Of Dawn and Darkness (The Elder Empire: Sea Book 2) Read Free Page A

seamless wood. His spine felt as though someone had run a carriage into it, and trying to catch a breath felt like inhaling a lung full of needles. The recent injury to his shoulder screamed, and he had unhealed bruises over practically every inch of his body.
    His sense of time had shattered, so he didn’t know how long it took him to return to coherent thought. Only a handful of seconds, most likely, but it felt longer. With his brain returned to its proper position, he understood his situation in full clarity.
    Someone was sitting on him. Someone with an arm wrapped around his eyes and a cold point of metal against the back of his neck.
    He left his mouth to steer itself, hoping to say something witty, but all that came out was a sort of muffled grunt. The assassin on his neck sensed this and shifted her weight slightly, enough to allow him to breathe without unfortunate pain in his chest.
    “I’m sorry, Captain,” the Consultant said, from her position on his back. “I can’t allow you to call on your Vessel, or I might have to kill you before we’ve had a chance to talk. Please understand.”
    If I have to be assassinated on my own deck, at least she’s polite about it, he thought. Out loud, he said, “Quite understandable.” His voice came out as an animal noise, closer to the squeal of a pig than to human speech.
    She flipped him over without allowing him to respond, knocking his wounded shoulder and the back of his head on the deck again. He scrambled for his bearings, staring up at the stretched, green-veined skin of his sails—translucent in the sunlight—that loomed above him. Before he gathered himself again, she had her knee pressed to the base of his throat and the tip of a bronze-bladed dagger under his chin.
    “My name is Meia, Captain Marten,” she said. “We’re going to renegotiate the course of this ship.” Her voice was businesslike and professional, but her eyes were the vertical-slitted orange of a draconic Kameira. They had been blue only days before, when he’d fought her in the crumbling corridor of a Gray Island prison. Her blond hair hung loose, though short enough that it stayed out of her eyes, and she wore tight clothes of unrelieved black. One bronze knife was entirely too close for comfort, pushing as it was against his skin, and she held the other reversed in her left hand. Free for use, he supposed.
    “I remembered your name, Meia,” he said, and his voice came out reasonably human this time.
    “You should, since you abducted me. That’s a new crime for you, isn’t it?”
    “As the offender, yes. I’ve been the victim of abductions, however temporary, more times than I would like to admit.”
    “That should give you some sympathy for my position.” The cold edge of bronze pressed harder under his chin, and he couldn’t ignore the Intent that leaked out from the weapon.
    The man begs for mercy, but mercy is not called for, so the blade draws his blood.
    Agitated and drunk, the soldiers attack, but they do not know their opponent. The blade draws their blood.
    The child of death and unnatural life lets out a howl, shrieking as it wraps its fleshy tentacles around the woman’s leg. Bronze flashes, and the blade draws its blood.
    Over and over, Calder Read the history of violence. The visions came with the weight of endlessness, as though he could dig forever and always unearth some older death at the end of this assassin’s blade. Intent and significance hung heavy in the bronze, such that it took everything he had to shut them out.
    So heavy that the weapon almost seemed to have a mind of its own. It wasn’t Awakened, he would have sensed that, but it was only one technicality away. He was afraid he might Awaken it with a stray thought.
    Awakening would change the physical shape of the blade, likely resulting in his throat slit. As that was the exact situation he was currently endeavoring to avoid, he corralled his mind as tightly as possible.
    “...for the