by Will Wight
The doors exploded inwards, the first wave of enemies kicking their way through the wood, as Foster threw open the door leading down to the basement where his family had been captives for three weeks.
His basement had an unspeakable stench, such that he could barely breathe. One of his grandsons vomited into the corner. Blood and worse stained the floors, along with shredded ropes and bits of soiled bedding.
He tried not to look around the room, tried not to imagine what had happened in here over the last few weeks, instead tapping into his Soulbound Vessel.
The band of tools around his belt came to life, expressing their eagerness to work. His Vessel was interesting, almost unique, in that he was bound to a set rather than a single object. Bone fragments from a Cloudseeker Hydra were worked into most of the tools and into the belt itself, so they floated where he needed them.
He tended not to use the Vessel much anymore. For one thing, the second the Vessel realized that he was working on something other than a gun, it tended to lose interest. For another, floating tools gathered too much attention. He was the only gunsmith Soulbound on record in the Empire, so if strangers saw an old bearded craftsman with levitating tools, rumors would fly.
This time, he only needed to hammer a nail.
The tiny hammer that was part of his set flew up, Foster held the nail in place, and the hammer dipped when it realized that he wasn’t working on a gun, or a weapon, or even a gunbelt.
No one—save maybe the Emperor himself—had ever been sure exactly how Awakening worked, so Foster wasn’t sure if the Vessel had senses of its own or if it simply connected to his Intent. Either way, Foster felt the moment when the hammer realized he just wanted it to nail a door shut.
It sagged in disappointment, dipping in the air, and turned its head toward Foster.
Art? It asked hopefully.
His Vessel wasn’t the most verbal, but it managed to express itself anyway. It wanted to work on what it considered art: one-of-a-kind weapons.
For the ten millionth time, Foster spared a thought of frustration and resentment for his younger self. His single-minded obsession had infected even his Vessel.
Foster focused his Intent, on the fact that this was life or death. “We don’t get out of this,” he growled, “and we can’t make anything ever again.”
The Vessel gave the equivalent of a silent sigh. Safety, it said in the tones of a child mocking something ridiculous.
But it did finally, halfheartedly, start hammering nails.
Foster kept up himself with a larger hammer, hurriedly nailing the door shut and closing it with the leg of a chair across. The brigands would be drawn to the sounds of hammering and would check this room first.
Sure enough, a shot rang out, and a hole erupted in the basement door. Foster ducked, but he felt a breeze pass through his hair. He had almost taken a shot to the head.
A glaring brown eye looked at him through the door, then backed up. From the position of the man’s body, Foster could tell the bandit was taking aim. He prepared to fire Oath to Eternity blindly through the door.
There came a clamor like a rising tide from inside the house.
The half-seen bandit through the door spun, looking at something in the living room.
Then a flashing golden blur took him off his feet.
A gun cracked like thunder and Foster heard laughter. Blessed, familiar laughter.
“Foster!” Urzaia called happily from down the hall. “You are a week late!”
Foster collapsed on the basement stairs.
The relief was too much. His mind and body had been strained beyond their limit again and again, stretched with alchemy and fear, so in the first second of safety they simply gave up. He tried to struggle to his feet, to help Urzaia.
But why? A Champion was here.
The battle was over.
Urzaia pulled the secured door off its hinges with one hand, tearing it apart like it was made of sticks and string. The huge man looked down on Foster, his blue eyes kind, smiling his gap-toothed smile. He was in full gladiator regalia, leather armor strapped all over his body, and the golden hide of a Sandborn Hydra—his Soulbound Vessel—wrapped around his left arm. In his hands he held his dark Awakened hatchets, which were already slick with blood.
A bullet slammed into his back, richocheted off, and bit into the ceiling.
Urzaia brushed dirty blond hair out of his eyes as he knelt in the middle of Foster’s house, ignoring the battle behind him. “Do not worry, Foster. We are here now. I will take you home.”
Foster passed out.
Chapter Eighteen
“Yes, of course Kelarac keeps his promises. I know I’m not supposed to say so, but I find that to be a stupid question.”
“Then if you worded your deal perfectly, so that there were no loopholes, nothing he could take advantage of…couldn’t you end up with a beneficial request? A wish, so to speak?”
“I apologize; I was mistaken before. That is a stupid question.”
—Transcript of a Witness interview with
Bliss of the Blackwatch
present day
Calder sat in a plush Capital sitting-room with the air of a slaughterhouse, but he didn’t focus on details. He already knew this was a dream.
Only the man sitting in front of him was real…and he wasn’t even a man.
Kelarac’s steel blindfold gleamed as he reached to the side, lifting a jeweled golden goblet to his lips. “You are dying, you know. You might have suspected.”
In the handful of times that Calder had met Kelarac in a dream world before, he had felt like he’d been transferred here physically. This time, it was more like his meeting with Ozriel: he couldn’t feel anything from his body. When he tried to look down, he saw only a chair.
If it weren’t a dream, he would have panicked. But you accept all sorts of impossible things in dreams.
