by Will Wight
Imperial Steward of the Aurelian Empire.
It was real. At last, he’d made it.
He folded the paper and slipped it into his pocket.
CHAPTER NINE
Ten years ago
The night was quiet, and only the slap of the waves and the throbbing hatred of the Lyathatan competed for Calder’s attention. He was mostly focused on the caged man in front of him, who stood and stretched in the yellow light of a quicklamp.
Urzaia was too tall for his cage, his shoulders bunched against the ceiling, but he beamed at Calder. “I have to stand to tell a story,” he explained. “It is not the same if I cannot use my hands.”
“I am your captive audience,” Calder said, his voice pitched low. He wasn’t sure what the two Champions would do to him if they found the Navigator captain interrogating their prisoner, but he didn’t want to find out.
“Are you sure? It has a sad ending, my story.”
Calder raised his eyebrows. “It hasn’t ended yet.”
~~~
Urzaia was born in Axciss, the City of Champions. One of the bigger cities on the Izyrian continent, Axciss is known for two things: its gladiator arenas, always popular sport with the Izyrian crowd, and the Champion’s Guild headquarters. Popular legend suggests that fighters are so common there because of the Guild presence, though some believe that the Guild only stays there because of the fights.
His father was a gladiator, a veteran of over two hundred fights that could fill the seats whenever his name appeared. Urzaia grew up in the stadium, sweeping seats and selling drinks as soon as he could walk on his own.
By the time he was big enough to drag bodies out of the sand, the Guild came for him.
His father had died only a few months before, killed by an infection after a victorious fight. When the Guild came through the arena, looking for hopefuls, his mother signed him up for testing. It would be the last time she ever saw him...but the last time she ever paid for his meals, either, so in her mind the scales were likely balanced.
The first test of the Champion’s Guild is a simple one: you’re paired up against another boy, and you have to beat him bloody before he beats you. The strong win, the weak are eliminated. As the Guild only selects the biggest, strongest boys of their age, the fights can get vicious.
Urzaia never thought his initiation was fair; he knew how to fight, and the other boy didn’t. He was pinning his opponent to the ground before the instructor’s shout faded.
Most of the winners went to the Guild, while the losers—and the winners who had been injured too badly—were left in the street. Urzaia spent the next two years working for the Champion’s Guild, doing mostly the same thing he’d done in the arena. He swept up, carried drinks, beat rugs, carried weapons, and dragged bodies either to the furnace or the graveyard. In the meantime, he learned the basics of combat.
He missed those days. There was a certain nostalgia in remembering the first time he drew an instructor’s blood with the point of his sword.
The second test followed his working years. This time, it was a tournament, according to very specific rules. More like a gladiator’s work than actual combat. This was practical, as Urzaia saw it; the bulk of a Champion’s income in the modern age came from duels or exhibition matches meant to show off an employer’s might.
Of the sixteen entrants in the tournament, Urzaia came in second. The final round was the first fight he had ever lost.
He and three others were selected for further testing, while the twelve who didn’t make it were either expelled from the Guild or returned to another year of sweeping and hauling.
At the time, he’d expected a warm welcome from the older Guild members. Or at least an acknowledgement that he was one of them. Not so. They tended to ignore him, leaving him to train on his own unless he made a mistake. He didn’t understand until later that the first two tests were nothing more than building a foundation. The true test came next.
They kept him in a room with a team of alchemists, forcing potions down his throat and syringes into his muscles. He still couldn’t recall the memory without shuddering. He spent months in that room, alone at night and surrounded by faceless alchemists all day, living a nightmare. He saw things that weren’t there, lost control of his body, and lived in constant pain. The agony was like nothing he’d experienced before or since, as though his own body had turned inward to tear itself to shreds.
After half a year of constant torment, he was released. His supervisors at the Guild seemed surprised to see him, but the ensuing barrage of tests were mild compared to the treatment that had damaged him in the first place. When they finally concluded that he was in one piece, they released him into the Guild.
Years later, he found out that something had gone wrong during his test. He’d reacted badly to some of the alchemical processes, so while most candidates are kept at the agonizing stage for six weeks at the most, Urzaia spent six months feeling like his skin was stuffed with knives. They had expected him to emerge mad, if he survived at all.
But he was as sturdy on the inside as he was on the outside, and he left the care of the alchemists, as one of his supervisors put it, “Saner than when he went in.”
After his release, the Champions finally treated him as—
~~~
“I’m sorry,” Calder said, interrupting.
Urzaia lowered his hands mid-sentence. “Is something wrong?”
“They almost tortured you to madness?”
The former Champion shrugged one shoulder. “I am a very happy person. I have been, always. My mother once said that I was born with a smile on my face.”
He smiled wider in demonstration.
Calder shook his head. “I start to wonder if we shouldn’t just round up and execute all alchemists.”
“Eh, it takes strong pain to make strong men. Injections into the bone are bad, and you do not want one. But the one giving you that injection, he is not always bad.”
“That’s...noble of you.” Calder wouldn’t have let the alchemists go, any more than he spared the ones who tormented his father.
