Of Sea and Shadow (The Elder Empire: Sea Book 1)

by Will Wight

  At first glance, Calder thought she was his own age. Then he wondered if perhaps she might be even younger. But as she walked closer to their table, she carried herself with the businesslike bearing of a much older woman.

  She did not sit, nodding first to Alsa, and then to Calder.

  “I spoke with Cheska,” she said, and her voice was high and clear, like a child’s. “We had a visitor, didn’t we?”

  Alsa stared straight ahead, her back rigid. “Yes, ma’am. This is my son Calder, ma’am.”

  The girl looked at him without any recognizable expression. “Calder Marten. I am Bliss.”

  What kind of a name is Bliss? he wondered. And it still bothered him that he couldn’t tell how old she was.

  But his mother had called her ‘Guild Head.’

  He bowed deeply at the waist. “I’m Calder Marten, Madam Bliss. I do apologize—”

  “Just Bliss. If you like, you can call me Guild Head.” She squinted, as though she were having trouble seeing him properly. “Shouldn’t we sit, in an establishment like this?”

  In such chill and windy weather, the tea-shop was somewhat packed. Over two dozen people had turned to watch the three people in black coats, standing stiffly instead of sitting with their tea.

  Calder slid into a seat next to his mother, trying not to blush. Bliss considered her chair as though she’d never seen one before, then abruptly plopped herself down. “What has your mother told you of our project down at the harbor, Calder Marten?”

  “Nothing, Bliss, but—”

  “Guild Head,” she corrected.

  He paused for a second. She had given him permission to call her by her name, hadn’t she? But he continued nonetheless.

  “I’m sorry, Guild Head—”

  “Bliss.”

  “Bliss,” he repeated, confused.

  “Guild Head.”

  Now he was getting frustrated. He forced a smile. “What would you like me to call you, ma’am?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t care. I wanted to see how long you’d put up with it.” She poured herself a cup of tea, and Calder realized that not only had his tea arrived, but she had stolen his cup.

  He rushed on, trying not to show his irritation. “My mother hasn’t told me anything. I snuck down here against her will, because I wanted to see what she was working so hard on. And from what I can tell, your Guild is in desperate need of Readers.”

  Bliss trailed a finger in her cup of tea, drawing lazy spirals in the liquid’s surface. It was hard to tell if she was paying any attention.

  Alsa didn’t say a word. Nor did she pour herself any tea.

  “I am quite a skilled Reader, as it happens,” he went on.

  The Blackwatch Guild Head nodded absently, sticking her finger in her mouth.

  “I could work for you, on this project.”

  Now Bliss was blowing on the surface of her tea, watching the ripples bounce of the inside of the teacup.

  “I can work hard, and I can keep a secret.” He decided to play the ‘sympathetic son’ card. “It pains me to see my mother working so hard on something, and with me not able to help. I’m sure you can understand.”

  Bliss tilted her head quizzically. “No, not really.” She turned to Alsa. “Will he be a security risk?”

  “No,” Alsa said hoarsely.

  Excellent. His mother was vouching for him. If the Guild Head said he could work there, surely no one else would have any problems.

  “I’m glad,” she said. “I wanted to leave his memories intact.”

  In the cold, a drop of sweat rolled down Alsa Grayweather’s cheeks. “You brought it here?”

  “Of course I did, don’t be silly. It’s in my coat.”

  Slowly, it dawned on Calder that he might have jumped into a cauldron that was deeper and hotter than he had expected.

  “Do you know what we do at the Blackwatch, Calder Marten?” Bliss asked. She had tilted her tea saucer up on one side and was trying to spin it like a top.

  “I’m taught that you study the Elders in order to defend the Empire against them.”

  The saucer clattered to the table and she picked it up, trying again. “What do we do, though? What have you heard?”

  She sounded as if she herself wasn’t sure. “I imagine you study ancient texts of the Elder Days. Search through ruins, old journals, that kind of thing. I’ve heard that you look for Elder cults and bring them to justice.”

