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

by Will Wight

  The rumbling in her mind grew louder, stealing her attention, as did the whispers echoing from her left-hand shear.

  She rose to her feet, gripping the hilt of her blade to keep it from rattling in its sheath.

  “Back away from the box,” Kerian said calmly, pulling her own set of shears. Zhen also had a knife in each hand, though his were gleaming steel instead of battered bronze, and the blade Tyril produced looked more like a short sword.

  The stone box started to shake, its buzz climbing to a rumble and the rumble to a deep throbbing. It grew in volume and deepened in pitch, until it sounded...

  Exactly like a beating heart.

  With a crack like thunder, the box snapped in half, slabs of stone falling away and leaving the Heart sitting there as if on a pedestal. The song of Nakothi rose to a crescendo, shrill and deafening.

  Wake, wake, wake from your slumber! Come, come, come and taste fresh meat!

  Wake, my Children, and rise!

  To either side of the room, the stone walls—each carved with fanciful reliefs—shook under mighty blows, as though a construction crew had taken to them with sledgehammers. The room trembled, dust fell from the ceiling, and cracks appeared in the ancient stone.

  “What’s in the rooms around us?” Shera shouted.

  Zhen turned to her, pale. “The Am’haranai crypts.”

  Shera didn’t wait to hear anymore; she bolted for the Heart, wrapping it in the rags that she had once used to contain it. The Heart must have burst through its restraints at some point in the box.

  Just as she lifted the Heart, the walls crumbled, and the dead forced their way inside.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Twelve Years Ago

  Lucan staggered back from the obsidian statue. Memories swirled in his mind—the stoneworker chips away at the obsidian, terrified that he might fail; the soldier poses for a sculpture, eager to get back to the front; the stone itself remembers echoes of slow cold and unimaginable heat colliding. In the rush, his own memories were all but lost.

  “I can’t,” he choked out. “There’s too much.”

  The Emperor stood over him, dressed today in all the colors of a glacier. “A Reader does not need the strength of a soldier, but the understanding of a poet.”

  This coming from the most powerful Reader ever born. “Then please, help me understand. There’s too much identity here. Too many identities. How am I supposed to—”

  “You hide behind questions like a coward. Try again.”

  With anyone else, Lucan would have debated, explained himself, thrown up more questions like a smokescreen to regain the upper hand. But this was the Emperor.

  The gleaming black statue showed a soldier in ancient Imperial armor, his sword forgotten on the ground in front of him, clutching both hands together as if in prayer. Lucan put one hand on each of the statue’s shoulders, staring into its stone eyes, and plunged back into the tide of remembrance.

  As he did, he chanted silently to the obsidian soldier: Move, move, move, move, move! Light and life, please move!

  The Emperor sighed and gestured for Lucan to take his hands from the statue. He did so, almost collapsing, grateful for the chance to catch his breath.

  “When we first discovered Reading as a discipline, the ability to sense and manipulate human Intent, we didn’t know what to call ourselves. Everyone had ideas, most of them grandiose: Soulweavers, Oracles, Enchanters, Fate’s Chosen…”

  In a train of blue and white robes, the Emperor paced around the obsidian statue. “Do you know why we settled on ‘Readers’ instead of ‘Writers’?”

  Lucan was still trying to wrap his mind around the story. Here, in front of him, was someone who had physically witnessed the birth of Reading itself.

  “Because without understanding, without truly reading the depths of memory in an object, we cannot affect its power. Once we do understand, however, we can begin to make changes.”

  Gently, the Emperor placed one hand on the soldier’s black stone head.

  The room filled with a sharp, constant sound, like the crunch of snow or the crack of ice amplified and stretched to last minutes. The statue shivered…

  And then abruptly shattered like black glass. Pieces of obsidian rained down, and Lucan took an instinctive step back.

  “That’s impossible!”

  The Emperor didn’t look back, merely brushed black dust from his hands. “And who taught you that?”

  The older Architects had. The ones who could Read, anyway. They’d taught him from ancient books taken from Imperial Academies, written by some of the greatest Readers in humanity’s history. Some of them written by the Emperor himself.

