Skykeeper (The Drowning Empire Book 1)

by S. M. Gaither

  Skykeeper

  The Drowning Empire: Book One

  S.M. Gaither

  Contents

  Copyright

  Also by S.M. Gaither

  A Map of the Caspian Empire

  (the way things begin)

  Part I

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Part II

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Part III

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Part IV

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Part V

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Epilogue

  Thanks for Reading!

  SKYKEEPER

  Copyright © 2017 by S.M. Gaither

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Cover Art and Typography by OwenGraffix.com

  www.SMGaitherBooks.com

  Also by S.M. Gaither

  Cursebreaker

  The Queen of Cursed Things

  A Map of the Caspian Empire

  (View full size image at www.smgaitherbooks.com)

  (the way things begin)

  In the beginning there was chaos above, and so the Creators sought refuge below.

  The young man with the golden-green eyes repeated this oldest of his world’s stories to himself one more time, clenching the ring that had been given to him for safe-keeping.

  He did not believe in this story.

  He had stopped believing in it years ago.

  But even tales that were not true could bring comfort, and so he kept reciting this one as he watched his friend step into the shadow of the breaking sky, her hands lifting upward.

  She seemed fearless.

  Far below the sea, separate from the evils of the World Above, a newly created empire welcomed the faithful home…

  Had she always been so fearless? Or did her new magic simply make her reckless?

  …into a land of endless beauty….

  Green light danced from the girl’s fingertips. Someone nearby clapped at the sight of it.

  …into a land of safety and prosperity…

  The green light became a shield. A solid wall lifting at the girl’s command, securing itself over the weak part of that barrier that held back the impossible vastness of the Sea-Above.

  More clapping. They were all so proud of their newest keeper, one of the blessed few who would help hold up their sky and keep them safe. There was something particularly extraordinary about this one, they all thought. And the young man agreed. But clapping would have distracted him from clinging to that old, comforting story, and so he kept his hands at his sides.

  …a land that would shine eternal, so long as the light of its keepers refused to go out...

  And here it was, just as the story predicted: A perfect keeper shining, a perfect sealing, a makeshift sky made perfect once more by that divine magic. It was always an incredible sight to behold. For centuries now, it had been an incredible sight to behold. And an eternity from now, perhaps it still would have been—

  If only things had not started to break.

  If only the girl had not fallen to her knees.

  The barrier darkened. The land below it shuddered within a spreading, sickening grey shadow. Its edges shivered with a rush of unnatural wind and shattered power, and the water poured down, down, down from the sky and onto the girl.

  And the first of the lights flickered out.

  In the beginning, there was chaos above.

  The boy with the golden-green eyes found that he could no longer recite the story, because he’d suddenly forgotten the words. All the words in the world were gone, it seemed, save for those in the single question that kept breaking like a storm-tossed wave over his stunned mind—

  What happens now that the chaos is below?

  Part I

  Chapter 1

  Siro, Capital City of the Gardian Kingdom

  Present Day

  Our world threatens to break in the same way it has for centuries: painfully.

  Much more painfully than I expected.

  Like a white-hot knife slicing across my chest, excruciating in its suddenness and in the lingering, fire-like tingle spreading through my veins. Then the pain begins to fade, becoming only an occasional pulsing, a pressing and falling against my insides like the ebb and flow of water along a shoreline.

  And as it rolls away, I smile.

  My brother watches me silently as I regain my composure completely, crystal goblet still pressed to his lips and his kind, thoughtful eyes peering out over it. They’re nearly identical to mine, Eamon’s pale amber eyes—in color, in shape, and now in their growing excitement.

  Because he realizes it too. It’s happened at last: this burning in my skin, this pull in my blood, the tremors in the air all around me…

  All the signs that a rift is opening somewhere close by.

  I have finally, finally sensed them.

  “You felt that, didn’t you, Aven?” My brother lowers the goblet and leans forward, resting his elbows on the table. "The emperor will be glad to hear it."

  “And relieved,” I add.

  Because it should be flooding the space around us, that relief; there are so few of us able to feel the breaking sky’s warnings these days, and so my blood waking to that sky’s callings is nothing short of celebration-worthy.

  But there are no celebrations in Eamon’s eyes.

  No relief in them, either.

  The excitement is already fading, and now there is only a sort of weary disenchantment glistening there. One that he tries to blink away, but not quickly enough to keep me from seeing it.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” comes his expected reply.

  “It looks like something.”

