by Will Wight
“The Sleepless do not worship Elders. We’re not a cult. Nor do we capture and examine them ourselves, like the Blackwatch do. Our goal is to communicate with the Great Elders, to establish a common understanding so that we can benefit from just the tiniest fraction of their wisdom. Not for ourselves, you understand. For all of mankind.”
Jyrine finished the speech with a self-satisfied smile. “That’s not so bad, is it?”
She’s insane, Shera thought.
Something inside Shera must have wondered if she was doing the right thing, if keeping the Heart safe was worth all her time and energy. But now, hearing Jyrine’s story, she knew she had to keep the Heart out of Sleepless hands at all costs. Out of everyone’s hands.
They wanted to learn from the Great Elders. From the Dead Mother, whose voice whispered eternally, trying to talk humans into dying so that it could remake them into a horrifying monstrosity. From Kelarac, who kept the souls of those who fell afoul of his deals. From Kthanikahr, who wanted humanity replaced by worms. From Tharlos, who simply wanted to burn it all to the ground.
Shera had wondered why she was fighting, and this was why. Because the alternative was to leave the world to people like this.
She leaned back from the bars, loosening her arms, rolling her neck, and rubbing the ache in her wounded shoulder. She felt as though she’d been taking a long nap, and she was finally waking up.
“So you’re idiots,” Shera said aloud. “Thanks. That tells me what I wanted to know.”
With her right hand, she reached back and pulled out her remaining shear.
Jyrine stiffened and stepped back at the sight, her hand going to the Elder symbol on her bracelet. It wouldn’t help her. Shera’s knife had enough Intent that it would break straight through the lock, with a little force.
She couldn’t afford to let Jyrine live. The woman’s own story had made it clear. She was crazy, and she would work as hard as she could to steer the world toward anarchy and destruction.
Then she looked at Jyrine’s terrified expression, and she stopped herself.
Lucan would say her life was worth as much as Shera’s.
Shera heartily disagreed.
But at the same time…insane and misguided as she was, Jyrine at least seemed to be sincere. For the good of all mankind.
Shera turned away, walking toward Lucan’s cell. The woman was a danger to herself and others, but she wasn’t malicious, and she was locked away. If the Sleepless did do something today, Shera wanted to have a prisoner around to question. And Jyrine wasn’t going anywhere.
Then the door burst open and Calder Marten walked in.
Shera went into a fighting crouch instinctively, holding her shear steady in one hand. He was flanked by his second-in-command—Andel, she thought—a Heartlander man wearing all white. Shortly behind him walked Dalton Foster, the grizzled old man with two pairs of spectacles hanging around his chest. He looked skinny and weak, but he was supposedly one of the greatest gunsmiths in the Empire’s history, so Shera didn’t discount him.
Behind them, the hall was filled with Consultants. Including Hansin, Lucan’s regular guard.
And Kerian, wearing purple. Her eyes were filled with fury and she had her shears in her hands, but she didn’t attack.
What was going on? Was this the settlement they’d reached with Calder? Allowing him to visit his wife made sense, but why the show of force?
Is Lucan in danger?
At that instant, Shera noticed a thin golden crown nestled in Calder’s red hair. The surprise she’d felt from seeing Kerian was nothing compared to the shock that struck her when she recognized that circlet.
He was wearing the Emperor’s crown.
“On your knees,” Calder commanded, and the order resonated through the hall. It echoed between the stone walls, driving into Shera’s skull, pressing on her back like a heavy weight. The order carried with it all the authority of the Emperor himself, all the charisma and influence he’d built up over a dozen centuries.
Shera understood why the other Consultants were following Calder. They were under his control. For a loyal Imperial citizen, someone who had sworn their allegiance to the Emperor and the Empire, such a command would be impossible to resist.
But the Emperor had already set her free.
“Protect the Empire,” he had commanded her once. “Even, if necessary, from me.”
Shera stayed on her feet.
