Of Darkness and Dawn

by Wight, Will

  “Then why talk to us at all?” Shera asked. Syphren thought that was a very good question. It was somewhat confused about why there was no battle going on.

  Maxeus gestured above him. “You may have noticed that I have other dishes on my plate today, so to speak. The sky cracks, and one calls the Blackwatch first and the Magisters second. Also, I believe I told you that it was my colleagues who want to aggressively pursue armed conflict with your...independence movement. Whatever their policy, I don't actually want a battle yet.”

  It was the first thing he'd said that Shera was sure was a lie. “Assassinating Regents is a bad way to start, then.”

  Ayana's eyes shot over to her and back to Maxeus so fast that no one else likely noticed. Shera did, and she knew that if not for the presence of a dozen hostile Magisters, Ayana would just have driven a bladed fingernail into Shera's side. It was the sacred, unwritten rule of the Consultants: never give away free information. Shera had just revealed that they knew about Alagaeus' death and Maxeus' involvement in it.

  Of course, the existence of this trap meant that he knew all that already, so she hadn't actually given him anything. She was leaning on that reality. If he felt surprised or threatened by that revelation...well then, she wouldn't survive this conversation. At least she wouldn't have to listen to Syphren anymore if she were dead.

  The thought of death sparked her Vessel's petulant wrath. It felt like the blade was throwing a tantrum in her head at the very idea that it wouldn't be able to drain anyone's life away.

  “That depends on what you're after,” Maxeus said without missing a beat, and Ayana relaxed a fraction. He wasn't surprised, and apparently not thrown off his game. “As I said earlier, I'm not trying to goad you into attacking. I have a different goal in mind, and in the end, I think you'll find that it's not so incompatible with your own. I want to see an Empire united, after all, not torn apart. And certainly not quartered.”

  He's not provoking us. He's provoking the Regents.

  It made sense, from a certain point of view. If the Regents attacked on their own, then they wouldn't be cooperating with the Guilds. He would have a chance to take on his opponents one at a time, rather than together. And with the Regents gone, the Guild Heads would be much more likely to come to a compromise.

  But her heart began to cool, even as her left hand drifted to Syphren's hilt. Now that he'd told them this much, he wouldn't be letting them live.

  “I'd like you to take a letter to your High Councilors when you leave,” he said, producing a letter from his jacket pocket. “That is, unless one of you two are Architects yourselves? No?”

  Shera blinked. Beside her, Ayana radiated astonishment that even Shera could feel. He was just...releasing them?

  “I thought not. Here.” He spun the letter to Shera, who caught it on reflex. Not the best move: it could have been filled with destructive alchemy, or invested with some kind of trap. But she already held it in her hand, so the damage was done.

  It didn't explode. Gingerly, she extended Syphren's senses, and felt no power whatsoever from the envelope. It appeared to just be a letter.

  What convoluted trap was this? Setting an ambush only to talk and let them go? What did he gain from doing this?

  If anything, it seemed like he was going to absurd lengths to catch them and then release them. Why?

  Whatever was happening, it was too subtle for Shera to detect. She slipped the letter into her belt. The reality trickled slowly into her mind—she was going to walk away. She'd see Lucan again. Get a full night's sleep, maybe a whole day if she could arrange it. Eat a hot meal.

  And she couldn't figure out why.

  She glanced from one of the assassins to the other. Some of them had black cloth stretched over their mouth and nose, just like the shrouds she and Ayana wore as part of their Gardener blacks. She recognized a face here and there: Keina and Ari, Jora, Narin. A few whose names she'd forgotten. She hadn't seen them in fifteen years, and wouldn't have called them friends even as a child, but she was surprised how clearly she could picture them now.

  Though she still couldn't see the Guild Head's angle, she had at least confirmed that these were indeed Maxwell-trained killers here. The Magister's Guild had taken them in at some point after they'd left the Luminians, and was now using them to assassinate Regents. What had happened in the intervening years? What filled in the gaps?

  Inexplicably, the thought caused a flare of anger. How dare Maxeus take them and use them like this? She'd spent her whole life thinking that everyone had gotten out but her, and the idea had brought with it a certain satisfaction. If she had known that Maxwell had never really died, that those he'd kidnapped and trained were still being used by someone else...

  What would she have done?

  Two of the black-clad killers rolled the door back, exposing the light of a streetlamp. Ayana bowed to Maxeus and began moving toward it, but Shera lingered a second longer.

  She knew that they were walking out with complete confirmation of their suspicions, with every bit of information they'd wanted and more, but something still nagged at her, like a splinter in her heart. She didn't know why, but she wanted to give these other men and women a chance to escape Maxwell's clutches at last.

  Otherwise, she would have accomplished nothing by killing him.

  Something else tugged at her emotions, too. Syphren. It begged her not to leave, tugging at her anger, her sympathy, her greed, her exhaustion, her ambition. It played every note in its arsenal to get her to feed it.

  But Shera had one advantage: she was tired. She focused on her desire for sleep, set her highest ambition as her own bed. It gave her the strength to turn around and walk for the door.

