by Will Wight
First, he’d rather take her alive. Both to get information from her and because they would need the Consultant’s Guild to join them rather than remain in open rebellion.
Second, he wasn’t about to risk himself in open combat with her again. Not even while wearing the Emperor’s armor.
He took a step back. “This is not about me or my pride.” The Guard could hear him, so he had to make sure he took the moral high ground. “We will stop you from tearing the Empire apart. Whatever it takes.”
As much as he would love to defeat Shera personally, he wasn’t an idiot.
“Though he would surely win, the Emperor does not fight battles on his own behalf.” Loreli, the strategist. Come to think of it, she was one of Shera’s allies. What did she think about this conflict?
Calder was leaving this battle to his more qualified subordinates.
“Southeast corner,” he called.
The Champions joined him in moments.
Rosephus gave a cruel chuckle, crimson daggers dancing around his head. “So even a roach can’t scuttle around when it’s pinned to a board.”
Tyria rolled her eyes. Gold light pooled under her feet, and vines began to emerge. “Is she a snake or a roach? Pick one.”
“Wait!” Calder shouted. He threw out a hand to hold Tyria back. “Something is strange about her Intent.”
It was hard to Read in the mist, just as it was hard to see or hear, and the armor muffled his ability even further. It was difficult to Read anything without drowning in the overwhelming Intent of the armor itself.
So he pulled off one gauntlet and extended it toward her, careful not to get within arm’s reach. He didn’t want to lose fingers to her dagger.
She didn’t move, and he sensed no dangerous Intent from her. As always, Reading a person’s current mentality was a tricky business, but he felt pure chaos coming from her direction. Like three people were living in her body who all wanted vastly different things.
Then he caught a glimpse of green light. He tore his hand back, shoving the gauntlet back on.
“Take her! Take her now!”
Tyria obeyed, casting her Soulbound powers toward Shera in thorny ropes of shining gold. The vines wrapped around Shera in a cocoon.
“What are you worried about?” Rosephus asked. He had the tip of his sword pressed against the ground and was spinning it in place. “We have her already. Now that we do, you should lend her to me for a day.” His smile was ugly. “She’ll never go against us again.”
A slash of green light sliced the golden cage.
In an instant, all of Tyria’s power flashed green and imploded.
Rushing into Shera.
The influx of emerald light lit her up like the flash of a green quicklamp, so Calder saw her through the mist for a moment.
She was crouched with the blue blade in her right hand…and a glowing green blade in her left, having just cut through Tyria’s power.
She had unsealed her second Vessel.
“No more capture!” Calder shouted. “Just kill her!”
Rosephus had been waiting for the word. He leaped toward Shera, swinging a huge sword with one hand. He had just seen Shera absorb power from Tyria’s Vessels, so he didn’t use the red daggers hovering over him, slashing down with his physical weapon.
The Consultant met the Champion’s blow and deflected it with her dagger, sending it into the floor beside her.
In the same motion, she spun with blurring speed, driving her green dagger at Rosephus’ head. He ducked out of the way as though he had seen the future, but still not fast enough to avoid having a gash opened in his helmet.
Another flash of green light flowed into Shera, but in the same motion as he dodged, Rosephus swept his leg at her ankle. She fell and rolled into the mist before silver light flashed from Tyria’s needle and speared the ground where Shera had fallen.
All of that happened in a blink, and by the time Calder processed what had happened, he had already come to one conclusion.
Time to go.
Shera was apparently a double Soulbound with the strength to deflect a Champion’s blade.
He officially no longer had the qualification to participate in this fight.
He would leave this to warriors with a chance of victory and retreat.
He bolted in the direction he thought was the exit, grabbing an Imperial Guard as he ran into the woman. She stabbed at him as he emerged from the mist, but the attack didn’t even scratch the Emperor’s armor, so he ignored it.
More Guards had flooded into the room after Shera’s entrance, but no one knew where anyone was in the mist. He managed to gather three more before he hit the north wall and started feeling his way to the door.
“Where is she?” one of the Guards demanded.
The room was filled with the deafening noise of the Champion-level battle.
“Who cares?” Calder responded. “We’re leaving.”
None of them argued.
Every second in the mist, feeling their way along the wall, felt like an hour. He expected Shera to leap out of nowhere at any second, plunging a dagger through his visor.
But maybe that would be his chance. His armor had already withstood her knives once, so maybe…
No, he had to die to such foolish thoughts. If she escaped the Champions, she was beyond him. He had to let her go.
“Lost her!” Tyria shouted, and Calder’s heart sank.
He turned to his Guards. “Just run for it!” he called, but his voice died as he saw only two with him.
The mist had grown thicker, so maybe he couldn’t see them. “Sound off!” he said.
“Here!” one Guard said.
No one else said anything.
In the blink since he’d checked, another had vanished.
As he watched, the last Guard was pulled into Bastion’s Veil as well. There was a look of horror on her wide cat-like eyes.
He shoved out his orange glowing sword, his heart hammering in his chest. “She’s here!” he shouted.
“WHERE?” Rosephus roared, and it sounded like his voice was coming from everywhere at once.
