Of Kings and Killers

by Will Wight

  Calder flipped through the rest of the book. “My two remaining Champions will be with him as well to add authenticity. If anything happens to me, they’ll still be close enough to respond.”

  “We’ll be glad to have them. Meanwhile, Steward, you will be in a waiting room we’ve secured inside the Stage building. Wearing the Emperor’s armor for an added layer of protection. After the address is over, you will visit the double and switch places, after which you will greet selected citizens personally. Once they have passed through our security screening.”

  Ideally, Rojric would deliver the address while Calder was a mile away, as he had done during Calder’s coronation as Steward. But there were a few business-owners and members of prominent families who were too important to the Capital to ignore, and Calder had to greet them in person. So he had to stay close enough to be switched.

  Though while sitting inside a guarded room wearing the Emperor’s armor, Calder would be far safer than Rojric.

  “Flawless,” Calder declared. “However, I have recently gained some insight into the mindset of the Consultants. We believe they will come after me after the Farstrider report is distributed, but this is only their first opportunity. It won’t be their last. If they do act tonight, I don’t want to let them get away. Can we seal the Stage building with the assassin inside?”

  The Guard exchanged glances with his partner, then stepped closer to Calder. So close that Calder could smell a strange musk from the man’s bear-like limbs. “There is a padlock that General Teach sometimes used. It was Awakened by the Emperor, and it can seal the exits to an entire building in an instant. But you’ll have to authorize us to use it.”

  Perfect. Calder couldn’t have asked for anything better.

  “We have to minimize the chances of a leak,” Calder whispered back. “After we leave, tell me its location and I will retrieve it myself. Tell no one.”

  Louder, he added, “Good work, Guardsman. Now, could you give me and Rojric some privacy? I would like a moment to give him some notes on his performance.”

  The Guards looked Rojric up and down before one of them pulled a belt knife and handed it to Calder.

  “I don’t think he could take you even if he had a weapon,” the Guard said. “But just in case.”

  Calder resolved to make sure this man got a raise.

  As soon as the Guards left the room, Calder walked over to the nearby table, placing the belt knife next to the logbook.

  “If you’re concerned about security, you can keep a Guard or two—”

  Calder silenced him with a gesture. Then he reached down, tore a corner of blank paper out of the logbook, and scribbled on it.

  When he’d finished, he held it up for Rojric to see.

  Could be listening.

  Rojric swallowed audibly.

  Calder immediately fed the scrap of paper into the candle-flame, then dropped it to the floor to let it burn out. He tore off a second piece of paper and scribbled another note.

  I will give the speech.

  The double’s eyes widened as he realized where Calder was going.

  This will be risky for you. Are you willing?

  They had found Rojric for his ability, not for his loyalty, but the man was obviously brave enough to pretend to be Calder while knowing that it would attract the attention of enemies.

  Sure enough, the man’s spine straightened and his eyes hardened. He gave Calder a single, firm nod.

  Calder reached out and shook his hand.

  Thank you.

  He looked up to the Emperor’s duplicate armor standing on the pedestal over their heads, then added more to the note.

  Now, help me get this down.

  Bliss woke from a nightmare, sweating and breathing heavily.

  That in itself was not so unusual. Nightmares were tools favored by several Elders, and many others inspired nightmares even in the most steel-willed.

  But this was not an Elder nightmare. Not unless the Elders had taken to stirring up memories.

  She remembered her birth.

  Emerging from an alchemical bath in a body that she now recognized would be normal for a three- or four-year-old child, she had looked up and seen Nathanael Bareius’ glasses gleaming in the light.

  There had been a whole team of alchemists in the room that day, and the memory was so distant that she wasn’t sure she took any particular notice of Bareius, but in her dreams he was the only one she remembered.

  Likewise, she didn’t remember his actual words. She hadn’t been able to speak yet.

  But she imagined him saying, “If she fails the tests, put her into the incinerator. Like the others.”

  She knew that, in reality, he had probably said nothing of the sort.

  He wouldn’t have needed to. Everyone in that room knew the procedure.

  But she had passed their physical and mental examinations, and so she had been brought into her new home: a polished pink room.

  There, he had kept her for years.

  She only had three sorts of visitors in those years. First, her tutors, faceless interchangeable men and women in alchemist masks who taught her everything she would need to know about the world through textbooks and worksheets.

  Second, Nathanael Bareius himself. He said he was her father, and a father was someone who should always be obeyed.

  Third were Elderspawn of Tharlos.

  Her first…few dozen…encounters with them had been just like any other child’s. She had screamed and panicked and tried to escape. Spawn of Tharlos were shapeshifters who held no form for long, bizarre ever-melting blends of animals and objects.

  But she found you could grow used to anything over time.

  Once she had learned to tolerate the Elderspawn, she had been given a length of yellowed bone. This time, she really did remember what Nathanael Bareius had said to her: “No one has ever managed to beat this before, but you will, won’t you? You’re such a good girl.”

  She had wanted so badly to pass the test.

