by Will Wight
Calder’s breathing quickened. Only a moment ago, it had seemed like the ships were barely crawling toward the Gray Island, but now he felt like everyone else in the fleet was speeding toward their doom. “What are our options?”
“We have to go after him immediately,” Teach responded. She reached into a saddlebag, strapped to the side of her mount, and pulled out a black-and-red helmet that matched her armor. As far as he could remember, he’d never seen her with her head covered before. “I can only stall him on my own, but together, we have a chance of removing him.”
“Together? Me and you?” Calder was flattered that she thought him capable of fighting alongside her, but the sudden surge in confidence seemed out of place.
From underneath her newly donned helmet, Teach gave him a look that told him to stop being an idiot. “Not me and you. Me and her.”
She pointed behind him.
Without much surprise, Calder turned around to see Bliss standing there. Her Blackwatch coat reached down to the deck, and her pale hair blew behind her in the ocean breeze. She stood perfectly straight, her face serious. “Hello, Calder Marten. You should pay closer attention to your surroundings.”
“Hello, Bliss. I don’t see how that would help.”
The Head of the Blackwatch would likely have spent ten minutes telling him about all the reasons he should pay more attention, but Teach was kind enough to cut her off. “Bliss, can you back me up? If we can remove Jorin immediately, we’ll have practically disarmed the Guild.”
While that wasn’t true from Calder’s perspective, he could see how it might seem so for Teach. The Consultants didn’t have a Guild Head; without Jorin, there was no one else who could fight on the same level as Bliss or the General.
An uncomfortable memory surfaced from a week or two before. Somehow, a Consultant Soulbound and her partner had managed to kill Mekendi Maxeus. He’d been a Guild Head, a powerful Magister, awake and alert. If they could kill him, why couldn’t they do it again?
But Bliss cocked her head, thinking. “Someone has been considerate and removed Bastion’s Veil. If it stays gone, I can release the full extent of my ability. I can remove the island, if you like.”
Calder shivered.
“But if the Veil comes back, they will restrict me almost completely. I still do not think I will be in danger from the ordinary Consultants, but under those conditions, I will not be an opponent fit for Jorin Curse-breaker.”
Andel cleared his throat. “Excuse me. Bastion’s Veil?”
“The wall of mist that’s usually around the island,” Calder replied. He’d learned some things this past few months, after all. He had no idea what the Veil could do, but he at least knew what it was called.
Teach looked troubled, and her Kameira croaked at her from behind. She reached back to calm it, stroking the glittering scales crowning its head. “I was not aware of that. More reason to strike quickly.”
An explosion rang out from the island, followed by a splash next to The Eternal. The front of the Navigator fleet had gotten into range of the Consultants’ cannons.
General Teach’s gaze moved to Calder. “You have the crown?”
“Yes,” Calder said, resisting the urge to add ‘ma’am.’
“Try to use it on the Consultants. If it works on them from a distance, then you’ll conquer the island yourself. If Bliss and I can kill Jorin or force him to retreat quickly enough, we’ll force the Architects to surrender on our own.”
“And if they have countermeasures for both?” Calder asked, knowing the answer.
“Then we do it the hard way,” Teach said. She swung up onto the back of her winged Kameira, a legend in crimson-and-black armor. Tyrfang hung behind her in its sheath, radiating deadly Intent.
Bliss joined her a moment later, hopping straight from the deck onto the lizard’s back. “Good-bye, Calder Marten. I will see you again tonight, if we both survive. Perhaps also if we both die, assuming common beliefs about the afterlife are—”
The rushing wind of the Kameira’s takeoff swallowed her last words.
The cannons from the island were firing in earnest now, a distant and irregular drumbeat. No Navigators had returned fire, likely because none of them were within range of a valuable target.
Calder looked at what remained of his crew. Dalton Foster, the gunsmith, sitting on a cannon. Andel Petronus, the quartermaster, standing calmly with his hands behind his back. Petal, the alchemist, quivering with her head peeking up from below.
