where the window used to be, precariously close to the edge. The wind smelled of salt and icy winter weather, but he drew in a long, slow breath.
Jerri laid a hand on his shoulder and guided him back from the edge, just in case. “Don’t worry, Mister Marten. Calder will have our ride here in just a moment.”
She hoped.
~~~
When Calder’s raft sank, he knew he was going to die.
He’d been sure the raft would hold. He spent all afternoon investing it, meditating over each board with specific Intent. It shouldn’t have broken apart or dipped beneath the waves for anything short of a falling elephant. He’d even rubbed a drop of his blood on each board, to bind his Intent closer to the material.
He never figured out what he had done wrong, whether his Intent had conflicted too much, whether he hadn’t focused enough, whether the Intent in each invested board had fought the power in all the others. He didn’t have time to think when his raft drifted apart, leaving him to plunge into icy water.
Calder had no doubt that this was the night of his death.
First, Candle Bay was directly connected to the Aion Sea—that haunted ocean of a thousand different terrors. For every unfounded ghost story and sailor’s tale of the Aion, there were five hundred monsters and phantoms all too real. This was the sea where the Blackwatch fished for Elders. They’d spent the past year trying to summon Elderspawn into this very bay.
He didn’t know what waited for him beneath the waves, but he knew it must hunger for his blood.
So that was his first concern. His second: the water was cold.
When his head first dunked underwater, he almost gasped at the sheer, shocking, bone-stabbing cold of the winter water. He only avoided inhaling a chestful of icy seawater because his lungs were frozen in the grip of the frigid waves.
He pulled desperately at the waves, paddling with numb limbs, hauling his bag of invested tools along with him though it seemed to weigh as much as an anchor. All the while, visions of circling sharks and grasping Elder tentacles haunted his mind. In his imagination, the black bay beneath him was packed so full of terrors that they scarcely had room to swim.
Calder was somewhat puzzled when, five minutes later, he found himself alive and dripping on the rocks beneath Candle Bay Imperial Prison.
He raised his arms above his head in a kind of Champion’s salute, and he would have shouted had his mission not required stealth. He had conquered the freezing water, and the unnamed monsters of Othaghor and his brood.
Take that, Candle Bay! Bow before me!
Then he realized that the wind was blowing through him like a frozen spear, and his wet clothes clung to his body as close as his skin. He had to admit, this might not be the best time for celebration.
With shivering fingers, he undid his pack. All of his tools were still accounted for, and none the worse for their dunk in the bay. Water couldn’t wash away Intent, after all.
The first item, a rope made of knotted sheets stolen from the Grayweather residence, weighed the most. He wrung as much water out as he could, half-surprised that the moisture didn’t freeze to slush before it reached his feet.
When the knotted rope was somewhat dry, he swung it like a lasso over his head and slapped it against the wall of Candle Bay Imperial Prison.
Calder had spent the most time on this particular item, and it bore months of his Intent. As soon as the cloth struck the wall, he focused his Intent once more, pouring it into his makeshift cloth, reminding it of its new purpose: to climb.
He had explained the disappearance of eight linen sheets on a particularly disastrous trip to the laundress. Alsa hadn’t trusted him with the laundry since.
The cloth rope slithered up the side of the wall, directly under his father’s window.
…which, he suddenly noticed, was a slightly smoking square-shaped hole in the wall. The Emperor’s key hadn’t done that. How had Jerri and his father managed to burn a hole through metal and stone? Had Jyrine gotten her hands on some weapons-grade alchemy without telling him?
The cloth crawled inside the cell, and a pair of tan, slender hands grabbed it. Jerri’s head poked out of the hole, her earrings swinging and glinting gently green in the moonlight.
“Imagine meeting you here!” she whispered down.
“Have you seen an older gentleman, about my height, with flaming red hair? I seem to have misplaced him.”
Jerri began climbing down the rope, which he assumed she had tied to something on her end, since she didn’t collapse to her death on the rocks below.
A moment later, his father followed.
Calder couldn’t help the grin that swallowed his face at that moment. They weren’t safe, not by a fair shot, but they’d still done it. His father was out.
Jerri jumped the last story, landing a little unsteadily on the rocks beside him. He seized her shoulders to steady her, but she didn’t seem to mind whether she fell or not.