“The Consultants finally got me, then?” he asked. His final memories were hazy, but he could piece things together. Shera had plunged a dagger into him.
“They have you now.”
Kelarac waved a hand and the curtains were drawn back from one of the sitting-room’s windows. Beyond the panes of glass, Calder looked down onto himself from above.
He was lying face-down with a gaping, bloody hole in his back. Men and women in the black uniforms of Consultants bustled around him, using Awakened tools to hack away at the white armor encasing him.
The view shifted below and the table became transparent. He could see himself.
Looking into his own face was a punch in the gut. It didn’t look like he was dying, it looked like he was dead. His skin was waxy and pale, his eyes stared sightlessly at nothing. As his enemies worked to loot his armor, the impacts jerked his body so that his head bounced on a loose neck.
“The Emperor’s armor is keeping you alive,” Kelarac said casually, sipping from his goblet again. “As you can see, the Independents are prying it off. As soon as they finish removing it, you’ll die.”
Calder couldn’t feel his stomach, but he was still somehow hollow and sick.
He’d failed. Everything was for nothing.
When he spoke, his voice sounded empty. “What about Ach’magut? He said I would rule.”
From behind his blindfold, Kelarac showed surprise. “For a time, did you not sit the throne?” He gave a regretful sigh. “We intended for there to be so much more…a human we could actually communicate with. I even sent the Champions to save you, but you wasted the gift I bought. At great expense, I might add.”
Calder was still staring into his own dead eyes. He had wasted his life.
“Then why did you bring me here?” There was no hope in the question, only resignation.
“I’ve invested in you, and I rarely deal personally with a human more than once. I thought we could watch your end together. Call it a…professional courtesy.”
On the table, Calder’s body jerked and sent blood dripping down the pale
armor. A plate came away and the wound oozed more freely.
Shera leaned over, inspected the body, then said something to one of the Consultant surgeons.
The Independents had hindered him at every turn. They had prevented him from doing anything he’d planned to do, from showing everyone that it was better to be ruled by a mortal like him than an immortal who couldn’t understand human concerns.
He had even tried to tell him what he’d learned from Ozriel about destroying the Great Elders, and they had refused even to take his messages.
He could have done so much more for the world…if only they had let him.
His anger boiled up suddenly, and he wanted nothing more than to jump back into his body and grab Shera by the throat. He turned to Kelarac, furious at everyone. “You said I should be glad to see you. Tell me what you want.”
A Great Elder wouldn’t have brought Calder here if there wasn’t something he wanted.
Kelarac didn’t let an instant go by. He pounced like a shark, leaning forward and baring his teeth, his necklaces and rings flashing gold in the light. “I want everything. Give your life to me, and I will use it as you could never imagine. I will accomplish everything you could not. I will grind your enemies to dust. I will establish a global Empire so grand that people forget the first one. When people speak of the Emperor in a thousand generations, the only one they remember will be you.”
Calder stared into his own reflection where the Elder’s eyes should be.
He ached for it to be true.
Even if he gave himself up here, how was that different than dying? When someone died for a cause, you called them a hero. And Kelarac kept his deals.
But that didn’t mean he could be trusted.
“You want my soul? You’ll torture me for eternity after I die?”
Kelarac waved a hand. “I’ve already told you, I don’t know what a soul is. I want you, and only for the duration of your natural lifespan. We can make that a part of the deal, if you like.”
Calder turned that over for loopholes, but Kelarac gave a sigh of mild annoyance.
“When you use a tool and it is destroyed, do you continue tormenting its broken parts or do you simply…throw it away?”
Somehow hearing himself being referred to as a tool reassured him. He had already known that was how Kelarac thought of him, so hearing him say it out loud made him more trustworthy.
But he wanted to throw Kelarac off-guard, to observe his reaction to something unexpected, and he had just the tool for the job.
“What about Ozriel?” Calder asked casually.
He thought he was about to observe a rare expression of fury from Kelarac, but the Great Elder laughed. “You met him, did you? He’s something of a house-servant. No, not even a servant. He is the furnace in which trash is disposed. There are many worlds beyond this one in which you and I are currently trapped, and he is only a small part of them.”
“He said he would destroy us if it looked like you would escape. Does he not have the power to do that?”
“Oh no, he does.” Kelarac picked up a small dried fish from a nearby tray, lowering it into his mouth. “As would I or any of my brethren, in our true forms. And he will try. But in our long-awaited plan to escape this prison, do you really think we had failed to consider our jailers?”
Through the window, blood spurted from Calder’s back again. His limbs twitched, and Calder found his attention locked onto his own dying body.
"Our time grows short,” Kelarac said. “I do not have the mind of Ach’magut, but I will make my own prediction now: you and I will come to an agreement. We will wake up in your body, which we will share. I will restore it to perfect health and eliminate your enemies in one stroke, and then I will sit upon the Optasia. Using its power, I will open the sky and hold off our warden until my brothers and sisters have escaped. Then…”
The window changed.
