Seablood

by Cameron Bolling

  Seablood

  Battle of the Horizon Trilogy Book II

  Cameron Bolling

  For my Dad,

  who has always been my biggest fan,

  And for my Mom,

  who passed down her love of writing to me.

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  About the Author

  Prologue

  The river burned red in the light of the dying day. It bobbed past rocks in the twisting bed it had carved for itself after years of passage through the village, visiting as a sightseer and then gone just as quickly as it had come. Nothing else came and went so freely as the river; the walls of the canyon and the eclipsers above made sure of it.

  Whirlpools spun out from Oleja’s bare ankles as she swung her feet back and forth lazily in the current. Beside her, Ude kept his legs utterly still, and the water flowed past them as if no obstacle impeded it there at all.

  The pair sat on the riverbank, at a section where small ledges of rusty orange stone leaned over the water and the waves broke against them rather than rolling up onto sandy shallows. Few people walked about along this stretch of river, as the shape of the banks made it a difficult spot to gather water for cooking or to wade into the current to cool off.

  Oleja glanced up at Ude. He sat there with his eyes shut—not forcefully as if trying to hold back the bright light of the sun, but relaxed and calm. He did not move. The breeze made a few strands of his white-grey hair dance around his wrinkled face.

  Most in the village wouldn’t bother to sit with the man, much less linger by the riverbank with him for so long. If they spoke to him, it was with a sneer, but most didn’t bother to regard him in any manner at all, good or bad.

  But Oleja liked him. He told good stories, especially about his father, Tor, and tales of the Old World passed down to him. Few cared enough to keep those stories alive anymore, and Ude couldn’t carry them all alone. The other people of the village worried more about carrying the very real and very heavy burdens they lugged up out of the mines, as without them, everyone in the village would quickly starve.

  Ever since Oleja’s mother and father had died four years prior in a cave-in down in the mines, Ude had helped to take care of her—not that she couldn’t take care of herself. She was twelve now, and she could always take care of herself. But she liked having someone around to tell her stories.

  When she looked up at him again, his eyes were open. He gazed out at the ripples on the water’s surface, running swiftly downriver as one great force. After a moment, Ude tilted his head back and looked up at the sunset-painted sky.

  “It’s quite beautiful… the sky,” said Ude. Oleja looked up.

  “It’s the same one we see every day.”

  “Is it?”

  “Well, yeah. It’s not like we are going anywhere.”

  “Hm” was all Ude offered in response. He sat quietly for another moment, and then spoke again. “You are lucky to be born of something so beautiful.”

  Oleja sat up straighter on the riverbank, puffing out her chest. She was skyborn, and that meant something special ran through her veins. Some call to freedom and power and honor. It meant she would be a hero like Ude’s father, Tor—even if others in the village refused to acknowledge him as such—and like the other legendary heroes from the stories.

  “Yes,” said Oleja, looking up to the sky with renewed interest.

  “Do you think about your skyborn heritage often?”

  Oleja nodded. “I want to honor it as best I can. I want to prove that I’m a fair and honorable hero.”

  Ude chuckled. “That is good. Keep that ambition burning—once those flames go out, it is awfully tricky to set the blaze anew. But my question, more specifically, is about your parentage. All who are born of human flesh have two parents, yes? Perhaps others help to raise them, and become parents in their own right, but it’s the union of two that creates new life.”

  “Yes,” said Oleja, unsure of what else to say. The old man had ways of talking great winding paths around her. “Why do you wonder about my parentage? It’s the sky.”

  “The sky and what else? Did the sky alone create you, or did something else aid in the process. I would say that those who are skyborn must have two parents, the sky and another.”

  “Like what?”

  Ude rubbed his chin with two fingers. “For some, I think it must be a union of the sky and the sun, and they inherited many traits from both parents; because of the sun, they focus on routine. They work well in the mines, and they are always dependable. When I was a boy, I had a friend named Drenjo—Drenjo Habori—a skyborn boy. He exhibited those traits, so I think he must have been a child of the sky and the sun.”

  “But the sun is part of the sky,” said Oleja.

  “Is it?”

  Oleja thought for a second. “I don’t know.”

  Ude only nodded. “Others, I think, must be born of the sky and the moon; always changing, hungry for something new. Their desire to leave the canyon is strong, but perhaps they don’t burn brightly enough to figure out how to get out. Maybe no one does.” Ude shook his head. “And then I think for some, they are born from the sky and the stars. Maybe they have an aptitude for beauty, and they form deep connections with the others around them. The rain, too, must aid in creating some skyborn children. Those born of the rain are always there to help, always easing the lives of those around them. They help to relieve the stresses of day-to-day life, perhaps with jokes or stories or simply doing kind deeds for those in their circles. Some might be of the clouds—distant and slow and perhaps a bit too laid-back. Or the wind, loud and brash but never consistent. Or they could be of the earth, strong and steely and determined, always there, wise and calculated, yet never seeking out change without very good reason.”

