Severance
Book One of The Sovereign
Michael Pritsos
&
Jessica Mastorakos
Severance is a work of fiction. Any names, characters, places, and incidents are purely part of the authors’ imaginations. Resemblance to actual events or persons is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2014 Michael Pritsos & Jessica Mastorakos
All rights reserved.
Cover Art by Kat Mellon
Cover Design by Zographos
Edited by Little Green Eyed Press
To order additional copies please contact:
Nyx Writing Syndicate
[email protected]
ISBN: 978-1500392710
This book is dedicated to our families, for their unwavering support and encouragement, we thank you.
Prologue
Wailing of newborns could be heard from down the hallway as the two officials strode quietly to the nursery. Each man carried a wax candle with a cupped hand to shield the flame. Upon entering the nursery, they broke apart and went to the infants. The room was still dim with four torches providing light from each corner. The younger official smiled as he looked down on the inquisitive faces of each boy and girl.
“Jacob,” the older man called from the other side of the room. “Careful not to spill the wax.”
“I know,” Jacob replied curtly. He rolled his eyes and felt a slight tension in the room as his superior trespassed into his mind. “I know how to do my job,” Jacob thought flippantly.
“I merely wished to remind you of the children’s fragility. Watch the flame,” Esau answered without looking at his young companion.
Jacob guarded his thoughts and turned to the small girl before him. He held the candle above her cradle. The flame captured her attention quickly. Her hazel eyes watched it, cooing with interest. The flame flickered and danced and Jacob smiled satisfactorily before turning to the next child. This one was a boy, pale in complexion with blond hair that complimented his green eyes. The boy was bigger than the girl, and much more attentive. The flame danced wildly under the child’s gaze and Jacob hurried quickly away before it could be guttered out. The boy had what looked like a satisfied smile on his face, though Jacob knew he should be much too young for such an expression.
“They look good, yes?” Esau thought from across the nursery.
Jacob rolled his eyes. “I told you I want you to speak aloud. Things are too quiet in this world for us not to hear one another’s voices from time to time.”
“You must have had a strange upbringing,” Esau said with a scratchy voice. He cleared his throat. “My parents rarely spoke.”
Jacob could hardly care about Esau’s childhood.
“I heard that,” the elder official thought with agitation.
Jacob walked silently to the next cradle. There was something odd about this child. Its thoughts wandered as the others did but it showed little interest in the candle Jacob carried. He moved the flame closer to the boy until it was inches from his amber gaze. The boy stared at the fire but soon found more curiosity in Jacob’s eyes.
“What’s wrong?” Esau asked. He moved from the girl he was testing to Jacob’s side and held his candle low for the infant to have two flames to play with. Instead of watching the fire dance for him, the boy yawned, his eyes fluttering to bring sleep.
“Perhaps he was premature?” Jacob suggested, barely above a whisper.
“You know he’s not,” Esau answered. “This child’s thoughts are different than the others. They look about the world around them with the hunger of knowledge; this one wishes for sleep and his mother’s breast.”
“Do not all children think such thoughts?” Jacob asked. He’d held his job for close to a year now, but encountering the primitive beings first hand was still something he knew nothing about. Jacob was perturbed by the callousness he detected in Esau’s voice. He wondered if Esau had always been this way, or if this was the result of many years in this profession. Jacob shuddered at the thought of one day becoming so cold toward infants like this one. The boy was still an innocent babe, after all. Jacob belatedly realized that he should not be thinking such thoughts. He needed a distraction. He began counting the infants in the room.
“There are nineteen,” Esau said suddenly. “Do you wish to tell his parents or should I?”
“I’m still not wholly convinced,” Jacob replied. “Perhaps if we came back tomorrow—”
“We have no time for that,” Esau said. “The child is born with… flaws. Accept it and move on, Jacob. I’ll tell his parents. There are still three more hospitals in Vulcan we have to check before we can leave to check one of the dilapidated villages around this city.”
“I’ll tell his parents,” Jacob said. “I have to learn how to do it at some point. Will you prepare the boy?”
“He’ll be ready by the time you’re back.”
Jacob nodded and checked the number on the cradle. Head down and shoulders heavy with the weight of his impending message, he slowly made his way to the room labeled Alpha-17. Before he even got there he could see down the hall to where the parents talked silently. The boy’s father was standing over his exhausted wife. She looked exhausted as she lay in the bed where she’d delivered what seemed to be their only son. Her husband stroked her tousled brown hair and whispered lovingly to her. She smiled sweetly for him and they looked so happy. Jacob felt a pang in his heart. This is not their child anymore, he thought grimly in an attempt to push away the emotion. Yet how could it not be? The boy’s olive complexion and dark hair matched his father’s. His mother’s big amber eyes could be seen halfway down the hall to serve as a mirror for the infant’s own.
The parents looked up as Jacob walked into the room. Immediately their faces changed and the grip of the mother’s hand fastened quickly to the father’s.
“I’m so sorry,” Jacob began.
“No,” the boy’s father said. He fell to his knees and Jacob felt his thoughts as a waterfall of pain and frustration. His wife began to seize with sobs and reached out to stroke her husband’s dark hair.