Instead of Calder’s dying body, it now showed Calder wearing armor and a tall, spiked crown of yellowed bone. He raised his hand and the crack in the sky opened onto a massive void.
Human figures with the features of monsters walked in front of Calder. The man with worms coming out of his skin must be Kthanikahr, the silhouette of solid shadow would be Urg’naut, and the squirming, shifting figure that blinked into a different form every second was surely Tharlos.
For a brief, unnerving second, he thought he saw Bliss’ form among those Tharlos spun between. Then they all ascended into the void.
Every Great Elder but Kelarac lifted off, and he caught sight of a celestial battle beginning in the void beyond their world.
Then his own hand moved, the sky was healed, and he walked away.
He sat on a throne in the center of the Capital…and the world began to speed forward. Days flashed to night in a fraction of a second. The Capital healed itself, built up, expanded. Ordinary ships began to look like those of the Navigators.
Buildings got higher, larger, and some began to gleam as though they were made of metal. Ships sailed through the sky, people stepped through glowing doorways and emerged on the other side of the world, plants that fit into a window-box produced endless fruit.
“This is no imagination,” Kelarac said from an inch away. He was no longer seated across from Calder but sat right next to him on the couch. Had this been a couch before? “These are miracles I already have the knowledge to create. With us together on the throne, the world could be this prosperous in a year.”
Time spun forward until a gray-bearded Calder was laid to rest in a stone coffin. Mourners lowered him into a massive tomb over which a ninety-foot golden statue of Calder himself stood guard. The Capital swelled with people for the funeral of the Emperor, and a woman with Calder’s red hair placed the crown on her head.
“Rule stays in your family for eternity,” Kelarac went on. “And they are free to live their own lives. I will need no vessel after you. I can remain an advisor, sharing my knowledge with your line until this world ends.”
He spread his ringed hands. “Or until I grow bored of the game and decide to escape myself. I don’t destroy my toys when I am done with them. I will leave you humans to your own devices.”
If Calder had eyes, he was sure tears would be streaming from them.
This was everything he’d always wanted, brought to life in more detail than he could have imagined. For the first time, he could understand what Jerri had seen in the Elders. If the world could be like this…
What would he not sacrifice?
Calder stood and moved to the window. He reached out to see if he could touch the illusion that Kelarac was showing him.
His fingers tapped against the glass.
His fingers.
He still couldn’t see any part of his body, but he felt his hand touch the cool glass between him and the vision. As soon as it did, the view changed.
Now, a pair of Consultants were on the table, straddling his body, prying the plate from his back with crowbars that shone brightly. Awakened tools.
Even so, the Emperor’s Intent glued the armor to him as though attracted by magnets. The Consultants strained, pulling the plate of white metal away. The further it got, the faster blood flowed from Calder’s back, until it pooled at his sides and dripped down to the floor.
Over it all, Shera watched with cold, dark eyes.
Kelarac came up behind Calder and put a hand on his shoulder. “It’s up to you to choose, now. One future…” The image in the window flashed back to a crowd of people cheering his daughter’s coronation. “…or the other.”
He patted Calder once more and then walked away. “I admit, I’ll be disappointed if you make the wrong choice, but I won’t force you into anything. You’ve given me enough already.”
Calder stood and thought. He wasn’t foolish enough to trust a Great Elder for no reason, but his other trades with Kelarac had been for his benefit. And Ach’magut had let them leave his presence with their knowledge.
While the E
lders were alien to humanity, they weren’t evil. They had their own goals.
As Jerri had told him, the Sleepless didn’t deal with all Great Elders equally. A few of them, including Kelarac, could be dealt with for the benefit of both parties. Others were too dangerous to risk interaction.
He stared at the crown on his future child’s head.
If he lived and went on to get everything he wanted, it would be for the world’s benefit. Even if Kelarac didn’t keep his word about the advancement of technology, just being ruled by someone of human lifespan being would be a benefit for the Empire. The regional governors and Imperial advisors could have a real say, not just bowing to the whims of one immortal man.
He could have it.
But he kept watching the crown and thinking.
What would a real Emperor do?
He had once looked down on the Emperor for using a Heart of Nakothi to maintain his life. Now, he was afraid he knew the answer to his question.
He turned back to Kelarac. “Where are we right now?”
“This is a projection of your consciousness into an artificial space. It’s not a technique you’re capable of understanding. Think of it as a dream.”
“And why don’t I have a body? When I’ve visited you before, I felt like I had been transported there.”
The Great Elder tilted his head. “As I said, these concepts are beyond you. If you demand a simple explanation: your connection to your body is too tenuous. You are close to death, so I brought only your consciousness.”
Calder lifted his hand. He could feel it now.
With great concentration, he materialized his hand. He could barely see it, as though it wavered in and out of existing, but he reached to one side and managed to carefully lift Kelarac’s goblet.
“So what does this mean?”
Kelarac laughed and spread his hands. “That your will is tenacious enough to establish yourself in a dream. If you wish, I can educate you on the physics of conceptual existence, but you don’t have the time.”