Skykeeper (The Drowning Empire Book 1)

by S. M. Gaither

  Is the sky they keep so different from our own?

  I haven’t met many foreigners, and Varick is the first I’ve ever seen perform in one of our sealings. Because we don’t normally mix like this. Not now. My father wore the symbol of the unified skies, and it may be tied around my arm now, but it is mostly a dated, discarded symbol.

  People usually only worried about their own skies these days.

  And I wonder, again, what Varick has done to convince the emperor to break with this trend; my curiosity burns, fierce and demanding as my magic—but I can’t dwell on it.

  Because the chain reaction has begun now, and all the air around me is humming with power.

  I hear the deep, concentrating breaths being taken by everyone to my left and right. Calming breaths to combat pain, to focus on the magic and not the blood that is drip, drip, dripping into the shallow trace of water left on top of the otherwise solid lake. Most of the keepers don’t separate as cleanly as Varick. The smell of blood and burning flesh fills the spaces between us, and it makes my nervous stomach roll.

  I summon through my hands.

  It takes a frustratingly long time for the light to rise from my veins. I am used to this being much easier—as easy as all the times I have practiced these motions so endlessly and faithfully.

  But never with this anxious pressing and pulling in my blood.

  And never with such an unsteady sky roaring above.

  Still, I persist.

  Not my best performance, but the separation doesn’t draw much blood when it finally happens, at least. It does leave my palms raw and red and itching, and the sealing magic that drifts above me and into my control is thin. That thinness is also somewhat expected, though—because the magic in our blood always concentrates around the heart, and by the time it circulates to the fingertips, it’s understandably diluted.

  But I don’t trust myself to call it from close to my heart. Not as Varick did, or as Eamon is doing now. What comes from there is powerful, but always more difficult to control and more dangerous to summon. And for all the time I’ve spent studying the way my brother does it, I’ve never felt brave enough to attempt it myself.

  The light flows from each of us into the center of our circle, individual strands all eventually intertwining around the column of dark blue Varick sent upwards.

  While the strands bond together, I follow the other keepers’ examples and lift the water mask that hangs around my neck, holding it over my mouth. I tap a finger into the indentation in the side of the mask, and it activates, the turquoise material glowing and stretching and suctioning over my nose and all the way down across my neck.

  The water mask in place, I reestablish control over my part of the now-bonded magic. The others do the same, and then we take a collective step back and pull each of the individual strands tight.

  Next comes the weaving.

  My breath catches and lodges in my throat at the thought, forming a nervous lump that I can’t swallow.

  With our mouths covered, all communication between us has fallen to our movements and our eyes. With only a few deliberate looks and memorized hand signals for coordinating, we begin to move in synchronized silence, and soon we’ve perfectly formed our two rows, facing each other with an arm’s length of space to everyone’s left and right. Quick steps carry us in and out and in between each other while the magic spins and stretches wide above us. By some miracle, I manage to stay in formation and not miss a single of the ritualistic steps—though I feel constantly on the verge of doing so.

  When we finish the weaving, I take my first deep breath in what feels like an eternity, and I shake my hands to rid them of the cramping that vigorous summoning always brings. Then I drop slowly to my knees. All around me, the other keepers drop as well, murmuring prayers in the old language to Sirona, or to whatever lesser gods they think can best aid them now. When I close my eyes, I picture the tiny statue of Cerid that sits by my bed. She’s carved out of red granite, with delicate hands clasping a sprig of spiraling ivy to her chest. One of the elders gave it to me when I started my training years ago; Cerid is the demigoddess of strength and renewal, a protector of young keepers and a symbol of the life each new generation of them promises this world.

  I finish my silent prayer to the ivy-bearing goddess, open my eyes and sneak glances around me—first at Varick, because I am trying to think of what sort of gods, besides their Creator god, they worship in his homeland. And then I look to my brother.

  I asked Eamon what gods he prayed to once, and he told me, with a wink, that he never prayed to the same one twice. But he never let me skip practicing these rituals, and when I was younger, he was worse than Mother about making sure I memorized every prayer in every one of my ceremony books.

  Still I wonder, sometimes, exactly how seriously he takes this part.

  The look on his face is as serious as I’ve ever seen it, though.

  He is in front of me now, already rising back to his feet. But I may as well be invisible to him, because he has eyes only for the sky now.

  When I follow his gaze, I immediately understand why.

  The rift is rebelling.

  I’ve seen this happen before, but it is still haunting, the way the rift almost seems to be aware of what we’ve come to do. As if it senses its end is near. And so it is growing darker now in protest, from blue to purple, to black and angry as the rolling sea-sky around it. The wind picks up, howling and whistling, turning the loose strands of my hair to daggers that stab at my eyes and mouth. The mist whipping around us feels more eerie than magical, all of a sudden.

  Varick interrupts the tense silence a second later. “It’s… widening,” is all he says, and somehow his voice carries to us all, even over the harsh wind and the muffling from his mask.

  “I’ve never seen one grow this quickly,” says a tiny voice to my left. It belongs to a girl, not much older looking than me. Blood trails in steady, weaving patterns down her arm, but the look in her eyes isn’t the pain I expect to see.