  Those were all safe guesses, fueled by Artur’s teaching and Calder’s own textbooks. Even when he surreptitiously Read his mother’s belongings, he got the impression of a woman who spent most of her time researching and the rest traveling.

  Finally, Bliss got the saucer to spin on its own. “Why would we need to search through ancient journals, Calder Marten? We can study the Elders now. Here. Under scalpel and scope.”

  He couldn’t tell if she was joking or not, but he smiled to show her that he wouldn’t be easily fooled. “I’m sure their remains still exist, but it can’t be the same as when they were actually...roaming the...”

  Calder trailed off. The saucer, instead of slowing down, had begun to spin faster and faster. Bliss wasn’t touching it; indeed, she seemed not to notice.

  With an audible ‘whoosh,’ one of the other diners burst into flames.

  He jerked his head over to get a closer look, but the woman seemed fine, flipping her news-sheet over to read the back.

  Something slithered behind the counter, dragging wet tentacles across the tiled floor. When he looked closer, he saw nothing, not even a trail of slime. Had he imagined it, in the corner of his eye? Or was it lurking out of sight?

  The windows in the front of the shop shattered, spraying shards all over the room. His eyes snapped to them, but the glass was smooth and whole.

  All the while, the saucer spun faster and faster. A wisp of smoke rose from the tabletop.

  Bliss took a sip of her tea, and then turned the cup upside-down. Nothing spilled. “If you want to play on our side, you should at least know the game. The Elders are not gone, Calder Marten. They’re not dead. Most of them are not even sleeping. They are here, all around us, and the only ones standing between you and their endless hunger are a handful of soldiers in black.”

  A dark fog rolled in through the walls, billowing closer and closer. He jerked back, almost knocking his chair over, and spun around to run, but the fog closed in from all directions. Something moved in the darkness, a misshapen shadow. A wet piece of meat—warm and sticky—slid down his back, and he fumbled with his coat, but then a hand reached out of the fog for his face. He jerked back, raising his arm to shield his eyes.

  The saucer fell to a stop, clattering on the tabletop. Everything was normal: the fog was gone, the tea-shop spotless, the air clear and the light sunny.

  Except that the other diners had vanished. Only three people now sat at the shop—two seated women and one young man, standing alone and shivering, all three wearing black.

  Bliss replaced something in the inner pocket of her coat, something that looked like a spike of yellowed bone. “We can’t afford to hire people part-time, Calder Marten. There are things waiting for us in the dark places of the earth, and you will either stand with us against them, or you will stand aside.”

  Shaking, sheathed in sweat, and trembling, Calder forced a smile. “That sounds like a challenge.”

  The Blackwatch Guild Head took another sip of her tea. “It can be challenging.”

  “I still want to help.” What he wanted was to run home and curl up under his bed until he stopped shaking, but he couldn’t back down now.

  Bliss tossed something down on the table. It was a metal badge, a little smaller than the tea-saucer, marked with the Crest of the Blackwatch. A squirming mass of tentacles overlaid by six inhuman eyes.

  “Welcome to the Blackwatch,” she said. “I’m glad you got to live. I like Alsa, and I don’t think she would have been happy if I had killed her son.” Bliss looked around. �
��I don’t see the shopkeeper. Should I leave payment on the table, or wait until she returns?”

  “I will take care of it, Guild Head. Don’t worry.”

  Bliss nodded precisely. “I see. Then I will pay for the tea next time, because that is fair. Now I will leave, so that your son can express his fear to you in private.”

  After the Guild Head left, Calder dropped into a chair. Not the seat Bliss had used; that one, he nudged away from him with his foot.

  He couldn’t seem to stop trembling.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered eventually.

  She looked almost as shaken up as he felt. “I had no idea she was even in the city. She was supposed to be gone for months, capturing a nest of Crawlers down in Erin.” Alsa gathered herself, jabbing a finger at him as though she meant to skewer him with it. “And that’s why I tried to keep you away from my work!”

