Of Dawn and Darkness (The Elder Empire: Sea Book 2) (22 page)

In one scuttling motion, they were gone, the door slamming shut behind them.

The old man in charge of the Sleepless shook his head sadly. “May his soul fly free. We must come to a closer understanding of our Elder neighbors. If we could communicate, we could have saved that poor man. Alas.” He wasn’t a member of the main cabal, the leadership of the cult, but he apparently had command of the other acolytes. If Jerri got the chance, she would see that he was ‘demoted’ to feed the worms of Kthanikahr.

The prisoners were separated by gender, as Calder and the others were prodded into a room full of male prisoners. Jerri was led across the hall, where a handful of women were kept.

As Calder saw her taken away, his eyes flashed with rage. He shot forward, breaking free of the first man holding him, but his weapons had already been confiscated. Three Sleepless piled on him, crushing him to the ground.

Hot rage boiled up, stoked by the fires of her Vessel.
How dare they treat us like this? We will rule them all someday.

She was almost swallowed up by a daydream of sweeping this place with emerald fire, searing the flesh from their captors’ bones and leading the imprisoned to freedom. Seeing Calder on the floor, struggling to fight for her, it was harder to resist than usual.

But she still had other goals. Instead of killing everyone, she forced a smile, reminding Calder that she was still all right. She allowed her captor to lead her across the hall, where she joined four other women with bound hands and feet.

When the Sleepless man pulled a stretch of cord from his pocket and moved forward to bind her, she gave him her most charming smile. His eyebrows raised, and she stepped in closer, leaning her chin on his shoulder.

She whispered straight into his ear, “If you touch me again, I will burn you from the inside.”

His head bobbed back so he could look her in the eye. She tapped her Vessel so that her earring would spark ever so faintly.

Burn the disobedient to ash.

With greatest care, the Sleepless backed out of the room. He didn’t take his eyes off her until the door was shut and bolted.

Jerri found a chair in the corner and pulled it around so that it was out of sight of the doorway. If the door swung open again, she didn’t want Calder to see her free. She might have to come up with an explanation.

As she sat in the chair, unbound, and started to plan a way to use these developments to her advantage, she felt four sets of eyes on her. She looked up, and the other women gazed at her with expressions of awe.

“What did you say to him?” one of them whispered.