  It’s terror.

  I release my mask so I can give her what I hope is a reassuring smile.

  She doesn’t return it.

  “The middle is going to rupture.” Eamon’s voice. It sounds as calm as ever.

  The other keepers are already moving, their eyes on the sky, their bodies falling so easily into a new formation that most of them don’t even need to watch what they’re doing. And it isn’t a formation I’ve had much practice in, but it is easy enough to take cues from the more experienced, and not to miss a beat.

  “Let’s get this seal in place first,” my brother is saying. “It should hold things back long enough for us to prepare for our next step.”

  He initiates the placing accordingly. We all follow his example, lifting our hands—and the magic we control—upwards, as if praising the very sky that threatens to drown us. Praising it, just as we always have. Singing songs and preparing feasts in honor of its creation, even after shifts and storms have shown us that it can be a fickle protector.

  It’s strange, I think, the way the things we most admire often have the most power to destroy us.

  But it isn’t destroying anything this time.

  Because like a great shimmering net, our seal rises and wraps its way around Varick’s column of magic, then spreads outwards, suctioning itself over the width of the break. My arms shake and throb as I help hold it in place until it completely connects. I watch it smooth over, turning the shadowy parts of the rift back to thin grey, and then finally back to the almost-normal dark blue shade of the barrier.

  The wind calms dramatically quickly, and I can’t help the feeling of satisfaction that comes when I realize: I’ve finally been a part of this. My nerves from before are still there, of course, tucked into the back of my mind, settled in the bottom of my stomach—but I don’t let them bother me. I’ve been working toward this moment for too long.

  So for now, at least, I enjoy its sweetness.

  It
is fleeting.

  As my arms drop back to my sides, the dark blue sky flashes quickly and violently back to grey. Everyone watches with bated breath for several long moments. And then it begins to rain, big drops that slice through the still-glowing, still-fresh seal, and plop at our feet, unbearably loud without the raging wind to drown them out.

  “Get off the lake,” Eamon says quietly. “Everybody. Now. Regroup on the shore.” His hand is on my shoulder a moment later. “I’ll catch up,” he tells me, giving a little shove to start me moving. And once I’ve started, my body continues on its own, obediently jogging toward safety while my brother turns to continue directing people and shouting orders.

  My jog becomes a sprint as the water falls faster and faster from the sky. On the shore, the people who haven’t fled themselves are shouting, hurrying us in. My eyes are focused on them. I refuse to let myself look back.

  So I can’t see exactly what is happening with the rift.

  But I can still feel it.

  I can feel the way my magic is reacting to it—so powerfully, so desperately wanting out, out, out to answer the sky’s pained call. It gives a particularly agonizing lurch. I stumble. And the moment my eyes lose sight of the shore, I lose the struggle to keep my balance. I land on my hands and knees, and water splashes up around me.

  Too much water.

  I feel like I am kneeling, sinking, into a muddy pool. The solid surface I walked out here on is disappearing. The Energeia’s magic must be wearing thin, or being overwhelmed, maybe, by the sheer, shattering energy of this rift; I don’t know which. All I know is I need to get up.

  But I can’t.

  My body is shaking too hard to stand.

  Too hard for me to have much chance of swimming if I’m pulled into that rough, swollen lake below.

  So I do the only thing I can think of: I clumsily fix my water mask back over my face and then I start to crawl, my trembling hands clawing through the wet muck.

  Mist and raindrops near blind me.

  The surface gives a little more with each inch I move over it.

  But then I see something, just to my right—a flash of blue magic.

  I hear a voice call my name, and I look over and see Varick standing on a much more stable-looking part of the lake. The water between us is lit with his strange magic, and it takes me a moment to realize what he’s done: a seal over the lake instead of the sky, holding together the Energeia’s spell and keeping it solid.

  A bridge.

  I hesitate only a moment before I change directions and crawl toward it instead, inch by inch, until the lake feels solid enough that I try standing again.

  But even Varick’s magic isn’t strong enough to keep all these breaking things together.

  I only make it halfway to him before the sky gives another vicious cry. One that must make him flinch, because that blue magic beneath me scatters as I lose my balance. By the time I manage to rise again, the solid path in front of me is gone. I find myself on the very edge of the lake as it swells violently up, pushing through what’s left of the solidification spell and drowning the last of Varick’s light in the same surge.

  Varick isn’t shouting my name, now.

  He is shouting for my brother.

  For him to help me, even though the last thing I want is for Eamon to be trapped here and surrounded by these same rising waters. I turn to find Eamon, to shout at him myself and tell him, No! Leave me and go! But my gaze ends up looking to the Sea-Above instead.

  It is so very, very dark.

  A hand grabs my arm in the same moment a resounding crack rings out. And then that sky directly above me rips open, begins to bleed a gushing current of white, foaming water. My gaze falls, and my brother’s eyes widen as I meet them.

  His voice, whispering my name, is the last thing I hear before the water hits me.

