Skykeeper (The Drowning Empire Book 1)

by S. M. Gaither

  The first bag is quickly refilled, and I’m securing its fastenings when I hear soft footsteps from somewhere behind me.

  I twist round, knife drawn and bag forgotten.

  There is no one there.

  But the second I go back to the bag, a man emerges from the trees directly in front of me.

  I stumble back, and when I turn around this time, I see the source of the footsteps from before: another man is closing in from this side. His waxy skin glistens with sweat. His eyes are tired, hungry for the completion of the hunt.

  The waxy-skinned man is bigger than the other man, but he has a rusty sword clutched in his right hand, which tells me he likely prefers using it as opposed to hand-to-hand combat.

  My wrist stiffens. My finger slips into the ring beneath my knife’s handle, getting a proper throwing grip on it, and an instant later the knife is soaring through the air.

  It connects cleanly with its target, sinking deep into the man’s dominant wrist. I never aim to kill. Only stop. And I see him stop briefly at least, his arm twitching violently from the pain—but I am forced to turn before I can see the full extent of the damage I’ve caused, because the other man is diving after me now. I duck. Drop the rest of the way to the ground and sweep a low kick at his feet. He topples over and I scramble away, swoop up my bag and take off in a sprint.

  The person who catches me—by grabbing me by the hood of my cloak and jerking me violently to a stop—appears so suddenly that he may as well have materialized from the mist. I manage one swift elbow into his ribs before he pulls his weapon on me. A dagger, with a curved hilt accented with red stones.

  I only catch a glimpse of it before he presses it to my throat.

  In my peripheral vision I can see that he wears a cloak similar to mine, the hood drawn right up over his head, its shade blacking out everything on his face except a smug, triumphant grin. I try to get a closer look at his face, but the second he realizes I’m trying to turn and properly see him, his grin fades. He grabs me by the arm and twists my back to him.

  I would resist, but that blade is still uncomfortably close to my neck.

  “Don’t struggle, and don’t die,” says my captor, leaning closer. “Simple as that.”

  The other two men catch up with us a minute later, panting slightly. The one I threw my knife at has sheathed his sword, and he’s clutching his wrist against his chest. Blood still pours from the cut, and I watch it darken his blue tunic with grim satisfaction. He hasn’t bled to death yet, which means my aim was perfect—I avoided the radial artery. But, judging by how limp the wrist is, it’s likely I successfully severed an important tendon or two.

  A shame crippling him doesn’t do me much good, given I’m now outnumbered three to one.

  The bleeding man steps forward. “How kind of you to stop her for us.”

  My captor laughs—a dark, cold sound without humor. “I don’t think so, boys,” he says. “This one’s mine.”

  I’m confused, but only for a moment, because an instant later, the rage on the other two men’s faces makes it clear that these three aren’t working together at all. So I’ve escaped one group of hunters only to land in the hands of another.

  Perfect.

  The bleeding man draws his sword again, grasping it in what I assumed was his nondominant hand with much more control than I expected. He charges. I panic. I ignore my captor’s warning and struggle, kicking and swinging as hard as I can. He lets me go surprisingly quickly, and I’m still getting over the shock of my sudden freedom when I hear a sharp snap. I look up toward the sound, toward where the other men should be standing.

  But they’re gone.

  Chapter 10

  Where the hunters should be standing, there is instead nothing but a strange shimmering in the air. I hear another snap and look back to see that shimmering spreading in every direction, surrounding me and the hooded man in a circle no less than fifteen feet wide.

  That man. There is something in his hands, something small and wrapped in black, and as I watch, he flicks it to the ground with another of those terrible snaps, and the circle around us is suddenly completed. The world within it is motionless. No wind blowing. No animals scurrying in the icy undergrowth. Nothing but the sound of our tense breathing.

  I grab another knife from the sheath around my thigh.

  “Where did they go?” I demand, nodding toward the circle’s edge without taking my eyes off the man.

