by Will Wight
“Did you damage their ship?” Meia asked softly.
Calder managed to awkwardly lurch his head to one side until he could see her reaction. That meant the poison was wearing off, which came as a relief. “Not...me.” He had no idea what could have caused a twisted explosion like the one that had torn The Eternal apart, but the two ships were clearly alone out here. He would attribute this to the mysteries of the Aion.
Good thing he had turned to see her face, because she paled a shade when she heard that. She nodded absently, as though she’d expected his answer, and then turned from him. “Guild Head,” she called, and Calder did what he could to roll over and watch her. His wounded shoulder complained.
Bliss stood with her back to Meia and Calder, watching the sky. “It’s coming again. Secure all hands.” She glanced back at Calder. “Isn’t that what you’re supposed to say?”
It wasn’t, but Calder was in no mood to correct her.
“Guild Head,” Meia repeated, even as the air over The Testament warped and began to twist. “Who controls the Optasia?”
Bliss looked back to the sky, watching space bend like folded glass. “I thought no one did, but that’s clearly not true, is it? Calder Marten, I suggest you turn the ship.”
He didn’t need her to tell him that. His Intent was already traveling to the Lyathatan, frantic and demanding, layered with the voice of Kelarac.
The Elder jerked the ship to starboard, sloshing waves of freezing water over the side and dousing Calder in a shocking storm of ice. The ship’s lines bound him in place, securing the rest of his crew at the same time. Bliss could no doubt take care of herself, and if Meia was pitched overboard, that would solve several problems at once.
But no ship was designed to leap sideways. The stress tore at the boards, springing leaks in a dozen places, lancing through The Testament like a hammer-blow. The bolts fastening the Lyathatan’s chains strained at the surrounding wood, beginning to pop and splinter.
Calder could fix everything, given raw materials and a little time, and he had greater concerns at the moment. As another scream from the dying Windwatcher split the air between the two ships, a bubble of force popped into existence over The Testament.
This close, it looked like a soap bubble, a transparent sphere of energy that warped and twisted everything seen through it. If he hadn’t dragged the ship to the side, an explosion like the one that had destroyed The Eternal would have uprooted his mast. It wouldn’t have been a lethal blow, but a crippling one. Calder would have to rely on the Lyathatan to take them anywhere, which was not a winning proposition over the long term.
More importantly, if they had lost their mast, they would have been delayed. Perhaps long enough to prevent them from rescuing the crew of The Eternal. Fortunately, Bliss’ warning had come in time.
The Head of the Blackwatch had one hand stretched out to point at the bubble, which popped a second later with a deceptively quiet, empty sound.
“How is this possible?” Meia asked, her voice harsh and demanding.
Bliss turned to her. “My Watchmen must be dead, and something else has taken control of the palace. I must immediately return to the Capital, because that is my job, and I will be taking Calder Marten with me. He is now a very valuable replacement part.”
Calder didn’t particularly like the sound of that.
“I see,” Meia said, nudging Calder with her foot. “Can he handle it?”
“It’s better than leaving the weapon in the hands of an enemy.”
“True.” The Consultant watched the wreckage of The Eternal, which lurched closer and closer as the Lyathatan pulled them over. “I propose a truce, Guild Head. It seems I need to visit the Capital after all.”
“Your Architects have not ordered you to the Capital.”
Meia sheathed both of her knives behind her back. “If they knew what I know, they would.”
~~~
When the Lyathatan reached Cheska Bennett’s ship, it first reached under the hull with its clawed hands and slowly lifted. Water poured out of the shattered vessel, the deck stabilized, and survivors in the water swam away from the monster in renewed panic. Most of them paddled desperately for The Testament, trying to escape the rise of the giant Elderspawn.
Calder made sure that rope ladders had been unfurled down the sides to meet them. Andel and Petal were on hand for first aid, and Calder himself was huddled under a blanket against the railing. He sipped on an alchemical concoction of Petal’s that was supposed to reduce the poison’s control over his body, but was primarily making him feel as though the whole world was upside down.