It was the first time he’d been alone with them in weeks.
“Five years,” he said quietly. “I’ve known some of you for longer, but it’s been five years since we knew I’d end up here. I was hoping that more of us would make it, but...we’re here, and we’re together.” He had more to say, but he concluded with a simple, “Thank you.”
Foster nodded. “Captain.”
Andel bowed. “For better or worse, you’ve made my life much more interesting.”
Petal popped her head up. “I still like it here,” she said.
Something snapped in the air like a leather flag flapping, and Shuffles bowled past Petal and flew up to Calder. Its claws dug into Calder’s shoulder, its tentacles tickled his cheek, and its black eyes scowled. “FOR BETTER OR WORSE,” it shouted.
Calder rubbed its head, though he couldn’t tell if it liked that or hated it. “That was almost heartwarming, coming from you.” With another effort of Intent, Calder once again Read the Lyathatan.
Move, he ordered.
Even as The Testament jerked forward, the Elder’s resentment came through clearly. The human orders me, he borrows the power of the Great Ones, but he will see. In only ten thousand years, I will rule a piece of this ocean floor, and my domain will be absolute.
In ten thousand years, maybe it would hunt down Calder’s distant descendants, but that was their problem. For now, he needed the ship to move.
Before long, he’d caught up to the rest of the fleet.
Two Navigator Vessels were obviously taking on water, having taken too many hits, their crew floating on longboats or simply swimming away. Several others sported damage, but most of the Guild reached the dock of the Gray Island largely unharmed.
The first ships pulled up to the edge of the dock or to the rocky shores of the island, Imperial Guards leaping off the decks and onto dry land.
They faced no enemy.
Silently, the Consultants were allowing the Navigators to settle in, delivering their payloads of soldiers. Other than the cannons, which had now gone quiet, there was no sign that the island was even inhabited.
Under the cracked sky, all was peaceful.
Calder pulled out his captain’s horn, a hollow tin cone that magnified his voice. It had been invested to amplify its effect, and as he spoke, his voice boomed out over the island.
“Friends of the Consultant’s Guild, this is the Imperial Steward, speaking with the authority of the Emperor himself. Lay down your weapons and come out of hiding. You will not be harmed. I repeat, lay down your weapons and come out of hiding. You will not be harmed.”
Calder had been somewhat worried that he wouldn’t be able to tell if the Consultants countered the power of the crown or if they simply couldn’t hear him, but he could feel the Intent flowing from the Emperor’s crown and infusing his words. If any Consultants were within earshot, and still felt any loyalty to the Empire, they would obey.
But at his words, a thin cloud of mist rolled down out of the trees. Not a thick bank of fog, but hazy wisps like smoke. The cloud got thicker deeper in the island, and he thought he heard crashes in the distance, but it could be the waves playing tricks on his ears.
Not one Consultant showed up.
Cheska called over to him, a captain’s horn of her own in hand. “The crown’s a misfire. We’re heading in.”
Calder waved back, acknowledging her point, as Cheska signaled the Imperial Guards, soldiers, and various members of the Navigator’s Guild to ad
vance up the slopes of the Gray Island. Every ship had come packed with combatants except The Testament; Teach had insisted that he should never come closer to shore than the sound of his horn would carry.
The sturdiest Imperial Guards marched in the front, those with thick skin or rigid carapace that would make them tough to kill. So they were the first to run into the traps.
Tiny alchemical explosives popped into flares of light all across the face of the island at the same time, sending chunks of rock rolling back into the advancing forces. Some Guards stood firm against the assault, while others bowled over into the men behind them.
After the miniature avalanche, the advance froze for a few minutes, while the Guards got their bearings. Calder didn’t see any deaths and surprisingly few injuries, but the armored Guards had taken the brunt of the trap. As they gathered themselves, the Imperial Guards advanced once again.
This time, Calder didn’t see what struck them down. It might have been darts, or a poison gas, or even bees, as far as he knew. But the front ranks started slapping at themselves, waving crazily in the air, and collapsing. Some of the toughest members withstood the traps, continuing forward, but many others stayed on the ground. Now, there were corpses.