  Oleja listened intently. She had never thought that perhaps she—and the other skyborn people of the village—had another parent besides the sky. She knew her mother and father—Rasea and Uwei—adopted her after she arrived in the village. But another figure, somewhere out her in the world, standing beside the sky? She’d never considered it.

  “What am I, then?” asked Oleja as soon as Ude took one of his rare pauses from speaking. “What do you think is my other parent, besides the sky?”

  Ude turned to look at her. “I think you are the child of the sky and the river.”

  Oleja looked down at the waves lapping at her ankles. The river? What was so special about the river? It was just water, and so small compared to the immensity of the sky.

  “Not what you expected?” asked Ude with one eyebrow raised.

  “No.”

  “Let me see if I can explain, then. The river is powerful and always moving. It courses through the canyon and grinds away the solid rock of the earth. No obstacle that stands before the river will stand for long. Either the power of the current will wear it away until it is nothing, or the entire river will
find a new path around. And it always finds a path. Nothing can hold the river back from where it wants to go.”

  Oleja straightened up again as Ude spoke. Powerful. Determined. Yes, that was her.

  “The river never stops,” continued Ude. “Sometimes it may rest for a short time, coming to a slower-moving pool in its bed, but before long it is off again, rushing ahead at full-force towards its aims. It never comes to a stop altogether. If it did, it would no longer be the river. The constant motion is what separates it from a pool of stagnant water that grows hot and stale in the sun.”

  “I don’t often slow down. I like to keep moving.”

  “But the river can be dangerous as well,” continued Ude. “People can get swept away and drowned in its currents if they aren’t careful or if they don’t understand its power. And the river pays no attention to what lies in its path; it never looks ahead to the route before it, only to the destination at its very end, yet it goes there with full force and will tear through anything in its way. It will do whatever it must to get where it is going. It can even cleave entire villages in two.” Ude raised his hands and gestured to the two sides of the riverbank, where the village lay in its two halves.

  “I know that I have a lot of power,” said Oleja with a wide grin. “And I’ll cut through any eclipsers in my path.”

  Ude nodded, a gentle smile in his eyes, though his lips remained firm and steady.

  “You certainly do have a lot of power—the unified power of the sky and the currents. Be sure you know how to wield it. And remember to look to the path ahead, not only to the destination you seek.”

  In her hand, Oleja picked up a fistful of dusty orange gravel. She threw it out into the water, and the stones hit the surface with a dozen tiny splashes, all vanishing at once into the depths.

  “I know how to wield it.”

  Chapter One

  Towering cliffs of stone rose up around Oleja on all sides. Hiding the early morning sun from view, they cast shadows across the ground that darkened the path before her as she walked through the hollow in the center, dwarfed by their immensity.

  It was a feeling all too familiar to her.

  If someone had told her before she escaped her village that even after she launched herself out of the canyon, got chased hundreds of miles across the desert, nearly died several times, and lost her leg, she would only end up in a new city at the bottom of a new hole, she might have considered just staying home.

  She said such words only as a joke of course—she was out, and alive, and for that she could never express enough gratitude, but she liked to harp on the irony of the situation nonetheless.

  The cliffs around her now made those of the canyon look like the low barrier around an infant’s crib. Even the towers from the ruins far behind her would have no hope of reaching such a height. Shining silver stone comprised the walls, adorned with hues of green provided by tall angular trees known as “pines” and other vegetation. Despite the key similarities between the valley and the canyon, the two landscapes could not have been more starkly different. Even the size of the valley stretched many times wider than the canyon, easily fitting the entirety of the city of Ahwan at its base. The cliffs around the edges, though steep, were not nearly as harsh in their incline as those that imprisoned the people in the canyon, and would certainly not be overly difficult to climb.

  In fact, Oleja’s room sat part of the way up one such cliff, in a section of the Ahwan medical district dedicated to housing new arrivals—individuals who, as Oleja had been told, “could carry in nasty diseases,” and thus remained separate from the city-proper, quarantined until they received clearance to venture down to the valley floor and explore the city.

  And today marked Oleja’s first opportunity to make such a trip.

  Tap tap, thunk.

  It wasn’t so much that she hadn’t been permitted into the city-proper until that day; she had just passed the three-week anniversary of her arrival in Ahwan. Rather, other obstacles had stood in the way up until then, obstacles grander than any “government” as Oleja had heard it referred to.

  Tap tap, thunk.

  Being in a room up on a steep mountain slope, those obstacles came in the form of stairs. A lot of stairs.

  Tap tap, thunk.

  “Do you need to pause and rest, dear?” asked Maloia, turning her head to glance behind her, her clay-red curls bouncing with the movement.