  “It’s an accepted fact,” Lucan said. Sometimes, when you dug yourself a hole, you had to dig yourself out. “In your own work, A Letter to the Young Reader, you say that, ‘An object cannot be made to gain a property that it does not naturally possess.’ And also, ‘An object’s physical nature cannot be changed by Intent alone, save through the Awakening process.’ This seems to violate both of those rules.”

  The Emperor raised one hairless eyebrow. “Yet I have done it. Surely you’ve heard the stories of the Magisters—burning homes to the ground, raising tornadoes of dust, growing forests overnight.”

  That had bothered Lucan as well, when he was a child, but he’d asked enough questions to kill the mystery. “Magisters carry staves possessed of potent natural forces. The powers of Kameira, Elders, or certain plants. With a staff, a Magister might produce such an effect.”

  Kneeling, the Emperor plucked a shard of obsidian from the floor. He stood and tossed it up, snagging it out of the air. “True, a Magister’s staff can help. But it is a tool. And only in the hands of a master can any tool reach its true potential.”

  Lucan gave up. In the mind of the Emperor, the word ‘impossible’ had no meaning. Someone who had lived for a thousand years must regard the limitations of mortals as suggestions rather than rules.

  “How?” he asked.

  The Emperor caught the shard of obsidian again, then pinched it between two fingers and held it up for Lucan’s inspection. “This process is known as ‘active Reading.’ It’s a useful skill, but one that few possess. Perhaps twenty-four in the entire Empire, including several Magisters.”

  In his hands, the obsidian crumbled to black sand and blew away.

  “It is similar in concept to Awakening, but it requires understanding the object at a fundamental, physical level. Once you do, you can alter the physical structure at will. Only in simple ways, and still taking into account the nature of the object.”

  He swept a hand toward the statue. “If you manage to crumble this statue to dust, you might be the twenty-fifth.”

  Lucan looked the statue in its black eyes. If he mastered this, he’d be assured a seat on the Council of Architects. From there, he would be the one to steer the Consultant’s Guild.

  In his opinion, that ship very much needed a pilot.

  As Lucan’s hands tightened on the statue’s shoulders, the Emperor paused. “I’m told the process is painful at first, and there are some who end up insane. But you should be young enough. I believe you will adapt.”

  So much for encouragement.

  Before his senses were swallowed up entirely by the Reading, he saw his Emperor nod toward the rows and rows of black stone soldiers kneeling behind this one.