But after the first wave, no one behind them suffered the same symptoms. Either the traps had run out of darts, or the Consultants were preparing a different surprise. It was hard to see details in the chaos, even through a spyglass.
Seconds later, the ground erupted in enemies. Black-clad Consultants burst from behind boulders, from under camouflaged trap doors, and from the trees. As one, they each discharged pistols, stabbed with spears, or struck with their daggers. They seemed to come out of nowhere, at least three attackers for each victim, and then they faded back into their territory.
Of course, they weren’t without casualties. One Imperial Guard with clawed hands seized a Consultant by the neck, pulling the man’s head off. A woman, a Navigator, managed to shoot one Consultant in the chest and stab another before the third killed her.
Those enemies that had encountered resistance remained, dead or locked in hopeless combat. The majority of the Consultants had disappeared, fading back into the landscape.
Unable to watch quietly any longer, Calder signaled the Lyathatan. It pulled the ship forward, easing it toward the battle in progress.
The Consultants had found a way to resist his crown since his last visit, as he’d feared they would. But maybe it wouldn’t work at close range. Maybe it only worked once. Either way, he needed to try something else.
As he got closer, he realized he wasn’t alone. The Eternal was off to their port, which wasn’t unusual; Cheska had just repaired her ship and wouldn’t want to see it damaged so early, and she needed a vantage from which to call orders. But to starboard was another Navigator’s ship, one that seemed to be edged in gold. Empty golden snakeskins the size of blankets hung from the railings and virtually every surface, streaming in the wind like flags.
He’d never seen the ship before. That in itself wasn’t particularly suspicious, as new Navigators joined the Guild every month or two, but it was hanging back just as he was. He looked over to Cheska and jerked his thumb in the direction of the other ship.
She understood. They were close enough to communicate without use of a captain’s horn, so she called over. “Scavengers. Don’t worry about them. They’ll hang around any battle to see if they can get something out of it.”
Calder was still somewhat curious, but he put the other ship out of his mind. He was no tactician, but he could tell the battle was not going well. The Imperial Guards had stalled, unable to press forward in the face of traps and potential ambush.
He shouted through the captain’s horn as he approached, demanding that any Consultants reveal and surrender themselves immediately. Not one complied. The closer he got, the clearer it became that the crown simply wasn’t going to work. Whether the distance was stopping him, or the thin layer of mist, or whether Jorin had come up with some countermeasure, it was clear that he couldn’t order the Consultants to give up.
Which left one chance for a quick and easy victory: eliminating Jorin. If Bliss and Teach succeeded in removing Jorin from the fight, the rest of the Guild would have little choice but to give up. Whether he died, fled, or gave up, it would result in victory for the Imperialist forces. Calder just had to leave it to the Guild Heads.
He wasn’t prepared to do that.
The Testament drifted closer to the island as he kept shouting orders to the hidden Consultants. Maybe something about the Intent of the captain’s horn interfered with that of the crown. If he descended in person, he might be able to break the stalemate.
Besides his futile commands and Cheska’s periodic orders, the day was largely quiet once more. For a handful of minutes, the Imperial Guards on the shore simply milled about where they were, searching for hidden bolt-holes or traps. There was no sense advancing into more traps, while Calder and Cheska waited for news from the other Guild Heads.
Each minute that scraped by felt like hours, with the sun seemingly frozen overhead. Finally, as he could take it no more, Calder decided to have the Lyathatan carry him over to The Eternal so that he could confer with Cheska more closely.
Then General Teach smashed through the treeline as though blasted from a cannon, her armored form crashing through a stray pine. She trailed dark power like a smoky comet, and as she landed, the grass crisped up and died around her.
“Withdraw!” she shouted as she pushed herself to her knees, propped up by Tyrfang’s naked length. The blade was a pure, almost haunting black, with an irregular vein of throbbing red up the center. Even at this distance, Calder felt its Intent press against his mind. He had to focus through Kelarac’s mark, bracing himself, in order to stay conscious.
