by Will Wight
“Here’s what I would like you to do, Jyrine,” the man said, gently taking her by the shoulders. She didn’t resist, allowing him to move her a few feet to the right. The soft organic light hanging from the ceiling hadn’t gotten any dimmer, but he was still bathed in shadows, even inches from her face. As he moved, she sensed the movement of a vast bulk behind him, though she saw nothing more than a normal human silhouette. As though he were something massive cramming itself into the shape of a man.
He finally released her when she was standing with her back to the Optasia, facing the door. “Stand in this spot as long as you can, using the full extent of your power to defend yourself. That’s all. When at last you feel like you cannot continue or you are about to lose your life, you can simply...stand aside.”
Gold flickered in the darkness as he smiled.
The Elder seal around them trembled, and a beat of thunder shook the floor. The Guards had begun their attack. Her heart pounded and her breath quickened from a mix of fear, anticipation, and the sheer thrill of adventure. Her earring began to sparkle, gathering green light.
“Who are you?” she asked, not for the first time. He’d dodged her questions before, but now...now, she hoped, he would give her a real response.
“I am...a business partner of your husband’s. I’m the one who arranged for your jailbreak and ensuing expedition through the void. I assigned you here, Jyrine Tessella Marten, and I sowed the seed of this moment long before you were born.”
Jerri fell to her knees, pressing her forehead to the floorboards. “Kelarac, Great One,” she whispered. Only in her most daring daydreams had she imagined that she would someday come face-to-face with one of the Great Ones. This was even better than she’d hoped; Kelarac was actively helping her. He had guided her wisdom closer to his own, so that she could continue serving the world.
“Do you wish to learn from me?” Kelarac asked, and his voice came from all around her.
“More than anything.”
“I know the secrets of time, of the worlds, of the future and of human Intent. With a fraction of my knowledge, you could guide the Empire into a new golden age. Each man an Emperor, each woman an Empress.”
She could picture it as he spoke, as though he were feeding her specific images. A man flexing his Intent to open a solid wall into a door; a woman climbing into a machine shaped like a winged Kameira, and soaring through the clouds; a little boy waving his hand and causing a thousand flowers to bloom in a field.
“The mysteries of this world are keys that can unlock any door,” the Great Elder’s voice went on. “And they will be yours...if you pay the price. And today, I take my price in obedience.”
She stood, green power swirling around her fingertips and lighting the room. She’d never been so ready to fight.
With Kelarac’s knowledge, she could shock the world. Prove to everyone, even Calder, that she’d been right. That she and her father were justified all along.
The Soul Collector laughed fondly, and the door tore open.
Jerri hurled fire.
~~~
At first, standing in the courtyard, Calder tried to take on a passive role in the defeat of the Elder wall. The mountain of flesh was not going down passively, lashing out at each of the Guards and Watchmen that dared approach. They were using their armor and weapons to clear the way for the Guild Heads—General Teach marched up with Tyrfang in one hand, keeping a healthy distance from the other humans so that the sheer aura of her weapon didn’t strike them dead.
Bliss skipped along next to her, apparently immune to Tyrfang’s power, the Spear of Tharlos leaning against one shoulder. When she and Teach struck together, it dwarfed anything Calder had seen before, exploding like an alchemist’s charge and sending stinking flesh blasting fifty feet into the air. Calder had to stagger back and hold a hand up over his eyes to block a faceful of Elder gore. They stood in a tunnel slashed in the flesh, black-edged with death and corruption.
But the wall was still growing. They weren’t getting closer to the heart.
Eventually, he knew, they would carve through. They were doing damage faster than the wall could heal, and they wouldn’t stop until they broke through to the center. But at this rate, it could take hours. And Bliss had emphasized speed above all else. No matter what they had to do, they had to reach the inside of the Elder wall as quickly as possible.
Calder lifted the sheathed saber he’d carried from his room. He had wanted to avoid drawing the weapon in front of Bliss, in case she could somehow sense that it came from Kelarac. Besides, he was wearing clothes fit for the Emperor himself. He didn’t want to ruin them with Elder blood on the first day.
But now, it seemed, he had no choice.