  “Believe me, I wish I’d listened.”

  There were a few more moments of silence between them.

  At last, Alsa cracked a smile. “I knew you’d end up in a Guild.”

  ~~~

  When he finally returned to the house, and endured a lecture from Artur and a stern glare from Vorus, Calder made his way up to his room. Jyrine was waiting for him in the hall outside, almost bouncing with excitement.

  “You made it!” she said. “I knew you would, when your mother caught me. What was it? Was it a ship? What happened?”

  Mute, Calder pressed the Blackwatch badge into her hand. He ignored her gasp of shock and her string of further questions as he pushed his way through the door, crawled under his bed, and curled up in the dark. Shivering.

  CHAPTER NINE

  “I can’t believe there’s nothing here,” Naberius said a week later, as they anchored outside the island.

  Calder pulled on his hat, checked his pistol, and loosened the cutlass sheathed at his hip. “Don’t worry, the island is disturbing enough.”

  It was true. The ‘island’ resembled nothing more than an expanse of pale, flabby flesh, with fronds of black seaweed growing here and there like patches of hair. In the distance, ten arched towers curved together in two rows of five. Between the arrangement and the yellow-white color of the towers, it resembled the rib cage of a giant.

  As far as Calder knew, it could have been exactly that. He wasn’t about to make assumptions when it came to an island haunted by a Great Elder.

  “Everyone exaggerates!” Urzaia called. “That is what makes a good story!”

  Naberius tossed his black curls behind his shoulder. “I tell you, this island and the sea around it were both crawling with abominations. I was not exaggerating. Was I, Tristania?”

  The Silent One shook her head once.

  “You see?”

  “I could never doubt such enthusiastic testimony,” Andel said. His round white hat shaded his eyes, his suit was spotless, and he had both pistol and sword buckled at his hip. The silver pendant of the White Sun hung on his chest, glistening in the noon sunlight.

  Naberius smoothed out his suit, which for once was a dark, subdued shade of blue. “I suppose I shouldn’t question providence. This makes it much safer to go ashore.”

  Calder focused on his Vessel, extending a ramp down. It hit the island’s shore with the smack of wood against flesh instead of crunching against sand.

  This island continued to disturb him, for reasons even beyond the obvious. Not only was it frightening to behold, there was no gradual transition between sea and land, as he had expected. The ship could get within five yards of the shore without problem. Based on what he Read from the Lyathatan, Calder discovered that the “island” actually curved up on the bottom. As though it were floating on the surface of the water instead of resting on the ocean floor.

  Like a giant corpse, bobbing on the ocean.

  No use worrying about it now, he thought. For the moment, the eerie island served their purpose admirably. He could get closer than he had ever dared to hope, and he wouldn’t need to send the Witnesses ashore in a rowboat.

  It meant that, if he had to abandon them, at least he wouldn’t lose a boat.

  The Chronicler and his Silent One were all the way down before they realized that no one else had followed them.

  The crew of The Testament stood on deck, dressed for battle. All except Petal, who must have stayed below deck—Calder hadn’t really expected her anyway.

  “The day isn’t getting any younger,” Naberius said impatiently.

  Andel finished lacing up one of his boots. “Neither are we.”

  No one else moved.

  For the amount Naberius was paying, Calder supposed he owed the man an explanation. “Good hunting, Naberius. We brought you here. Now you can take as long as you need to find your artifact, and we’ll be here waiting.”

  The Chronicler’s expression darkened, and Tristania patted him on the shoulder. “What if Shera decides to attack us while we’re running around on our own?”

  “You should run back to us,” Urzaia suggested. “As fast as you can. You get back here, and we will protect you.”

  “This was not why I hired you, Captain Marten.”

  Calder widened his eyes, adopting a surprised expression. “Isn’t it? I was under the impression that we were supposed to deliver you, and then you would find the artifact on your own.”

  “I was under the impression that your crew would provide me with assistance and security.”