  It had been weeks before she could even hold the Spear without turning her hand into a slithering mass of tendrils or her floor into honey.

  Once she mastered that stage, they reintroduced the Elderspawn. This time, they were hostile.

  She had defended herself with the Spear.

  Bliss didn’t know how long the tests had continued, but she remembered when the Soulbinding was complete. The Spear of Tharlos’ Intent had become clearer and clearer to her until one day, its logic just made sense to her. It wanted things to change. Anything and everything, all the time.

  That day, she had changed her location for the first time.

  And she saw the facility where she had been trapped. The prison.

  She saw the outside.

  She saw what had happened to the others before her.

  And now her nightmares showed her the label outside her cell. Her name: #4162B.

  That facility no longer existed.

  It had taken much longer for her to break the hold that Nathanael Bareius had over her, and she still sometimes woke shaking at the memories. It kept her anger hot.

  She shivered in her nightgown and patted the Spear of Tharlos in its Intent-sealing harness beside her bed. Revenge was too difficult to achieve on the richest man in the world, she found. And she had a greater purpose now anyway.

  How could she put her personal desire over protecting people from the Great Elders?

  “You can’t, of course!” Bareius said from the foot of her bed. He adjusted his glasses, his smile wide. “I would never ask you to.”

  Instantly she whirled, impaling him through the chest with her Spear.

  He spurted blood and fell, but a second Bareius stepped out of her closet. “Bliss…that’s a wonderful name, a beautiful name for my daughter. I’m proud of it, if I do say so myself.”

  “I picked my name,” Bliss muttered. “It’s mine.”

  The room had gone from freezing to scalding hot.

  She swep
t the Spear through the second Bareius, but he jumped backwards into a swirling portal into the void.

  Bliss felt a brief surge of triumph. He was in league with the Elder cultists! She’d known it all along.

  Well, she hadn’t known it, but that made a great excuse to kill him.

  She followed him.

  Somehow she was certain where the portal would come out, and she changed her location from her bedroom to the rooftop of a bell tower in the Capital.

  Her bare feet found purchase on the cool tiles even as the moon shone overhead. He smiled. “Not bad, but how about this?”

  He leaped off the tower.

  She changed to follow him, transporting herself directly to the ground.

  …but not the ground where she intended.

  She found herself standing in a grassy field. Bliss glared at the Spear—it interfered with her intentions sometimes, because even plans should change.

  But it was hard to focus on her Vessel. Slippery. As though…

  …as though something was getting in the way.

  Bliss sharpened herself. She gathered up all her concentration and directed it to changing her blood in a very specific way. Cleansing it.

  Removing any foreign agents.

  For a moment, she burned with fever and her heart sped up.

  Then her mind was clear.

  Alchemy.

  She had been poisoned.

  She saw the world around her clearly for the first time since she’d woken in her bed: the moonlight playing over the grass, the ground under her feet, the trees casting their shadows, and the fifteen laughing Bareiuses surrounding her.

  Bliss glared at the nearest one. Now that her mind was unclouded by alchemy, she could feel the foreign Intent in the illusion.

  “I imagine he is paying you a lot of money,” she said. “But is that really worth me learning who you are?”

  The illusions of Bareius exchanged uncertain glances.

  Bliss drew herself up and spoke with the dignity she felt her position deserved. “I will not punish you if you tell me where I am.”

  Like pricked soap bubbles, the illusions disappeared one at a time.

  She clicked her tongue. “Rude.”

  So someone had gone to great risk poisoning her—and not with a lethal poison, but with one that would inhibit her judgment and cognitive functions. That same someone had hired a Soulbound to project illusions and lure her away from the Capital.

  It wasn’t hard to imagine who that someone was.

  He never tried to harm her, because even Bareius knew he needed the Head of the Blackwatch and that she would be almost impossible to replace. He usually just stayed away from her.

  Which was a good decision for several reasons. If he had tried to administer a lethal poison, the Spear of Tharlos would likely have neutralized it immediately. It needed her alive.

  Bareius had known that, but he had still gambled quite a bit to be rid of her. It must be important.

  The Independents wanted her out of the city, so they were going to make a move. Or they were already making one.

  She tried to transport herself directly to the Capital. When nothing happened, she realized she must have been even further than she thought.

  Until she made it back, there was nothing she could do.

  Chapter Thirteen

  three years ago

  While Jerri continued to weep, Calder distanced himself from her and the two remaining crew members of The Reliable.

  One remaining member, he corrected himself.

  Lakiri had been stung by several of Othaghor’s Slithers; the marks had swelled up and turned purple, oozing with pus and a strange ichor. Her seizures were nearing their end, and Calder doubted she would make it even if they had a medical alchemist on hand.

  He could only count it as a miracle that the rest of them had escaped without being stung, but he had been bitten three or four times, and the others were in the same condition. As far as he knew, these things had a slow-acting poison in their teeth that would do worse than the stings.