  “No, I’m fine,” said Oleja. She hoped the heaviness of her breaths did not betray her.

  Maloia moved on, leading Oleja down the street. In the weeks since her arrival, Maloia had been her primary caretaker; now, as Oleja made her first journey into the city, she served as her guide as well.

  Tap tap, thunk. Tap tap, thunk. Oleja hurried to keep up.

  Her forearms ached as her muscles struggled to help her along, shaking off the grogginess that came from weeks spent underused. But next to the pain that climbed up out of her leg, the aching in her arms found no hold on her. She lifted her left leg and stretched it out before her to take another step, a movement so familiar and yet so foreign to her now. Thunk—her prosthetic hit the cobbled ground again.

  In her three weeks of bedrest, Oleja had been anything but idle. Days and nights passed by outside her window as she worked away, manipulating materials in her fingers as she built herself anew. She despised feeling so helpless, lying in bed and relying on others to aid her with even the most basic tasks, so she kept herself busy by tinkering her way out of that bed and onto a new leg. She had no other choice. Saving her people came with a number of prerequisites, not the least of which was the ability to walk back to where they waited for her in the canyon.

  The prosthetic was a good start, but she still remained a far ways off from the mobility demanded by the tasks ahead. The new leg was a clunky thing, and already a list wound around in her brain of all the tweaks and improvements she had to make when she returned to her room. Wood made up the body of the leg and foot, with a hinged ankle joint carefully pieced together no fewer than two dozen times over the course of the weeks as she worked to perfect it. With tight springs, the intent had been to mimic the range of movement of a traditional flesh-and-bone ankle, but now that she walked on it—and more than just up and down the path outside her room—she found that all it helped her do was lose her balance.

  Truly, balance was the trickiest part. With the prosthetic alone, she only managed to better learn the ways of laying bricks and mortar for Ahwan paths. The struggle to balance created just another obstacle to overcome, and she had done her best job of it.

  Tap tap. She moved her crutches ahead. Fitted with bracers that clasped her forearms, they were modified versions of the aids Maloia gave to her when she arrived. Indispensable in helping her remain upright, they also took some weight off of her left leg—which, though healing nicely, was still extraordinarily sore.

  If Maloia had gotten her way, Oleja would still be in bed, and doomed to remain there for another couple of weeks. But Oleja had better things to do—more important things to worry about—and she couldn’t stand to spend another day lying in bed. So that morning—after extensive convincing—Maloia had helped Oleja wrap the stump of her leg in fresh cotton socks and strap on her prosthetic for the first big test of its function. And overall, things seemed to be going smoothly—minus the throbbing pain and sweat soaking through her clothes, at least.

  Maloia walked a few steps ahead. Her head roved right and left as she scanned the windows lining the street. Oleja did her best to keep up, and though Maloia kept her pace slow, she found herself falling behind at times. Maloia, upon noticing, always paused to wait without protest. Her cheery smile and supportive words only made Oleja’s face grow hot each time.

  But the woman taking care of her, who had seen her in her weakest and most vulnerable state, was the least of her concerns. Oleja’s embarrassment and shame came more from the eyes of every other who walked the street around them. Nothing she could do would save her
image in the eyes of Maloia, and she was only one person besides. But the other passersby—those were the people Oleja needed to impress. The people to whom she had to show her strength and her leadership. A plan brewed in the back of her mind, and the people of Ahwan had a role to play.

  And the people were many in number indeed. Before setting out, Maloia had reassured Oleja that the streets would be less crowded given the relatively early hour. Oleja suspected less that Maloia lied, and more that her own expectations for the city were too mild. At least a hundred people walked up and down the street just within Oleja’s view, nearly enough to rival the busiest times on the streets of her own village. She remembered Kella—the raider girl—telling tales of towns that held up to a thousand people. From what Oleja knew of Ahwan, it boasted a size even bigger than that.

  But even more startling than the number of people was how wildly different they all looked. The raiders, strange as some of their features were, did not come anywhere close to representing the diversity of the streets of Ahwan. People walked about paying no mind to how bizarre all of the others looked. Some wore faces many shades paler than Kella or Maloia’s, while others had skin even darker than Jeth’s. Between them stretched the full spectrum of colors in between—some people even had skin the same brown hue as Oleja’s own.

  There were people with dark brown and black hair like that she was accustomed to, but also hair of gold, and lighter brown, and orange like Maloia’s. Hues of silver and of white shone atop some heads, and others had their hair shaved off altogether. Tall and short, muscled and thin, and some whose bodies were altogether unlike those of the people from Oleja’s village, with a stature like that of someone who wore many thick layers of clothing one on top of the next. “Fat,” as Maloia had explained—a term unknown to her after spending nineteen years never meeting someone whose ribs did not threaten to burst through the skin of their abdomens.