  He takes his time answering, paying more attention to his hands than to the knife I’m pointing at him. Whatever he tossed has left a strange grey powder all over his fingers. “They didn’t go anywhere,” he finally says as he kneels and attempts to wipe the grey off on a pile of frosted leaves. “As far as they’re concerned, we’re the ones who’ve disappeared. Doesn’t look like this from their side.” He motions to the sparkling air. “Looks like nothing to them, and the second they wander too close, they’ll forget there was even anything here to begin with.”

  “Sham magic,” I breathe in sudden realization.

  My mind races with stories now, with tales I heard as a child about the dangerous people who carry these sort of sinister spells— wanderers and wayward souls who care little about the costs and consequences of using such dark magic.

  “Useful stuff,” he says casually. He straightens up and removes his hood, revealing a dark mass of wavy hair and giving me a clear view of his dirt-and-ash-streaked face for the first time. He looks younger than he sounded, as much a boy as a man—he can’t be more than two or three years past my own seventeen. His face isn’t as heavily lined or scarred as most of the men Fane has sent. And his eyes, steel grey save for specks of wolfish yellow-green around his pupil, have a life to them unlike anything I’ve seen in all my other hunters.

  They’re strange.

  The longer I look into their greyness, the more I become convinced that something is wrong with them, although I am not sure what that something is.

  “You’re staring,” he informs me with a grin. “Incredibly rude of you, you know.”

  I narrow my eyes but ignore his accusation. “You don’t seem like someone Fane would hire,” I say, my eyes drifting to the streaks of spell residue he left on the leaves. “Who are you, exactly?”

  “That’s considerably less important than who you are, now isn’t it?” He pulls a weathered scrap of parchment from inside his cloak. I know what it is before he even finishes unrolling it. I take one glance at it, at my own face staring back at me from above Fane’s official offer of a reward for my live capture, and the knife flies from my hand and hits the picture dead center. It rips the parchment from the hunter’s grasp and sticks it into the ground a few feet away.

  He looks down at his now-empty hand. “You missed me.”

  “If I had wanted to hit you, I would have. Easily.” His smile is beginning to annoy me. I don’t have time for this. “And I have more knives, so I suggest you either get out of my way, or else start explaining who you are.”

  He takes a step closer to me. “Let’s just put it this way.” His voice is harsher now, but he is still grinning that infuriating little grin. “I’m the one who is going to be responsible for your live capture and return to the Emperor-Lord Fane, for crimes of treason and neglect of duty. Personally? I’m hoping the rumors are true, and that he plans to hang you for it. Anyway, that first part—it was all right there in that paper”—he points at the poster on the ground— “the one you just stabbed? You could’ve read it for yourself if you hadn’t been so rash.”

  “I’ve read enough of those, thank you,” I say, “and you are not going to return me anywhere. No one is. Not until I’ve done what I set out to do.” My eyes sweep quickly around the circle, trying to determine the best path of escape.

  The second I move, the hunter shakes his head.

  “Wouldn’t run, if I were you,” he says. “The circle’s barrier will have the same effect on you as it likely has those men by now. You touch it, you lose all
sense of purpose and rational thought. And then I get to fill in the blanks however I like, and you’ll just have to take my word for things.”

  “You’re lying,” I snap.

  “Try it and see.” He picks a stray leaf from his sleeve, lets it flutter all the way to the ground before adding, “It would make things easier on me, at least.”

  Trapped.

  After almost ten days of this, I am finally, honestly trapped. My mind turns escape plan after possible escape plan over and over in my head, but each of those plans seems less plausible than the last. I curse under my breath.

  “Now,” says the hunter, closing the space between us and taking me by the arm again, “we’ll go out the other side, just in case the other two are still waiting for us over there.” I watch him retrieve the small black object he tossed to the ground—the artifact that contains whatever piece of himself he gave up to make this particular sham spell. It crumbles to dust as soon as he picks it up, and a section of the glistening barrier in front of us fades away.