  Maxeus put a hand on her shoulder. “Keep your Intent under control, young woman. It's difficult not to feel threatened when a Soulbound keeps thinking about murdering us all.”

  He withdrew his hand a second before Syphren drew his life away, but that was the final push. In an instant, Shera's thoughts went icy cold. Her left hand gripped Syphren's hilt, and her right hand whipped out to grab his wrist.

  She missed. He pulled his arm back a hair’s breadth before she reached him, but she didn’t stop her motion. Instead, she seized a Magister around the neck. With her power, she inhaled.

  And a bright green wisp lifted from his chest, spiraling around her arm as it sank into her body. The world jolted into focus, each color brightening six shades until she could clearly distinguish the grain of the wood in the far wall. The night air smelled delicious, and the gasps of shock and fear floated through the air like music.

  At last.

  Shera darted out of sight, into the shadows behind a stack of boxes, as the Magisters started to tear the room apart.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  In the simplest possible way, Readers are above the law. A Reader with enough skill and power can, given time, escape any shackles and evade any punishment save instant execution. Mortal judges are powerless to enforce their will on Readers or Soulbound with any degree of precision or impartiality.

  Which is why the Guild of Magisters exists.

  —Recovered fragment of a third-century magistrate’s tablet, stored in Consultant’s Guild archives.

  ~~~

  Mekendi Maxeus, Head of the Magister's Guild, had everything well in hand. The situation may have looked dangerous, from an outsider's perspective, but he was confident in his ability to handle the unexpected. The warehouse he'd purchased, packed with crates of legitimate goods, had provided the perfect cover. And it finally netted the spies he'd been waiting for.

  Now, as the Soulbound somehow tore the Intent from one of his Magisters and flipped out of sight, he was prepared. He hadn't quite told them the truth, to begin with; he never expected them to walk away without a fight. He had their measure, and he knew that the only thing he had to do, in order to provoke them into attacking, was...nothing.

  As soon as they entered the room, before he lowered the veil of In
tent that hid him and his men from their sight, he'd been Reading them. He knew that the older assassin, the one with Imperial Guard blood, would take any opportunity not to fight. She was an ambush predator, and she knew it.

  The other, the Soulbound, was still in tension. Freshly bonded to her Vessel, unless he missed his guess, and still chaotic because of it. She would be the powderkeg that would ignite this explosion...and after he'd given them every opportunity to leave in peace.

  Now, when he claimed that he'd been attacked by Consultant Gardeners, every word would be true. The Witnesses would hear him, verify his testimony, and would likely support his alliance against the so-called Independent Guilds. They could be enough to tip the balance, and if they brought the Champions with them...why, that would likely be game and match.

  He didn't indulge himself in self-satisfaction very often, but this was too much to resist. Even his pat on the Soulbound's shoulder had been carefully calculated to push her over the edge, to tempt her into using her power.

  The one miscalculation so far was her attack on his Magister, which was a regret. The man would get the best medical treatment available, once the Consultants were dead.

  As soon as the Soulbound woman ducked behind the crates, he flared the flame on top of his staff. It was a simple exercise in Intent; he wasn't Soulbound to the staff, but it had the blood of a flame-controlling Kameira running through it, and its wood was invested with a connection to flame. Through the staff, fire was his plaything.

  Assassins needed shadows, which he banished in firelight. Now, his own bought-and-paid-for squad of killers could go to work.

  They did, creeping along in imitation of the Consultant Gardeners they'd been meant to mimic, wrapping around the shadows to encircle the Soulbound.

  As Maxeus waited for his forces to take her into custody, a discrepancy in Intent floated across the room. Fear had spiked for an instant, and then gone quiet. Behind his mask, he scanned the room, searching for the source of the flutter.

  There. The door was shut, and only a trickle of blood marked the presence of the Magisters who had escorted the first assassin out. Where was the mutated woman with the bladed hands?

  He cast his mind out to search for her, but in a flicker of shadow she stood in front of him, looking even more like a picture out of an Elder’s nightmare in the light of his burning staff: her hair pale and drifting, her black knife-hands spread wide, her eyes cold and deadly.

  One glimpse was all he got before she knocked his staff aside, sending it skittering away.

  The world plunged into darkness.

  Maxeus had seen some morbid visions in his time. He'd Read the Intent of fresh blood-soaked battlefields, as fear and panic still clung to the corpses. He'd sensed the aftermath of Elder attacks, and of Imperial executions. He'd hunted down kidnappers and rapists, murderers and sadistic torturers. Each time, the crime came accompanied by a vision and a “taste” of the criminal's Intent. So he had quite the catalogue of terrors stored up for use in his nightmares.

  And this one very quickly joined the list.

  When a Magister is plunged into darkness, they have one instinctive response: to search without their eyes. To rely on their sixth sense to find their way, freezing as they searched for danger. It was just as much of an automatic response as a child extending his hands to feel his way around a lightless room.

  Unfortunately, this meant they froze in place.

  Two wisps of green light rose with a hiss like a death rattle, swirling away in the darkness. Lives stolen by the Soulbound.

