Heart of the Empire (The Broken Lands Book 1)

by Carrie Summers

  “Bunch of fools! Split up and search the area. There are only two of them!” Moments later, grunts tumbled through the brush as multiple people shoved into the foliage.

  With a nervous glance over his shoulder, Havialo pressed aside a branch thick with leaves and plunged deeper into the brush. I followed, as quietly as I could, but exhaustion made my limbs clumsy. Each step was getting harder.

  Ahead, the mage crouched even lower, peering into a tunnel in the brush that looked like animals had made it. Dropping onto hands and knees, he crawled inside, mage’s robes snagging and leaving strings behind. As I half-crouched, half-fell to follow, I plucked off the most obvious strands and balled them in my hands.

  Behind, much closer than before, a branch crackled then snapped. I dove into the tunnel, twigs clawing at my scalp and snagging strands of hair still trapped in my braid. I shook my head to free them. Dizziness rose from the leaf-strewn ground, grabbing hold and sending me sprawling.

  My arms were like limp seaweed while I tried to push my chest off the ground. I blinked specks of crushed leaves from my eyes, squinted down the passage, held in a cough brought on by the musty earth.

  A few body lengths onward, the tunnel split. I couldn’t see Havialo but I wormed forward on elbows and knees. Somewhere deeper into the brush, a twig snapped.

  Or was that behind me?

  I froze, cocking my ear.

  Another crack of a stick, creak of leather, and a steely grip closed around my ankle. I screamed as my attacker hauled me free of the tunnel, dragging my shirt up to my ribs and exposing my belly to the twigs and pebbles that covered the ground. As my shoulders cleared the tunnel, I rolled. My captor wore a protector’s uniform. His face was set in determination, and even his jaw muscles bulged.

  On instinct, I kicked. A lucky shot—my foot slammed into the man’s groin. The air left his lungs in a gust as he bent double, releasing my ankle. I scrambled away, diving into the brush. Sturdy branches resisted me every step. Havialo must have been following faint trails—either animal or human—this whole time. Unable to push my way through, I flopped on top of the brush and tried to squirm forward as if I were swimming.

  No use.

  Within moments, the hand latched me again. The protector snared the other ankle, too, and dragged me back to the path. I grabbed at handfuls of brush which bent then broke. Handfuls of twigs clutched in my fists, I slammed down to the ground, elbows first.

  I groaned as the man twisted my legs, forcing me to roll over. Transferring his grip so he pinned both ankles with one hand, he dropped his shin over my waist, shoving the breath from my body. The man weighed as much as a mule. I thrashed, punching with my fistfuls of sticks, but his meaty arm and shoulder were all I could reach.

  “Here!” he yelled toward the waystation.

  I beat on his shoulder again, for all the good it would do. His disinterested expression sent a shock of cold through me. I’d heard stories of the protectors’ cruelty. People who fled the law had their legs broken and splinted to heal crookedly. Or sometimes the protectors removed a foot. Thieves had fingers chopped off and their cheeks branded. And so on.

  “I didn’t do anything,” I protested between shallow breaths.

  The protector didn’t acknowledge my words. His expression remained unchanged. Had he been born emotionless, or had his training stripped his humanity?

  Shifting more weight onto the leg pinning me down, he yanked a wooden whistle from his pocket. The shrill tone sent ice down my spine. From the direction of the waystation, more branches snapped and rustled. Where was Havialo? Teppo’s words flashed to mind. The mage had betrayed my father, leading to the capture of Father’s men. For all his talk of keeping a vow, Havialo was a traitor. He’d probably abandoned me here.

  At once, rage roared through me. I bucked my hips, dug my heels into the ground, twisted and aimed a punch at the man’s neck. If I could just get the right angle…

  His fist came from nowhere. Sparks exploded across my vision as my jaw lurched to the side, joint cracking. My ears rang.

  “Wait!” someone yelled. Maybe Teppo, maybe someone else. “We need the girl!”

