by Will Wight
Syphren practically screamed in joy.
CHAPTER TWENTY
The eye of the Emperor sees all.
—Common proverb
~~~
GOOD-BYE, Ach'magut said, and it was with chilling finality.
The Emperor flexed his Intent once more, and a thousand sources of flame—falling matches, fractured quicklamps, banked coals—all flared to life.
There was a giant hole where the town of Silverreach had once stood, and now it was on fire.
For twenty or thirty seconds the Emperor kept his vision where it was, basking in satisfaction. The whirlpool of rubble slowed to a trickle, carrying hellish flames down into the library below. Nothing moved except flickering flames and rising smoke.
Then the Reading ended.
Shera was standing in her own body so suddenly that she almost sank to her knees. Her eyes ached and her head still flickered with the phantom of pain, but she couldn't put words to the relief she felt at being in control of her body again.
She spoke anyway.
“I was not prepared for that,” she said.
Lucan was on his knees, clutching his head in gloved hands and trying to formulate a question. “How...why...”
Meia spun in place, feral, eyes and head moving as though looking to spot a threat.
And the Emperor lounged in his network of metal, grinning ear to ear, and he laughed. He laughed long, and deep, and as hard as Shera had ever heard anyone laugh.
The three Gardeners stared at him.
Shera’s left hand snaked back to grip her shear. She wasn’t certain what an Elder-touched mind looked like, but hysterical laughter certainly wasn’t sane.
The Emperor waved her down, still laughing.
“I did it,” he said at last, and his voice was rough. Almost hoarse. “I did it again. He won’t be able to recover from that for…”
The Emperor seemed to run out of breath, and he simply chuckled instead.
“What about the rest of it?” Lucan asked. “The other Elders.” His whole body shook, and he stayed on his knees, as though he couldn’t muster the strength to stand.
“It was all Ach’magut’s plan. Has been for years. He knew I would use the Optasia again, knew I would even beat him, but he was betting on me losing myself.” The Emperor raised a limp hand to the steel enclosing him. “And here I am. I’m still here.”
He tried to push against the cage of the throne, but to no avail. “Help me out of this.”
Meia started to move, but Shera put a hand out to stop her. “Are you saying the Great Elder made a mistake?”
Shera had known practically nothing about Ach’magut before tonight, but now she’d sensed his Intent directly. He would have calculated everything, even the smallest possible variation, hundreds of years ago.
The Emperor leaned back, losing the strength to lever himself out. “Suspicious. Good. That’s why I wanted you. But you’re not taking into account the difference of scale. Men call me immortal, but Ach’magut is truly timeless. For me, tonight was a major victory, because it set all the Elders back years. It probably set him back centuries. For him, it was nothing more than a minor fluctuation, and one that he probably accounted for. It doesn’t matter to him if it takes another ten thousand years to beat me and return to life, so long as he eventually does.”
He met Shera’s eyes and smiled, more warmly than she’d ever seen from him. “But that doesn’t mean we don’t have something to celebrate.”
Relief flooded Shera’s chest, almost against her will. She wanted to stay suspicious, but if this was what it looked like for the Emperor to be overcome by Nakothi…well, if it was, she had no way of detecting it.
She looked over at Lucan, who smiled and nodded. Mission complete.
She finally let herself relax, moving forward to help Meia pry him free from the Optasia device. She would have to find out more about that later; she’d known the Emperor’s power was overwhelming and superhuman, but she had never seen anything like he’d demonstrated tonight. True, it seemed to have taken everything from him, and he’d risk handing over his body to the Dead Mother, but it was still almost frightening. If he had this much power, he could overthrow humanity on his own.
The Emperor finally emerged, leaning heavily on Meia, and he and Lucan shared a joke. They all three laughed.
Shera barely heard it.
She wanted to join in their celebration, because “celebration” meant time for her to go back to her room and enjoy twelve hours of uninterrupted sleep. But a subtle gravity drew her back to the same thoughts.
The Emperor had rolled the dice tonight. He’d had no choice, but he was gambling with the world as the stakes.
The High Council wanted me to kill him quickly.
Why? She was sure they still had some private reasons—Consultants always did—but she felt she’d seen another piece of the puzzle.
They didn’t want him to have a chance to do this. The Elders had cornered him into betting his sanity on an uncertain outcome, and he’d escaped this time. This time. But as he’d said, Ach’magut could afford to play this game for ten thousand years.
Eventually, the Emperor would lose. Maybe tomorrow, maybe in a hundred years, his attempts to hold the Empire together would finally break it.
Given enough time, the Elders would win.
So long as the Emperor ruled.
As she watched Meia carry the Emperor away, Lucan still smiling and helping as best he could, Shera felt like she’d swallowed a dagger.
“Kill when you have to,” Maxwell had said. “Kill when you’re in danger. Kill when the target has earned his fate. And kill when the target serves no useful function.”
For the first time since her friend Mari, Shera didn’t want to kill someone she’d been ordered to. But, as the Emperor limped away under Meia’s care—with no power in his body or his Intent—she realized she would never get a better chance. The next time he used the Optasia could very well be his last.