  “I don’t know, Avy.” He gives me a small smile. “It’s just strange, is all.”

  I stare at him, uncertain whether to laugh or shake my head. “Strange? Why? We’ve been expecting this day—we’ve been hoping for it.”

  “I know,” he says with a slow nod. “But maybe I just wasn’t prepared.”

  “Gods,” I tease, trying to keep the moment light. “Don’t tell me you’re going to become all sentimental on me now.”

  “Hardly.” His expression is thoughtful for a moment, and then he says, “I suppose I only meant that I’m not prepared to deal with you tagging along to all my sealing ceremonies, too. That used to be the only time I was able to get rid of you.”

  I pick up the last bite of sweet seedcake I’d been nibbling at, and I fling it at his face. He knocks it away easily, years of keeper training showing in his reflexes.

  “Manners,” he says, grinning. “What would Mother say if she caught you throwing food?”

  I make a rude face. He laughs. For a moment, we are just as we h
ave always been, and I think I must have imagined that weariness in his gaze before. But then he stands and pushes in his chair, and the light from the chandelier catches in his eyes, and I see it again: an anxiety that doesn’t fit with the upturned curve of his lips.

  He is keeping something from me.

  “I should go and inform the council of what we’ve felt,” he says, “and help them start preparing for the ceremony.”

  “I’m going to dress for it.”

  He braces his arms against the chair’s back and looks through me, not at me, as he says, “Of course you are.”

  And I can’t think of what I am supposed to say, what I am supposed to do to draw those concerns in his eyes down to his lips.

  But before I can say anything, I sense another pull, painfully deep in my chest this time.

  It sends that fire itching back through my skin.

  Knocks the air from my lungs.

  It still wouldn’t have knocked the lingering excitement from me, if not for the way it made my brother flinch.

  If not for the way his eyes are closed, now, and the way his breathing has turned slow and practiced. Because it is one thing for the sky’s call to make my breath catch, and my inexperienced hands shake and fumble, but it has been a long time since I’ve seen it have this strong of an effect on Eamon.

  “I’ll meet you by the gate,” he says, eyes slowly blinking open, “and we can walk to the temple together. Try not to take forever getting ready, how about? It feels like we aren’t going to have much time with this one.” His voice has gone quiet again, but his smile is nearly back to its normal, confident brightness.

  And that brightness is what I choose to hold on to as I walk to my room, humming softly to myself and running my hands along my arms, absently trying to soothe the burning from my skin.

  Chapter 2

  The bells are sounding loudly, now.

  Loud and quick, each toll folding smoothly into one another until there is no telling where the individual ones begin and end.

  It is a familiar, comforting noise. Because this is how it always goes with the larger rifts: once they are first sensed and announced, the people standing guard at Sirona’s temple ring out the giant bells there, and it sets off a chain reaction. Every glass-ceilinged home in Garda’s capital city, Siro, has an individual bell to answer the giant one’s sound. Some only ring them once—that’s the most basic part of the tradition—but most get caught up in the excitement, and after their mandatory chime, they keep going until long after the city fills with this symphony.

  The idea is that, if it’s loud enough and sweet-sounding enough, the gods and goddesses of our world will awaken and accompany our party to the ceremony to protect us.

  I am standing on one of the arched sandstone walls that flank either side of the palace gates, and from up here—from high on the hilltop that the palace sits on—I have a clear view of the capitol’s transformation; of the people who have dropped their everyday hustle and bustle and taken to dancing in their yards instead, swinging those bells around with their neighbors; of the creatures their noise is drawing from the trees and from the countless streams that snake through the city. The ruby-colored coi, in particular, always slither out of the water and toward the sound of the bells. There is a small group of them gathering on the banks outside the palace, their bodies arched, mouths open to add a high-pitched harmony to the bell’s song.

  I close my eyes and try to focus on that song, try to let it drown out the memory of my brother’s strange behavior from earlier. And when that isn’t enough to still the unease in my stomach, I turn my thoughts to the keeper magic in my blood instead.

  Remember your purpose, I think. And remember to breathe.

  When I open my eyes a minute later, my hands are glowing with the familiar green light of that magic. A trail of it spirals like smoke from my left palm and snakes its way around my wrist, lifting my ceremonial bracelets and gently ringing them against each other.

  It is only the beginning of what the rapidly approaching ceremony will demand from me.

