by Will Wight
But the game was over. She’d won.
She readied her two shears and let the mist overcome her again. “I’m not here to defeat you.”
As the Champions tore apart the room, Shera paced around Calder, occasionally stopping to avoid a wild attack from the blind Soulbound. Calder whirled in place, his visored face turning this way and that, pointing his sword into the mist.
Finally, she saw an opening and stepped in, driving Syphren into Calder’s armored back.
Despite its long history as a weapon, Bastion had been unable to pierce the protection of the Emperor’s Intent. But Syphren…Syphren had been made to pierce defenses. To turn the target’s power against itself.
Calder would have been better off wearing ordinary steel.
There was an instant of resistance as the point met white metal before it flashed green and penetrated. The armor sank into flesh, and Shera could feel Calder’s life bleeding from him. And into her.
There was no saving him now, but this didn’t quite satisfy her anger. Calder had caused her too much frustration and pain.
So she leaned closer, whispering into his ear. “All hail the Emperor of the World.”
It was the last thing the false Emperor would ever hear.
As she pulled her dagger free, she tore Calder’s life from him as well. It was paltry next to the power from the Champions, but it still energized her, sharpening her senses as she dashed for the exit.
She cast her vision into the mist, looking outside…where, at last, Jorin and Meia had arrived. They had torn apart an entire wall of the Emperor’s Stage and were rampaging inside, looking for her.
Shera ran to join them.
If they played their cards right, they could still salvage the plan and end the war right here.
The Imperialist figurehead was dead.
Chapter Sixteen
two years ago
Yala pushed through the door into the lower levels of the Mason house where, years ago, she had been trained. This had been her childhood home, though she hadn’t known all its secrets.
Now she was charged with its defense.
She pushed through the door from the harbor flanked by two Readers, an alchemist, and a field medic. Architects all. They had waited outside the door until the sound of gunfire stopped.
Only then did they enter. By any reckoning, an ambush of eight with firearms would be enough for two, but she had not gotten this far by underestimating Gardeners.
The stench of blood and black powder filled the room, which was thick with haze.
Her Readers and medic flanked to check the bodies of their four loyal Consultants, but to Yala’s eye, only one wouldn’t make it. He gurgled face-down into the floor, a sucking chest wound making a scarlet circle on the ground. The others were wounded or poisoned, but with help so close, they would live.
Two traitors lay on the ground as well.
Lucan, the Reader, lay sprawled on his back. Musket-balls rested on him where they had failed to penetrate his two layers of invested cloth, though some of the black fibers had come unraveled from the force.
The camouflaged cloak of Kameira hair still shifted to match the background, making him look like pieces of his body had just vanished. The left side of his skull was cracked as though someone had hit it with a hammer, leaving a red mess the size of a baby’s fist.
He convulsed, his eyes rolled up into his head, blood matting his dark hair. He would be dead within the hour.
Shera was in worse shape.
She had holes all over, her black uniform not invested as well as the Reader’s. She sprawled on her stomach, her left hand extended in a fist toward the gaping hole where the trap door had once been.
Shera’s left shear caught her eye: it was still sheathed. Interesting.
Yala would have expected her to go for her second knife. Instead, the girl’s fingers twitched around whatever she held in her fist.
The alchemist stepped up to Yala. “High Mason, ours are stable. One beyond saving. Should I stabilize the Gardeners?”
Yala gave one sharp nod, which sent the alchemist to work. Shera and Lucan both would be tried before the Council and executed, per Guild protocol.
Yala returned her attention to the spot where the trap door had once been.
Lucan had torn open a ragged opening into the floor itself big enough for two men side-by-side. As Yala had suspected, he was more dangerous than any Reader had the right to be.
She wanted to see this with the cold detachment of her office, but she didn’t. This hurt. Her Consultants had betrayed her, had betrayed their own Guild. Her sorrow and her anger fed on each other, and she didn’t know which was stronger.
What a waste. What a colossal waste.
Shera and Lucan were both talents of a generation, equal to her daughter, as the Emperor had both wisely divined and enhanced with his personal attention.
But they were never bound to the Consultant’s Guild as firmly as they should have been, not like her daughter was.
When she had met with Lucan the night before, she’d hoped he would see the error of his ways. He was meddling with the fate of the Empire itself.
But she hadn’t leaned on trust. One of the weaknesses of the Gardeners, especially these two, was their endless faith in their own abilities. What does it matter if there are guards? They must have thought. We’re better. We’re smarter. We know best.
She had brought her team into place as soon as Lucan’s bed had been discovered empty tonight. They would have spotted a tail, so she didn’t tail them. Her team headed straight for Mason headquarters, posting the guard that they would have posted against any other intruders, with a backup ambush in the document room.
Yala had beaten them by being the first to get serious, to treat this matter as gravely as it deserved. But she hadn’t wanted to beat them. She had wanted all this to end up as an unnecessary misunderstanding.
She had wanted them to follow her orders.
She wished, as she had wished in the past, that they had a Guild Head. Someone who could unite the Consultants as a leader and a symbol in a way that an ever-shifting Council never could. No one trusted a council.