“The boy will live, you should have the comfort of knowing,” Jacob said in his best attempt to sound formal enough to fit the title he carried. He was an official of Vulcan, charged with the testing of children six days out of the week to ensure that good births would mean good future citizens of Gaia. Citizens that had no defects.
The boy’s father howled in agony and then looked up with tears in his eyes. “Is this our lot in life?” he asked to no one in particular. “Why have the gods cursed us so?”
“You will have more children,” Jacob declared, “children without flaws. The boy is yours no longer. He is Thalassan now.”
The official turned to leave and heard the grief behind him as he walked. The grey stones of the corridor stretched from meters to miles with each step. He was halfway down the hallway when the thoughts of the parents finally began to fade. Jacob took a deep breath and walked back into the nursery where the boy was already wrapped in swaddling clothes and deep in slumber. Esau held him like a sack of vegetables.
“Let’s go find him transport,” Esau said as his protégé entered the room.
*
“Another shipment of spearheads for you,” Cosimo declared as he brought his wagon to a halt before his customer.
The soldier wiped the grogginess from his eyes before he hopped onto the back of the wagon. There were two crates, one large and one much smaller. The smaller one was open and appeared to be filled with blankets. He paid little attention to the rest of the contents. The soldier lifted the lid of the larger cr
ate and brushed aside the dry hay to see the metal beneath. Whistling satisfaction, he hopped back down and smiled at the traveling merchant. “I tell you, Vulcan makes the best weapons money can buy,” the soldier stated.
“It’ll be the usual price,” Cosimo began. “At two silvers a head, and two hundred heads in the crate, that’s four hundred silvers, Gerard. Or six pieces of gold and change, should you have it.”
“The garrison only lets me deal in silver,” Gerard answered. “Too easy to replace the gold with brass, they think.”
“Silver can be replaced with nickel just as easily,” the merchant said. “Don’t try it on me, though.”
Gerard went to his outpost, a small guard’s station meant for two just outside the garrison’s stone walls. He was only tasked to purchase spearheads once every couple months or so. The rest of the time he spent checking everyone as they passed through or jotting the names of the soldiers leaving their small fort. The garrison was only one of six that sat on the outskirts of Tellus, and nothing compared to the vast base within the walls of the Citadel. Gerard was Cosimo’s only military customer but he hoped that that would change as more steel was brought from Vulcan to show its superiority over iron.
Gerard brought the merchant a heavy sack of coins. “Your blacksmith should think of moving to Tellus. There would plenty of work for him here once people got a look at this metal. Just as strong as iron but no brittleness. It doesn’t rust, you once told me?”
“It does but it’s much slower to rust than iron,” Cosimo replied. He took the bag from the soldier and dumped it on the wooden floor of his wagon to check the coins easier. Though he sensed no deception from Gerard that did not mean the garrison commanders would not try and pull one over by sneaking a couple dozen tin coins into the mix.
“Your man does a good piece of work,” Gerard said. “Perhaps I should command him to move here?”
“Ferrer stays in Vulcan because he has family there and a life,” Cosimo stated. “Would you have me out of work?”
Gerard laughed. “You would do fine, I’m sure. You have something else you’re delivering anyway, I saw.”
“It’s a child,” Cosimo said curtly. “I’m not typically in the orphan business.”
Gerard turned his nose as if he just smelt a foul stench and spit on the ground. “Thalassan?”
“Yes, a bothersome one as well,” the merchant answered. “He’s nearly drank all the milk they gave me for the trip with him and I never signed up for changing dirty linens. My own kids are well past that stage, but it was always the missus who took care of that task. This nasty bastard is lucky I want to get paid. I’d let the linens go unchanged, but I know enough to know that I won’t get my money if I hand over a dead baby.”
The soldier laughed again. “You are a heartless one, aren’t you?”
“I’m no wet-nurse,” Cosimo growled. “The sooner I deliver this child to transport, alive and well enough, the better. Everything seems to be in order.”
Gerard waited until Cosimo gathered up all the coins once more into the bag and they both climbed aboard the wagon to let down a wobbly ramp to carry the crates down. Working together they grunted with the weight and left the boxes outside the outpost door for Gerard said that was where the men would come to pick them up anyway. With two loud bangs on the oak gate’s doors the men on the other side of the wall began to open the way for the merchant and his wagon.
Cosimo nodded a curt goodbye to the soldier and got back into his wagon’s seat. He snapped the reins on the lumbering mules before him and with a jolt they started forward through the gate’s opening. With the sudden movement a wail emerged from under the blankets in the wagon. Cosimo scowled in agitation.
* *
The young captain tapped his foot up and down on the deck of his ship. They were to leave at daybreak and the eastern sky was already filling with a dull grey that suggested the sun would rear its bright head soon. The soft echoes of crying could be heard below deck and he was eager to set sail. It was only the tediousness of a schedule that made him delay their departure. The schedule of a tardy Gaian diplomat.
“How long to depart, Thomas?” one of his sailors inquired.
