Of Dawn and Darkness (The Elder Empire: Sea Book 2) (6 page)

Now he was sure Bliss was trying something. “Are you insulting me on purpose?”

She popped up from the inside of the cask, a coil of rope on her head. “That’s ridiculous.”

He still had the Emperor’s crown, and the candles of the Witness in charge of Imperial finance. Access to power and funds both. But then, the Guild Heads could have any team of Readers unlock the secrets in Naberius’ wax-sealed memories, and Teach could take the crown from him without much trouble.

His only asset, it seemed, was being disposable.

He could use that.

“So when we reach the Capital, what’s the plan? You clear the way to the Optasia, and I sit on it, and everything’s better again?”

“That depends on one very troubling factor,” Bliss said, staring off into the horizon.

“What’s that?”

“Who’s using it now?”

~~~

Jerri’s hand hovered inches away from the throbbing gray-green flesh that walled her inside the room. The bulbous meat that enveloped the walls would have been disgusting, if she hadn’t been trained to look past its appearance and into what it
represented
: an advance in knowledge and technology so complete that humans might never understand it.

Besides the Elders, who had the power to instantly grow a life—real, living flesh—and bend it to their will? Even the Emperor couldn’t do that. The Elders controlled life and death, memory and knowledge, space and time. The merest fraction of their expertise would improve the lives of people all over the Empire.

Put that way, it was hard to understand why anyone
didn’t
want to learn from the Elders. Distasteful as they might seem, they embodied the clearest road into the future.

But thoughts of the distant future would only distract her for so long when she was more concerned with today.

“How long must I wait?” Jerri asked.

The room’s only other occupant, a dark-skinned Heartlander man who might have been a native of the Capital, sat on the corner of the Emperor’s bed. A softly glowing bulb, dangling from the new-grown flesh overhead, cast shadows on his face. Jewels gleamed at his neck, on his fingers, in his ears, in his hair—it seemed that he had crammed gold and gems anywhere he could fit them. Only his eyes were plain and unadorned, covered as they were by a steel blindfold that seemed to have been bolted to his face.

She’d seen other Elder cults who believed in mutilating their bodies, demonstrating their dedication to the Great Ones, but no one else had gone so far as to blind themselves. Especially not to these gruesome extremes. It looked as though he’d driven steel screws straight into his own eyes.

But he smiled broadly at her question. “If you wish to learn from the Elders, patience is the first and most valuable skill. There are beings who will not begin a conversation without observing the other party for at least a year, and whose names take a man’s lifetime to properly pronounce.”

This was another characteristic of the absurdly devout: they always pretended to know more than they did. “You haven’t answered my question.”

“To understand the answer, you must first understand the question.”

Fury flowed into her from the Vessel on her ear, and both earrings lit up. One shone with the power of unreleased flame, and the other restricted that power, protecting her from its corrosion. To some degree.

Green fire played around her fingers, and she examined her fingertips as though searching for the proper words. “I owe a debt to the Great One who freed me from captivity, not to you. I owe you nothing. I do not know you, nor do I know what I’m doing here, and until I
do
I’m afraid I can’t cooperate. If it is your job to guide me, as you claim, then I suggest you start doing so. Otherwise...well, I am a Soulbound. And you’re not.”

That was an assumption on her part, but a good one. She wasn’t a Reader, so she couldn’t sense if one of the man’s rings or necklaces might secretly be his Soulbound Vessel, but she doubted it. The Sleepless had only one true combat-capable Soulbound in their membership, and the cabal valued her highly because of it. He may have been a mercenary Soulbound hired by the cult for this one task, but then he wouldn’t have been so secretive about the nature of that task. Besides, only a true fanatical believer would blind himself.

The man stroked his thin beard like a sage in thought. “By definition, I cannot be a Soulbound. One requires something to bind, after all.”

Before Jerri could think too hard about that statement, the room shook. The flesh of the walls quivered, and the living light flickered. “That one was closer,” she said.