  I don’t let the magic break the skin now, but I do allow traces of it to evaporate through, trying to relieve that dull, dancing pressure; that almost-constant-by-now pressing that feels like the blunt end of a dozen needles continuously prodding just below the surface of my skin, continuously searching for a way out. For a way to reach that rift that threatens our world.

  “This is the way,” I whisper, reciting the beginning of one of the many prayers we say before ritual trainings. “We are the way, and along the way there is light…”

  I watch the misty echoes of magic circling my hands for a while before letting it go, letting it drift up to the sky. Or up to the barrier, rather, because that is really the more proper term for it; we call it a sky, but there are no clouds floating through it, and no stars or suns or moons—not as in the pictures I’ve seen in books about the surface world above. There is no great heaven resting upon our version of sky, either.

  There is only the weight of the fathomless Sea-Above that the barrier holds back, of endless blue water rippling high overhead in mesmerizing patterns.

  It is a weight that has been entrusted to us keepers since the beginning of our world. That barrier is a powerful enchantment, one the Creators pooled their strongest magic into.

  But the sea above it does not like to be restrained.

  So it is up to us to maintain our “sky.” To reinforce and heal the places where that sea threatens to overwhelm, where it results in rifts like the one I feel calling to me now.

  I am still staring at our sea-sky, while my lips keep moving soundlessly, habitually reciting my prayer, when I hear footsteps approaching. Thinking it must be Eamon—that it must be time to go already—I turn around.

  But unfortunately, the eyes I meet are my mother’s.

  She is smiling. Cerin Fairchild is always smiling, and her eyes are always sparkling with a gleam that could be sinister—if such a rounded, pudgy face had ever had any chance of being called sinister.

  But then, maybe that is too harsh a word.

  Or perhaps it gives her too much credit.

  The truth is that my mother is too simple to be sinister, really. Although she is an opportunist, true enough; there is a reason I have three other siblings, and why I would have even more if my father hadn’t died so young. And I am almost positive it has nothing to do with the fabled beautiful and limitless power of a mother’s love, and everything to do with a single, much simpler thing: Greed.

  Because you see, she positively drips with it.

  Today, it has taken the form of the string of diamonds around her neck, of her silk gown and those priceless gemstones adorning her fingers. Just a few of her many gifts from the Emperor-Lord Fane, the shining, guiding light of the empire of Caspia himself. Compensation he so generously gives—and that my mother so willingly takes—in return for her children’s gifts.

  This last part is the reason she smiles so gleefully now. And it is the reason she is eagerly, breathlessly taking in my ceremony-ready appearance as she approaches me, her eyes dancing from my bare feet up to the shimmering blue tunic I wear, and then to the slate-colored arm sleeves and leggings made of a special material that will absorb any blood. They linger even longer on each of my charms, on their sapphire stones that have been blessed at the Temple of Sirona, the creation goddess of our southern kingdom. Because Sirona is the goddess I take my full name and title from—a title that will be mine to use, now that my blood has proven it truly carries her Pure essence and that more powerful connection to the sky that comes with it.

  Aven Elise Fairchild, Pure Daughter of Sirona, Keeper of her Southern Skies.

  A title that will bring even more wealth to our family. To my mother.

  I sigh, and I drop down from the wall and face my mother. My feet are supposed to be on the ground, anyway, because to be a keeper means to be willing to give your life, your energy, your magic back to the world—so we are su
pposed to stay as intimately connected to that world as possible. Bare feet before and during the ceremony, and nothing man-made between myself and the ground.

  For a long, uncomfortable moment after I hit that ground, my mother only stares at me.

  “It’s true what I overheard, then,” she finally manages in an overwhelmed little voice. “You’ve felt the sky’s call.”

  I nod.

  Still more staring. And then, slowly, very slowly, her eyes light with an almost triumphant sort of gleam that makes my stomach turn and my tongue taste sour.

  “You look beautiful,” she says, her gaze fixing on the sapphire centered in the thin headpiece I wear.

  “It’s not meant for beauty,” I say tonelessly.

  She waves a dismissive hand at my words. Her arm links around mine, and before I can protest, she is dragging me through the gate and strolling me along as if it is the most normal thing in the world—us taking casual, close walks like this.

  If she notices the way I cringe at her touch, she does not mention it.

  She leads me to the stairs that rise to the palace, pausing beside the stream that cascades down parallel to the steps. She studies her reflection in the gently rippling water, lifting a hand to the ridiculous white-and-gold-tipped wig she is wearing and wrapping the loose ends around her fingers to re-curl them.