Tomes Apprentice Read online

  Published by Raconteur House

  Murfreesboro, TN

  TOMES APPRENTICE

  The Tomes of Kaleria: Tome 1

  A Raconteur House book/ published by arrangement with the author

  Copyright © 2019 by Honor Raconteur

  Cover by Katie Griffin

  Vintage Pattern. Seamless background. by poppindx/Shutterstock; Set of traditional oriental chinese golden rectangle frames on pattern red background for decoration. by shlyapanama /Shutterstock; Brushed Painted Abstract Background. Brush stroked painting by Hybrid_Graphics/Shutterstock; Gray industry wall by mxbfilms/Shutterstock

  This book is a work of fiction, so please treat it like a work of fiction. Seriously. References to real people, dead people, good guys, bad guys, stupid politicians, companies, restaurants, cats with attitudes, events, products, dragons, locations, pop culture references, or wacky historical events are intended to provide a sense of authenticity and are used fictitiously. Or because I wanted it in the story. Characters, names, story, location, dialogue, weird humor and strange incidents all come from the author’s very fertile imagination and are not to be construed as real. No, I don’t believe in killing off main characters. Villains are a totally different story.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights.

  Purchase only authorized editions.

  For information address: www.raconteurhouse.com

  The world was chaos.

  Abe ran directly ahead of her, and that was an odd sight. Abe never ran—he wasn’t athletic enough to really do that for long stretches of time. Even now, she could hear him wheezing, see his feet stumble a bit from fatigue, but he kept trying to run. People jostled them from all sides—women, children, men, all panicking as they tried to flee the city before it was consumed.

  Another high-pitched whistle soared overhead and they all automatically ducked even as they kept running. The volcano was truly gaining fury and speed now. The locals had jokingly called the volcano Mount Puff for the past century, because even though it released gas and smoke on a regular basis, it never did anything more. But something had broken that tableau and it raged in full fury now. Mei Li would suspect one of the fire demons had gotten loose from their sealed imprisonment and stirred the volcano to action, but she knew for a fact all were still safely sealed for another five years at least.

  Two of the city guardsmen with her blocked people from running her over, and she could hear their grunts of effort as they strove to keep their feet. The city wasn’t on fire—not yet—but they could see giant clouds of ash pouring out of the volcano, see hints of magma running like a slow-moving avalanche towards Overlook. The city didn’t have much time. Anyone who could find a boat got on, and any boat captain who could take passengers, was.

  Another guard ran up to them, stopping them in their tracks and half-yelling to be heard over the rush of the volcano and the screams of the panicked. “Tomes! The stabilizing walls, can they hold the lava at bay?!”

  A Tomes far in the past had created the stabilizing walls around the city to keep Overlook from slowly sinking into the ocean. Mei Li, an apprentice Tomes herself, knew the full history and the magic that had built those walls. She shook her head at the same time her master spoke.

  “No!” Abe denied, aged voice cracking as he tried to shout loud enough to be heard. A difficult thing for him, as he wasn’t a loud person to begin with. “The walls are meant to hold back sea water, nothing more! They’ll be as overwhelmed by the lava as any other building!”

  The guard’s craggy face darkened with dismay. He was not, however, surprised. “I was afraid of that. Sir, come with me. We need to get the records out and I need you to tell me if we’re missing anything. For caution’s sake, you two shouldn’t be on the same ship!”

  Mei Li saw the sense in it, but she didn’t like the idea of separating from Abe. Her master and teacher was old and often didn’t handle being alone very well.

  Abe turned, caught her eyes, and held them for three seconds that felt like an eternity. In those blue eyes, so different from hers, she saw the calculations, the fear, the worry. She saw them, shared them, and knew what Abe would say before he spoke a single word.

  There was never more than two Tomes at any given time in the world. For safety’s sake, they shouldn’t be on the same ship, in case some catastrophe hit. But without the records, written by all the previous Tomes, they would be in just as much trouble. The records told them how to fix all the problems, dangers, and constructs that kept this world in balance.

  As a Tomes Master, Abe had a strong responsibility to ensure that the many, many records safely got on board ship. But equally important was Mei Li’s safety, as she was one of two people who could even read them.

  “Go,” Abe ordered her firmly. “I’ll make sure all the records get on board.”

  Mei Li hated it but she nodded. “Be safe, Master.”

  “You too, Mei Mei.”

  A firm hand landed on her shoulder, pulling her towards the docks, and she stumbled as she tried to keep up with the man leading her away. Her head throbbed under the pressure of the noise, her vision narrowing to only the path in front of her. It jolted her when she felt wooden planks under her boots instead of the rocky pavement of the streets.

  A schooner waited at the docks, the deck hands letting only certain people on board, and Mei Li recognized most of them as officials of some sort. The rest of the people trying to claw on board were pushed away and ordered to go find another boat. Mei Li didn’t like seeing it, but there was no way for everyone on the dock to fit on the boat. Trying would only capsize it.

  She was pushed and pulled through the press of bodies, then up the gangplank. She barely had her feet under her on the deck when someone else pulled her aft, away from the many lines and sails.