Shera materialized in front of him, looking like the gray phantom of death with a blue blade in one hand and green in the other. He could see nothing of her face beneath the hood. She was an inhuman specter, here to claim his soul.
There were some who believed in a certain type of Elderspawn that showed itself only to the dying a moment before death.
If it were real, it would look like Shera of the Gardeners.
“Where’s your wife?” she asked. Her voice was ice itself.
He had not expected her to speak. The longer he engaged her in conversation, the longer the Champions would have to catch up; he could hear shouts and explosions as they hunted for her.
He levered his sword, both to project confidence and to see her better in its light. “You want to know? Defeat me and I’ll tell you.”
Shera seemed to dissolve into gray as the fog devoured her. Even the lights of her Vessels vanished.
“I’m not here to defeat you,” her voice said.
Terror shivered up Calder’s spine, and he spun in place. Somehow he’d lost the wall, and he groped blindly in the direction he thought it was…but that left his back open. He spun, swinging his sword. He no longer cared if he accidentally caught a Guard.
Even through his fear, he focused on his objective. She would open herself when she attacked. He had to trust in the Emperor’s armor, trust in its Intent to protect and preserve his life. If it turned her first strike, he could land one in return, and then she would be easy prey.
A weapon pierced his back.
He’d been stabbed before, and there was no way to prepare for the pain. It lanced through him, seeming to penetrate his bones all over. It was like being kicked by a horse at the same time, knocking him forward, driving the breath from his lungs.
On top of the unspeakable pain, he felt something draining from him. As thou
gh the dagger were drinking his blood through a straw.
She had stabbed straight through the Emperor’s armor.
How?
But that question bled away as his vision blurred at the edges. He tried to turn and swing his sword, to take her with him, but instead his sword fell from limp fingers.
His whole body sagged, but she supported him as he fell, leaning forward to whisper into his ear.
“All hail the Emperor of the World.”
His mind filled with the image of the one who had spoken those words to him, so many years ago: Ach’magut, the Overseer.
The Great Elder had made it sound like a promise.
And now that promise was fulfilled.
Darkness closed in on Calder, and his thoughts turned to Jerri. Years of habit couldn’t be broken so easily.
But she didn’t deserve his last thoughts.
Instead, he chose to remember the sun on his face and the pitching deck beneath his feet. Petal presenting an experimental draught to him as her hands trembled with doubt. Andel adjusting his hat as he pricked at Calder’s ego. Foster shouting with his head halfway up a cannon. Urzaia’s laughter echoing over the ocean. Shuffles fluttering down to land on his shoulder.
…and, though he resisted it, even Jerri slipping her arm into his and looking with him out over a strange and magical sea.
He kept that memory in his mind until he could think of nothing any longer.
Tyria stumbled out of the fog and onto the bleeding body of the Steward.
The Gardener had vanished, but of course she had. Her mission was over. Tyria reached out and pulled the Steward’s helmet off his head; his eyes stared, glassy and empty, into the distance.
With two fingers, she tested his pulse. Nothing.
She was no Reader and no medical alchemist, but she was more than familiar with corpses. And this was a fresh one.
Still, she needed to move him. She couldn’t leave his Awakened weapon or the Emperor’s armor to the Independents, and she was sure that they were coming. They wouldn’t send their Guild Head in alone, no matter how many insane Soulbound powers she had.
“Northwest corner, Rosephus,” she called back. “He’s down.”
Chapter Fifteen
three years ago
Calder stood at the wheel mostly for show as the Lyathatan pulled them into Candle Bay.
He tilted the wheel one way or the other, but the sails were furled, and the only steering he did was to briefly nudge the Lyathatan with his Intent to show the Elder what their location looked like through human eyes. His thoughts were free to drift.
And so they did. Instead of the ocean ahead of him or the swiftly approaching skyline of the Capital, Calder saw Mister Goss’ body.
He had barely known Goss at all, and the brief impression Tommison’s crew had made was anything but good, so it wasn’t as though he was personally upset by the man’s death. He was only…disturbed.
Was Ach’magut’s prophecy really a prediction? Had the Great Elder really calculated the future?
Or did he command the Elderspawn to make it happen?
The Slithers had bitten everyone equally, and from everything Calder had ever heard or read, Othaghor’s creations were more like animals than ordinary Elderspawn. They had no cosmic designs, they operated on no twisted logic, they merely fed and reproduced like any beast.
Shuffles was himself a spawn of Othaghor, and Calder fed him fish on a daily basis.
But no one had been stung other than Lakiri and, apparently, Goss. Had a more intelligent Elder held the Slithers back to avoid harming the future Emperor?
Tommison’s death was even more suspicious. He had been in a tower alone with those munitions for weeks. What were the odds that he would blow himself to oblivion so soon after their arrival?
The others called him paranoid. They all had been bitten, after all. They had certainly been in danger. Andel had been swallowed alive, and if Calder’s cutlass had been a hair slower, Jerri would have been stung.