  Maxeus had been in enough combat situations to react appropriately, diving away from his last known location and reaching for a light. He pulled forth an alchemical light that he kept for just such emergencies as these, shook the sturdy glass ball in his fist until it started glowing, and then rolled it across the floor so it wouldn't give away his new position.

  In the harsh yellow light of the quicklamp's glow, he saw chaos.

  Men and women shouted and pushed each other, their boots kicking the light this way and that in their mad scramble to locate the enemy. Blood stained the floor, two limp bodies marking the locations of Magisters who had stayed where they were when the lights first went out.

  In the shadows, flashes of green and the fall of bodies identified the Soulbound. Waves of terror and clashing sparks pinpointed the daughter of the Imperial Guard.

  Blood sprayed across a nearby crate, and his heart sickened as he wondered how many Magisters he'd led to their death today.

  His assassins had adopted to the darkness the best, which was appropriate. He'd spent an exorbitant sum housing and training them after the Luminians lost them, recognizing their potential. If the Magisters lacked anything, it was a keen killer instinct—most of their Guild was made up of scholars and researchers. He'd cultivated these ready-made killers in anticipation of a day when they might be needed.

  Honestly, it was easier than he'd ever imagined. Whoever this Rudeus Maxwell had been, and however he'd died, he'd done an excellent job instilling discipline into his kidnapped children. As much as Maxeus hated the man's methods, he couldn't deny the results. Only the mythical Gardeners themselves could have done a better job.

  As proven now, when one of the Gardeners pulled a man of his into the darkness. After a brief scuffle, the man fell limp to the floor, and a shadow flitted away. Judging from the soft flow of his Intent, the man wasn't dead. Interesting. Maybe these assassins weren't as ruthless as he'd always heard.

  Maxeus sensed something, like a strain of music just out of earshot. He edged blindly around a stack of crates until his hand brushed a stretch of polished wood: his staff. He seized it, levering himself to his feet.

  Less than a minute had passed, but his men were in a panic, and the enemy was disciplined and effective. Time to change that.

  Gathering his Intent, Maxeus plunged his awareness into the gray wood.

  As a sapling, the tree is planted among the ashes of a burned home. It is fed water mixed with Kameira blood, and as it grows, wildfire passes through the underbrush every year. Far from destroying the sapling, the heat makes it stronger.

  It is born in fire, nourished by fire, healed by fire. And there is fire in everything.

  The Guild Head's Intent flowed through the staff, enhancing the heat all around him, carrying the latent power of a Kameira through his staff and into his surroundings. A ring of flame appeared against the walls of the warehouse, the dry crates catching, spreading a burning wall as a barrier.

  He could replace this warehouse and its contents more easily than his Magisters. As callous as his business had made him, the lives of Guild members always came first. He'd known the Gardeners would fight, which was why he'd brought such an overwhelming number to suppress them. He hadn't thought they'd be so effective so quickly.

  The glassy eyes of a Magister, a friend, stared up at him from the floor.

  Battle anger came over him, and he placed the end of his staff against a large crate. A wash of his Intent made it lighter, and he shoved it aside. This investment should never have worked instantly, but he was cutting corners. It would return to its original weight almost immediately, and would be almost impossible to invest thereafter.

  But it was enough to expose the Soulbound, her trembling green dagger held over the body of one of his black-clad assassins. Judging from her chaotic Intent, she was trying to resist the will of her Vessel, and steadily losing the fight.

  Soulbound were most fragile during the first few months of bonding with their Vessel. They weren't any weaker—the Soulbound gained power at the instant of Awakening an object, so their relative strength remained constant with time. What changed was their skill and their stability.

  Right now, this woman was unskilled and unstable. Her Vessel was demanding that she take this man's life, and it was taking all her concentration to refuse.

  That was fortunate. If nothing had slowed her down, Maxeus might have had to actually burn the whole wa
rehouse down in order to stop her.

  He swung his staff like a club, which she ducked, but his Intent filled the staff. His will for it to strike was enough, and the staff pulled itself to one side, clipping her across the jaw. The impact sent her spinning to the ground. Where she would burn alive.

  Maxeus gathered his fiery Intent as the smoke billowed from the edges, filling the room. Though he could hardly spare the attention for it, there was some kind of commotion near the doors. Most of his Magisters were fleeing the flames, though some stuck around to see to his safety, and three newcomers pushed past them on the way in.

  Three men. Two with exceptionally pure Intent, and one with a head shrouded in remnants of Urg'naut. Maxeus recognized him; he'd tried to banish the Elder curse around Darius Allbright years ago. The Luminian Order was here.

  So much the better. Darius would be able to ascertain the truth for himself, and the reality might be enough to get the Order to break their association with the Consultant's Guild.

  After he burned this assassin to ash.

  He raised his staff, preparing to slam it and his Intent down into her body together.

  ~~~

  Shera had barely recovered from the blow, her head still spinning, but she had never lost her grasp on Syphren's hilt.

  The life running through her could not be stopped just because she was about to die. The energy she'd stolen begged to be used, demanded to find an outlet, and she was hungry both to wield that power and to gather more.

  When the Head of the Magisters drew up his Intent, his staff rippling up its length with flames, she felt both the heat and the weight of his power. His will would descend on her like a hammer, blasting her to pieces or setting her aflame.