“I am a noble man. Anyway, after my release, the Champions finally treated me as one of their own...”
~~~
Mental conditioning was a core part of Urzaia’s Champion training. His trainers did not tear him down, but built him up. He was pitted against normal human opponents, with no enhancements or invested weapons, and made to feel invincible. Constantly, the older Champions would talk about how lucky he was to have joined their Guild, and how weak the others were.
After a year of this, Urzaia was ready to believe it. His wounds healed overnight, he was immune to most poisons, and even many Soulbound powers no longer affected him. His strength and reactions grew beyond anything he’d ever imagined, and his eyesight was as sharp as a hunting bird’s.
He strode out into his first assignment feeling like he could take the world apart.
It was appropriate that he was sent straight to the arena. One of the fight masters, who owned an entire team of successful gladiators, had begun to monopolize the markets for new fighters. He’d bribed his way into all the prisons in the city, and as soon as they received a criminal with combat training, he snapped them up. None of the other masters could compete, and his team was milking the arenas dry.
So his opponents had pooled their earnings to hire a Champion.
For his first job as a member of the Guild, Urzaia had picked his weapons: a pair of hatchets crafted by an Izyrian master smith. Urzaia’s father had used battle-axes in the arena, and he himself had gotten used to hatchets while chopping up firewood at the Guild. More than anything, the weapons simply felt right. He was no Reader, but he thought it must have something to do with their Intent.
He stood at the arena, sand under him and blue sky overhead, surrounded by a screaming crowd, and he felt invincible. The enemy had a team of eighteen, released to fight him in pairs. The first pair had spears and shields, while he car
ried only a hatchet in each hand.
He fought them two at a time until all eighteen lay dead or crippled, watching the fight master’s face grow paler with each defeat. When he won the ninth fight in a row, the crowd stood to their feet and roared.
Urzaia had never enjoyed a fight more.
From then on, he expected similar fights every time. Odds stacked against him, fighting to correct someone who had twisted Imperial law to his own advantage, righting wrongs and defeating worthy opponents.
Instead, his second assignment shipped him north of the Dylian Basin. He was headed as far north as any man had ever been, where tribes had set up a chain of villages in the snow. Apparently, they no longer considered themselves part of the Aurelian Empire, and had formed their own society with their own rules. Urzaia was there to administer punishment on behalf of the Emperor himself, who had assigned this mission to the Guild. It was with a sense of pride that he set out, determined to hammer the primitive armies into the ice and return with documents of surrender inside a month.
The first year, he enjoyed his work. It was harder than he’d imagined to fight in the snow, so even when the villagers organized hunting parties of thirty or more, it was rare that he could kill even three or four before the others melted away. This was a challenge in itself, even though their warriors could not fight him evenly.
The second year, he wished for an enemy Soulbound. The ambushes had grown frustrating, and even when he flattened a village, the inhabitants would just pack up and move somewhere else.
The third year, he was beginning to question why he was there in the first place. Navigators seldom brought any news or orders for him, and when they did, it was only an order to stay where he was and continue working. Not that he was seeing any results. He had probably killed two or three hundred warriors, from various villages, but no single group took too many casualties. And none of them had even come close to surrendering.
By the fifth year, he had all but given up on performing his duties for the Empire. When he became bored, he would hike up the mountains and lure a Kameira—usually a Brightwolf, or an Icewinder, or a Hydra of some kind—down toward a village, where he would fight the warriors and the Kameira both. This was chaotic and often unsatisfying, but created a few interesting fights.
One day, everything went wrong. He couldn’t remember exactly what led to it, but he woke at the bottom of an icy pit, a dead Brightwolf lying on his chest and slowly squeezing the life from his lungs. Both his legs were broken, his hatchets were missing, and the pit was surrounded by the corpses of fifty warriors from several local villages.
He fully expected to be flattened beneath the body of a Kameira, but a scouting party from a far-off village found him first. They dug him out, loaded him on a sled, and dragged him back home.
Stories of his violence had reached them, but none had seen him personally. They failed to recognize him, and so they let him live as one of them. While he was there, he realized they were living perfectly well without the Empire. Why did they need an Emperor anyway?
So he asked them why they had chosen to rebel, and they told him.
They paid taxes because their ancestors had always done so, but they never received anything in return. There were no roads. No one gave them food or shelter from the winter storms. No Guild came to defend them from the frequent Kameira attacks, and there were no chapter houses within a thousand miles. Quite simply, they had never been part of the Empire, except in name.
But the final blow came when an Elderspawn had invaded, years before. It moved from village to village, spreading a disease that slowly turned people into monsters. By the time the Blackwatch arrived, the whole region had been infected.
They offered no explanation, and taught the locals nothing. Instead, they killed everyone affected, and half of the seemingly uninfected children. Then they vanished during the night.
At that point, the villages had done something new: they called all their leaders together, from all over the region, and jointly decided to stop paying taxes.
That was when the Emperor finally took notice of them.