Looking at the four frightened women, Jerri realized her opportunity. “You have to know how to talk to these people,” she said. “And to do that, you have to know a little about the Elders.”

~~~

Calder’s hands and feet were bound and he was bruised all over from being tackled to the ground, but frustration and anger choked him. Elderspawn, he could understand. They were evil and alien, and they viewed people as particularly stupid animals. But what were
humans
doing on the side of the Elders? How short-sighted or cruel did you have to be to take orders from a Great Elder?

More specifically, what were they doing to Jerri?

The boy who had tried to escape was shoved in a corner, wrists and ankles tied, just as Calder’s were. He had a look of absolute despair on his face, as though he knew what was coming and it was too horrifying to think about. There were five other men in the room, besides Andel and himself. Four of them were in various stages of insensibility—either unconscious, dazed, or possibly dead. One, an old man with a wild mane of gray hair, watched Calder with a smirk.

“What are you squirming about? You think you can fight Elderspawn with both hands tied, do you?”

“I’ve seen worse,” Calder said. He had. The Lyathatan looked like it was made out of sharks and nightmares, and made the Inquisitors seem like bizarre lobsters by comparison. As for their current situation...well, he’d been in tighter straits outside the Candle Bay prison. He’d been forced to bargain with a Great Elder to break out, true, but he
had
escaped. This was nothing.

The old man chuckled, raising both of his tied hands to lift a pair of glasses to his face. For the first time, Calder noticed two pairs of glasses hanging from a leather thong around the man’s neck. Why would someone need two different sets of glasses?

He snorted when he saw Calder through the lenses. “What are you, eighteen?”

He was seventeen, but he didn’t feel like saying so. “‘Remember the wisdom of the blind man, who does not weigh the silver in another’s hair.’ Laius the Younger.”

Gray eyebrows lifted. “Sounds like you’ve cracked a book. Must not be a local.”

Calder smiled as broadly as he could, though his chin was bruised, and it came out more like a wince. “Calder Marten, Navigator Captain.”

“Imperial prisoner,” Andel corrected, “under the supervision and probation of the Navigator’s Guild.”

“Ah,” the old man said, nodding as though the picture now fit perfectly. “And you are?”

Before Andel could introduce himself, Calder stepped in. “This is Andel Petronus, a barnacle that attached itself to my ship. Somehow, I can’t seem to scrape him off.”

Andel ignored Calder, focusing on the old man. “And you are?”

“…Duster,” he eventually said.

Calder and Andel stared at him together.

“That was a strange pause just now,” Andel said, just as Calder began, “If you don’t want to tell us your real name…”

‘Duster’ grumbled, staring into his nest of a beard. Calder thought he saw the man’s cheeks color. “If I say my name’s Duster, it’s Duster!”

Andel nodded to him, conceding a point. “Well, Mr. Duster, we’ve given you our professions.”

“Don’t tell me you’re a valet,” Calder said. “I won’t be able to resist making a joke about dusting furniture.”

Duster shot Calder a look, and addressed his response to Andel. “I used to be a gunsmith.”

A light came on in Andel’s eyes, and he stared at Duster’s face as though he’d figured something out. Calder inspected the old man too, hoping to learn something. As far as he could tell, Duster was the same as every other man over seventy years old: craggy face, gray hair, scowl for anyone under thirty. Only his untamed hair and his two pairs of glasses set him apart.

But whatever Andel had figured out, Calder couldn’t worry about it. He was too busy figuring out a way to escape.

“Were you any good?” Andel asked, his voice layered with implication.

Duster met his eyes. “Some would say so.”

Calder jumped in before they could bore him with pointless reminiscing. “You don’t have a gun, do you?”

From the way Andel and Duster looked at him, you would have thought it was the dumbest thing that had ever come out of his mouth.
It was an honest question.

“Were you armed before you came in?” Duster asked, a little more harshly than Calder felt he deserved. “Are you armed now? What kind of kidnappers would they be if they let us keep our guns?”

“Not very good ones,” Andel said, holding up a gun.

This time, the ensuing silence was shock, as everyone conscious in the room had their attention stolen by the sudden presence of a pistol.

Calder kept his voice calm. “Andel. Where did you get that?”

Andel gestured down to his white belt. “I tucked it into my pants while no one was looking. After they found my spare, they stopped searching. But don’t get too excited. It’s the one I fired earlier, so I have neither shot nor powder.”

“Still, it’s something. Good work, Andel.” Calder’s mind kept moving, piecing together a plan. They could at least threaten the guards with their weapon. That would be better than nothing, and it might slow the cultists down. First, they only had to get out of the room.

“All right, we can do this,” he said at last. “It will only take me a day or two to Invest the latch enough that we can escape. Once we do, Andel—”

Duster snorted. “I’m a Reader, boy. Can’t be done.”

Calder stopped, a little stunned from the sudden interruption to his flow of thought. Before he’d collected himself, a question came out of his mouth. “You’re a Reader, and you decided to be a gunsmith?”

He’d seen bad liars before, and ‘Duster’ was one of them. “Readers make good craftsmen! Anyway, if you
