by Will Wight
“Yes. I think you are.” Kelarac stroked his short beard, deliberating. “I have a servant in your area who might serve you well. Yes, very well indeed. But there is, of course, the matter of price.”
Calder nodded to the invested odds and ends displayed on the table. “Those are quality work. They represent months of my time and Intent. Surely, they are valuable enough to warrant this one small task.”
Behind the metal blindfold, Kelarac’s eyebrows raised. “These? These are the gifts you offer for the pleasure of my hospitality. If you wish to make a transaction with me, then I require something more substantial.”
“Not my soul,” Calder said quickly. Painful as it was to die in Candle Bay, he didn’t want that fate hanging over his afterlife.
Kelarac waved one jeweled hand. “What is a soul? Despite the name I was given by men, I do not understand souls. I like the title because ‘Soul Collector’ implies that I own humans in their entirety. Minds. Bodies. Service. These things I understand.”
Was it worth living, if it meant servitude to a nameless Elder beneath the sea?
If it means Jerri and my father go free, then yes.
“How much of my service might this cost me?”
Kelarac laughed again. “I collect whole objects, Reader of Memory, not pieces. To that end, I require something else that I believe is in your possession. A small copper key.”
Calder’s mind flashed to the Emperor’s key. Jerri should have had it, which meant it should be in his coat!
“You have a deal,” Calder said quickly, before the Elder could change his mind. He patted down the pockets of the coat until he located the key, holding it out for Kelarac.
The Great Elder shook his head. “We exist right now only in this dream-space. Give the key to me when you return to the cold, and the dark. Then my Lyathatan will come to your aid.”
Calder stood up, buttoning his coat as though he meant to walk out into the winter wind. “A pleasure doing business with you, Lord Kelarac.”
Kelarac drummed ringed fingers on his display table. “A word to the youthful, child. Alchemy is a new discipline, but we had addictive substances of our own when I walked this earth. Among the purveyors of such blends, there is a saying. I believe it has survived into this era. ‘The first taste is always free,’ yes?”
He smiled his gold-capped smile. “I hope you enjoyed your first taste, Calder Marten. I do look forward to the second.”
Then the cold, dark water came crashing back.
~~~
Calder climbed up onto the rocks of the bay with just enough strength to breathe. Jerri hauled him up as his father stood dumbly nearby, watching.
“I hope you found some help down there,” Jerri said.
He looked up at her, a little disappointed. “A little concern would be appreciated, thank you.”
“You said to trust you.” She smiled and placed a hand on his wet coat. “I trusted you.”
If he was anything but freezing, that would have warmed him. As it was, he tried to smile through his violent shivers.
“I’m glad to hear that,” he said. Then he threw the Emperor’s key into the water.
She watched the copper flash as it fell into the darkness. “I take it back. I don’t trust you anymore.”
“Trust me.”
“No, it’s too late for that now.”
There came the sound of something slapping against rock, and they turned. The prison guards had thrown down a ladder and were descending, pistols or batons in hand, to the rocks.
“I’m going back,” Rojric whispered, and Calder couldn’t tell if he sounded terrified or delighted. “They’re taking me back!”
Across the bay, a huge construction of wooden planks and boards shook like a rattled cage.
Calder pointed with one shaking hand. “Lady, gentleman, I believe our transportation has arrived.”
The wooden scaffolding, which had surrounded The Testament like a cage for two years, exploded outward in a shower of splinters. Debris the size of small trees flew halfway across Candle Bay, sending up sprays of water wherever they landed.
When the air between them cleared, the dark green ship was sailing toward the rocks. No wind filled its sails because there were no sails to fill, but still the ship slid across the black glass of Candle Bay.
Its wake stretched behind it like a bridal train, but a ripple preceded the ship as well. Almost as though something huge were swimming in front. Dragging the ship along.
When the vessel loomed over them, the guards backed against the walls of the prison in panic. They knew what haunted the Aion Sea, and nothing that dragged a ship behind it could be anything less than a monster.