~~~
“When I heard that story,” Urzaia said, “I decided that the Emperor must not know. If he knew the story, he would know this was not a rebellion, and he would not have sent me. By then, I had made enemies in many of the villages, as you might imagine. But those who would let me help, I helped. I built fences, fixed sleds, fought Kameira that attacked. I made a difference, I think. And I fell for a local woman, settled in, built myself a house. For two years I lived this way. It was boring, but sometimes boring is nice. And I could fight Kameira bare-handed, so that was exciting.
“After two years, another Navigator showed up with personal instructions from the Emperor. They had the Imperial Seal and everything. This paper told me that I had run out of time, that I needed to kill until there were few enough villagers to fit onto the Navigator’s ship, and then to pack the holds with the rest. We would return to the Capital, where they would face trial.
“Not only did I tear up the order in his face, I was...not so kind to the Navigator. Or his crew. They sailed out much faster than they planned, I think. But now, I regret that I did not kill them and send their ship to Kelarac.”
Urzaia looked to the distance and sighed, his smile fading completely for the first time. “Three months later, two of my brother Champions came to take me. It was the most interesting fight I’d had for seven years, so that’s something to thank the Emperor for. But there were two of them, after all, and they were not weak. They are the ones who now call themselves Eight and Nine, actually.” He nodded to the door of the cabin, beyond which Eight stood sentry while Nine recovered from his burns.
“They took me to the Capital, where my own Guild Head passed sentence on me in the name of the Emperor. I was stripped of my titles and rights as a Champion, and sentenced to death in the gladiator’s arena of Axciss. This is not so rare, you understand. Criminals can continue making money for the Empire, even while they face the penalty of death. For me, I am happy to die where I was born.”
Urzaia smiled again and settled back on his heels. Calder was sure his own face showed some combination of shock, anger, and horror, but Urzaia didn’t seem to mind. “This is why you shouldn’t trust the Emperor too much,” Urzaia said. “He is not like they say he is. Maybe he cares about the Empire, but he does not care about its citizens very much.”
The statement struck deep in Calder. It was exactly what he’d always said, based on his Reading of the Imperial relics.
He had to get this man on his crew. If only there was some way to get around his inconvenient death sentence.
Calder leaned forward and grasped the bars of the cage, staring intently into the Champion’s eyes. “Urzaia. I can’t do anything now, but I will come back for you.”
The prisoner’s eyebrows rose. “It would surprise me if you did.”
“You just need to hold on. Stay alive. Do whatever you can. But some day, as soon as I possibly can, I will come back for you. I have reason not to trust the Emperor myself, and I can’t let a man go who’s smart enough to see things as they are.”
Urzaia laughed, though he kept it quiet enough not to alarm Eight. “I don’t consider myself a smart man. But if all I must do is keep winning, I can do that. I have not lost in the arena so far, and I don’t see a reason to do so now.”
He looked back at Calder, still grinning. “I will wait for you as long as I can, Captain. How long do you think it will take?”
Calder had no idea.
CHAPTER TEN
When the sky cracks, death can pass either way.
—The ramblings of an Elder-touched madwoman
(From the Blackwatch archives)
~~~
The man in the steel blindfold could come and go as he wished, but Jerri was still a prisoner. That grated on her even worse than his attitude. More than once, she was prepared to leave, but he always said something to trick her into st
aying.
“Even the basest Elderspawn can wait in the darkness for a week. A servant of the Great Ones must be able to tolerate the dark.”
“I can come and go because I am only a humble messenger. If I were fit to be the guardian of this room, I too would stay.”
Each time he returned, she considered killing him. And each time, he managed to say exactly what would get her to stay. Even though she knew it was impossible, she started to wonder if he was Reading her mind.
That, and the Emperor’s quarters had a full bathroom complete with a toilet and functional plumbing. Otherwise she would have burned her way to freedom days ago.
Now, on what she determined was her sixth day in the Emperor’s Elder-sealed room, her self-proclaimed guide appeared again. He stepped out of the shadows as though he’d been there all along, gold teeth gleaming in the middle of his smile. “Good news, Mrs. Marten.”
The name hit her hard, harder than she would have expected. She’d spent most of her married life on The Testament—and years prior to that, too—where everyone called her by her first name. On shore, no one knew them. Hearing it now, from a fellow member of the Sleepless in the belly of an Elder construct, felt...entirely wrong.
But he had likely said it just to see her squirm, and she wasn’t about to give him the satisfaction. She threw her braid behind one shoulder and straightened her spine. “What is it?”
“They’re finally coming in.”
He had spent the last six days deftly dodging any question about what they were waiting for. Now...was this it? They’d waited for the Imperial Guard to stop poking at the Elder seal and finally wheel in the big guns?
But what did she care if the Imperial Guard made it in here?
“Are we going to wait here for them?” Jerri asked, finally. She hated to ask him, but she felt entirely out of her depth here. Whatever the cabal had this man doing, she didn’t understand it.
Maybe it was a trick of the light, but her guide was a little harder to see than he had been a moment before. Even his brightly colored robes had dimmed to little more than shadow, and she could only pinpoint him clearly because of the reflections of gold in his jewelry. It was more than a little unnerving, which made her feel more at home. Dealing with Elders was supposed to be unsettling.