  That isn’t what holds my attention.

  His arm does. Because his right sleeve has shifted back with his movement, and I see something far more important on the light brown skin that shift has revealed: complex patterns of black ink that twist up around it. Like the protective charms that some keepers paint across their bodies before ceremonies, almost—except these are less colorful, less glossy; more like permanent shadows that have fixated on his skin. I’ve never known anyone from Garda to mark themselves permanently like this. The only people I’ve ever seen with anything similar were some of the traveling merchants who used to pass through the capital city sometimes.

  And they all came from the same place.

  “You’re from the Westland Kingdom, aren’t you?”

  It’s the reason his eyes seem wrong, I think. Because I’ve heard that the western kingdom’s proximity to the Endlands—and to the evil airs and energies of it—causes a distinct greying of the eyes of its inhabitants.

  A greying that is usually made even more prominent by the use of sham magic spells.

  He regards me silently, almost curiously, for a minute before answering. “Not that it’s really any business of yours,” he finally says, “but yeah. From just outside Bastian’s capital city, if you really must know.”

  I look away and try to recall the bits and pieces of Westland information I managed to refresh my mind of before I left. Three main islands. Bastian is the largest of them. Tume is the capital of it, and if I’m thinking correctly, it’s a poor city run rampant with gambling and underground market dealings—the most common contraband being sham spells like the ones he carries.

  I shudder to think of what other dark things he may be carrying.

  “When were you there last?”

  “Why?” His tone seems uneasy, suddenly.

  “Because—I have a few questions for you.”

  He slows for a few steps, pulling me almost to a stop with him. “You do realize that you’re the criminal here, right?” he asks. “That, if anything, I should be the one interrogating you?”

  “I am not a criminal,” I say, bristling.

  “And yet such an impressive bounty on your head…”

  I attempt to jerk out of his grip, but the movement is about as pointless as I expected; he only readjusts his grip, shoving me out in front of him and twisting my arms back behind me instead. I feel like a criminal now, being marched straight along to the gallows. “How honorable,” I mutter, “hunting down young, defenseless girls so you can line your pockets with silver.”

  He laughs again.

  I feel like he is finding both me and this whole situation entirely too amusing.

  “Oh yes, you’re perfectly defenseless,” he says, “as evidenced by all the blood pouring from that other hunter’s wrist. And then after you slammed your elbow into me like you did, I was certain you were completely frail and helpless. I’m also fairly certain you’ve bruised half of my ribs, but never mind that.”

  “A thousand pardons,” I say. “Next time you grab me in a dark forest and hold a dagger to my neck, I’ll be sure to respond by turning around and curtsying for you instead.”

  “Good idea,” he says cheerfully, as if it really were. And for a moment I consider bruising the other half of his ribs.

  I wonder if he would find that amusing?

  It likely wouldn’t help me get any more information out of him, though. So I stifle my irritation and quickly decide on another tactic. “If money is what you’re after, we could make a deal,” I say, thinking of the things I stole from my mother. “I have jewels, coins—whatever you want.” None of which I plan to actually part with, but that is beside the point.

  And it doesn’t matter, anyway.

  Because he is ignoring me.

  “It would be a much easier for you,” I press, glancing back over my shoulder at him. “This way, you can turn a profit without having to put up with me all the way back to Garda. All I want is information, and I’m telling you: name your price.”

  But apparently, he is not selling, because I still get no answer.

  I face forward again, but I would swear I could actually hear him smirking at my offer.

  I refuse to look at him any longer, or to give him any more attention than I have to. My mind turns again to thoughts of escaping, however impossible it seems.

  The forest around us has gone very quiet, almost as if we’re still inside the walls of his dark magic. I search the space around us as we march along, looking for more shimmering or other telltale signs of it, but there is nothing except fog drifting through the air and weaving in between the trees.