The Emperor had outlived his usefulness.
This time, Shera sought the cold. She froze her own feelings, drowning herself in ice, until her thoughts were clear and her feelings utterly cold. She closed the last few steps to the Emperor, drawing her left-hand shear as she moved.
Lucan glimpsed her face as she walked, and his eyes crinkled in confusion.
Shera wrapped her arm around the Emperor’s chest, plunging the invested blade into his chest. Up and under the short ribs, as she’d been taught.
His clothes resisted for a moment, invested more heavily than most armor, but her shear had been given Intent by almost two thousand years of assassins, by Jarelys Teach, by Lucan…and most recently, by the Emperor himself.
It reached his heart, and she wrenched the blade from left to right, so the wound didn’t seal itself. When Shera felt the warm blood spurting over her wrist, she knew the Emperor was dead.
At least for the moment, she felt nothing. The whole process had taken five seconds.
There was never much drama associated with death, in Shera’s experience. It was quick, often quiet, and usually no more violent than your average tussle in the street. The target struggled a little even after they were already dead, twitching their hips and grabbing with their fingers as though they still fought the inevitable. They made a few noises, halfway between words and animal grunts. The blood made everything sticky.
And after a minute or two, everything would go quiet. The body would release itself, emptying bowels and bladder. It didn’t take long for the stench to follow.
The Emperor was no different than anyone else…
For the first thirty seconds.
During that lull, Shera moved her left hand out of the stream of blood while he twitched. She pushed his flailing arm aside as she lifted the chain off his neck, freeing the pewter cage at the end of it. The container that concealed the Heart of Nakothi.
She looked up at Lucan and Meia, who were still paralyzed. Meia’s eyes were wide
with shock, and they were bright orange, with vertically slitted pupils. Her alchemical enhancements were calling out for blood.
In another situation, Shera might have excused herself. Explained her reasoning.
But she was still cold, so she kept her shear in hand, looking to Lucan.
He’d pulled both his gloves off, but he hadn’t touched his own shears. So he’d started to react, and then frozen. Unsure.
There is no such thing as mercy. There is only hesitation.
He’d hesitated.
His expression…if she had to put a name to it, she’d say he looked desolate but resolved. As though he’d watched a brother die, but had already come to terms with reality.
He nodded to her, once. “I understand,” he said. He started to say something else.
Only half a minute after death, the Emperor proved that he would not go as quietly as anyone else.
Shera had heard superstitious rumors about what happened to Intent after death, mostly from other Consultants who were afraid to kill Readers. In Shera’s experience, Readers died disappointingly ordinary deaths. She couldn’t speak to the fate of their Intent, whether it vanished in one final rush, lived in their immortal soul, or was buried with their bodies, but she’d never seen evidence one way or another.
The Emperor’s Intent exploded out of him in a fury of invisible force.
It was like the hazy bubbles he’d produced in the Optasia: a semi-solid dome that expanded outward in a wave, tearing his surroundings apart. Shera was blasted backward, tumbling away from the corpse, though she managed to hang on to both her shear and the Heart of Nakothi.
The room was practically destroyed. The paintings fluttered down in bits of expensive confetti, their broken frames still partially hanging on the walls. The distant bed had been tossed on its side, the walls and floor tiles cracked. It looked as though a battle had been fought here, not minutes ago.
And that was all. Compared to the power the Emperor had shown when he dragged the massive shark out of the Aion Sea, they’d gotten off lucky.
Through the cold, Shera realized she had been right to strike now. If the Emperor had still been at full power, the force of his active Reading would have torn her to pieces. Now all she had to do was dispose of the Heart.
Lucan and Meia were still standing, Meia braced and snarling, Lucan with his hand calmly in front of him.
Shera held up the Heart on the chain. “We need to get this to the Gray Island,” she said. “We can destroy it there.” Even her voice was distant and professional; they were on an assignment now, and they only had to finish it.
Something twisted in her hand, as though she gripped a live mouse in her fist. She glanced down.
At the Heart in its pewter shell.
A voice whispered, soft and slithering. “The only life is in death…the only death, in imperfection. Let me perfect you.”
Around her, the debris began rising from the floor. Lucan responded by raising both hands. “Run!” he shouted.
At least for the moment, the song rooted her in place.
“Only death is eternal, only death is vibrant, only death is truly alive. Die, and be born again.”
Shredded pieces of paper that had once been paintings drifted backward on a silent wind, gathering into a tiny cyclone over the Emperor’s body.
Teach had warned her: You’ll have to separate the Heart from him immediately, or the Dead Mother’s power will bring the Emperor back to life.
The song continued, vile and enticing, and she shook her head to clear it. She had to move, but she could barely even see through the cloud the song had placed on her mind.
Meia’s clawed hand seized her shoulder and hauled her back, to the other end of the room, away from the corpse. She pulled Shera toward the doors.
Which burst open, and Jarelys Teach marched in.
She had clearly seen battle. Her armor was scratched and dented, and in places stained by purple blood. There was a long gash through her close-cut hair. But her blue eyes were wide and alert, and she scanned the room in a second.