  Chapter 6

  The unstable surface of the lake caves in and I break through, the cold darkness beneath eagerly swallowing me up. The cascade of water still rushes from the sky—so heavy and so almost solid—a stone weight that settles on my chest and drives me deeper and deeper. It catches my mask and rips it off. I flail wildly, arms and legs slicing through the water and trying to propel myself from underneath the driving current, but it’s too strong and I am too weak, and my body only tumbles and twists, spiraling deeper.

  Until, very suddenly, it stops.

  My shoulder scrapes along the floor of the lake. Only scrapes, because I am only drifting now. Nothing is pushing me down anymore.

  I open my eyes.

  Bits of sand and lake debris blur my vision, and on both sides of me there is blackness—but above me is light. Familiar light. My brother’s magic shines brilliantly in the form of a personal seal, a barrier pushing back the falling wall of water, wrapping around, and containing it so I can escape its violent current. His eyes—the only part of his face not covered by his mask—plead with mine, urging me back toward the surface.

  I see blood flowering from the scars reopened on his chest and arms, clouding up the still water beneath his barrier. And those pleading eyes look tired, more tired than I’ve ever seen them, and I don’t want to leave them behind.

  But I don’t have my mask anymore.

  And my lungs remind me of this a second later, with a burning so sudden and fierce that it feels as if they’ve spontaneously combusted and set my whole chest on fire.

  My thoughts are growing hazy, everything falling away save for a few simple commands: Kick. Swim. Surface. And a single primal, instinctive thought, over and over: I won’t die like this. I must not die like this.

  I crash through the surface and drink the air so greedily that I keep swallowing mouthfuls of the choppy waves along with it. Those waves keep threatening to knock me back under, and my instincts keep driving me to safer waters, and too much time passes before I come to my senses and turn back around to search for my brother.

  But he is not there.

  No.

  No, no, nonono—

  There is nothing solid left of the lake at this point; only those rolling waves and whitecaps as far as I can see. I scream my brother’s name, over and over, turning around and around as best I can in the rough water. Then I dive. I have to go back down—there is no time to come up with any other plan, no time to try and fight my way to the shore to get help. Eamon is most likely unconscious from blood loss by now.

  I make it no more than ten feet before someone grabs me and starts dragging me back toward the surface. As I resurface into the cool night, for one fleeting moment I am overwhelmed with hope. With relief. It’s Eamon pulling me back, I’m sure—he heard me calling, and found his way to my side, just like he always does.

  Except it isn’t him.

  “Varick, what are you—”

  “Making sure nobody else dies while I’m in charge,” he interrupts.

  “Nobody’s died!” I shout, coughing up dirty lake water in the process. “Eamon is alive, and he’s down there, he’s…. he’s… Let. Me. Go!”

  I try to break free, but my body is so tired that it’s a foreign object to me at this point, paying no attention to anything I want it to do. And Varick is ruthless in his grip and in his pursuit of the shore. He pulls me toward it as easily as if I were made of air.

  I feel as though I could be the air just now, too, all stretched and thin and suddenly empty of everything that has given my life weight.

  I don’t feel the sky calling anymore.

  I don’t feel anything anymore.

  I don’t remember giving up, or at what point I stopped shouting my brother’s name and shouting for Varick to let me go back. To please, please let me go back. But when next I have any sort of clarity of thought, I am somehow already sitting quietly on the shore, my knees drawn close to my body and my shivering chin resting on them.

  All around me is chaos.

  Water still pours steadily down into the lake, which rises higher and higher. People have scrambled up the shore
in all directions, leaving their pinwheel flowers and colorful streamers behind in the foam-covered sand.

  In the distance, bells can still be heard.

  The ones who stayed behind in the city, still ringing them.

  They don’t realize what’s happened.

  They don’t realize how useless their efforts have been.

  There are no gods or goddesses awake to protect us here.

  There are only the keepers who are trying desperately to form seals, even if temporary, to hold back the sky. Keepers who are trying to reorganize somehow, so they can at least slow the bleeding.

  It occurs to me at least once that I should be helping them. But it feels like the whole world is drowning, and so even the smallest movement feels so pointless now. Like it was all pointless. Not just those bells that are still ringing, but everything else, too. Every step we trained for, every chant we learned, every prayer we whispered.

  Because we failed.

  Somehow, we failed.

  And so instead of moving, I can only scan this madness around me, eyes searching for comfort, for some sign that life will soon resurface.

  They don’t find it.

  What they do eventually find is Varick, emerging from the water in the distance.

  He is carrying a body.

  No, no, no.

  Several people rush to meet him, to help cradle the lifeless form in a bit more of a dignified manner and carry it up to higher ground.

  This is not happening.

  I see Lord Fane, his regal silhouette of flowing robes and tall, proud posture. He watches in silence, still as stone, as the people set the body on a nearby hilltop and back away with their heads low.

  For a quick, terrible moment of rage, I want it to be him. I want it to be his body that’s lying there, not so regal, and not so proud. I want it to be his dead eyes that people are unable to look at, that they’re sinking so sadly away from.

  I want to make it his dead body.

  But I can’t.