“Closer,” her companion agreed, “but they are not yet striking at the heart. It’s merely a flesh wound, as they say.” He smiled to himself, revealing two teeth capped in gold.

It had been perhaps three days since Jerri had been stuck in this room, though it was hard to tell the exact time without access to natural light. She remained surrounded by skin and muscle as though she’d been swallowed by a great Elder whale, food oozing through disgusting openings at regular intervals. Her transmission through the void had taken her directly here, and she’d waited in the dimness for instructions. In vain, so far.

Yesterday, the blind man had appeared next to her, presumably through a void transmission similar to her own.

It was he who explained exactly where they were: the center of the Imperial Palace, inside the Emperor’s personal rooms.

That knowledge had distracted Jerri for hours, as she explored the suite of flesh-covered rooms in a new light. This was the bed where the Emperor had slept. Those paintings were favored by the Emperor. The decorative swords on the wall, if they had ever been used by the Emperor in self-defense, would count as some of the greatest weapons in history. She wished Calder was here, so that he could appreciate the rich stores of Intent that no doubt lingered in this room.

As always when she thought of Calder, pain and sickness and anger rolled through her. She had handled him badly, she knew. Almost as badly as she ever could have. The assassin Shera had shown up at the worst possible time, before any of her plans had borne fruit. When Jerri finally saw Calder again, she had been forced to act out her duty as a member of the Sleepless. She could hardly have made a worse impression.

But still, he had abandoned her in a cell. Her own
husband
. It hurt.

Make him listen,
her Vessel demanded, indistinguishable from her own thoughts.
He cannot stop you.

To distract herself, to keep her from another fight with her own Soulbound Vessel, she turned her attention to the one object in the room she didn’t understand. Behind a shattered section of wall, inside what must once have been a hidden closet, there was a knot of gray-green flesh the size of her entire body. More than anything, it reminded her of the Heart of Nakothi, as though the Heart itself had grown a hundredfold and swallowed something inside.

Between the folds of its flesh, she caught a glimpse of silvery bars and wires. Like an intricate cage of polished steel, packed into Elder flesh.

She’d examined it for two whole days with no result, and had only barely resisted the temptation to burn it away with her Soulbound power. But she’d forgotten to ask her new, unhelpful guide about it. Until now.

Jerri pointed to the mass of metal and meat. “Is this what they’re after?”

Her companion turned to her, studying her through sightless eyes. “So even blind humans can find the truth if they root around long enough.”

She gripped fistfuls of her red pants to keep her irritation in check. No one had ever nettled her quite so thoroughly as her blindfolded guide; even with a Vessel that provoked her to rage, she had maintained an agreeable disposition for years. She thought of herself as quite a gentle person, though she longed to blast this man to smoking pieces. “You would be the expert on blindness, I suppose.”

“Indeed, thank you for noticing,” he said gravely. “I can tell Readers apart from the blind, though most cannot. It’s a skill I spent much of my life perfecting.”

As with most everything he’d said, that statement tied her brain in knots. He could tell the difference between Readers and ordinary people? How? Calder was one of the more skilled Readers she’d ever known, and even he couldn’t do that. Perhaps only the Emperor could.

She examined him more closely. His skin was dark enough, he was the right build, and he spoke in oblique riddles. Perhaps he was a royal; one of the direct descendants of the Emperor. That would certainly explain his attitude.

The room shook again, and this time the air between Jerri and the hidden silver cage rippled. It was almost invisible, as though someone had thrown a rock and managed to disturb space, and for a moment an image of another place flickered in front of her eyes. It was so vivid that it swallowed all of her senses—she smelled burnt wood, tasted the salt of the ocean, saw sunlight on waves—and so quick that she couldn’t make out details.

It was the vision of a Reader, shared with her for a split second. She’d seen such things before.

“Did you see that?” she demanded.

“I’m not permitted to, I’m afraid. Safeguards.”

She pointed to the flesh-covered steel again. The gesture didn’t help anything, since he couldn’t see it, but she felt like pointing. “What
is
that? Why do they want it?”