Calder turned his back to the ship. He grinned at Jerri and his father.
“I’d like to introduce my friend, the Lyathatan.” The ship slowly ground to a halt.
Rojric looked confused. “Is that...the name of the ship?”
“No, the ship is The Testament. The Lyathatan is...” Calder gestured to the bay, sure that this time his timing would be perfect.
The ship creaked as it settled in the water. A rain of droplets flowed down its wooden sides in a steady patter.
He gestured again. No Elderspawn appeared.
“There’s supposed to be a huge monster pulling the ship,” he said at last.
The guards decided that moment to rush the rocks. Rojric stepped forward, holding out his wrists to be shackled.
“No!” Calder shouted. He reached into his coat for an iron spike—if it worked on Elders, it would surely do something unpleasant to a living man. Jerri, for some reason, reached up to her earring.
And finally, the Lyathatan burst out of the water.
It lunged up like a cannon-shot, a giant creature shaped like a man and standing even taller out of the bay than The Testament’s mast. Moonlight rippled over its fish-like scales, shining through the ridges running down its spine. Its six-fingered hands were webbed and tipped with nails like spikes. Shackles wrapped around each scaled wrist, attached to chains that led beneath the ship.
And its face...a shark’s mouth with three black eyes on either side of its head. Gills flared on its short, muscular neck.
Calder’s breath left him, but he forced a smile. “You...see?” he asked, teeth chattering from cold and fear. “He fights with us!”
The Lyathatan let out a hiss as loud as a roar, like air shrieking through a thousand teakettles.
One of the guards raised his pistol and fired in a puff of smoke. It did exactly what Calder had expected: nothing except to make the Elderspawn target that particular victim first.
Its claws closed on the guard, deceptively fast, and then the Lyathatan swallowed him whole.
“Fire!” someone yelled, and then muskets were firing from the top of the prison, all aimed at the monster.
Calder wasn’t going to wait to get hit by an enthusiastic marksman or a rampaging creature. He grabbed his father, scrambling for the edge of the rocks, aiming to swim for one of the last construction materials to cling to The Testament: a rope ladder dangling from its side.
“No!” Rojric yelled, struggling. “Not in the water! Not with that thing!”
Calder had to admit, his father’s fears were reasonable. Normally, he wouldn’t want to be anywhere within ten miles of anything that looked like the Lyathatan.
But of all the things he’d ever heard about Kelarac, he’d never heard anyone say that the Great Elder ever broke his bargains.
He grabbed his father and shoved him into the water.
Calder turned to Jerri, planning to help her down, but she had already executed a perfect dive into the waters of Candle Bay. Far from showing terror, she actually stopped to tread water underneath the Lyathatan, staring up at its gargantuan body with a grin on her face.
Suddenly, his expression matched hers. He’d almost gotten her arrested, summoned a monster, and told her to swim through ice-cold water for the dubious safety of an Elder-pulled un
finished ship...and she looked like she was having the time of her life.
I’m going to marry that woman, he thought, and jumped into Candle Bay.
The climb up the rope ladder qualified as one of the most tense, frightening, and exhilarating things he’d ever done. Musket-balls tore finger-sized holes out of the hull, the Lyathatan raged and smashed men into rocks, guards shouted, and water rushed in a deafening cacophony. As the monster fought, the chains jerked the boat this way and that, making the ladder swing against the hull.
Rojric reached the ship first, and he simply stood around and shivered. Jerri climbed up next, heading straight for the ship’s wheel.
“I don’t know how to steer a ship!” she shouted, over the noise.
Neither did Calder. “Turn it! Turn it!”
She spun the wheel, and the ship turned slightly, but it couldn’t fight against the monstrous strength of the Lyathatan, who simply jerked The Testament back into place.
“We’ll need something better than that!”