Calder’s expression grew frustrated, and he put out a hand as if he thought it added to his power. “Shera, I order you to put down the knife.”
She gripped the blade tighter. It was still difficult to move—her body was convinced that any attack against him would be a betrayal of the Emperor—but she didn’t drop the weapon.
Dalton Foster seemed satisfied, smirking as he stroked his beard. “There, you see? That’s what I expected it to do. This absolute command thing is unnatural. It shouldn’t work so well.”
Beside him, Kerian glared helplessly, but she didn’t say a word.
Ice crawled over Shera’s heart once again.
They were keeping her fellow Guild members hostage, using the Emperor’s own crown to force Consultants to betray their cause. If she had considered letting Calder live before, now she was determined to see him dead.
“Where did you get that?” she asked coldly, still staring at the crown.
Instead of answering, Calder looked to Lucan. Shera’s body tensed, and she held the knife so tightly it shook. She may have problems attacking Calder, but if he threatened Lucan, she would put her knife through his heart no matter what it took.
Lucan seemed calm enough. He lifted a closed chest the size of a jewelry box, from which Nakothi’s Heart still spewed whispers. “What do you intend to do with this?” he asked Calder.
With his other hand, he gestured to Shera. Move over.
She edged to one side, where he had a clear line to her between the bars. As soon as Calder’s attention fully focused on Lucan, and he opened his mouth to speak, Lucan hurled the box at Shera.
She was ready, snatching the box out of the air with her left hand despite a scream of pain from her shoulder. Without looking back, she bolted past Jyrine’s cell and farther down the tunnels.
Calder shouted an order, and the hallway filled with the padding of soft Consultant shoes rushing afterwards. She started to dodge from side to side as she ran, expecting a spade in her back at any second.
Nothing struck her.
She didn’t dare look back, but she stopped dodging and focused on speed.
He can order them to follow me, she thought, but he can’t order them to do it well.
The idea encouraged her as she rushed down the tunnel, and she remained encouraged for exactly ten more seconds. Then she realized that she was lost.
“Does anyone know how to get out of here?” she called.
“Right,” Kerian grunted, as though it were difficult for her to speak.
Shera turned right.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Ten Years Ago
The Emperor lounged in his chair while the three Gardeners sat stiffly in theirs. He closed the Heart of Nakothi back into its pewter cage, tucking it back down the front of his robe.
That’s how he’s lived for more than a thousand years. The information stuck in Shera’s throat like a chunk of meat. She had never wanted to know that. Someone could kill or torture her for knowledge like this, not even counting what the Emperor would do if he thought she had let something slip.
And it was…disappointing, somehow. Shera had never worshiped the Emperor in the same way that others did; she knew that, behind his immense power and centuries of experience, he was just a Reader with more skill than any other. There was nothing divine about him.
But he was still the Emperor. The symbol of everything good about humanity, of Imperial stability, of civilization itself. He was beyond change, beyond corruption. Knowing that his long life came from a Great Elder was like lear
ning that he feasted on baby hearts.
Meia kept her expression stoic and her back straight, but her hands were trembling in her lap. Lucan had gone slack in his chair, eyes wide and staring at nothing. It was hard to tell with his dark skin, but it looked as though he’d gone a shade paler than normal.
Compared to those two, Shera figured she was handling the news rather well.
“Forty-eight hours ago, the Blackwatch reported that a member of their number had stolen certain sensitive documents regarding Nakothi and her spawn. Thirty-six hours ago, he hired a Navigator and set out into the Aion. An informant aboard suggested that he means to travel into that sea, to the location of Nakothi’s corpse, and remove another of her hearts.”
Shera was the only one of the three Consultants still capable of speech, so she asked the question. “She has more than one?”
The Emperor stood from his chair and began to pace. “Twelve. Most of them are no longer viable, but if he can revive one…I am the only one alive who can bind myself to the heart of a Great Elder without going entirely mad. In the worst-case scenario, we’ll have an insane immortal wandering the earth, doing the bidding of the Dead Mother.”