  The man ignored the order. I blinked away tears as he cocked his arm for another punch. His knuckles were white where the blood had been squeezed from the skin.

  Somehow, I knew that if he got another blow in, I was done. Either dead when the hit snapped my neck or wishing I was when the protectors punished me for resisting.

  A familiar tugging pulled at my senses, a plucking originating deep in my spirit. No, I thought. Not now. The protector’s weight shifted as he moved to put force behind his punch. Feebly, I tried to move my head aside, but I’d already lost control to my aura-sight. A colorless veil fell across the scene, dimming my vision.

  The man’s spirit hovered above me, moving in languid time to the slow descent of his fist. I shoved the vision away, desperate to regain control. But I only fell farther into the sight’s grasp.

  It often happened like this. During times of stress, or when the nightmares threw me from sleep and into the arms of my mother. When I woke her with my screams, Mother's aura flared red with fear, slashed with steel-gray concern.

  But I sensed nothing from the man attacking me. His spirit was dull. Lifeless. An empty, sucking void. My very soul shied away from the pit in the center of his body.

  And somehow, I shoved.

  Recoiling from the experience, as if my mind had been bowed like a twig that bent and bent until it finally snapped, I slammed back into my body.

  The protector’s gaze had gone vacant. His fist thudded against the ground a finger’s width from my ear. Elbow buckling, he toppled sideways.

  As I pushed against his legs, now pinning me with the sheer weight of his bulk, brush crackled nearby. A head and shoulders appeared above the leaves, backlit by the setting sun. Another protector—I recognized the uniform by the hard lines of the leather spaulders covering his shoulders. I squirmed away, finally slipping my legs from beneath my unconscious captor.

  As I wiggled backward to the far side of the clearing, the wind started. The gentle breeze swelled within heartbeats to a full gale battering the thicket. The protector who’d just arrived squinted against the sudden storm, holding his forearm before his eyes to defend against the razor edges of leaves slicing through the air. He shuffled forward, blinded by the fierce wind.

  A whirlwind, the gale only increased, seizing sticks and twigs and small pebbles and hurling them at the advancing protector. The wind howled in my ears, but I soon realized it didn’t touch the ground. The protector’s feet were just a few paces away, untouched by so much as a breeze. But in the tempest above, I could no longer see the man’s waist, much less his head and shoulders.

  Havialo stuck his head out of the animals’ tunnel. As the mage motioned for me to follow, a loud crack penetrated the howl, and a fist-sized stone dropped to the ground. The protector toppled into the clear air beneath the tornado, an area of his skull caved from the blow.

  My gorge rising, I crawled after Havialo. Branches tore at me while the howling wind fell behind us. We didn’t stop moving until we reached the base of the Crease.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Kostan

  Lost in fever dreams

  “I DON’T SENSE loyalty to the Empire. But he’s conflicted… I can’t really understand it.”

  A man grunted in response to the woman’s words. “What do you think, Falla?”

  She responded, voice sharp enough to cut. “Too risky. I don’t know why we haven’t sliced his throat. But I’ll respect your choice.”

  I tried to open my eyes, but the lids were glued together. A small moan rose from deep in my throat. Something—fingers?—brushed my forehead. I drifted.

  When I woke again, I was shivering, sweat coating my body and soaking the blanket beneath me. My swollen tongue filled my mouth, choking me. A fistful of fabric was clutched in my hand. I tried t
o unclench my fingers to release it, but a full-body shudder wracked me. The sole of my branded foot brushed the bed, and I screamed when the agony filled my leg bones all the way to my hip.

  “Shh,” another woman said. She draped a cool rag over my forehead. “Drink this. It will ease the pain.” She set the rim of something frigid against my lip.

  I wanted to obey because my leg was liquid pain, waves of searing hurt sloshing up and down the limb. But I couldn’t make my lips respond. I tried to open my eyes then realized my lids were already cracked. Nothing but black surrounded me.

  A strangled cry leaked past my swollen tongue.