Calder dropped to his knees, which felt surprisingly good. The cold and the exertion were sapping his strength, demanding that he relax, shouting at him to stay off his feet. He leaned over, which felt like collapsing, and pressed both his hands against the deck.
And, focusing his mind, he entered a Reader’s trance.
Sometimes, when he Read an object, he would see a clear vision of its creation or its lifetime of use. Other times, he would merely feel impressions: echoes of its Intent.
This time, his mind plunged through the ship and into a library of sensations. His mother, perusing the plans for the ship, pointing out potential problems. Laying its skeleton, putting her time and sweat and Intent into every beam.
He felt himself, like echoes of an old, familiar song. He’d paced every step of this deck a hundred times, pouring his focus and drops of his blood into the ship’s skin, its flesh, its heart. The chains, he and his mother had worked on together—turning each link into an addition to the whole rather than a separate entity, shaping the shackles until they could compel even an Elder creature to work for the good of the ship.
There were other minds here, of course. Every worker who had pounded a single nail or painted a yard of polish had invested his Intent into the ship’s memory. But there were two souls here, two voices in the chorus, that stood out among the rest.
His mother’s and his own.
In this moment, the wooden vessel felt more like a part of him than his own arm. He’d used drops of his blood when he worked on a particularly difficult piece of Reading, and now he could sense those pieces of him, tying the ship to him with a dozen knots of power.
And he could sense the true potential of The Testament, lurking beneath what he understood like a whale waiting to surface. He’d never Awakened anything before: the process was supposed to take days, even weeks of understanding the object, and even then you could never predict the full effects.
But with this ship, the project that he had helped create, it just seemed so easy.
Calder wrapped his Intent around the true significance of The Testament, its true power and purpose, and he pulled that power to the surface.
Around him, the ship changed.
Planks welded together as though the deck was made from a single, seamless plank of polished wood. Holes gouged by musket-balls filled in. The nails rippled and flowed until they melded with the planks, almost indistinguishable patches of iron strength. The hull merged smoothly until it looked like a green-black shell, the railings fusing together until the whole ship was made of a single piece. He could sense it all, the same way he could sense his own skin.
Sails unfurled from the yard like wings spreading from a dragon’s back. These weren’t made from canvas, but from a stretch of greenish skin, the material thin enough that the moon glowed through. Faintly, Calder could see veins pulsing in the sails, carrying the blood of the ship.
Through the shackles, Calder felt the Lyathatan. A being of indescribable age, vast hunger, and unknowable strangeness. It had its own goals, from those as simple as defending its territory to complex plots that Calder couldn’t comprehend. It did not resent its servitude: this was one subtle step in a long, intricate, delicate plan that would span centuries. If it stayed in thrall to Calder for the rest of his merely human life, the Lyathatan wouldn’t notice any more than a mountain noticed the dying of summer grasses. It would live on, having made another move in a game as slow and distant as the stars.
Equally, the Lyathatan felt Calder. It felt his Intent. And it obeyed.
With one clawed hand, the Elderspawn tore Candle Bay Imperial Prison open like a gutted fish.
It scraped the stone from the wall, shattering every window. Prisoners in their red jumpsuits cowered against the far wall, trapped in their tiny cells like dolls in a dollhouse. The basement was filled with one pure-white room, like a surgeon’s laboratory. Alchemists in their glass-eyed masks and long aprons ran around, shouting. At the distance of his vision, Calder saw a man, naked and strapped to a steel table. A woman pulled a syringe out of his arm and ran, screaming, from the sight of the Lyathatan.
Another mental order from Calder, and the monster ripped the room to pieces.
When it was done, Calder’s sight fuzzed at the edges. He sent one last, hazy thought to the Elderspawn and muttered a single word to Jerri.
“Steer,” he said.
Then he collapsed.
~~~
He woke with a headache that felt like someone had tried to split his skull with an axe. Sunlight streamed in through the cabin window, and he rolled out of his bunk, clutching his head in both hands.