Consultants scurried away from their hiding places like wasps from a kicked hive, scrambling to escape Tyrfang’s radius. Not all of them made it; a few black-clad figures lost strength mid-stride, tumbling to a halt on the dying grass. Half a dozen of the Imperial combatants met the same fate, keeling over in silence if they were too close to Teach’s landing site. The rest of the Imperialists on the beach retreated in a panicked wave.
A man jogged out down from the island, another dark sword in his hand, and trees blackened around him. He wore a wide-brimmed hat and a pair of dark-tinted spectacles, as well as a billowing brown coat that looked as though it was made of pockets. But even that wasn’t enough storage for him; through the spyglass, Calder saw a ring of keys on one hip, something like a shriveled head on the other, and a variety of other packs and pouches that he would expect from any Reader in the field.
Jorin Curse-breaker followed the line of dead grass like a road straight to Teach, but the deadly power of his weapon pulsed outward like a wave. If her Intent was a headsman’s blade, his was a tide, killing and corrupting everything around him. If grass died under Teach’s influence, under his, it dissolved to black ash.
When the bodies began to crumble and blow away, the Imperial Guards fled back to the ships. Calder added his own orders to Cheska’s: “Retreat. Regroup. Back to the ships.” None of them could resist the power of the Awakened blades, and it was foolish to try.
The Regent of the South tipped his hat back, scratching at his hairline. “My oath to eternity, it’s not so large a request. Pack up your dancing monkeys and take your show back on the road. We have no bare axes between us, and as I see it, we’ll be a family again before year’s end.”
Calder took a second to puzzle over the man’s speech, but apparently Teach understood him. “Please withdraw to your territory, Regent. This is a Guild enforcement matter.”
Jorin replaced his hat, shrugged his shoulders, and ran forward. Faster than he had any right to—he must have some sort of enhancements, like Teach herself. In a blink, he was before the Guild Head, slamming his blade down.
The Regent’s sword met Tyrfang, and the explosion of shadow and deadly Intent was so st
rong that it blacked them out for a moment. A few of the slowest Guards died, struck down before they could reach the longboats.
Calder didn’t have a quarter the combat experience Teach did, but he could tell that she was losing. Jorin’s assault was vicious, his power overwhelming, and with each defense Teach lost ground. In the few clear glimpses Calder caught of her through his spyglass, she was breathing like a bellows. Her armor showed several clear cuts, and Jorin’s coat was seemingly unharmed.
The crown wouldn’t even distract Jorin; he was one of the Emperor’s original companions, so the crown had never meant much to him. Calder cast about for something else, anything else, he could do to tilt the battle in Teach’s favor. He could have Foster fire on the Regent, but the two fighters would have to separate first. And if they failed to kill him, if he had some protection against cannonballs or musket-fire, then Jorin’s attention would turn to them. He’d sink The Testament from where he stood.
Finally, Calder’s thoughts returned to something he’d realized only a moment ago. None of them could resist the power of the Awakened blades, and it was foolish to try.
None of them could do it, but he could. He had once before, against the Elderspawn wall outside the Emperor’s quarters.
He tightened his sword-belt and grabbed a pistol. “Andel, take me ashore. I’m about to keep Jorin from killing Teach.”
Shuffles chuckled from the rigging, where he was gnawing on a fishbone. “KILLING.”
Calder pointed up. “He gets it.”
Andel looked at Shuffles. “He’s delighted because he thinks you’ll be murdered.”
“If it makes him feel any better,” Calder said, dropping the longboat, “he’s probably right.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Five years ago
Calder had once imagined sailing as a tedious chore, but in years of traveling the Aion, he’d never felt that way. Either the sky was raining acid, or they were fleeing from some monster large enough to eat the ship, or they were trying to figure out how to avoid stepping in the next deadly trap. Even when days passed by bringing nothing but endless blue, the tension never abated. There was always the understanding that certain death could emerge from the depths at any moment.