Of Kings and Killers

by Will Wight

  Calder followed the Regent’s gaze…and his breath stuck in his throat. Dread crept over him again, and it brought him back to Urg’naut’s infinite void.

  Shera prowled into the room, the lower half of her face covered by her mask of gray cloth. Her hood was down, leaving only her short black hair, and she stared at him with frigid hate. Her hands crept back to her daggers.

  And she walked next to someone worse.

  Estyr Six marched side-by-side with the Consultant, and her scowl held such a weight of Intent that it drowned out Shera’s. Three Hydra skulls floated around her cloud of blonde hair and she had her hands tucked into the pockets of her black cloak.

  She was still alive.

  She was going to kill him.

  Estyr lifted one hand as though gripping something…and Calder instantly figured out what she was gripping. His throat.

  An invisible hand seized him around the neck, cutting off his breath and lifting him until his feet left the floor. He scrambled, clawing at his throat on instinct, but of course there was nothing to grab.

  “What’s Kelarac’s bilge-boy doing here?” Estyr asked, jerking her chin at Calder.

  Calder tried to speak, to say something, to take even the smallest breath, but of course he could do nothing.

  “I’m not so certain myself,” Jorin said lazily. “Loreli?”

  Calder forced his eyes down to catch a glimpse of the third woman who had entered the room. The Luminian Regent walked out from behind Estyr, but before she could respond, two other people did first.

  “Let him down!” Cheska shouted. She moved closer to Estyr, but her steps were frozen in an instant.

  Calder appreciated the sentiment, but he did wish she had been more polite. There was nothing she could do to force Estyr Six into anything.

  Bliss, on the other hand…

  She dipped her hand into her coat, still scowling. She pulled out the Spear of Tharlos one foot at a time. As usual, it should never have fit into her pocket.

  “You should put him down so we can hear the charges against him. Otherwise I will be forced into combat against you.”

  Bliss might really be able to threaten a Regent, and he hoped it worked, because Calder’s vision was starting to be replaced by black spots. He kicked his legs, trying to find purchase to stand.

  “He is tied to Kelarac,” Loreli said, and Calder heard his death in those words. “…but he isn’t controlled. I investigated him closely.”

  Calder felt a brief spark of hope, but it was quickly drowned out by the panicked agony of being completely unable to breathe.

  The air crackled as another blow tore the heavens, a flash filling the room even though there were no windows. Estyr’s expression hardened. “Kelarac has fooled us before. I’m at least locking him up.”

  “I am certain,” Loreli said calmly. “I have thoroughly Read him, his ship, his crew, and his possessions. I will vouch that he is not a puppet, only a fool.”

  Calder would take any insult if it meant he could breathe.

  “Impossible,” Shera said, and Calder wanted to cry. “I killed him myself. He was dead.”

  Loreli shook her head. “There is no time to explain, but I assure you he was not brought back to life by a Great Elder. He is himself. Now, Estyr, would you please release him?”

  Darkness encroached on Calder’s vision. He was beginning to see Urg’naut again, that emptiness that now lurked behind his every thought. It was somehow an even more primal fear than choking to death.

  Until the grip left his throat.

  He fell to the ground, coughing and hacking and choking down oxygen. He took the longest, sweetest breath he could remember since the last time he’d almost drowned.

  The grip around his jaw loosened as Estyr spoke again. “Fine, but why is he here?”

  Loreli glanced up at the ceiling. “Kelarac is on his way—”

  Jorin lifted a hand. “And possibly the others. Five, if you count Ach’magut.”

  “We don’t,” Estyr said. “The Emperor dealt with him only a handful of years ago. He can’t pull himself together, even now.”

  Loreli fiddled with one of her braids, staring into the floor. “We know Kelarac is coming. Nakothi, Kthanikahr, Tharlos, and Othaghor are unknowns. With their prison weakened, any or all of them may have manifested earlier than they should have been able to. However, we have two advantages. First, as they have not fully recovered, they will be weaker than they were in our day.”