In the end, the Lyathatan was able to rescue both Guild Heads and three of Teach’s crew, none of whom had the strength to stand once they reached The Testament. Evidently surviving a shipwreck really took the wind from your sails. So to speak.
Cheska had a nasty cut over one eye, her breathing was shallow, and she didn’t look likely to wake any time soon. Petal was currently fussing over her, carefully lowering a glowing syringe to the woman’s throat.
The crew members were in varying states of panic or insensibility. Only Jarelys Teach seemed to have her wits about her, and she was still visibly exhausted and soaking wet.
By now, the screams of the Windwatcher had gone silent.
Calder’s crew took care of the survivors, but Calder himself kept his mind focused on the ship. The Lyathatan strode through the water ahead of them, carrying the remnants of The Eternal in its clawed hands. The Elder tugged their ship behind it, but considering the beating The Testament had taken, it was all Calder could do to hold his Vessel together.
He would have had an easier time if he could have left the remaining half of The Eternal behind, but he knew what that would do to Cheska. “A captain’s ship is his life. A Navigator’s ship is his soul.” That had once been a common saying, though the origin was long lost.
Every passenger cabin and half the hold was filled with cargo from The Eternal, from food stores to clothes to weapons. They’d salvaged everything they could, but now The Testament felt stuffed to the brim. Teach leaned against a trunk full of books with her eyes closed, arms resting on sacks of powdered soap. Foster sat cross-legged on a massive roll of blankets, tinkering with a cannon and muttering into his beard. And Bliss popped up from behind a cask like a prairie dog, glanced around, and slowly hid herself again.
The Guild Head slid from cask to crate to giant basket, weaving her way across the crowded deck like a child taking a game very seriously.
When her head rose out of a box next to him—he had no idea how she’d managed to get inside the box without him seeing, but he’d learned to stop asking pointless questions—he nodded to her.
“Good evening, Guild Head,” he said.
She turned to him, solemnly inclining her head from over the rim of the box. “Good evening, Calder Marten. Are you sick?”
He took a sip from the mug in his hands, which tasted like lemons and cinnamon and lightning. The world lurched around him, as though reality were trying to stand on its head, but by now he’d grown used to the effects of the alchemy. “Just tired. I was poisoned earlier, and now I’m holding the ship together.”
“I see.” She pointed to the blanket wrapped around his shoulders. “I’ve noticed that people often wrap blankets around the injured and the sick. Does it help somehow?”
“At least I won’t be tired, shaky, and cold.”
She rubbed her chin as she considered. “I see. I’ll remember that.”
The Guild Head started to lower her head back into the box, a clockwork toy rewinding itself, but Calder stopped her with an outstretched hand. He was actually going to touch her shoulder, but reminded himself at the last second that he might want to keep the hand.
“Bliss. Who attacked us?”
He’d been planning on waiting for Meia to disappear so that he could talk to Bliss without interruption, but that plan had worked entirely too well. Meia had vanished almost immediat
ely after the survivors of The Eternal had been rescued, and he hadn’t seen her since. He would have sworn that she’d left, if there had been anywhere else for her to go. A cursory Reading of the ship didn’t reveal her, though he couldn’t spare much attention or Intent for a thorough search.
As far as he knew, the Consultant could be lurking over his shoulder, listening to every word. But that couldn’t be helped. If she overheard him, so be it; he had to know what they were sailing into.
Bliss’ brow furrowed. “That’s a good question. I don’t know, though I’m certain the Elders are involved if they’ve taken over the Imperial Palace. You know how difficult it would be for a human to use the Optasia.”
Calder reminded himself that his mother treated Bliss with endless patience, and tried to summon some of that for himself. “No, in fact I don’t. What is the Optasia?”