  “And when you’re done with that,” the Emperor said, “you only have three hundred and ninety-eight more to go.”

  ~~~

  Hardly daring to breathe, Meia clung to the thick branch like a squirrel. All around her, golden leaves drifted down from the canopy of the autumn forest.

  She paused a moment to catalogue her injuries. The backs of her calves and thighs were spotted with acid burns—those wouldn’t cause trouble yet, she simply needed to ignore the pain. Her left wrist was twisted, probably sprained. She could use it to hold a dagger or a needle, but she couldn’t climb or throw a spade fro
m the left. Her neck and shoulder still ached from where she’d been hurled into the trunk of the tree, but they hadn’t seized up yet.

  Worst of all was the long gash on her ribs. The cut had soaked through the bandages. Every minute or two, a tiny red drop squeezed out of the wrapping, crawled down the branch, and plopped onto the forest floor.

  Her body was sending out too many complaints to ignore, and her head was fuzzing over. More importantly, the Duskwinder would smell her blood on the ground and find her in seconds.

  Meia gritted her teeth in a forced grin. The Emperor’s supposed to know everything? Well, he doesn’t know me.

  He’d been very open about his intentions. “We will find your limits, Meia,” he’d said. “If I am to stretch you, I must know your breaking point.”

  Shows how little he knew. Meia didn’t have a breaking point.

  A broad silhouette twisted through the air, snaking down and landing among the crunchy leaves. Bronze wings creaked as they folded back into the scaly body—a twenty-foot-long serpent with wings and a spiked tail. Its scales gleamed like bronze armor, its single eye jerking around the forest. It flicked three forked tongues out, tasting the air.

  Tasting her blood.

  The Kameira’s eye shot upwards. Faster than thought, it had wound itself up the trunk of her tree, flaring its wings to intimidate its prey.

  I’m not trapped, Meia reminded herself. It’s trapped up here with me.

  She attacked. She pulled the shears from their sheaths at her back, their blades gleaming like sunset, like the Duskwinder’s scales. Her belly was still pressed against the bark of the branch, so she reared up onto her knees, striking with both blades like a snake’s twin fangs.

  The blades plunged toward the Kameira’s single eye, but it swept them aside with one wing.

  The impact shoved her arms aside, and the rest of her body followed. As she had been trained, she tossed her shears aside to avoid landing on a blade, but it wasn’t a long fall. Her back slammed into the ground before she fully realized what was happening, driving the breath from her lungs. The back of her head thudded against the soil.

  The Duskwinder was unwrapping itself from the tree. She had to reach it. She had to kill it. How was she supposed to kill it from her back? Her fingers scrambled at the pouch of spades tied to her thigh, but the blades had spilled out in the fall. Their edges sliced her fingertips, drawing more blood. It didn’t hurt. Why didn’t it hurt?

  She finally palmed a single spade as the Kameira loomed over her, its huge serpent eye gleaming in the afternoon sun. It hissed, revealing a mouthful of fangs and tongues.

  Meia hurled the spade. It pattered weakly against the snake’s jaw, unable even to pierce the soft skin underneath its head.

  The throwing blade landed lightly on Meia’s chest, still wet with her own blood.

  The leaves drifting through the autumn sky swallowed her vision, but Meia still did her best to glare at the Duskwinder. This big snake was lucky she couldn’t get up, or she’d be peeling it down the middle and skinning it for steaks.

  It was lucky that it got to eat her, before she could eat it.

  Then a man with dark skin and bright clothes was standing between her and the serpent. He raised a hand and said something Meia couldn’t hear.

  The Duskwinder slithered backwards like a man scrambling away from a cliff, flapping its wings to push itself back faster. Half a second later, it was winging its way off into the afternoon sky.

  The Emperor looked down at Meia, as though he’d simply happened to check his shoes. “Another failure,” he said.

  The words pierced Meia’s chest like a spear, and she struggled to sit up. “Again, please,” she managed to say. “Almost…I did…again.”

  She couldn’t seem to sit up, so she flopped over onto her stomach. The pain nearly made her black out, but she seized her body in the grip of her will, crawling forward, trying to reach her shears on the leaf-strewn forest floor.

  The Emperor laid a hand on her shoulder, and she froze.

  “You have the heart of a Champion,” he said warmly. She couldn’t see his face, but he sounded like he was smiling. “Estyr Six herself would admire your spirit.”

  Tears burned in Meia’s eyes, and she let her muscles relax, gulping down deep breaths.

  “However, the spirit of a Champion will do you no good if you only have the strength of a Pilgrim. We have reached your limits, Meia. No matter how you push yourself, you will never fight among the best with this body.”

  Meia let her focus drop. All the pain of her injuries came flooding back, and she welcomed it, letting it burn her. She wasn’t good enough. That was what he was telling her—irrefutable words from the Emperor himself. No matter how hard she tried, she would never be good enough.

  Leaves crunched as nearby Luminian Pilgrims rushed forward, to heal her and carry her back for medical examination.

  As golden light descended on her injuries, the Emperor spoke again. “This body won’t do the job, so I’ll have to give you a new one.”

  ~~~

  For the fifth time that morning, the hired thug put his boot on the back of Shera’s neck, shoving her cheek down against the floor tiles.

  The six men above her laughed and shouted coarse suggestions, clapping each other on the shoulders. An Imperial agent had hired them from a nearby prison, offering goldmarks and reduced sentences for a few days of beating up a little girl.

  Their laughter cut off, and they each dropped to one knee. Shera knew what that meant: the Emperor had arrived. Even the scum of the Capital feared and honored him.

