The Bone Shard Daughter (The Drowning Empire, #1)(78)

“Never leave you.” He wove through my legs again, nearly making me trip and forcing me to halt. I hated to admit how much his assurance eased the tightness in my chest. Mephi sat on his haunches in front of me. “But, Jovis,” he said, and the sound of my name in his raspy voice made my spine tingle, “the people here – also your people.”

I thought of the long hours I’d spent at the Academy at Imperial, the sidelong glances at my skin and features, the way I’d had to always work harder and longer just to prove myself. Who among them had cared about me? I’d spent two lonely years there, watching my back and earning their grudging respect – until I could claim my Navigator’s tattoo. They’d wanted me to fail, and had been disappointed when I hadn’t. “They are not my people!”

I slammed a hand against the wall and felt, almost too late, the thrumming in my bones. I pulled the blow, sucked in the tremor before it could shake the tunnels around us.

Mephi had lowered himself to a crouch, his ears flat against his head, his eyes on the ceiling above us.

I let out my breath slowly, afraid that letting it out quickly might shake the foundations of this place. “I’m sorry. I need to be careful.”

His gaze still on the ceiling, Mephi crept forward and patted my foot. “We stay together. We leave together.”

Relief swelled in my veins like a tide. I put out a hand to lean against the wall – and stumbled. The lamp swung wildly from my hand, threatening to slip from my grasp. I tightened my fingers around it, focused on putting my feet beneath me. The wall I’d slammed my hand against was no longer there. “What is this?” I lifted the lamp once I’d caught myself, my heartbeat thundering in my ears.

Mephi slipped past me before I could stop him.

“Wait, you don’t—” I cut myself off, shook my head. Mephi’s tail disappeared into the dark room. It wasn’t any use. He wasn’t a pet, no matter what the Shardless assumed. He was a friend. A very foolish friend.

I stepped in after him, keeping the lamp held high. I needn’t have worried. The room was small, no monsters hidden in its corners. I checked behind me and found a slab of stone for a door. I ran my fingers along the edge. Back out there, in the hallway, I could have sworn the walls had been smooth – no doors or doorways to speak of. Where had this come from then? Had the light just been too dim for me to see the outline of it?

Mephi had opened a chest and was rifling through it, dust filling the air around him. “Stop it,” I called to him. “You don’t know what’s in there.” But it was as though I hadn’t spoken at all. He tested his teeth on a stone bracelet, and then tossed it aside when it proved not to be edible. His furred form was swathed in bolts of elaborately embroidered cloth – half of which he’d emptied onto the floor.

I sighed and checked the rest of the room.

A sinking bed lay in the middle of the room, and in a corner a deep tub had been carved into the floor. It must have been a lovely place to relax a long time ago. Stone shelves lined the walls. They were mostly empty, but when I held the lamp up to them, I could see impressions in the dust where items had once lain. My spine prickled. Someone had been in here, and judging by the dust, it had even perhaps been in the past year. “Mephi,” I hissed to him. Even my whisper seemed too loud. “Get out of there.”

A couple of scraps of wood lay on the shelves, but there in the corner I saw something else. A book.

Mephi scrambled from the chest and darted to me just as I pulled the book down. “Food?” he asked. I couldn’t tell what time of day it was, but it must have been close to sunset. Past dinnertime. He’d been eating even more than usual lately, and had been more sluggish in the mornings.

“No,” I said. A brief longing hit me – to be free of this place, of this darkness, to be out on the water again. “We’ll get some food in a moment.” The cover of the book was unmarked, the binding decorated with only a few lines of flaking gold paint. When I opened the pages, they crackled. An earthy scent wafted from the paper. I brought the lamp in close so I could read it.

I didn’t recognize the script.

I knew Empirean; I even knew some Poyer. But this was neither of those things. The script was tight and small, words nearly running into one another. I flipped through the pages, looking for something I recognized.

And then I stopped. Flipped a few pages back.

This word. I knew this word. It was written differently from what I was accustomed to, but it was the same word.

Alanga.





29





Lin


Imperial Island

Uphilia moved like a ghost through the palace. I didn’t know where she lived so I’d had to send my little spy construct out to find her lair. It took my spy three days to report on its location. Three days I spent poring over books, trying to study as my mind filled with images of Bayan melting. I couldn’t figure out what had happened to him. Each time I saw Father in the hallways, he didn’t look at me. I’d dared only once to ask him where Bayan was, and Father had only said “resting”, a warning in his tone. I knew better than to press the issue. Still, I’d gone to Bayan’s room the next night and had found it locked. When I’d placed my ear to the door, I’d heard nothing, not even the sound of his breathing.

Why hadn’t he wanted to see Father? Why had he wanted to hide from him? The only conclusion that made sense was that Father had done this to him.