Skykeeper (The Drowning Empire Book 1)

by S. M. Gaither

  The man nods. I feel her gaze on me again, but don’t meet it until she sighs and says, “The body you saw was already dead.”

  “Then why? Why did they—”

  “It was a keeper. A very young keeper, and this is how we bury the young.”

  I shake my head. I don’t understand. I don’t want to understand, or to think about any more keepers being buried in whatever way, for whatever reason. Especially not young ones.

  How young?

  As young as me?

  As young as my sisters?

  No. I won’t think about it.

  But the man explains all the same, in a practiced voice completely devoid of emotion: “When the young die, unready for death as the young normally are, we must make sure they aren’t able to find their way back to the living the way they naturally want to. It’s harder for them if they are put to rest in pieces. It scatters them. Confuses them, so they give in and accept death.”

  “That is…”

  “We do what we have to in order to keep death away,” the girl says through pursed lips. “We have enough of it here lately without allowing any extra to creep back to us and try to steal some more of the living.” She pulls me away from the men, gives me a little shove through the door. “But never mind about that. You’re wanted inside.”

  As the door swings shut behind us, a flutter of movement—some sort of creature landing on the girl’s shoulder—makes me jump.

  A dragon, I realize as it twists my way and studies me through soot-colored eyes. He’s much smaller than the pony-sized monsters that had the run of the palace gardens, but he has the same streamlined body attached to four muscular little legs, and a barbed tail nearly twice the length of the rest of him. He shines even in the dim light, his scales a glistening patchwork of every shade of blue imaginable.

  He is a welcome distraction from the horror outside, I think—and the girl must agree, because her grip on my arm loosens a bit.

  “His name is Atlas,” she tells me as we climb stairs that seem much too elaborate, based on the modest face of this building. The plush steps and curled, gilded railings stand out even more when I look around at the otherwise dreary interior. Most of this place has the appearance of something that was likely grand-looking at some point, as these stairs still are, but has since faded to drab curtains and chipped statues shoved into cobwebbed corners. Even the scent in the air—sweet water blossoms, with a busy top layer of dust—suggests once-beautiful things now buried.

  “He’s been hiding out in here,” the girl says, extending her arm and letting the tiny creature slide from her shoulder and hook itself around her elbow instead. “Doesn’t like the noise outside any more than you do.”

  The noise. My stomach rolls, and I force myself to talk to keep my mind off of vomiting.

  But all I can think about is the last thing she said to me outside.

  “You said you’ve had a lot of deaths lately.”

  “The skies grow darker, and our numbers grow thinner.” Her voice is quiet. “They were thin to begin with. We can’t keep up with all the increasing, strong rifts we’ve had lately. The young have to face those rifts before they’re ready, and the old are becoming more scar than flesh, and so deaths are inevitable at this point.”

  “How many?”

  We’ve reached the top of the stairs, and in front of us is a set of double doors. There is a scene carved in their splintering wood—a likeness of the middle kingdom’s Creator goddess, Austri, surrounded in rays of light. The girl lets her hand rest on one of the rays for a moment before answering. “Enough that some of us are getting tired of burying our own,” she says. “And so riots like the one outside usually follow every sealing we perform these days—particularly the ones that end in death.”

  “What good do they think throwing stones and lighting fires will do?”

  “Good?” she repeats, slowly pulling the door open. “They aren’t concerned with good anymore.”

  The room we enter is circular, lit by glowing white stones piled in grooves at the base of the walls. The center of it is open, but that opening is small—barely enough to catch a glimpse of the darkening sky. It’s so unlike back home, where entire ceilings are made of glass, open and embracing as much of the Sea-Above as possible.

  Beneath the small glass opening here, an old woman is sitting with her head bowed and thumbs pressed into the center of her forehead. There are a handful of others on either side of her, most of them mimicking her pose—save for the young woman closest to her, whose eyes burn my direction the second I step into the room.

  This woman speaks without taking her eyes off mine, but too quietly for it to actually be intended for me. It isn’t in the common tongue, either. It is in harsh syllables accentuated by strange clicks, unlike anything I have ever heard before, and my mind races as the room fills with it, as all the others abruptly abandon their meditative poses and join in.

  They sound like they’re arguing.

  And they all keep glancing at me.

  My breathing quickens. I want to run. Out of this room, out of this village, maybe all the way back to Garda and to more familiar things.

  I don’t manage a single step backward before the doors are slammed shut and I am pushed forward and made to kneel down in front of the old woman in the center. She holds up a hand. The arguing around us immediately stops, but the tensely wrapped silence is almost worse. I feel like prey thrown to wolves that are crouched and still and just waiting to pounce at my first sign of weakness.

  Determined not to show any more weakness that might encourage them, I sit up straighter, and I meet the elder woman’s one blue eye. The other is covered by a patch, the skin around it raised with keeper scars. Her cracked, red-stained lips part into a slow smile as I stare at her. “One of Garda’s golden children, come so far,” she whispers. “How very fortunate for us.”