are
a Reader, why are you…” The old man hesitated, trailing off as he realized what he was about to say.

Calder finished for him. “…a high-ranking Guild member? Because it pays well, it’s among the most respected positions in the Empire, and because it’s what every Reader aspires to be. Not a gunsmith.”

“Technically, it’s because you were conscripted to pay off an
enormous
debt to the crown in reparation for your numerous, irresponsible, and destructive crimes.” Andel’s voice was as bland as his face.

“Thank you for volunteering, Andel. We needed to feed someone to the Elderspawn on the way out.”

Duster must have been lost, because he returned the conversation to the previous track. “Anyway, I’ve only been in here three days. When it started, there were forty of us.”

Calder looked at the room’s eight total inhabitants: four unconscious or debilitated men, one little boy huddling in the corner, and the three of them. “Ah.”

“Yeah. Those spiders pull a handful of us out at a time, and I’m not expecting any of them back, if you follow me.”

Still, Calder couldn’t imagine that a Reader had sat idly in a room for three full days. “You had to have found
something.”

By way of demonstration, Duster pinched the cord between his wrists and pulled it apart. It tore like spun sugar. “Been working on this the whole time. Not that it will do me any good. First thing I did was try the door, and guess what? Too much Elder Intent. I barely Read it once without trying to swallow my toes. I do it again, or you do, and we’ll likely kill everyone else in here.”

The old man leaned back against the wall, eyes shut. His resignation frustrated Calder, but it seemed to intrigue Andel, who said, “You seem awfully cavalier for a man about to meet the Elders.”

A smile touched the corner of Duster’s mouth. “Nothing I can do about it, is there? Might as well wait my turn. And some things…well, not everybody fears dying quite so much as they maybe should.”

Calder dismissed the gunsmith and his fatalism, chewing on their problem once again. They had two Readers and a gun; there
had
to be something they could do with those. And if the Inquisitors really took away groups of prisoners each day, then Jerri was in as much danger as they were. He needed to get everybody to safety, and he needed to do it immediately.

Andel only watched him think. At any second, Calder expected a sarcastic comment, and he was prepared to respond in kind. But Andel stayed silent, watching.

For the better part of the next two hours, Calder considered and rejected plan after plan. They didn’t have enough time to invest anything substantial, and it would be foolish to rely too much on the gun. What if the cultists were willing to take a pistol round?

What it came down to, as always, was a lack of information. When did the Elderspawn Inquisitors come to take their prisoners? What would happen to them afterwards—might there be a chance to escape en route? Calder posed several small questions to Duster, but either the man didn’t have the answers, or the answers were useless.

After two hours of collecting and sorting information, Calder finally asked, “Are you
certain
you have no idea where our other weapons are?”

“I was sure the last time, and I haven’t come across any new information in the past ten minutes.”

“Not a hint? Not a clue?”

Duster peered around, his eyes mockingly wide. “I can be fairly certain they’re not in this room.”

This time, Calder let himself be deterred. “We’re going to have to fight someone or something, and we can’t do that with an empty pistol. If we at least had some powder and ammunition, that would be
something.”

Absently, Duster pointed straight to the corner of the room.

Calder followed the end of his finger, but saw nothing there. “Are you trying to send me to sit in the corner, or…”

“My tools are in that direction. No weapons, but I could build a whole gun with the spare parts and tools I keep in there. Load it and fire it, too. We get to those, we could load the gun.”

It was hard not to snatch the pistol from Andel and club Duster over the head with it. “You said you didn’t know where the weapons are!”

“I don’t. I know where my tools are. I always know.”

Andel and Calder exchanged a look. “You’re a
Soulbound?
And you’re still in here?”

Duster let out a deep breath, ruffling the edge of his beard. “Not the kind of Soulbound you’re thinking of, son. If you need somebody to assemble a working pistol in two hours, I’m your man. You want a musket that will strike in the damp and never jam, no problem. Can’t throw much of a fireball, though.”

“A Soulbound gunsmith should be the best,” Calder said. “Why haven’t I ever heard of you?”

Andel made a point of rolling his eyes. That was unusual for Andel; usually he understated his criticisms. And kept them less childish. Calder must have said something
really
stupid, but he couldn’t figure out what it was.

“Be that as it may,” Andel said, “I think we’ve strayed from the main point. Marten?”

“Good point. I’ll get us out of the door. Duster, you’ll take us to your tools. From there, we’ll fight our way out.”

Duster peered at him as though examining a jewel. “That’s your plan, is it? Fight to my tools with an empty pistol, load it, and then fight the way out with
one shot?”

“I wouldn’t consider planning my strongest suit, but my plans have worked so far.”

The gunsmith looked around, taking in the room where they were held prisoner. “Have they?”

Andel sighed, awkwardly lurching to his feet with his ankles tied together. “I hate to encourage him, but he’s almost right. At least he’s proactive, which I prefer to sitting here waiting to die.”