  “Push off!” a woman’s voice bellowed.

  The ship slipped its moors, the anchor’s chain clinking faintly as it was pulled in. Mei Li focused on the volcano, now that she could, and fear threatened to seize her heart. It gushed harder now. The sky was nearly pitch black from the smoke and ash. Would Abe be able to get out of Overlook before the magma and ash buried the city?

  And would any of the many, many books of instructions be saved in the limited time they had?

  Mei Li’s hands tightened on the rail to the point of pain. She couldn’t see how anything could be saved on this horrible day, but prayed she was wrong. If she wasn’t, then it was more than a city this world would lose.

  The whole continent’s population would be in danger.

  Mei Li grumbled and swore as she climbed up the rocky mountain. Her shoes were not adequate to the task, the thin soles already worn. The jagged rocks tore into the hide without much trouble. She wasn’t sure if she was bleeding, but there was no point in stopping. She had nothing to bandage with and really, did it matter? She’d either get help or get eaten. Those were her options at the moment.

  Just the reminder made her swear, even as she slipped a little, her hands roughly catching on a boulder to stop her from sliding off the side of the mountain altogether. It would be just her luck to fall to her death trying to climb up this deathtrap.

  Two years she’d lived in this tiny, remote, backward village. Two years since she’d been shipwrecked onto the unforgiving rocks. The villagers had rappelled down in order to scavenge from the wreckage and coincidentally found her, barely clinging onto a boulder. In a bout of charity, they’d hauled her up with them. Then they didn’t k
now what to do with her.

  At the time, eighteen-year-old Mei Li had known a great deal about the world but hadn’t understood that not everyone was like her. It wasn’t the way she looked—not something so superficial, although she certainly stood out here. Her skin was fair, not bronzed by the sun like theirs. Her hair was inky black, matching her dark eyes, and they found her almond-shaped eyes and lower nose bridge strange. Really, that should have been her first hint—that they didn’t know her looks were average for her native country of Maar.

  But her looks were not really the problem. Naive Mei Li hadn’t understood that the remote villages—especially the truly remote ones, like this one—thought reading was something only an elevated person could do. Like priests. She hadn’t understood that speaking of politics was forbidden to women. She hadn’t understood that knowing how to design and build things was definitely not something a woman should be doing, much less a child. Mei Li had gotten into constant trouble the first few months, as she struggled to adapt to this very strange culture she’d landed in.

  The first three months, all she’d done was focus on ways to get out again. Even if these people had no idea who she was, what she was meant to do in the future, Mei Li did. Abe had made sure she understood thoroughly. She absolutely couldn’t afford to sit there and rot.

  She’d kept trying different ways of sending up a signal for help, or getting a message out, but her every attempt was thwarted by the villagers who were alarmed at her ‘magic’ and ‘blasphemy.’ They’d started watching her constantly, taking anything out of her hands that could either be used to write with or construct a beacon with—which was pretty much everything. Mei Li was nothing if not resourceful.

  It had been maddening in the extreme. Even after she’d stopped her obvious attempts and switched to covert ones, they’d still watched her. Trying to force her into a marriage with one of their village boys had been their last-ditch attempt at control. (Mei Li had kneed him in the groin and then dislocated his shoulder. He’d not been willing to come near her since.)

  After six months of butting heads with them, they’d stuck her in a hut off to the far side of the village and more or less made sure she stayed there. Which had been nice, in a way, as she hadn’t had to pretend to go along with their stupid customs. But frustrating as well, as she couldn’t find a way to escape from this ridiculous place.

  Really, considering her history with them, her climbing the mountain right now was rather inevitable. The villagers firmly believed whenever they had a bad winter, or the fish stopped biting, the mountain god—Dashu—was angry. And in typical tradition, what did you do when a mountain deity was angry? Sacrifice something to it, of course. What, you may ask? Why, what else but a virgin?

  What else but the troublesome, strange girl who’d washed up on shore and caused problems all the time?

  And so here she was, trudging up a mountain. Not that Mei Li had any plans to get eaten, but she knew a great deal more about the gods and deities of the world than those idiots down in the valley did. She had no clue what was up here—they’d never let her out of the valley before this—but she was reasonably confident it wasn’t part of the pantheon. If it was something she could negotiate with, fine. If not, she’d try to either trick it into helping her, or kill it before it tried to eat her.

  Either way, she was finally free of that stupid place she’d been kept confined in for far too long.

  The wind whipped past her, making her ears ache and her black hair fly all about her face. Despite the braids she’d done up this morning, wispies kept flying free and stinging her eyes or creeping into her mouth. She dragged them free again and again only for them to sweep right back a second later.

  It was cold up here, far colder than in the valley, the air thinner and harder to breathe. Mei Li dragged in deep lungfuls and paused often to catch her breath. She could feel the strain and ache in her calves as she forced herself to climb the sheer sides. There was no easy path up. Why would there be? No one wanted to be the sacrifice to a deity, and they didn’t worship it up close.