In the deepest chambers of her heart, she wanted a leader because she wanted to have a purpose again.
She loved the Consultants, the Emperor’s thousand hands in the shadows, and she wanted them to move as one body. Let the burden of leadership pass from her, so that she could serve as she was always meant to.
But the steadiest hands available were hers, so light and life, she would take the wheel and steer this ship.
Only moments had passed since she entered the room, and now a pair of Consultants approached Shera. One pulled her shears away, shuddering as he touched the one in her left sheath. The other knelt to examine her hand.
That one stumbled back as her fist began to hiss and a spark of light emerged from between her knuckles. With one last surge of life, Shera opened her hand and shoved a ball across the floor.
It rolled, one end sparking like a lit fuse.
The two Consultants flipped Shera over, and the girl’s eyes were open. Shera looked into Yala’s face and smiled.
One of the Shepherds lunged for the hissing ball, but Yala’s alchemist gave a throat-wrenching cry, pointing at the ball as though all the shifting demons of Tharlos were packed within
The Shepherd hesitated, but Yala’s reactions were better trained.
“Out!” she roared, sprinting for the door herself, hauling a wounded man to his feet and shoving him through the still-cracked door.
The Consultants had evacuated the basement in two seconds, slamming the door behind them and backing away from it. The only two remaining in the room were Lucan and Shera, and though they would surely die to whatever alchemy they had unleashed, they deserved their fate. She did regret that they had managed to escape a fair trial.
But she had to be sure.
She spun on her alchemist. “What was that?”
“Gas,” the young, pale waif of an Architect responded. “It has a spark on the side that lights an internal fuse.”
“What kind of gas?”
“Could be anything! Hallucinogen, paralytic, emetic, irritant, plain smoke…” The alchemist frowned mid-sentence, watching the door. She pulled a fine green cloth from her pocket, pressing it against her face—which had already been covered by another invested cloth, so Yala could only assume the redundant protection was necessary—and pulled goggles down from her hairline over her eyes. Only then did the alchemist peer beneath the door.
Whatever she saw, she let out a sigh of relief and stood. “Everyone stand back,” she said. “I’m clearing the room.”
No one needed an excuse to take another step away.
She cracked it, peered inside, and then threw the door wide, striding into the room. She began to laugh. “The Emperor has left us some luck,” she said. “She missed us.”
Yala moved up to the doorway, following the younger Architect’s gaze to the floor. Stray wisps of gray fog drifted up…from the basement. Shera lay next to the opening, clearly unconscious.
Shera’s gas bomb had rolled straight from her hand and down into the basement below, where it would hurt no one.
“Is it safe to enter?” Yala asked, only passing through the doorway when the alchemist waved her in.
“By the scent, I believe this to be a dose of ‘sister of metal.’ It works quickly, especially in a tight room, and causes muscular seizures without interrupting cardiovascular operation. Non-lethal, and it clears up in under a minute. She must have prepared it for the guards.”
Yala had to hand it to Shera; the Gardener had blunted her blade when dealing with fellow members of her Guild. The High Councilor snapped for the medic to get back to work. Maybe, if their one grievously injured man survived, she could have mercy on Shera for this. Exile instead of execution.
Yala peered down into the next room. “What about our guests? Will they be affected by the gas?”
More than two years ago, when Yala had been first contacted by the Emperor, she had led a team of alchemists and archaeologists to examine this tomb of the Regents.
The only Readers she brought tonight were those she trusted implicitly. She didn’t want anyone outside the High Council and a handful of necessary Architects knowing who they really protected beneath the house of the Masons.
The alchemists had a reasonably good idea of what the alchemical systems in the coffins could do. As thorough as they could have without opening the coffins and releasing the legends within, anyway.
Those alchemical reports had, by Yala’s orders, never made it into the Miner archives.
The alchemist waved a hand in response to her question. “Between the protective investment on the coffins themselves and the air-cleansing systems we’re certain are inside, they’ll be fine. Their air is alchemically filtered, and if it goes beyond what the filters can handle, I’m certain it will trigger some sort of backup action to release the subjects.”
Yala nodded, turning her attention to the three gravely injured Consultants—the two Gardeners and her own man.
The medic had sealed up Yala’s man with sticky alchemical glue, given Lucan a shot of some kind, and wrapped a bandage around him. Those two were being carried out.
Now she was putting more glue-plugs over Shera’s gunshot wounds, but when she saw Yala looking, she shook her head.
“She’s lost consciousness, and I don’t see her ever regaining it. We have to move her, and even if she lasts to the operating room, we can’t stop her organs from failing. We would need a medical alchemist on site now, fully equipped.”
“Not my expertise,” the alchemist said, waving a stick through the dispersing gas from downstairs. She held up the stick, which had turned pink. “As I thought: sister of metal. Lucky for us.”
The word triggered an instinct in the back of Yala’s mind.
“Luck belongs to dice,” her old trainers used to say. “We don’t play dice.”
When fortune started to go Yala’s way, she got suspicious. “How is it lucky?” she snapped.