“It’s the Emperor’s throne,” she said, levering herself over the edge of the box to crouch face-to-face with Calder. “He used it to control a network of amplification devices all over the world, so that he could use his Intent anywhere, instantly. An ingenious system. Too bad it was so terribly flawed.”
Calder waited for her to continue, but she seemed to think that she’d explained enough. After a few awkward seconds, he prompted her. “Flawed?”
“Yes.”
Nothing else.
“How was it flawed, Bliss?”
She moved her head from side to side like a snake, searching his face from every angle. “You must have wondered why we were willing to let someone so young, inexperienced, naive, emotional, under-educated, and generally unsuitable call himself Emperor.”
Endless patience. “I hadn’t thought of it in quite those terms.”
“As we explained before, we need someone to sit on the throne. Not the blocky chair in the audience hall, although I’m sure that you will have to host an audience at some point, and you should be prepared for that. We need someone on the real throne. The Optasia. So while there are any number of other qualities that we would like in an Emperor, all we want is a Reader strong enough to use the Optasia to magnify their talents. And to not go insane, of course.”
Calder was having enough trouble wrapping his mind around the reality of a device that allowed the Emperor to cast his will across the world. Was that how he had become so much more powerful than any other Reader? Did he have an artificial, world-spanning system propping up his powers?
No, that wasn’t likely. Calder had Read enough of the Emperor’s trail to know that the man invested objects just by walking down the same street. An Intent like that couldn’t be faked.
But then, Calder would never have thought such an Intent could be magnified either.
“I’m sorry, Bliss, but I feel like I’ve been invited to a play in the third act. How does this device work? What did he use it for? Why does it have to be the Emperor who uses it, and not someone else? Most importantly, how is it going to drive me insane?”
The Guild Head smiled at him with obvious pity, patting him softly on the top of the head with one hand. “There, there. No need to apologize. The throne is linked to amplification devices created by the Emperor and scattered all over the world. They’re in the shape of statues, I believe. They took his Intent and focused it wherever necessary, so that he could deal with threats without leaving the Capital. I should think it would be obvious why we’re restricting its use: we’re handing control of the Empire over to the first powerful Reader who sits in the chair. That requires quite a bit of caution.”
Using both hands, she reached out and snatched his mug of softly glowing alchemical medicine, taking a brief sip. She made a face like a little girl who had bitten into a lemon, looked all around her, and then took another sip.
“What about the insanity, Bliss?”
“You’re very stuck on that. It’s not good to be too focused on one thing. Well, the Optasia was constructed so that the Emperor could respond to any of the Great Elders who acted up. Indeed, some of my predecessors in the Blackwatch wondered why they were necessary at all, if the Emperor could blast Elders to pieces from his seat in the Capital.”
“That’s another thing. How does anyone blast anything with their Intent? That doesn’t seem possible.”
She shrugged. “He’s the Emperor.”
In hindsight, it had been a stupid question.
“But the Emperor used the Optasia only rarely, for the greatest hazards, and in the last twenty years of his life I can only prove that he used it one time. Why is that, do you think?”
Bliss stared at him quizzically, as though genuinely wondering if he had the answer.
“If he had to focus his Intent on a Great Elder every time it popped up, he would be staring madness in the face. I don’t know how he ever did it without going insane; that sounds like it would be worse than Reading an Elderspawn directly.” And everyone knew you couldn’t Read an Elderspawn directly unless you were tired of keeping your personality intact. Or unless you had Kelarac’s handprint on your arm. Before that, when Calder sent his Intent down to the Lyathatan, he was very careful to Read only the Intent in the manacles and chains. Like looking at a reflection in a mirror.
Bliss beamed at him, patting him on the head again. “Very good! If I were grading you, I would give you full points. And I am grading you. Secretly.”