  “Unless they enter human vessels,” Bliss pointed out, forcing down a sudden lump in her coat.

  “Which brings me to our second advantage: we know their objective. They can’t possess just anyone, as we saw in the last war, and they must leave our world from this location. I thought that may have changed when the sky broke, but if that were the case, Kelarac would no longer be coming for us.

  “They have to come here, and they will head straight for the human with the strongest connection to them. When we know who that is, we have a significant opportunity.”

  Calder finally choked out some words, his voice rough. “When they’re in human form, we can strike them down. For good.”

  No one looked as surprised as he thought they should have, which confirmed his suspicions. So they had gotten his messages after all.

  One of Estyr’s eyebrows lifted. “And how do you know that?”

  Bliss and Cheska looked confused, but everyone else turned to regard him.

  “I told you. I sent messages. I sent messages to all of you!”

  “He told us quite a while ago,” Bliss agreed.

  Jorin adjusted his shadeglasses. “Easy to blame silence on a missing messenger. I suppose you learned as much from Kelarac, did you?”

  Calder looked around in disbelief before pointing a finger upward. “From him! The man in the sky! I spoke to him!”

  The Regents exchanged glances, and Shera’s scowl—still locked on him—deepened.

  “You really didn’t hear?” Calder asked.

  In their silence, he heard the truth.

  His heart sank.

  All of his messages had been waylaid. All of them. He was so sure it hadn’t been true.

  What else could he have done? Could he have spoken to Shera when she attacked him? Burned Ozriel’s message into the streets of the Capital?

  No, he had been trying to keep his knowledge secret from the Elders. If they knew that he knew their weakness, his elimination would have become their top priority.

  Light split the room and not-thunder shook the air. Estyr passed a hand over her face. “Only one way to find out. We corner Kelarac. And we keep a tight grip on his host body.”

  Once again, everyone in the room was looking at Calder.

  He didn’t like the look in Shera’s eye.

  “We should get rid of him now,” she said without a blink. “Take him away from Kelarac.”

  His fist slowly clenched. She had no idea that he could have crushed her with the Optasia and chosen not to. And she certainly didn’t know that he could crush her now, even without it.

  Cheska gave her a sneer. “Look at you, so eager to sacrifice someone else.”

  Shera lifted her eyebrows. “If a Great Elder wants me, kill me.”

  “Easy for—”

  “Shut up,” Estyr said. She didn’t raise her voice, but everyone shut up. “Kelarac’s coming here. He is…very close. Perhaps a day away. We can use that against him, but none of the others are close enough for me to detect.”

  Jorin tilted his hat to one side to scratch at the side of his head. “Kthanikahr and Othaghor will be harder to host than a Champion dance party. No human wants to give up their body to those grave-bugs. Nakothi, I’m sure, has choices from here to Axciss.”

  “And we know Kelarac will have a backup plan,” Loreli added. “Most likely a series of them. As for Tharlos…”

  Bliss calmly pushed down a rising lump in her coat again. “If Tharlos has a better host than me, I would be very
surprised. And I do not like surprises.”

  “With a coordinated, unified assault, I believe we could defeat any Great Elder alone in their current state,” Loreli said, but she didn’t sound confident. “We know where they’re headed, and we have to assume they’re all moving with urgency as Kelarac is.”

  The air crackled again, and the world flashed. Calder shuddered, and he knew he wasn’t alone.

  How long would the battle above last? He thought he knew who would win, if the demonstration of power Ozriel had given him was any indication, but that wasn’t necessarily any better than Urg’naut winning.

  With a jolt, he realized that the others didn’t know that they were living on borrowed time. Even the Regents might not know.

  Then again, they had known about how to kill the Great Elders. Maybe they also knew that their Outsider, Ozriel, planned on killing everyone.

  Loreli was still speaking. “If they take their time, they could easily move together and defeat us, but their history and our circumstances suggest they won’t. So we prepare for Kelarac.”