As for the explosives, Tommison had left them alone during his entire stay. It was only when Calder ordered him to prepare them in a hurry that he had the opportunity to fumble and blow himself up. If his alchemist had been alive, it was a tragedy that would have never happened.
Still, the thoughts plagued Calder.
Was Ach’magut manipulating events to make sure Calder survived to take the throne? Now there weren’t even any witnesses outside his crew to say that they’d recovered the crown, and no one on The Testament had any love for the Emperor. They would stay quiet.
Jerri walked up next to him, standing on his right side. The spidery text of her tattoo ran down her jawline and her neck, reemerging down her leg. She still wouldn’t tell him what it said—he suspected she didn’t actually know.
“Are we working for the Elders?” Calder asked suddenly.
Jerri flinched, which he understood. It was a startling question.
“…it depends on what you mean.”
“You know…the one with all the eyes.” He didn’t want to say Ach’magut’s name aloud. Not only did he not want to risk the rumor getting back to anyone, but he was afraid Shuffles would hear it and start repeating it.
“When he spoke to me, I was sure I knew exactly what he meant. I could feel it, like I was Reading it myself. He had seen how the world would play out, and he was telling me where I would end up. Now, I wonder if he’s just…pushing me where he wants me to go. He’s playing the music and I’m dancing.”
She snuggled up next to him, taking his arm. “The Elders are strange, and they’re old, and they’re dangerous. But they aren’t evil. At least not all of them.”
Calder’s eyes tracked to the entrance to his hold. Somewhere down there, Shuffles would be sleeping the day away in its covered birdcage.
“I don’t want to survive just because an Elder likes me best.”
He hadn’t liked Tommison. He hadn’t even known Tommison, really. But the idea that Calder had only lived because he met the preferences of a Great Elder…that felt wrong.
Jerri was quiet, watching the shore as they slid into Candle Bay. The rest of the crew scurried below, making their respective preparations to return home.
“I feel like I let you down,” she said finally.
He turned to read her face.
“I weighed you down in the fight, just like you said I would. I don’t want to be useless.”
Calder slipped his arm out of her embrace and wrapped it around her, pulling her close. “We’ll have Foster make you a gun. Not sure how much we’re getting paid this time, but it should at least make a nice dent in the debt. We might be able to make you a Soulbound someday.”
She burrowed closer to his side. “I’d like that.”
Cheska was waiting on the docks with a team of Readers in the employ of the Navigator’s Guild. Varia, her orange-clad quartermaster, was chief among them.
The Head of the Navigators marched up to the end of the dock before Calder had even tied off. She wore a simple brown tricorn hat and coat today, her red hair the most brilliant spot of color about her, and she put her hands on her hips.
“Well, Captain Marten? Where’s my cargo?”
Calder gave her a long-suffering look. “You sent us to die.”
Cheska gripped her hat so hard it looked like she was going to tear it in half. “Stop trying to hike up your pay and tell me if you have it.”
“No, I don’t have it!” Calder shouted. “I don’t have it, and I don’t have Captain Tommison or any of the others! I’ve got one of his crew, but I doubt you’ll want him, because he was Elder-poisoned and we can’t tell if it’s contagious or not. We have him in his very own box in the hold.”
He put more and more emphasis on every word until he was red in the face.
Cheska relaxed, searching his expression. “…Kelarac’s beard. Come on down, you can make a full report.”
Minutes later, Calder was standing on the docks and regalin
g the Guild Head with his version of events as Readers crawled all over his ship.
His version of events was remarkably like the real version, except the crew of The Reliable had lost the crown immediately upon their arrival on the island.
“…we found Goss dead in his bunk the next morning,” Calder finished. “If anyone had any clue what happened to the crown, it would have been him.”
Cheska watched him. She kept her eyes on his face for far longer than he was comfortable with, her arms crossed, chewing on her lower lip.
Finally, she stepped close enough to kiss him, looking up to meet his eyes. “The Regent is stuck to me like a coat of paint. Now, you know I might not personally care what happens to the crown, but if she comes asking for it, I’ll swear in front of the entire Witness’ Guild that I had nothing to do with it.”
“I can’t imagine—” he began, but she rode over him.
“And she will come asking for it the second it shows up for sale in some rich person’s display. Or when you start trying to prop yourself up as the Pirate King of Izyria or whatever title you’ve cooked up.”
“I would nev—” he attempted, but she cut him off again.
“There is only one thing I do care about, and if you lie to me, I’m going to feed you to Kelarac one squirming piece at a time.” She skewered him with her gaze, locking his eyes in place. “Are you being straight with me about Tommison?”
He had expected this suspicion, he just hadn’t expected her to ask him so directly.
If he was in her place, he would have been suspicious too; Calder walked away with his crew intact while Tommison and his crew all died under mysterious Elder-related circumstances.
And Calder had a Champion. If any ship in the Guild fleet was going to be able to get away with murder, it would be his.
In his mind, Cheska’s priorities did her credit.
She had some flaws as a Guild Head, but she always put her people first.
He dropped his guard, hoping that she could sense his sincerity. “I don’t know how we made it out and they didn’t. I don’t know how we made it out at all.”