“Then what do you want me to do with it? If this Optasia was too difficult for the Emperor, then I’m more likely to kill us all.” Calder questioned many things about the late Emperor, may his soul sink down to Kelarac: his character, his decisions, his concern for the people of the Empire. But Calder had never questioned the man’s power as a Reader. If the Emperor hadn’t figured out a way to use the Optasia safely, then Calder would do nothing but die.
Bliss lowered herself into the box, shutting the lid over her head. Her voice came from inside, muffled and indistinct. “Don’t worry. We know you can’t force Urg’naut back into his seal, or keep Ach’magut from rebuilding his library, or do anything useful.”
Every conversation with Bliss was an exercise in not taking offense. Calder happened to think he was doing quite well so far.
“We need eyes,” the Guild Head continued from within her box. “Through the Optasia, even when the Emperor couldn’t confront a threat directly, he could tell us what was happening with any of the Great Elders at any time. On our own, we can’t keep track of it all. And you’ll be able to send messages to our agents anywhere in the world. We’ll deal with all the real threats, as long as you keep us informed.”
That made a certain amount of sense. And he supposed he should be grateful; if the Guild Heads hadn’t needed someone to bear the risk of sitting on the throne, they would never have allowed him the chance to act as Emperor. The chance he’d always wanted. The chance he’d been promised.
Bliss spoke again, and this time her voice was coming from a different cask, this time on his left. He didn’t question it, just shifted his position so he was facing the Guild Head’s new container. “And, of course, the others want a figurehead to keep the people happy. A puppet. A pretty doll to put on parade so that the children feel protected.”
Now he was sure Bliss was trying something. “Are you insulting me on purpose?”
She popped up from the inside of the cask, a coil of rope on her head. “That’s ridiculous.”
He still had the Emperor’s crown, and the candles of the Witness in charge of Imperial finance. Access to power and funds both. But then, the Guild Heads could have any team of Readers unlock the secrets in Naberius’ wax-sealed memories, and Teach could take the crown from him without much trouble.
His only asset, it seemed, was being disposable.
He could use that.
“So when we reach the Capital, what’s the plan? You clear the way to the Optasia, and I sit on it, and everything’s better again?”
“That depends on one very troubling factor,” Bliss said, staring off into the horizon.
“Wh
at’s that?”
“Who’s using it now?”
~~~
Jerri’s hand hovered inches away from the throbbing gray-green flesh that walled her inside the room. The bulbous meat that enveloped the walls would have been disgusting, if she hadn’t been trained to look past its appearance and into what it represented: an advance in knowledge and technology so complete that humans might never understand it.
Besides the Elders, who had the power to instantly grow a life—real, living flesh—and bend it to their will? Even the Emperor couldn’t do that. The Elders controlled life and death, memory and knowledge, space and time. The merest fraction of their expertise would improve the lives of people all over the Empire.
Put that way, it was hard to understand why anyone didn’t want to learn from the Elders. Distasteful as they might seem, they embodied the clearest road into the future.
But thoughts of the distant future would only distract her for so long when she was more concerned with today.
“How long must I wait?” Jerri asked.
The room’s only other occupant, a dark-skinned Heartlander man who might have been a native of the Capital, sat on the corner of the Emperor’s bed. A softly glowing bulb, dangling from the new-grown flesh overhead, cast shadows on his face. Jewels gleamed at his neck, on his fingers, in his ears, in his hair—it seemed that he had crammed gold and gems anywhere he could fit them. Only his eyes were plain and unadorned, covered as they were by a steel blindfold that seemed to have been bolted to his face.
She’d seen other Elder cults who believed in mutilating their bodies, demonstrating their dedication to the Great Ones, but no one else had gone so far as to blind themselves. Especially not to these gruesome extremes. It looked as though he’d driven steel screws straight into his own eyes.
But he smiled broadly at her question. “If you wish to learn from the Elders, patience is the first and most valuable skill. There are beings who will not begin a conversation without observing the other party for at least a year, and whose names take a man’s lifetime to properly pronounce.”