  Cool fingertips pinched my chin and pulled my mouth open. Stinging liquid poured across my tongue and down my throat. I gagged then swallowed.

  A gray mist seeped across my blind vision then fell over my body like numbing fog.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Savra

  Traversing the Cosmal Crease

  I’D HEARD STORIES about the Crease, but none had captured the reality. Travelers claimed it had grown more impassable by the year as Cosmal Province had tilted farther and farther into the sea. But to me, the tales had been mildly interesting at best. Now I understood. Where the peninsula met the mainland, the narrow neck of land was folded and cleft, the earth’s bones exposed to the moonlight. Deep fractures plunged through raw dirt while cliffs the height of twenty people soared in menacing overhangs.

  “I thought there was a road,” I said, eying the shattered landscape. From one of the high cliffs, a sheet of stone cleaved free and crashed down, raising a cloud of dust that hid the impact zone. The falling rocks reminded me of the stone which had crushed the protector’s skull. I forced away the thought—nothing I could do would change what had happened.

  “There are two. The Imperial Crossing and this.”

  “This?” I squinted.

  “The smugglers’ track. The location shifts as the Crease changes and when the protectors get too near to finding the route. You can see the first cairn if you look closely.”

  I squinted and then nodded when I spotted the small stack of stones marking the entrance. “Who built it?”

  “There are black marketeers and Sharders who specialize in finding a safe path between Cosmal and the mainland. Good for us, because I’m sure you’ve heard the tales of travelers swallowed by crevasses.”

  “What about Teppo?” I asked. “If he used to be with Stormshard, wouldn’t he follow us here?”

  “I mentioned using the sea crossing for a reason. His ignorance about what had recently passed between your father and me had already made me suspicious—his excuse for leaving the stable only confirmed his guilt. He had no reason to leave the stable to fetch food. There was a full cabinet right beside us.”

  “What’s the sea crossing? I thought the only way off the peninsula was through the Crease.”

  “Most people believe the same. But there’s a channel off the eastern coast where the Maelstrom is almost predictable. It only works if you’re traveling north, and even then, you’re more likely to be shipwrecked than survive.”

  I grimaced at the idea of people desperate enough to take such a chance, but then realized I was in a similar predicament. “You think Teppo believed you?”

  “He never was very bright—he’s probably waiting for us on the beach now. In any case, once someone goes snitch, the smugglers sniff them out within weeks. He won’t know the location of this track.”

  “I hope you’re right,” I said.

  “Being forced to choose between poor options is never a good situation, but I wouldn’t suggest this if I didn’t believe we’d be safe. I couldn’t bear to fail my vow to your father.”

  Swallowing, I nodded.

  At sunrise, we set foot in the Crease. We’d finished the last swallows from our waterskin when I’d awakened, and my throat already burned with thirst. But Havialo assured me we’d find water on the other side.

  Above, the sky was an even, steely gray. The overcast made my nerves prick, bringing back memories of ear-splitting cracks, flashes of lightning, the screams of horses. The trail passed beneath towering cliffs of crumbling dirt and across slopes so steep that every footfall released an avalanche of dirt. Sometimes, we stepped over cracks in the earth so deep their bottoms were lost in blackness.

  Cairns marked the trail about every hundred paces, scraps of colorful fabric stuffed between the stones.

  “So much power waiting here,” Havialo muttered as he paused at one of the rock stacks.

  “I’ve never met a geognost,” I said.

  He glanced over his shoulder. “As you can see, we’re rather ordinary, despite our reputation.”

  Was he just being modest? Earth magic—at least as far as we’d been taught—was by far the most powerful force in the Empire. I’d hardly have called that ordinary.

  “You can harness the power of an earthquake, right? Does that mean you can tell whether the ground under the trail is stable?”