  By the time she was halfway up, Mei Li’s stomach growled in protest. They hadn’t even let her eat breakfast before kicking her out the door. Why waste food on someone who would be dead by nightfall, after all? Her throat was parched too, and she sweat from the exertion of the climb. It was a strange mix of being too hot and cold at the same time, the wind brutal and sheer enough to make the sweat on her skin icy.

  Mei Li was in a perfectly vengeful mood by the time she reached the first peak’s plateau. She might not have learned everything from her master, but she’d learned the true name of fire, and she’d set whatever it was up here ablaze if it messed with her. She was done. Just utterly and completely done with this whole situation.

  The plateau had a cave entrance—an obviously used cave entrance. A neat stack of firewood sat off to one side, a carved-out basin to hold rainwater stood nearby, and a clear section of earth led directly inside. It was the first patch of ground on this mountain she’d seen that didn’t have any scraggly vegetation or loose pebbles.

  Frowning, she looked about her, memory stirring. This rather looked like…no, couldn’t be. What would a dragon be doing all the way out here?

  Suspicions raised, she sucked in as deep a breath as she could before bellowing, “HELLO!”

  The word echoed around the mountainside before being stolen completely by the wind.

  Mei Li waited.

  Then waited a little more.

  Then gave up and sat down. Her feet were killing her, after all. She inspected the sole of her right foot with a grimace. She’d just known she’d torn into it. Deities, but that was going to be fun to clean out and walk on later.

  A rumbling sound came from inside the cave, like scales against rock, and she could hear him—no doubt a him with that low bass voice—long before she could see him.

  “Can’t believe they sent another one. I know it is, what with the winter this bad and the fish all migrating south. They always get this stupid idea in their head when the conditions are bad like this. Although really, what do they expect me to keep doing with all these girls—” A head popped out, a rather elongated shape with a very long nose and a forked tongue, golden eyes, and the bright red scales of a very young dragon. He likely wasn’t even one hundred yet, not at that hue. He spied her instantly and stopped dead, his body still mostly in the cave. “There you are. I must say, you don’t look like you’re from here. I wonder how they got you to come up? Oh right, you probably won’t understand me.” He gave a gusty sigh that was warm as a tropical breeze. “You’d think they’d use trader’s tongue, like everyone else in the world, but nooo they have their own regional dialect. Blasted communication barrier. The dialect here is thicker than pea soup.”

  “Tell me about it,” Mei Li agreed in his language, standing to greet him. She hadn’t spoken Long-go aloud in at least two years, so it felt more than a bit odd on her tongue, but she remembered it perfectly. She was, after all, Abe of Tomes’ apprentice for a reason.

  The dragon’s head jerked back, his nostrils flaring wide in surprise. “You speak Long-go!”

  “I do. I’m surprised to see you up here. I thought it was supposed to be a mountain deity or something.”

  The dragon made a face of disgust. “That’s what the villagers think. I did them one small favor when I first got here, about eighty years ago, and now they’re always wanting to sacrifice something to me. And virgins, too. I ask you, what’s the difference between virgin meat and someone…well, not?”

  “You know, that’s the exact argument I had with them this morning?” Mei Li got all hot and bothered just remembering the yelling match between her and the village chief. “And as I pointed out, boys can be virgins too! The chief said the law only recognized the chastity of a person who had not laid with a man, and I said, well if we’re going to get that technical about things, then all the men in the village definitely qualifie
d. It went downhill from there.”

  The dragon snorted a laugh and relaxed enough to exit the cave a bit more, coming within conversational distance. “I say, I have to remember that one. Wait, if you were forced up here, then why come? Are you suicidal?”

  “Hardly. Just without any good options. The mountain range is impassable,” she waved a hand to the rocky, steep mountains surrounding them, “and I don’t know how to sail a ship, nor am I able to manage anything they have here by myself, even if I could sail. I don’t have the provisions necessary to try hiking out. I thought I could at least come up and see what this ‘deity’ of theirs was, maybe negotiate some help. If it wasn’t reasonable, well, I do know the true name of fire.” She gave him a considering look before tacking on dryly, “Not that it would do any good against you.”

  “We’re rather fireproof,” the dragon agreed with false modesty. “But that still sounds semi-suicidal. You had no idea what I was until you climbed up, right? What can you possibly bargain with?”

  “Me.” Mei Li shrugged, splaying her hands out to either side. “Not that anyone down there appreciates who I am, but I figured a deity had a better chance of knowing. Providing it was a deity.”

  The dragon looked amused at her confidence. Or perhaps he mistook it as arrogance. Either way, he was nice enough to play along. “And who might you be, then?”

  “Mei Li, apprentice to Abe of Tomes.”

  The dragon stared at her for the longest moment, as if suspecting a prank. Then he yelped, so startled he jerked back, slamming his head against the rocky overhang with a resounding and meaty smack.

  Mei Li hadn’t quite expected that extreme reaction and came in closer, her hand lifted. “That sounded bad. You alright?”

  He wheezed, eyes rolling in his head, and dropped back down to the ground with a painful groan. “Owww. Ow. You—you said Abe of Tomes? His apprentice?”