“Calder, there’s a little problem I may not have mentioned.”
From above came the sounds of a heavy crash, followed by splintering wood. Seconds later, two heads poked their way out of the window.
“Stop! Hold it right there
!”
The other man started shouting about a break.
Rojric stopped entirely. He turned to the guards, as though he wondered whether he ought to start climbing back up.
“Father!” Calder called, no longer trying to keep his voice down. “Come on!”
Rojric shook himself and started descending, recklessly fast, sliding so that he must have burned his hands, kicking the wall whenever he got too close.
As he reached the rocks below, one of the guards pulled out a pistol.
Most of Calder’s invested tools hadn’t proved useful, so he upended his bag over the bay and shook it out. Then he raised the last device he’d prepared that might prove somewhat helpful: the bag itself.
The pistol rang out. The ball struck the bag and rolled off, as ineffective as a thrown rock.
Instantly, the bag started to come apart with the seams. All Calder could do with his Intent was enhance the properties of the bag; the material itself was inherently weak. With another year, he might be able to make the bag permanently bulletproof, but for now it would unravel after another hit or two.
Jerri huddled under the spread bag with him. “Nice job! Where’s the boat?”
“At the bottom of the bay.”
She eyed his soaking clothes. “I see you’ve made a trip down there yourself.”
Rojric was only partially covered by the bag, sticking his head out to keep an eye on the guards above. “Maybe I should just go back.”
Calder ignored him, his mind churning. A Reader’s weapons are all around him, as Sadesthenes once said. He started to catalogue everything available to him. His rope was already unraveling, intended to last only a single use and then fall apart. So he had a few wet sheets, his own soaked clothes, an unraveling bulletproof bag, his Blackwatch coat, a bunch of rocks, and water. Lots of water.
Water was useless to a Reader. Intent was carried in the structure of an object, so liquids were notoriously poor repositories. Legends were still told of Jorin Maze-walker, who spent years of his life investing a bottle of water until a drop of it could cleanse a curse. That served as an illustration of exactly how uncommon the practice was: legends were still told of a legendary Reader who managed to invest a single bottle of water. After years of work.
Panic began to swell in Calder’s chest. Until this point, he had been sure that he’d be able to come up with something to get them out of any situation. It hadn’t occurred to him how completely reliant they were on the raft.
Now that he thought of it, he probably should have tested the thing.
Above them, red quicklamps flashed to life. And a dozen alarm-bells began to ring.
Jyrine huddled close to him. “I know you’re the Reader, but if you could hurry up and think of something, I would certainly feel a lot better.”
“How long do you think it would take them to shoot us if we tried to swim for it?”
“How long does it take to load and fire a musket?”
Already, musket-barrels were emerging from all around the prison roof.
“Surrender your weapons!” A man called. “Return the prisoner! Drop the…bag!”
Second by second, the crushing weight of reality bore down on Calder. They had failed. They were all but caught. His father would go straight back to the alchemists and their experiments. His mother might lose her job, and would certainly see him as no better than Rojric. Jerri…well, they would likely return Jerri to her family. She, at least, should be safe.
And Calder would finally get what his mother had feared for him two years before: a cell next to his father.
A cell. Where he would sit, day after day, and fondly imagine throwing himself out the window.
The image filled him with new purpose, and he dropped the bag, leaving his empty hands raised in the air. “We…agree! We agree to…your terms!” He exaggerated the shivering in his voice, but not by much. “Please…just…save us!”
“Stay where you are,” came the man’s voice.
“Give me my coat,” Calder whispered to Jerri.
“I don’t know, I’m pretty comfortable wearing it.” But she was already climbing out of the coat, obviously eager to see what Calder had come up with.
It wasn’t much. He was going to see if he could invest enough Intent into the jacket to get it to float, and then send his father out in the bay, using the jacket as a makeshift flotation device. Since it was black, it should blend in to the night water, and his father might be able to cover his head with it and float at the same time.
It was a weak, desperate plan, filled with holes, but it was the best he could come up with. He had to try something.
Then Jyrine handed him the coat, and he felt his seven nails clink against each other inside.
Inspiration bloomed like light in a cave.
He fumbled through the jacket like a blind man, finally managing to extract one of the nails. When he did, he looked from Jerri’s face—still excited—to his father’s lost expression.
“Trust me. I’m not crazy.”