The alchemist looked like a child with no idea why her mother was suddenly upset. “Well, even if the sister of metal makes it past the coffin filters, the inhabitants are in stasis. They’ll just twitch for a while, they won’t wake up. It’s even less dangerous on them than it would be on us.”
Yala stared into the hole in the floor, mind swimming back through the last few minutes.
Shera had left a triumphant smile when she thought she’d gassed them all.
What would the gas do? It would be weakened by the investment on the coffins, then caught by the filters. If by some miracle it did pass the filters, the coffin had redundant backup systems…
Shera’s smile. If she had intended it to go off in the room, why did she look so triumphant? Even if it had gone off, it wasn’t lethal. It would only have immobilized them for a few minutes.
She had accidentally rolled a gas bomb down a hole big enough to swallow a tiger?
Shera, who could put a spade through a crow’s eye at twenty paces?
Yala’s subordinates had already pulled Lucan and the other hideously wounded man out of the room, and there were four currently carrying Shera. Though they had been employed on opposite sides tonight, they were gentle.
Yala seized her alchemist by the scruff of the neck, making her drop her diagnostic stick. The younger woman’s eyes grew wide behind her goggles. “What is the backup?” Yala demanded. “What happens if the gas gets past the filters?”
The alchemist trembled on her own even as Yala shook her. “I don’t…I don’t know, probably a secondary filter? Maybe a cleansing agent?”
“What happens if all of those were to fail? What’s the final failsafe?”
“System purge and subject release,” the alchemist said, as though it were obvious. “If anything too catastrophic happens to the alchemical systems, it will be designed to instantly trigger the final waking potion. The designer wouldn’t want them to die in their sleep.”
Yala slowly released the alchemist, her brain paralyzed with terror. Lucan must have Read the coffins directly, learned how they worked. How much time did she have? How much time?
Old habit snapped her out of it. “Harvest the Gardeners!” she shouted. “Do it now! Burn their clothes!”
She didn’t wait to be obeyed, dashing forward, stealing a reloaded pistol from one of her subordinates as she passed. The two men carrying Shera dropped the Gardener at Yala’s order, drawing knives.
Yala didn’t wait for them. She leveled the gun at Shera’s chest and pulled the trigger.
The explosion in the enclosed room deafened her, and the drifting smoke left her blind for an instant.
When the smoke cleared, she saw the lead ball hovering in the air an inch from Shera’s face.
That was when she realized she couldn’t move her finger from the trigger. She could barely breathe, as though chains had been pulled tight around her chest. She could barely twitch her eyes.
The other Consultants were held in place as well. Lucan had dropped halfway to the ground, hovering in midair.
A slam echoed up from below.
She knew it for what it was: a heavy coffin lid slamming to the ground.
Yala started to pray. To the Unknown God of the Luminians, to the Emperor’s ghost, to the Great Elders themselves, to anyone who was listening.
Please…please don’t let that be who I think it is.
Debris from the broken trap door shot upward, a volley of splinters shooting into the ceiling. A figure drifted up from the darkness.
Three large lizard skulls, each twice the size of a human’s, swirled into vision first. They orbited one another, drifting upwards over a head of blonde hair.
A myth flew into the room. The greatest Soulbound in Imperial history, the warrior who had fought Kthanikahr head-on, whose mighty power had created the Dylian Basin. The woman who coul
d have been Empress, had she accepted a crown.
She was tall and pale, golden hair hanging matted and wet behind her. She wore only a loose white robe, which must have been the clothes she was buried in. Her skin was still damp with potions, but she did not shiver. Her blue eyes were more terrifying than any Awakened weapons Yala had ever seen.
The Regent surveyed the room, her gaze landing on Yala.
“Where’s the Emperor?” Estyr Six asked.
Chapter Seventeen
Philosophers and historians have varying opinions on historical figures such as Estyr Six and the Emperor.
While they are no doubt incredible individuals, no one is above criticism. They came to power in war, and the ruthlessness that served them so well in battle against the Elders may not be the trait best-suited to a world at peace. Some say compassion and understanding should be valued instead.
When questions such as these were first raised, there was a widespread movement to put Loreli, Regent of the West, on the throne.
—Introductory History of the Empire, a common textbook for children
present day
When Jorin arrived at the Emperor’s Stage, the battle ended.
It was a better result than Shera had hoped for. Shera, Jorin, a handful of Gardeners, and a few supporting teams infiltrated the crowd watching Calder’s speech. Then, when they saw Shera’s signal, they were supposed to march in and retrieve her and then run from the city.
The Imperialists had, of course, sealed up the tunnels they’d used to escape the Imperial Palace the first time, so they had planned a new escape route. It was…unreliable, to say the least, being a network of civilian homes, but they had hoped never to use it.
However, their emergency plans had ended up working better than anyone had predicted.
The moment Jorin tore down the wall of the Emperor’s Stage with his corrosive Intent, all the Imperial Guards that had been protecting Calder threw down their weapons. Meia and the Regent came through the wall to see a bunch of Guards kneeling in surrender.