  Shera lay panting against the tiles, not bothering to get up. Her Gardener blacks were soaked in sweat, her hair matted against her neck. The Emperor had roused her from her bed at dawn for combat training, and she’d spent the last five hours in an almost constant beating. Nothing was broken or bleeding, but her skin felt like a seamless tapestry of bruises.

  The stone was cool against her cheek, and she let her eyes sink shut. Maybe she could snatch a few minutes of sleep without them bothering her…

  The toe of the Emperor’s slipper nudged painfully in her ribs, and she rolled over onto her back. “Some people would consider it an honor to be kicked by the Emperor himself.”

  He stood over her, draped in sheets of pink and purple and red. “Have you not had enough of kicking?”

  Shera dragged herself to her feet, sweat pattering to the floor. “I told them to stop, but I think they only listen to you.”

  Two of the rough men laughed. The others glowered, rubbing or testing the injuries she’d given them in their previous bouts. She didn’t take beatings lying down, after all. Well, not most of them.

  The Emperor laced his fingers together, watching her. “You must be tired.”

  “Call off these dogs, and I’ll be asleep in ten seconds flat. I don’t even need a bed.”

  His hairless head looked as though it had been carved out of a boulder. “I am prepared to have them beat you twenty-four hours a day. The sun will never set on your training. You will never sleep until you die from exhaustion, or until you put six bodies on the floor.”

  The Emperor shrugged, layers of bright cloths shifting. “Or you can do it now, and take the rest of the day off.

  Shera felt the old, familiar ice crawling over her heart…but the same ice waited in the Emperor’s dark eyes.

  “How am I supposed to fight six grown men?” she asked, finally.

  He leaned closer, his expression as frozen and unyielding as the moon. “I’m not training a fighter. I’m training an assassin.”

  The Emperor walked out of the circle of kneeling men, to the edge of the courtyard. “Rise,” he commanded.

  The men rose to their feet, chuckling and cracking knuckles.

  Shera took a deep breath, and ice bloomed inside her.

  “Begin,” the Emperor said.

  Casually, Shera slid a poisoned needle into the nearest man’s throat. He touched his fin
gers to the wound curiously, confused, but she had already turned to another of the prisoners.

  Like all the others, he was wearing the bright red one-piece uniforms of an imperial inmate. A scraggly black beard spread across his chest, and his crooked smile flickered as he glanced up at his poisoned companion. A look of confusion passed over him like a cloud.

  Too late. Shera’s finger dipped into the pouch on her thigh, coming up with three spades, one between each pair of knuckles. She drove her bladed fist into his stomach, and then spun aside.

  A whip-thin man carried an axe handle as a makeshift club. He had been forbidden from using it much until this point, but apparently all rules were suspended. He brought the club down.

  Shera planted her shoulder in the bearded man’s hip and shoved. The two men collided, the bearded man taking a crack in his skull. The thin man staggered backwards, and Shera spun a spade out of her fingertips and into his eye.

  It caught him in the forehead, and then a dark-skinned Heartlander grabbed her about the throat with his one remaining hand. He shook her like a doll, while one of his remaining partners punched her in the back.

  Her teeth rattled, and she felt her shoes pulling off the ground. Now that she’d killed someone, they wouldn’t hesitate to kill her.

  There’s no such thing as mercy, Maxwell had told her. There is only hesitation.

  She had left her shears outside the courtyard, still sheathed. No one had asked her for her other weapons, which was why she still had her needles and spades.

  This fight would be easier with her shears, but Ayana had driven as many lessons into Shera’s brain as Maxwell ever had. One of her favorites: A Gardener is never unarmed.

  It was an echo of Maxwell and the useful lessons he’d taught her before violating them himself. A warrior is never unarmed.

  Shera clutched the Heartlander’s arm with both hands, pulling herself up. She twisted, driving a foot into his nose. He staggered backwards, but she kicked him in the head again and again, mashing his nose to pulp and spraying blood all over his neck and chest.

  He roared and his hand loosened, dropping her.