  Estyr smoothly took over. “We’ll fight him on the sea. Our battle with Kelarac last time destroyed a chain of islands. If we fight him in the Capital, there won’t be a city left afterwards. Fortunately, he should be weaker this time. We face him with our combined might, get rid of him quickly, and then regroup in case we have to face another fight.”

  “Pardon the interruption, Regents,” Teach said, “but what happens to us afterwards? The sky is still open.”

  The three Regents exchanged glances.

  “When the air is as clear of Elder Intent as we can make it, I will sit in the Optasia and try to talk to him myself,” Estyr declared. “Defeating the Elders will make it safer for me and will show him we can take care of ourselves.”

  Jorin sounded uncertain. “Kiss a penny and make a wish, but we think it might be an advantage to beat them first. Someone up there is fighting Urg’naut, and we’re hoping they might decide to reach in and help us out.”

  “Don’t count on it,” Calder said heavily.

  He was still choosing his next words when Shera examined his expression and spoke for him.

  “He’s here to put us down, isn’t he?”

  A chill passed through the room, and Calder wasn’t sure if it was an effect of the battle in the heavens or if it was the fear and dread in their collective Intent.

  He gave a single nod. “He says that if it looks like the Great Elders are going to escape, he’ll destroy everything. The entire world.”

  A heavy silence settled onto the group.

  Bliss tilted her head to one side. “Urg’naut already made it out. Do you think it’s too late?”

  “We can do nothing but hope it isn’t,” Estyr responded firmly. “We beat Kelarac, then if the air is clear enough, we use the Optasia. If not, we keep beating down Elders until it works.”

  Bareius had said almost nothing the entire time, shuffling through a stack of papers and occasionally writing a note. When Estyr finished, he looked up into the pause.

  “So we sail off into the sea to fight…all four remaining Great Elders?”

  “Only Kelarac for certain,” Loreli said.

  “Do you think that’s a winning strategy?”

  She met his gaze and spoke very calmly. “We will fight until we can no longer lift our arms, and then we will pick up swords in our teeth and continue fighting. To our last breath and beyond, we will give no ground to the Elders.”

  “To our last breath,” Jorin and Estyr murmured together.

  To Calder’s own surprise, he found that he had said the words along with them.

  With the words came a memory.

  A fleet of dozens of ships and hundreds of Kameira tore each other apart on the waves and in the skies above the seas until the ocean was dark with blood. Kelarac, an ocean creature large enough to blot out the sun, summoned weapon after weapon from the void.

  Calder looked down on the scene from above. He stood on a floating platform tied on the back of a bird Kameira, and his own hand—clad in the same white armor that he wore in real life—flicked out and swatted aside a spear. Then he picked up a spear of his own.

  His Intent was deeper and heavier than a mountain. He hurled the spear and it tore through the air with a crack of thunder, slamming into a shield that Kelarac summoned.

  As the battle continued, he felt the Intent of the dying men that had given up any hope of survival. Their last words drifted up to him: “To our last breath.”

  Suddenly Calder remembered where he was, but the emptiness of Urg’naut threatened to swallow him. No matter which way he looked, there was only death.

  The Regents were giving him strange looks, and he let his words drop like bricks from his mouth. “Even if we beat him now…he’ll come back.”

  “That’s the fight,” Estyr said.

  “But there is a way out.” He looked to everyone in the room in turn, and everyone reacted with either surprise or fear when they saw the expression in his eyes. Everyone except Shera, who looked as impassive as ever.

  “When the battle begins,” he said to Shera, “stay next to me.”

  She nodded. As expected, she had understood him immediately.

  Cheska moved around him so she could see into his face. “What stupid plan is this?”

  Bliss had already grabbed his arm. “I don’t like what you’re saying. Say something else.”

  “The next time Kelarac offers me a deal, I’m going to accept.”

  It was surprising how quickly the Regents could gather the Guilds.