When he groaned and wished for something to stop the pain, he lost concentration. He got a brief glimpse of a woman stitching his blankets, hoping the pattern would please her daughter, and white-hot pain shot through his brain like a lance.
No Reading! he silently begged. No Reading, no Reading, no Reading!
After a few minutes, his pain subsided, and he realized that he felt something from the side of his face. Something like a snake crawling up his cheek. He raised a hand to brush it away, but the snakes only crawled onto the back of his hand.
Calder jerked his eyes over to his shoulder, desperate to see what was crawling all over him.
Shuffles stood halfway on his shoulder, halfway on his pillow, glaring at him above its tentacle-mouth. Its wings flared.
“Shuffles,” Calder said weakly. He was surprised to find himself smiling, and he rubbed the Elderspawn’s scaly head. “What are you doing here?”
“HEEEEERE!” the monstrosity said, and flared its wings. It shuffled down to the bottom of the bed and turned, glaring at him over its shoulder.
Calder took that to mean he was supposed to get up.
A second later, someone pushed open his door, letting in a river of sunlight. He flinched back, raising his hand to cover the sight.
Rojric Marten crossed his arms over his red prison jumpsuit and smiled. “How you feeling, son?”
“Headache,” Calder grunted.
Rojric nodded reasonably. “Reader’s burn. After Alsa Awakened her saber, she couldn’t see straight for a week.”
Calder had heard of Reader’s burn, but it only happened to Readers who pushed their limits. Since he’d never felt it before, he’d always assumed that he had fewer limitations than most.
Now, his pride pounded on the inside of his skull with a five-pound hammer.
But even that couldn’t dent his satisfaction. He’d freed his father! He’d actually done it!
Calder forced a smile. “You’re out.”
Tears welled in his father’s eyes. “Yes I am, son. And I’m not going back. I keep thinking I’m going to wake up and find myself…” He took a deep breath. “You saved me. Thank you.”
Calder’s chest puffed up like a balloon, and he felt as though he could wrestle an army. Once his headache went away, anyway.
Then Jerri shouted from above, and so
mething landed on the surface of the deck.
No, not something. Someone. Someone he could feel, even through the Reader’s burn, even through the ship’s deck. And his heart quaked with a pure, instinctive fear.
“Hide,” he whispered, and staggered out of bed.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
This time, Kelarac met him on a frozen battlefield.
Calder stood in the midst of a battle locked in a single instant, as though he had stepped into a painting. Men stood behind him, rushing forward with armor and spears to meet the charge of the monsters ahead. The humans were sweating, panting, desperate; their teeth bared in defiance, boots set against the ground. Many of them had bled through their bandages, or tried to hold their armor together with nails and bits of rope.
They faced an army of nightmares. Elderspawn of every stripe; not just the Children of Nakothi, stitched and blended together from the corpses of men, but monsters of all kinds. The giant worms of Kthanikahr, stuck emerging from their burrows as though time had stopped. The shadow-men of Urg’naut, the ever-shifting soldiers of Tharlos, the amphibious hordes of Othaghor. The monstrosities filled the earth and sky, frozen in the middle of crawling toward the men like dogs to a feast.
Black smoke hung in the sky like pillars, and the sky glowed an unnatural red.
Directly in front of Calder, Kelarac lounged on his version of a throne. Two human soldiers carried a third man, injured, on their shoulders. The injured had snatched up a spear from nearby and was beginning to turn around, as though he meant to fight with a bleeding wound in his stomach.
Kelarac sat on the wounded man’s injured belly, the spearhead propping up his back. It should never have supported him, but everything in this frozen tableau was as solid as stone. He rested his feet on the helmet of one of the nearby soldiers, leaning back against the spear, and let out a satisfied sigh.
“So you come to me again, Reader of Memory,” Kelarac said. “Not so young as before, but a child still.”
Calder swept a bow. “Lord Kelarac. Your wisdom is matched only by your generosity, in deigning to appear before me.”