Using the tip of the nail, he scraped a bloody gouge out of his hand. Jerri gasped, and his father moved forward as if to stop him, but it was too late.
Calder jumped back into Candle Bay.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Naberius shrugged off the ropes as he staggered down the hall of the Consultant’s chapter house. He’d been working his Intent into the bonds since the second they wrapped the rope around his wrists, and as soon as he was ready, the whole bundle came apart like rotten rags.
With his hands free, he tore off the cloth gag in his mouth, taking his first full, deep breath in days. When he was Emperor, he would make Calder Marten and his crew feel what they had done. He would tear them apart.
And then he would build them anew. It was his purpose. He realized that, now.
The Heart sang to him, even here, from across the island. After so many years in the Witnesses, he thought he’d experienced just about everything life had for him. Readers could see visions of the past, goals for the future, dreams and hopes and nightmares all bound up into the objects that people used every day. He thought he knew how the world worked.
But the Heart of the Dead Mother had a song unlike anything he’d ever experienced. It drew him, tantalized him, taught him. Simply from the feel of it—the cool lullaby—he knew that he would unlock secrets the world had never dreamed of. Hidden knowledge of life and death. He would be the wisest man that ever lived.
With that thought, he shook days of captivity from his mind. Who cared what Calder Marten had done? In the scale of the world, the sheer scope he’d seen when he Read the remnants of Nakothi’s body, Calder Marten was nothing. Less than nothing—the ghost of a dust mite compared to a titan.
Naberius focused himself. Even in his own mind, he hated babbling.
He straightened his coat, corrected his stride, and walked with perfect self-assurance out the back door of the chapter house. Nakothi’s song guided him.
It was on the other end of the island, in the back, and a little beneath him. As though someone had taken it underground. Were they trying to hide it from him?
He smiled only to himself as he stepped into a copse of trees, seemingly natural, and found a raked path. The way was clear before him.
Soon, he would destroy this world and birth it anew. He had been promised.
~~~
Jerri was no Reader, but she still had to press herself against the back wall of her cell to escape the Heart. Its icy grasp gnawed at her like a dog with a bone, whispering promises to her that she couldn’t hear.
You can be free, it said. You can be made anew. Your husband won’t understand who you are? You can change. Or you can change him. Rebirth comes for all.
Those who listened to the Elders for too long went mad, she knew. Even those who could not Read Intent, those like her who did not see straight into the unalloyed truth, could not stand more than the briefest glimpse into the minds of the Elders.
“They
are older than we are,” her father once said. “Wiser, stronger, more intelligent than all of mankind put together. That is why we must be so careful. The lies we tell ourselves are what allow us to perceive the world at all. Crack those lies, and the human mind is like an egg with a cracked shell.”
She hadn’t understood her father’s words until years later, and she had never experienced such an object lesson as right here, right now. The Heart spoke with the purpose of Nakothi, but the Dead Mother’s intentions were strange and alien. Jerri had to learn what she could, and put that power to good use.
Right now, she wasn’t even interested in learning anything. She simply wanted it gone. This was not the first time Nakothi’s Heart had visited these cells—its power came and went over the past two days, as Shera carried it to Lucan for him to inspect.
Every time Shera visited, the Dead Mother’s voice grew louder. And that affected more than just Jerri’s peace of mind.
Whatever Reader ritual Lucan had used to mute sound, it had either worn off or vanished in the presence of Nakothi’s Heart. She caught snippets of his conversation.
“...getting dangerous...can’t stay. Do it now. Jorin will...”
His voice faded, but it sounded as though he was lecturing someone. And she thought she heard him mention Jorin.
That could be Jorin Curse-breaker, the Regent of the South who had taken over after the Emperor’s death. He’d built the original system of prisons under this island, Lucan had told her, though the cells in which they now rested were new additions. Why would they need a Regent to get involved? Was he supposed to do something about the Heart?
Of course, it could be any other of the ten thousand people with his name. Heroes of Imperial legend tended to have generations of people named after them, so it couldn’t be uncommon.
A woman responded. Jerri couldn’t make out many details, but the response was flat and even.
“...not sure you should,” Lucan said. “It wants...here. That’s more...afraid to...”
The woman raised her voice, so Jerri could hear her clearly. “We have to do something. The entire island is in danger.”