  Everyone was on edge after Urg’naut’s attack, and most of the survivors had gathered in the Imperial Palace. With the three Regents gathering people together, the Guilds were organized and ready for battle in a matter of a few short hours.

  Cheska Bennett had sent out the call for all remaining Navigators already, when she intended to stage a protest of some kind against Jorin Maze-walker.

  Now, those preparations were put to use.

  Every Navigator in the Guild was loaded up with passengers. They made a fleet the likes of which the world hadn’t seen since the Elder War.

  Only The Testament had no passengers. No one but crew.

  Andel leaned over the deck, clapping his hat down against the wind that came down from the heavenly battle overhead. “Do you ever think that we sail the ugliest ship in the fleet?”

  Foster grunted. “Doesn’t compare to The Eternal. A ship that burns water…now that’s a real sight.

  “I like it,” Petal protested. “It’s ours.”

  “OURS!” Shuffles shouted in Calder’s ear.

  He didn’t join in. He was extending his Intent down through the mark on his arm, touching the Lyathatan’s current state.

  Careful steering was necessary here. A ship with fins instead of oars or sails overtook him on the port side, and he was almost scraping hulls with one that had the spines of a sea urchin.

  Behind them sailed Bastion’s Shadow. The ship of the Consultants with a yellowed Elder eye instead of a crow’s nest.

  He imagined he could feel that eye piercing him.

  They were the reason why he had no passengers. If Kelarac took him over—or even tried to do so—anyone on the ship would be in danger.

  The Consultants had promised to kill him alone, if at all possible. But if it wasn’t, they’d sink The Testament.

  No one had wanted more collateral damage than necessary.

  “Cheska will find room for you on The Eternal,” Calder said. “It’s not too late.”

  The others exchanged looks.

  “TOO LATE,” Shuffles bellowed.

  Calder looked up. “That goes for all of you!” he called.

  Bliss was tucked away in the rigging overhead.

  She had insisted on riding to battle in The Testament. The rest of the Blackwatch had tried to talk her into sailing with them, but she had remained firm.

  Only Alsa Grayweather, Calder
’s mother, had looked as though she understood. She had hugged both of them—Bliss and Calder—good-bye, and told them to be safe.

  That last part she said only to Calder.

  Once aboard, Bliss had ignored him, leading him to wonder why she’d chosen The Testament in the first place. She stayed silently looking ahead to their destination.

  Foster clapped him on the shoulder. “Why would we leave you now, boy? If we’ve stuck it out this long, you’d better believe we’re here to the end.”

  Calder’s eyes watered, and he blinked to clear them. “…humid today,” he muttered.

  “That’s twice we’ve moved you to tears recently,” Andel pointed out. “I hope this leads to some kind of raise. I left a lucrative position to save your life.”

  “Then you’re an idiot.”

  “Like captain, like crew,” Foster said.

  Calder gave them a once-over. Foster wore his shooting-glasses and was examining the rest of the fleet as though looking for flaws. Andel, blank-faced, had looked down to a list of their stores. Petal gave him an encouraging smile that shook with nerves.

  The wind played over his bare head.

  The real crown was too much for him; he was too afraid to wear it anymore, especially while he had the Emperor’s armor on. But with nothing on his head, he felt exposed.

  A thought suddenly occurred to him.

  “Say…what happened to my hat?”

  Bliss clung to the ropes of The Testament, watched the ships around her, and wondered why she was in such a bad mood.

  She didn’t like “moods” in general. Involuntarily changing her emotional state felt too much like something Tharlos would do.

  Of course, the world was falling apart. Cracking like an egg. That should be enough to put anyone off-kilter.

  But…no, this didn’t feel too far distant from what she usually did. If she failed to stop the Elders, reality would break, but she had always known that. Better than anyone else, she suspected.

  The Spear of Tharlos turned into a muskrat and started scrambling out of her pocket, but she used her Soulbound power to shove it back into shape.

  She thought she could trace her dissatisfaction back to two sources.