Meia finally found her voice. “I’m sorry, Highness, but…surely you must have placed some security around the island.”
“Enough to repel a fleet of ships like this one,” the Emperor said. He turned his back to them, staring out a dark window. “Even if I hadn’t, there are certain dangers associated with plumbing a Great Elder’s corpse. Realistically, this voyage has no chance of success.”
“Then why are we here?” Shera asked bluntly.
He turned back to them, clutching the amulet through his robes like a man suffering a heart attack. “I’m not used to basing my decisions on intuition. I prefer plans and data. But I have a feeling that we’re not dealing with realistic odds tonight.”
As he clenched his fist around the Heart, Shera could have sworn she heard distant whispers.
The Emperor nodded slowly, as if to himself. “Yes…Nakothi’s hand is in this game. But it’s not the final gambit. If we can stop her here, we may buy ourselves twenty or thirty years. No more.”
Shera remained silent, having no idea how to respond.
Suddenly decisive, the Emperor marched over to a blank wall and placed his hand against it. The painted wood shifted and flowed away from his touch, bunching at the corners.
Behind the wall stood a set of ancient armor on the stand, lacquered white, painted with the sun-and-moon crest of the Aurelian Empire. Beside it rested a pair of matched swords, each with a bronze blade.
Shera could feel the pressure from the weapons all the way across the room, like a wind pressing against her mind. Lucan staggered backwards, knocking over his chair and throwing up a hand to protect himself.
“Make your preparations,” the Emperor said, without turning around. “We leave in one hour.”
~~~
Meia had gone to see the alchemists about potions, solutions, and general upkeep she might need for the mission ahead, leaving Shera and Lucan behind.
Shera tied her belt, tested her shears in their sheaths, replenished her stock of spades, refreshed the poison on her needles, and checked the silk sash she wore wrapped above the belt. The sash had a thousand uses, from a garrote to an emergency climbing rope, and she had been reluctant to replace it with her new knife-belt. After a second’s thought, she added a few more trinkets she might need: her breathing-reed, a waterproof case of matches, and an emergency flare.
She kept checking her equipment to keep her mind occupied, but she knew she was ready. They had returned from an assignment only hours before. Her gear hadn’t gone anywhere.
Lucan’s preparations were more complex. He had his own set of shears buckled onto the small of his back, but the rest of his belt was hidden behind pouches, loops, and pockets filled with invested bric-a-brac. As she watched, he stuffed a thumb-sized hammer into one loop, poured some glittering sand into a pouch, and filled a pocket with what looked like acorns. Finally, he tucked a copper spoon into his boot.
“Preparing for breakfast?” Shera asked.
Normally he would have returned a joke of his own, but this time he rubbed his hands together, glancing around the room as if looking for something else to add to his collection. “It was forged by a young smith who wanted to escape his apprenticeship, and stolen by a petty thief. He used it to burrow out of a makeshift prison. With all the Intent invested in this spoon, it will be better for digging our way free than any shovel.”
“It’s still a spoon, though,” Shera said, striving for levity.
“Not if we need it. I’m prepared to Awaken it, if I have to.” Then he stared at her, so hard and so long that she shifted back.
“You don’t feel any different, do you?” he asked.
Quickly, Shera catalogued her emotions, trying to discover if she did, in fact, feel any different than usual. Her heart was beating a little faster, and she might have been a tad more self-conscious. Both normal, considering that Lucan was asking her personal questions out of a clear sky.
“I’m getting ready to go to work,” she said, hoping that would pass for an answer.
“We could die tonight.”
“Technically, we could die any night.”
But nothing would shake Lucan out of his dire mood. His hands flexed, as though he meant to knead each word as it passed through the air. “We’re not strangling a wine merchant in his sleep. If anything goes wrong tonight, we could be facing Elders and Navigators and disgraced Blackwatch. We’re so far past our depth we can’t even see the shore. And you’re not nervous?”