  The rest of the room remains unnaturally quiet.

  “You have to let me go,” I say. “There is a reason I have come so far, I—”

  “Go?” She looks as if the word is foreign to her. “Oh no, I don’t think so, Pure child. You have…obligations to see to.”

  The way her mouth twists as it settles on the word obligations makes me think of the line from my wanted poster: for crimes of treason and neglect of duty.

  “You can’t take me back to the emperor. There are more important things than the bounty on my head, and he is not—”

  “You misunderstand.” She leans closer to me, the movement surprisingly smooth for one who looks so ancient. “Child, your emperor will never see you again. No one in the southern kingdom will.”

  My breath catches.

  “It’s been so long since we’ve had a Pure for our own. The emperor hoards you and so many other keepers along with his gold and jewels, leaves the rest of us to drown in times like these—but this village is not meant to drown. You are proof of that, because as the sky grows darker and the hour grows later, our Austri, our Creator, has brought you to us.”

  There is a murmur of what sounds like agreement from the rest of the room.

  “And so with us you will remain,” the elder concludes, and the murmur becomes more enthusiastic, turns to quiet cheers among a few in the back of the room.

  “It was a mistake. You only found me because my own magic left me for dead.” It is this last point, I think, that may be my best chance at convincing them to let me leave. “What good am I to you, truly? I can’t control this magic. I can’t be your savior any more than the keepers you already have. But if you let me go, I plan to find a way to truly save you—to save the rest of the empire, too.”

  The elder only smiles.

  “You were not dying when I found you,” says my escort, whose eyes refuse to meet mine when I turn her way. “You were sealing, even without any conscious thought. Magic so powerful it seemed to have life on its own. I…I have never seen anything like it.”

  But not so powerful that it could keep that young
keeper alive, I think, and my stomach turns inside out all over again at the thought of that small body being cut to pieces.

  “You will learn to control that power,” says the elder. “And then you will be our savior.”

  “Your savior?” I repeat. “While the rest of the world outside this village drowns?”

  “The rest of the world is not my problem,” she says, and I am revolted.

  But for a moment I am also speechless.

  Because her words are almost identical to the ones I said to my brother when I found out he was leaving. Whatever was happening in the islands was not Garda’s problem, either.

  I sink back on my heels, the quiet heaviness of the room overtaking me as I search for something else to say.

  I want to stay disgusted at them all. It would be simpler. But there is a desperation, a hopelessness in this room that I understand a little too well—because it feels too much like those days following my brother’s death. And I know that despair is making them think only of surviving. Not of the world outside, or of what will come after the devastation is finished.

  And who am I to say they shouldn’t be the ones to survive?

  When there is so little hope to spare, how do you decide who gets it?

  Will the ones who can enslave Pures like me get to make those decisions?

  I picture a terrible scene now: violent kidnappings of my sisters and the few other Pures left, war breaking out as all the world desperately tries to find some way of holding up their own piece of the sky. They would only be attempting to mimic what Garda and the emperor have apparently been doing for decades, after all. And so the sky won’t have to destroy us—we will destroy ourselves first, and the sky will only have ruins left to wash away.

  “You will stay,” the elder says decisively.

  “I will not,” I say quietly. The fresh, raw memory of that body on the platform outside makes it hard to get the words out. I have to steel myself, to remember that to stay would be like hacking at the limbs of a poison tree, when I should be striking for the root. “I can’t. There are other things I have to do.”

  That girl with eyes like fire steps to the elder and kneels, speaking rapidly in their strange language.

  The room goes silent again, and the elder looks thoughtful for a moment. Then she nods. The grip my escort had on my arm—which had grown so light I’d nearly forgotten about her—tightens as she sucks in a breath. I might be imagining it, but I think I hear her mutter something that sounds like no under her breath.

  “Perhaps our Creator intended you as a sacrifice, then.” The elder reaches for my hands, still bound in front of me, and lifts them between us as she speaks. She runs a leathery thumb across the marks on my wrists. “There are stories, you know. The blood of a Pure, mixed with the magic of a common keeper. They say it can make a more permanent seal. That the gods will always spare the places where their own blood has been spilled in forfeit.”

  I jerk away from her touch so fiercely that the only thing that keeps me from falling is the grey-haired girl, still holding my arm. “That’s only a legend.”

  “There is a little truth behind every legend, is there not?” says the elder. “And there is enough blood in you to cover this entire village.” Her smile turns wild, triumphant. She believes she has won, that I can be so easily controlled by threats of death.

  But she is wrong.

  She doesn’t know that my brother raised me not to fear blood or sacrifice, and she apparently forgets that I have defied an emperor already.

  She’ll remember it before I am finished here.

  I shrug myself free of the girl’s grip on my arm, and I narrow my eyes at the elder. “Then you will have to spill it,” I say, voice quiet and shaking. “Because I am nobody’s slave.”

  Chapter 13

  The platform still smells like someone else’s blood.