  He cast me an ironic smile. “I’m not sure you really want to know what’s going on under this particular trail. Especially since it’s our only way forward. But as to harnessing a quake, it’s more like I can sense where I might nudge the land to breaking—which in the Crease is just about anywhere. If I did, I could gather the sudden release of energy and use it. But I can’t predict how one shift might cascade across the area. For all I know, a wave of earth might bury Dukket Waystation.”

  “But sometimes you can predict what will happen. Even redirect the energy, right?”

  He nodded. “When I… stopped the registrar, I focused the energy of the storm. All the lightning that might have struck came down at once. But it was a close thing. I barely kept control.”

  Stepping around a switchback, he began ascending the slope in the opposite direction. Dirt loosed from his steps poured into the tops of my shoes. I hurried out from beneath him. After another couple of turns, we reached something of a plateau. Atop this flat stretch of land, a few plants had dared to take root. Footprints crossed the block of earth to the far side where another cairn marked the descent from the tabletop of land.

  I hurried forward to walk next to him. “Will you tell me about Stormshard? If my father is part of it, I should be prepared.”

  His steps faltered. “A description of Stormshard depends on who you ask. I’d tell you it’s a failed resistance movement. A flame that guttered out for lack of air and fuel. Your father disagrees, I’m sure.”

  “Teppo made it sound like you were kicked out.”

  He walked faster, almost as if he could outrun my question. “That’s open to interpretation.”

  “He said you betrayed my father.”

  Havialo froze in his tracks and whirled to face me. “Teppo had no right to accuse. Your father is like a brother to me.”

  The anger on his face stole the words from my mouth. Swallowing, I nodded. Still, I noticed he hadn’t explained the situation, either.

  “If you feel Stormshard is misguided, do you think I should be worried about reuniting with my father? And how does that fit in with making me a scribe.”

  He pressed his lips together. “Your father’s heart is in the right place. Everyone associated with his… movement cares deeply about the cause. And he cares for you. Because of our history, I am committed to bringing you to him. As for receiving your scribe’s writ, it’s not part of my promise. But what if you don’t care to live a Sharder’s outlaw life? Consider it a gift from me if you like. A legitimate Function and the chance at a normal life. If you want it, anyway.”

  I wasn’t sure what to say. He was giving me a choice between following my father’s path and starting a new life far from my family and everyone I’d known. I wouldn't be ready to choose until I saw my father again. But I appreciated what the mage was offering.

  After another hundred paces, we reached the edge of the plateau and stopped. I stared over the brink, spine tingling at the
drop and the trail’s next segment.

  From the edge, a rope bridge stretched across a hundred paces of open air. Wooden pegs had been pounded into the earth to secure the bridge on both sides.

  “Care to go first?” Havialo asked.

  “Didn’t you have some promise you wanted to keep? Something about delivering me to my father safely?”

  He rolled his eyes before setting foot on the bridge. “Never trust a flame-haired woman,” he muttered.

  ***

  We descended from the Cosmal Crease, haggard and parched, hours after we’d started across the smuggler’s track. A small stream trickled along the base of the slope. I fell to my knees and drank so fast my head ached from the cold.

  “You’ll need to stay here,” the geognost said after he’d taken his own drink. “It may be tomorrow before I’m back.”

  I looked around. The ground at the base of the Crease was broken and boulder-strewn, providing plenty of shelter. Scattered pine trees broke the rubble, the forest growing thicker toward the north. We’d be traveling that direction, I assumed, though my knowledge of mainland geography was sparse.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Supplies. Scorlit Post sits near the exit of the Imperial Crossing. An hour’s walk from here.”

  A boulder stood between me and the forest. As I stepped around it, a strange roar seemed to rise from the trees.

  “Do you hear that?” I asked.

  “The famous winds of Guralan Province. You’ll have the pleasure soon.”

  I grimaced and slipped back into the shadow of the boulder, blocking most of the sound. “I’m tired, but I can walk another hour. I'll go with you so you won't have to come all the way back for me.”

  He’d been reorganizing the saddlebag, digging out the waterskin. When I spoke, he froze for a moment.