  “It would be difficult to assist you if we don’t even know what we’re looking for.”

  Naberius tapped his thumbs together, thinking. “I can see why you’d be reluctant,” he said at last. “I have somewhat kept you in the dark, so to speak. For instance, it’s possible that I may have understated the scale of this operation.”

  Andel stepped forward, putting a hand on his pistol. “Explain yourself.”

  But Calder had an idea. A premonition, maybe. He reached into his coat, pulling out a spyglass, and examined the crest of the island. At first he saw nothing except the island’s grisly geography, but after a moment, a few dark spots rose up from behind the hill. Ten figures walked up from the other side, dark silhouettes in black coats.

  “Light and life,” Calder muttered.

  Naberius sounded supremely proud of himself. “I wasn’t planning to pick up a shovel and dig for myself.”

  The men and women in black walked closer, and Calder waited for a look at one detail: the metal crest pinned on the breast of each coat. His heart sank as the details sharpened into visibility.

  A nest of tentacles overlaid by six inhuman eyes. The Elder’s Eyes. Crest of the Blackwatch.

  Calder folded his spyglass and tucked it back into his coat. “Change of plans. Now we’re definitely staying on the ship.”

  Andel squinted into the sun, watching the black-coated strangers approach. “How is that a change of plans?”

  “Before, I was open to persuasion. Now I am possessed of the firm and unyielding conviction that we need to stay aboard. If you’ll excuse me, I’ll be in my cabin, filling out the paperwork to legally change my name.”

  Minutes later, from his cabin, Calder heard muffled voices as the Watchmen and Naberius exchanged greetings with the crew.

  He forced himself to relax. Andel would speak for him, and he could trust his Quartermaster to cover for him. As long as he had the presence of mind to not mention Calder’s name, they’d be fine. And even if the Watchman asked...well, it wasn’t like Calder knew everyone in the whole Blackwatch Guild. What were the odds that someone he knew would be on this island at this moment?

  “Captain Calder Marten,” a man called from outside, and Calder sighed.

  “We would like to request your cooperation in this matter, sir. My commander wants to speak with you personally.”

  Calder emerged from his cabin with a charming smile. He adjusted his hat and ran a hand down his coat, as though he had only left to make himself presentable. “Of course, of course! I needed a moment to compo
se myself. Andel, gather Petal. We’re headed ashore.”

  He was rewarded with a rare look of surprise on his Quartermaster before the man headed down to the hold to carry out his orders.

  Calder marched down the ramp, his crew trickling along behind him. On the shore waited the two Witnesses and most of a dozen Blackwatch, each of them standing casually. They didn’t act like an armed escort, which was a relief. At least none of them seemed to hold a grudge.

  Naberius wore a smug look, arms folded. “I’m glad you decided to join us, Captain.”

  “I couldn’t miss the chance to learn about your mysterious artifact, could I? You’ve been so coy about it for these past weeks, and I do love surprises.” Calder smiled cheerily in the Chronicler’s face.

  The Watchman that seemed to be the leader, a white-haired man in a rumpled uniform, nodded to Calder. “Pleased to meet you, Captain Marten. I’ve heard a lot about you.”

  Calder winced. “I was afraid of that.”

  “Don’t worry, I don’t hold a young man’s foolishness against him. We’ve all broken out of prisons.”

  That was surprisingly understanding of a member of the Blackwatch, even if it did make Calder wonder about the old man’s past.

  “So...what have you heard, then?”

  The old man met his eyes. “That you’re on the right side. Everything else is secondary.”

  Calder looked around the group and saw the same respect on nine other Watchmen. He wasn’t prepared for the emotion that welled up inside of him at that moment—for one moment, he thought he might tear up.

  How would that affect their picture of me, I wonder?

  He cleared his throat. “Thank you, Watchman. I appreciate your understanding.”

  The old man gave him one quick nod, as though that were the only response he had expected. Naberius, meanwhile, silently worked his jaw. The Chronicler forced a smile.

  “Let us abandon this beach before more Children show up. I need to speak with your commander on a matter of some urgency.”