“It’s the key that controls the world,” he said softly. “Almost obsolete now, but it has its uses.”

Jerri was going to wring answers out of this man if she had to sift them from his ashes. “
What
uses?”

“At this moment? In this place?” He smiled again, his gold teeth gleaming. “It’s bait.”

The room continued to shake as the enemies outside—the Imperial Guard, she supposed—kept launching their attacks. No matter how she pleaded, or demanded, or threatened, her guide gave her no more answers.

Which was fine, she eventually decided. If no one would tell her what she was supposed to do in this overgrown room, she would decide for herself. And she’d already decided where she would start: by burning her way out.

CHAPTER FIVE

Eleven years ago

Two Imperial Guards dragged Calder Marten out of the Emperor’s palace. He had been kept in a room, not a prison cell, but he was still a prisoner. His eyes burned from a night spent weeping over his father instead of sleeping.

His father, who had been killed on the Emperor’s orders. Right in front of his eyes.

One of the Guards was a slender woman with vertically slitted eyes, whose head jerked at the slightest sign of movement. A pair of feline tails twitched behind her, and the hand that wasn’t holding onto Calder’s shoulder sprouted short claws. Her partner loomed over her, a muscular giant with bony spikes growing out of his skin like ominous armor. He supported most of Calder’s weight, propping Calder up with a forearm when the young man looked likely to fall. His spines jabbed into Calder’s chest every time.

They both wore the red-and-black uniforms of the Imperial Guard, marked with the Aurelian Shield crest: a shield emblazoned with the moon-in-sun emblem of the Aurelian Empire. Like everyone else in their Guild, they had been alchemically imbued with the power of Kameira, forever changing their appearance and giving them a host of strange powers. None of them more frightening than their Guild Head, who could kill with little more than a touch.

Calder tried to drum up some anger at the Head of the Imperial Guard, but the image of the woman killing his father brought him nothing but grief. Jarelys Teach wasn’t responsible for Rojric Marten’s death.

The Emperor was.

And so was Calder.

May his soul fly free,
Calder thought, and almost wept.

The pair of Guards dumped him out on the street as soon as they passed through the gate of the Imperial Palace, and he didn’t bother to stand up.

The woman pointed with one claw. “An Imperial officer has been assigned to supervise you for the foreseeable future. He awaits aboard your ship, in the harbor. Do not attempt to leave the city by land, or you will be hunted down. At dawn tomorrow, if you have not departed on your ship, you will be hunted down. If for any reason your officer fails to make his regular report, you will be hunted down.” She spoke as though she read from an especially boring shopping list.

Calder just nodded, still collapsed on the paving stones. He hadn’t expected to be assigned an officer, but it made sense. He owed the crown for a ten-thousand-goldmark ship. They weren’t simply going to turn him over to the Navigators without any supervision.

“Report to your ship by sundown at the latest,” she continued. “If you do not, you will be hunted down. Do you know your way to Candle Bay?”

“I wish I didn’t,” he said.

Calder waited until the Guards were gone before pushing himself to his feet. There was no point in going anywhere except straight to the ship. His mother lived in the city, but she couldn’t help him, and he dreaded telling her what he had done. His best chance at freedom lay in
The Testament,
his new ship, and in his job for the Navigator’s Guild.

Maybe, once he cleared his debt, he could make the Emperor regret ever letting him live.

Jerri appeared at his shoulder, placing a feather-light hand on his arm. “Calder?” Her eyes were dark, warm, concerned. “Can you walk on your own?”

He demonstrated by marching a few steps down the road, scarcely paying attention to where he was going. “We have to get to the harbor.”

“I heard,” she said, hovering like she expected him to collapse.

He remembered the Emperor’s face, cold and focused, with the crown gleaming gold on his dark, hairless head. It focused his willpower and his anger, propelling him through the crowd and down the crowded streets. “No one ever stops him,” Calder said. “No one can.” Jerri nodded as thought she understood perfectly.

“Someone should,” she responded.

He had expected more of an argument. She drifted along beside him, apparently unconcerned, her eyes forward and her braid hanging down her back. Her eyes were red and half-lidded, as though she too had gone without sleep.