When her eyes landed on the Emperor’s body, they froze. She stared at him for a long moment, face absolutely blank.
She turned to Shera, furious.
“Four hours,” she whispered, her voice garbled with rage. “It didn’t even take you four hours.”
She snarled, lashing out with one gauntleted hand.
Teach wasn’t nearly close enough for her blow to land. But something hit Shera nonetheless, tearing at her chest, sucking the air from her lungs.
Her thoughts were already cold, or she would have panicked. Instead, she leaped forward, shear in her left hand. She had to kill or disable the General while she could.
This time, Teach slammed a fist into her back, lightning-quick. She went down.
But after she hit the ground, somehow her breathing got easier. She took in a few breaths, and her mind cleared. Whatever Teach had done to her was lifted.
Lucan had one hand pressed to her back and one raised to Teach. “It was necessary,” he said to her.
Teach didn’t look like she cared. Her eyes moved back to the Emperor’s corpse as though drawn there…and then her hand flew up to her sword.
Tyrfang cleared its sheath.
Shera’s senses almost shut down. The ice around her heart collapsed, and nauseating dread took its place. Every breath felt like the beginning of a sob, and winter cold clawed at her limbs. Death crawled inside her, and her vision faded second by second.
It moved away from her, and Teach lashed out with her full fury against something at the far end of the room. A red-tinted shadow whipped out of the blade, washing over the room’s back half.
Blasting through the swirling portal that had grown over the Emperor’s body.
It was a circular window onto a deep void, blackness that danced with strange, distant lights of many colors. She would almost call them stars, but they were a little too big, far too colorful, and they spun with palpable energy.
Eclipsing them, crawling through the gateway, was a Child of the Dead Mother. Shera saw nothing more than pale flesh and protruding bones before the blast of Tyrfang’s power shattered its body, pushing it back through the darkness. But there were others clambering to get through.
“Leave!” Jarelys Teach shouted, and her voice would have carried over a battlefield.
Shera didn’t need to be told twice.
The three Gardeners supported each other as they practically crawled away from the Emperor’s living quarters, edging past streams of Imperial Guards who were drawn by their Guild Head’s shouts.
Explosions rattled the palace, but they didn’t turn back.
“Don’t turn your back to her again,” Meia advised.
“If I can help it, I’ll never see her again,” Shera said. The song of Nakothi still ran through her head like a toxic river, but it was easier to ignore now. Worse, she remembered what she’d done.
She did not regret killing the Emperor; it was necessary, and it would have been much harder had she waited. She only wished she had the other two on her side. “I…had to,” she said at last.
Meia nodded once. “Mission accomplished.”
Lucan said nothing.
~~~
Back on the Gray Island, beneath the House of the Masons, the ancient Elder heart went into a box. A rough-cut stone box, hewn centuries before by Jorin Curse-breaker as a way to siphon the energy away from the most powerful curses.
The Heart of Nakothi went into the box, still crooning its terrible song.
“Be reborn in me…” it whispered, and this time the voice sounded almost friendly. There was a part of Shera that wanted to pull it out of the box, to hear it more clearly.
The lid slid over it, and she shuddered in relief.
Now, they had nothing to do but wait.
Meia paced restlessly along one wall. High Councilors Yala and Tyril stood together, speaking in low voice about the political ramifications. N
either of them had congratulated, reprimanded, rewarded, or punished Shera. They had taken the news of the Emperor’s death completely in stride.
The world had ended tonight, but for at least two people, it was one more successful Gardener assignment.
It was the last person in the room that Shera cared about the most. Lucan leaned with his back against the wall, gloved hands crossed, watching the box. When Shera walked up to him and nodded in the direction of the hallway, he followed.
“He was going to lose,” Shera said.
Lucan drummed his fingertips together, watching her. “Yes, he was.”
When Lucan didn’t ask any questions, something was wrong.
“If I hadn’t acted tonight, while he was weak, he could have killed us all.”
“You did the right thing.”
There was clearly something else bothering him, but at the sound of the words, an undetectable tension in her shoulders eased.
But his eyes were still dark, his lips tight, his fingers pressed against one another. At last, he asked a question: “Why did Yala want you to kill him so soon?”
She had thought he would have figured that out by now, but she was only too happy to explain. “I understand now. She knew what he could do on his throne, and how risky it was. She wanted us to kill him before he got out of control.”
Lucan nodded again, his eyes on the wall. “That’s an excellent reason for her to come to me. But she didn’t.”
Shera had wondered before why Yala was confiding in her, pressuring her to kill the Emperor, and not addressing the whole team. She assumed it had to do with the same reasons the Emperor and General Teach had taken her aside; the other two were likely to hesitate, when faced with an opportunity to remove the target. Shera wouldn’t.
As she’d proven.
She hadn’t considered it from this angle. If the High Councilors knew about this powerful weapon that could magnify the Emperor’s Reading to a global scale, they had good reason to act early. But they should also have talked to the squad’s Reader, preparing him.