  Now that the crown was gone, Andel had been swallowed and probably killed by the Slithers’ big brother, and Urzaia was in pursuit. There was nothing more Calder could do for them.

  He only had one idea left, and it was a stupid one.

  Calder headed off to the beach, kicking away his boots as he walked. He carefully set down his gun belt; Foster would never let him hear the end of it if he got sand in the barrel of a Dalton Foster original. Then he limbered up his bare sword and waded into the surf.

  The Testament was close, so close that he could see Petal and Foster scurrying around on the deck, but he knew he wouldn’t be able to reach the ship with his Reading yet. Just to be safe, he opened himself to the Intent of his Soulbound Vessel, but it still felt distant.

  He waved his sword in the air, drawing Foster’s attention.

  They would have seen him anyway, he was sure, but he kept waving as he forced himself step by step into the ocean.

  Terror pushed against him as much as the water. He had seen the Elderspawn, the giant flatworms with extendible jaws and the teeth of crocodiles that had destroyed his longboat. They were in the surf with him now, he was sure, though he couldn’t see them.

  Every slight eddy of water against his skin felt like the brush of an invisible monster, and he shivered as he moved deeper.

  Foster had caught on to his message almost immediately. After only a moment of busying themselves on the ropes, he and Petal freed the sail, which instantly filled with wind.

  Calder stopped with the water up to his ribs. Even if he managed to swim with his sword and jacket, there was no way he could gather up the courage to try it; at least with his feet in the sand he had some kind of defense.

  The Testament drifted toward him, and Calder reached desperately for his Vessel.

  Finally, after too many agonizing seconds, he made contact.

  The Lyathatan is irritated by having to lie flat against the hated sand, and its irritation is what lesser creatures might call blinding rage. If this state persists, it intends to pull the ship out to the comfort of the sea even if it leaves the human that holds its contract behind.

  Calder shivered with a chill deeper than the water. As he’d suspected, the Lyathatan planned on abandoning him.

  Defend me, Calder commanded, sending a mental picture of his situation to the Elder.

  The ancient creature examined his communication, and Calder felt some of its irritation dissipate, replaced with humor.

  His heart sank. Humor was far worse.

  The Elder communicated in old, complex Intent that was difficult to translate, but Calder heard it as something like Defend yourself.

  With that statement, the Lyathatan sent its perspective on Calder’s situation, and Calder was glad he was standing so deep in the water, because he immediately lost control of his bladder.

  One of those worm-creatures had encircled him.

  Its flat, smooth body had looped wide around Calder in the water, like a noose slowly tightening. Now its head was raising out of the water, preparing to strike.

  Calder’s eyes snapped open, and he came face-to-face with the purplish crocodilian jaws of the Elderspawn.

  It was the kind of elemental, heart-stopping terror that he liked to think he was used to from his time as a Navigator. But no one could be prepared to face down the teeth of a predator unprotected.

  His sword came forward, he was flailing blindly like a terrified child. It had him.

  Until its head exploded into blue blood.

  A crack of thunder came at the same time as Calder was soaked in stinking azure gore, and he stood frozen in pure astonishment for a long second before he regained enough control over his body to catch view of The Testament.

  One of its cannons leaked smoke. Foster gave him a casual salute while Petal trembled behind him.

  The water was clouding further with Elderspawn blood, but from the Intent of the Lyathatan,
Calder knew there were more out there. He imagined he could feel them undulating closer like sea-snakes, drawn to their dying brother.

  If you save me now, I will owe you a favor, Calder sent to the Lyathatan.

  He didn’t know much about the Elder, but he knew that it was a creature of Kelarac. It was bound to The Testament as a result of a deal, and it should be open to bargaining now.

  The Lyathatan considered, and with every thought that passed between them, Calder could feel the worms growing closer.

  Food, the Lyathatan demanded, and Calder received the image of full-grown sharks. You will feed me.

  I accept!

  It could see the worms looping around the island toward him, and Calder couldn’t count on Foster nailing every one with a cannonball.

  The Lyathatan sent its agreement and Calder scrambled for the shore, scraping gore away from his eyes as he marched. The Testament was close now, so it would soon run aground, but as long as the hull didn’t fracture, that was a problem the Lyathatan could handle.

  For now, he had to get Jerri and the others. And they had to find Urzaia.

  For the most part, Urzaia reserved his rage for the Elders.

  Other people had managed to provoke him to wrath a few times in his career, but for the most part, he understood them. Even when they betrayed him or tried to kill him, well, they had reasons for what they did. It was usually easy to take in good humor.

  Elders, though…there was no understanding the Elders. There was no forgiving them. They followed their own natures, and those natures were alien and malicious.

  It was easy to hate Elders. Especially when one ate your friend.

  The toad creature, with its gorilla body and amphibian head, leaped from tree to tree. The sac beneath its chin was swollen with Andel and the safe containing the Emperor’s crown, and the Captain trusted Urzaia to get them both back.

  He’d already smashed the Elder’s right side into a mash of blue gore, but that barely slowed it down.