  Coppery. Salty. I can taste it on the tip of my tongue, and I can see the dark places where they didn’t manage to properly wash it away. Maybe they didn’t even try to wash it away. It will not be the last blood that is spilled here, after all.

  It might be only hours until mine joins it.

  My hands remain tied, and now my feet, too, all wrapped to a metal stake that shoots up from the platform’s center. Guards surround me. They’re not only here to prevent my escape, but to keep me from sleeping. To make sure I am ever more aware that death is the only thing coming for me if I continue to refuse to give in to the elder’s demands.

  I continue to refuse anyway.

  Just like I should have refused to follow the emperor’s demands—to let myself be blinded by his talks of tradition and honor, by his promises of the palace’s comforts—long before now. My whole life, I never bothered to look outside the borders of my glass city, never imagined that the emperor would hoard us to keep himself safe, while the rest of the world suffered and bled until it became this terrifying landscape.

  And now, more than ever, I am desperate to find a way to fix it.

  No more blindly obeying the ones in charge.

  I would rather die.

  Part of the crowd from earlier still loiters around the square. No elaborate costumes or masks left, because the piecing ritual is finished for now. But plain, unpainted eyes watch me from the shadows, and whispers take the place of the chanting from earlier. The rioting has ceased. The fires have been put out, although buildings still smolder and the haze of smoke still lingers.

  All throughout the night, the whispering people petition my guards to be allowed to speak with me. They climb up through the smoke-haze, up onto the platform, and they look me in the eyes. Some clutch at my sleeves and plead for my help, for any sort of hope I could give them. Others tell me there is no hope I could give them, and so they simply cannot wait to watch me die.

  I am not sure which is worse.

  Even the ones who want me to die don’t seem to believe it will spare them in the end, as the legend claims. They simply want me dead because death is their constant now, and for once, they want to see it happening to one of the southern kingdom’s golden children instead of their own. There is no sympathy for the loss of my brother in this place. Too many others have lost a brother here, and their grief hasn’t had time to settle and make sense, so anger is still surrounding and keeping watch around it.

  The platform shakes once more as yet another person climbs to face me. I brace myself for sobs or insults—whichever it will be this time. But when I look down to greet the figure rising toward me, the only thing I find myself facing is a grin. The rest of his face is hidden in cloak and shadow, but I don’t need to see it; that foolish smile has already been burned into my mind. I would recognize it anywhere now.

  “You again,” I say under my breath, watching the guards and praying they don’t overhear us.

  They don’t seem to be looking at us at all.

  What sort of spell has he pulled on them, I wonder?

  And more importantly, why?

  “They told me you left.”

  “I did,” West replies. “But then I came back.”

  “And whatever drove you to do such a thing?”

  “Something about barbaric sacrifices leaves a bad taste in my mouth,” he says with a shrug.

  I raise an eyebrow.

  “Believe me, I wanted to leave.”

  In the corners of my vision, I see people drifting closer to the platform. Wondering which side West is on, most likely. Is this one trying to convince her to live or to die? I am not sure I understand his reasons for being up here any more than those onlookers do.

  But for whatever reason, he is here, and it looks as though he is my only option.

  “Well, did you come back with a plan, by any chance?” I ask.

  “Plan?” He moves closer, slides a hand around my waist and pulls me against him. “I suppose my only plan was to take this chance to embrace the golden child everyone is talking about,” he whispers.

  My first reaction, after the od
d little shiver that trills through me, is to think of slamming my head—one of the few things I still have full control over—into his, and hope that it somehow knocks some sense into him. But then I feel pressure on my wrists, and I glance down and see a flash of metal between us. A knife.

  He really must have pulled some sort of dark magic to manage sneaking that up here.

  The thick rope binding my wrists falls away, drops to the ground between us. And then the cold, smooth metal is against my skin as he slides the knife up my sleeve, hiding it. Which is a nice start, but I am going to need more than a single knife to escape all of the people still lingering in these streets, watching and waiting for me to play savior or sacrifice.

  I keep very still as my eyes scan the dark village, taking note of every person they can see. Several dozen of them, at least. Too many to fight our way through. “We need a distraction,” I tell West.

  He nods. “Let’s start another riot, then, shall we?”

  Before he can elaborate on whatever scheme he’s building, one of the guards starts up the platform, demanding to know how West got up there. Apparently, whatever trick he pulled is wearing off. He doesn’t answer the guard’s questions, only lifts his hands harmlessly into the air and backs away from me.

  They’re quick and rough about removing him from the platform, but once on the ground, he manages to pull away. And they must not think him much of a true threat, because they don’t bother to follow him when he disappears into the shade of the closest building. I stare after him, heart pounding with the mixture of exhilaration and trepidation that comes from realizing my hands are finally free once more.

  Behind me, some of the ones who’ve moved closer to my platform have begun to chant again. And the words are ones I recognize, because they are part of one of the many chants that accompanied us to sealing ceremonies:

  Come see, come see

  Sky of water, black as can be

  World below in shadow without sound

  And how the sea is coming down

  Come see, come see