Shera placed a hand on his arm to steady him; alone, this close, the simple contact felt unusually bold. “There’s more at stake in this game, but it’s still the same old game we’ve been playing our whole lives. There’s nothing new here, so long as we keep winning.”
In truth, she didn’t feel much about the upcoming mission. If there were targets, she would kill them. If not, she’d have a night relaxing with Lucan and Meia. Even in the worst case, she could still catch a nap on the ride out to the island.
Sure, they might die. But a storm might capsize their boat, or the Emperor could choose to have them executed on a whim. No amount of worrying would change it, and there would be nothing to complain about afterwards.
Death did what she wanted, when she wanted, and nothing could stop her.
Compared to the outcome of the mission, Shera was far more nervous about the results of this conversation.
Then Lucan threw his arms around her, and her heart tried to drill its way out of her chest.
“I’m not going to let you go,” he whispered into her ear. “This time, I can stop it.”
She would have wondered what he was talking about if she hadn’t been too busy wondering what she was supposed to do. No one had taught her this. Should she return the embrace? That seemed logical, right? Maybe she should kiss him; that’s what the girls in Kerian’s romance novels would have done. But maybe that was too much, too fast. What would a normal girl her age do?
For the first time, she realized that the only people she knew were spies and assassins. And that maybe a Consultant’s training didn’t prepare her for everything.
Ultimately, she stayed frozen for far too long. Until Lucan lowered his hands, seized the hilts of her shears, and pulled the knives from their sheaths.
For that situation, she had been trained.
She drove a knee up between his legs, doubling him over. Then she slipped under one of his arms and slid around behind him, pulling his own set of shears from his back. She faced Lucan with one of his bronze knives in each of her hands, knees bent, balancing on the balls of her feet in a knife-fighting stance.
Shera came back to herself when she realized Lucan was still kneeling on the ground, groaning, her shears forgotten on the floor next to him.
Lucan would never hurt me, she realized. She knew that, and had
never really doubted it, but at the same time…
Trusting too easily is asking for a knife in the back. That was one of Ayana’s sayings, not Maxwell’s, and she’d meant it to apply to non-Guild members. But it seemed Shera had taken it too much to heart.
She dropped the blades and stepped hesitantly over to him. “I’m sorry, I just…reacted.”
Lucan flopped over onto his back, looking up at her with a strange expression. It looked like a mix between amusement and pain and sadness and resignation, and she wished she had his powers so that she could know what he was thinking.
“It was my fault,” he said from the floor. “I should have seen that coming. But, I—”
He interrupted himself, levering up to a sitting position. “We’ve been together for so long, I feel like we’re on the same page of the same book. We spend every waking minute together, and there’s no one else who’s done what we’ve done. It’s you and me, and maybe Meia, and then the rest of the world.”
He picked up one of her shears, staring into it as if to find his reflection in the dull blade. Maybe he was looking into the weapon’s past, Reading it, or maybe he found it easier to face the knife than her.
“You’re like a sister to me, and a friend, and maybe something…else. I don’t know. My point is, I look at you one second, and it’s like you’re perfect. And then…”
He didn’t take his eyes away from the knife. “…and then you scare me. You might be the most frightening person I’ve ever met. You go dark, and cold, and the person I know goes away.”
Shera was starting to long for the Emperor and his horror stories about the Great Elders. They hadn’t disturbed her nearly this much.
Because he was right.
Something was broken inside her, a part was missing, a cog had been stripped away. Maybe Maxwell had taken it away from her, or maybe she’d been born without all the pieces that normal people got. But she was different, and she wasn’t sure how to change.
Or even if she wanted to.
Lucan smiled, an expression without any humor whatsoever. It was the smile of a Gardener. “But I can tell you one thing, Shera. If I had to put money on one of us making it through this mission alive, I’d bet on you. So that’s what I’m going to do.”