  That makes me almost as anxious.

  Creatures like mist cats hide in fog, and they’re almost impossible to tell apart from it. They can’t hurt anything so long as they stay in their vaporous form, but that’s precisely how they hunt: by drifting like the fog over their victims, and then materializing and striking too quickly for you to do anything about it. They’re not usually a problem for me, because Finn sends most beasts, mist or solid, scattering quick as they can away from us.

  Where has he ended up, I wonder?

  I think of whistling, knowing that if he’s still close enough to hear it, he’ll be back at my side in an instant. And the sight of him crashing through the trees might be exactly the distraction I need to break away.

  Before I have a chance to put this plan into action, the hunter interrupts.

  “And what if I’m not doing this simply for the money?” he asks.

  So I suppose he was actually listening a minute ago.

  “Why else would someone like you want anything to do with me, otherwise?” I say offhandedly, still thinking of Finn and possible escape methods.

  “Someone like me?” he repeats. I’m not sure why he sounds so offended by the question; I meant it as a statement of fact—as in, he is a hunter. Different looking than the usual sort of them, maybe, but in far too many ways the same. Just one more among the host of people caught up in Fane’s propaganda, so ready and willing to believe whatever the emperor-lord writes on his fancy posters, because that’s the easy way, isn’t it? To just not question it. And it’s the most profitable way, too.

  The hunter is quiet for another few steps, but then he pushes me without warning down a more overgrown path that juts off to the right. Despite the thicker brambles and leaves, I see bent limbs and indentations in the icy mud that suggest someone has walked this same path recently. A moment later I hear a low whinny, and I realize: we must be almost back to where he tied his horse.

  I’m out of time.

  I don’t think anymore. I just whistle, sharp and loud and quick. It earns me a curse and a rough jerk backwards that leaves me side-by-side with my captor, who shoots me a dirty look.

  “Please,” he says, “make more noise. There are probably still a few hunters in these woods who aren’t aware of us yet; we wouldn’t want to leave without meeting them too.”
<
br />   I whistle again, louder this time.

  “Good god woman, I was being sarcastic.”

  I can see his horse through the trees now, little more than silhouette and movement in the shade of the woods. There is no sign of Finn yet, although I think I hear soft hoofbeats in the distance. A wishful hallucination, maybe, but either way, I need to keep talking, to stall at least long enough to find out.

  “You must know what is happening in the islands,” I blurt out. “Even if you haven’t been there lately, there are rumors, don’t you—”

  “I know exactly what is happening there,” he interrupts, voice sharp as the dagger he held to my neck.

  Sharp enough that, had I any sense, I would probably be afraid, and I would probably just be silent now.

  But as my brother loved to remind me, I never did have much sense about knowing when to quit. So the hunter’s tone does nothing except make me determined, all over again, to try and force answers from him.

  I steady my gaze, refusing to turn away from his glare. “If you know, then tell me.”

  “How do you know anything about it, anyway?”

  “I told you: I heard a rumor.”

  He makes an unconvinced sort of noise, deep in his throat. “All this way for a rumor?”

  I do have to avert my gaze, then, because I don’t want him to see the loss in my eyes and confuse it for weakness. “I trusted the person it came from,” I say. “More than anyone in the world.”

  “That person would have been better off telling you to mind your own business.”

  “If it involves the sky, then it is my business,” I say, my gaze snapping back to him. They’re the same words I put in the letter I left for my sisters, and the painful reminder of that makes my voice quieter when I add, “And if you won’t tell me the truth about what is happening, then I will just keep moving until I find it for myself.”

  He doesn’t seem to have anything to say to that, and I assume I’ve gotten as much from him as I am going to get. So, thinking only of further stalling until I can make my escape, I drag my feet to a halt and stop us both. I take his gaze again. Hold it, and try to draw out the moment for as long as I can.