“It’s Captain now, Hadrian,” Thomas said as a gentle reminder. The sailor had been an oarsman with the captain when he was a mere eighteen years old. They had served many days at sea together without titles putting any man the lesser, but when a diplomat is the cargo there must be a certain level of respect observed.
“My apologies, Captain,” Hadrian said. “How long to depart?”
“Dawn,” Thomas stated. He glanced to the east once more and found the grey transforming into a lighter shade of blue. It would be any time now yet still the old fool was not on board.
“I’m eager to depart this time,” Hadrian announced. “It gets easier every time. It’s something like a breath of fresh air to be there amongst the Thalassans. No guarding certain thoughts, constantly speaking aloud instead of lingering in one another’s minds. It’s refreshing, you know?”
“Aye,” Thomas said. “That it is. Where is the ambassador?”
Just as he was said it he saw a middle-aged man carrying a bundle and walking up the stony steps of the dock towards Thomas’ vessel, the Phoros. The young captain quickly curbed his thinking and waved.
“You were thinking I would be late, I bet,” the middle-aged man said as he approached the boarding ramp. He smiled. “Well you were thinking wrong, looks like.”
“A pleasant surprise to have you on time,” Thomas said returning the smile. “I only jest. What is that burden you carry?”
“This is a child,” the diplomat stated and looked at the sleeping infant’s face. “Another one to add to your cargo. Some merchant was carrying the wailing thing in a wagon and I could hear it throughout Tellus. He was on the way to the dock and expected coin to deliver it. I gave him a silver piece and sent the disgruntled fellow on his way. I only had to walk with the child for a hundred yards!”
Hadrian took a tally on a wax tablet. “That totals us at thirty and six this month, Thom—Captain.”
“Thank you, Hadrian,” Thomas said. Motioning towards the diplomat he added, “Would you like to relieve Lord Zacchaeus of the child?”
“Oh, of course,” Hadrian stuttered. He tucked his wax tablet and stylus away and began to move toward the diplomat who held back for a moment.
“I think it makes me look rather presentable, don’t you?” Zacchaeus asked Thomas, a hint of a smile playing at his lips. “Perhaps the Thalassans will be more inclined to accept our demands of higher taxes if they see the Gaian diplomat stepping off the boat with child in hand like a figure from an epic poem come to life.”
Thomas chuckled to satisfy the diplomat but in truth felt a twinge of unease. He stowed his thoughts of Thalassans away for a moment and motioned once more for Hadrian to take the child below deck. Zacchaeus boarded with all the grace of a bag of sand. As soon as his fine leather boots touched the wood of the deck, he chin lifted with an air of superiority. He barked out orders for the ramp to be stored away and the oars to be put to the water. He even began clapping to the beat of the oars, but as the man possessed no rhythm, Thomas took over that role until the oarmaster could find his drum.
Fifteen oars on each side of the vessel plunged in and out of the water, propelling the seventy-foot craft forward at a pace that would have them reaching the sea by the end of the next day. They can stow those oars soon, Thomas thought while the wind tugged at his clothing. The Phoros was a cog built for average speed with its ability to travel over a hundred miles a day, whether being rowed or under sail, its only difference from the typical Gaian cog being that it could be rowed at all. In Thomas’ line of work timing was everything, and certain deadlines required haste, whether the gods allowed the wind to favor him and his men or not. Thomas wondered just how quickly the Thalassans made their vessels travel.
As an island race they lived on an archipelago of nine piece
s of land, each one smaller than the next. Each isle had a culture of its own but they melded well as a whole. Thalassan islands were governed individually but they paid homage to one king. A vassal king under the Gaian Empire.
Zacchaeus was at the far end of the ship by now so Thomas let his thoughts wander. He could not care less if his sailors knew of the longing in his heart when he thought of the Thalassan woman on Triton. It was something that could not be helped. All his life he had been told that the Thalassans were a blight upon this earth. Their inferiority was displayed in their lack of understanding things that go beyond the natural. Yet there was a woman on the ambassadorial island, Triton, who had shown herself to be different than what his people said. He could agree with the others most of the time. The Thalassans could indeed be called fools, but his Sophia was not like the rest. She was something to be revered. This particular Thalassan could only be described as exceptional, at least in Thomas’ mind. The feelings he bore for Sophia would cause him to throw one of his own men overboard should they speak ill towards her.
The diplomat approached again and Thomas guarded his thoughts, thinking of the rhythm of the oarmaster’s drum that mixed perfectly with the sounds of oars plunging in and out of the dark blue water of the Skamandros River. It was the music of the sailor.
Zacchaeus walked quietly to stand beside the young captain and crossed his arms to watch the oars at work. “It’s a beautiful thing, eh?”
“Aye,” Thomas replied. “It is that.” Although he gave the answer he felt that the diplomat was guarding his own mind as well, using the counting of the oar strokes to muffle what it was he was truly thinking about. “What were you referring to?”
Zacchaeus chuckled. “Not the water, sailor.”
“I had figured that out already,” Thomas stated. Noting his own impudence he followed up with a quick, “my Lord” before he could be reprimanded.
Severance (The Sovereign Book 1) Page 1