He pulled the sheath off with one hand, tossing it aside, and held the blade in the other. “If this doesn’t work, I’ll have ruined my clothes for no reason,” he said to no one in particular.
“I hear you have to pay for the second set,” Andel called from behind him. He hadn’t known the man was here.
Calder stepped up to the Elder wall for the first time since his dream last night. In the daylight it loomed even higher, more menacing, a sheer cliff of rotting meat. The stench rolling from the freshly carved cave was indescribable, and he couldn’t get too close to General Teach for fear that her sword would actually kill him where he stood.
But he did have one advantage.
Through the six-fingered mark on his right hand, he funneled his Intent and Read the simple Elderspawn wall. As he’d suspected, it was a simple creature, fashioned for the sole purpose of keeping them away from this room. It focused on him, preparing to lash out with its whips of muscle, and he moved his blade where the lashes would strike.
Raw Elder sinew met orange-and-black mottled steel. The orange of the Awakened blade flared, corrosive Intent surged in the weapon, and the tendril blackened.
A silent scream blasted out from the Elder wall, audible to Calder only through Kelarac’s mark. The wall recoiled—not visibly, but through its Intent—and tried to attack around the blade. Each time, Calder intercepted the strike an instant before the whip actually landed.
He found himself grinning. Fighting like this made him feel like a sword-master from legend, unbeatable and unstoppable, advancing against any number of opponents. His sword was always in the right place even before it was needed, and he fought on sheer instinct. Too bad it only worked on Elderspawn.
When he reached the cave that Bliss and Teach had opened, he dared not proceed any farther. If Teach happened to accidentally move the Intent of her Vessel backwards, he’d fall over dead.
Just as his father had, at the end of that same weapon.
Instead, experimentally, he drove his Awakened sword into the side of the tunnel. The simple Elder being let out another scream of Intent, and a massive chunk of the wall just melted. Odious black goo rolled like a tide over his shoes, and he knew he’d have to burn this pair too.
It was as he’d expected, remembering the fate of the Elderspawn on the Gray Island. Any lesser Elder that encountered this sword dissolved.
He would have to join the two Guild Heads, if they wanted to make it through the wall in any reasonable amount of time. Which left only the little inconvenience of figuring out how to fight next to Tyrfang without dying.
“Guild Heads!” Calder called. They were only a pace or two ahead of him, as their tunnel was incredibly shallow at this point, but they were both thoroughly engaged in digging through the Elder flesh. In fact, shovelfuls of carrion and rotting blood splattered him every time they moved. “Excuse me! General Teach!”
“Speak!” Teach ordered, without turning around.
More than the stench, more than the sickening sounds of blades in flesh, more than the reality of what they were doing, the Intent rolling off of her Vessel made him feel sick. “I believe I can speed us up, but I have to get closer.”
Teach gave no acknowledgement that she’d heard, hacking away at the wall,
but Tyrfang’s Intent began to lessen. Her speed decreased in proportion, until the entire hall didn’t quite blacken and die with every swing of her sword.
On the other side of the General, Bliss just held her Spear jammed into the end of the tunnel, humming an aimless tune. The wall’s flesh actually fled from her blade, as if in fear.
Calder held his breath as he moved up, standing shoulder to armored shoulder. He immediately knew he’d been wrong; no matter how far Teach held herself back, the aura of the sword pressed against him like the edge of a blade. His vision blurred, and he could feel consciousness slipping.
He concentrated on his own sword, on the orange-spotted blade Kelarac had given him. Its power seemed to push around it, creating a little bubble where Teach’s influence was weakened. It helped, but not enough. He needed something else.
In a last, desperate attempt to distract his Intent, he focused his attention through Kelarac’s mark on his arm. The handprint grew warm and his Intent firmed, as though he’d braced himself against a solid foundation. That, finally, was enough. General Teach’s corrosive power scraped at him, trying to find a foothold, but through the mark Calder could hold it at bay.
It was a little alarming that the mark of Kelarac could support his Intent, suggesting that the Great Elder was backing him directly in some way, but he chose not to focus on that. One job at a time.
Now that Tyrfang’s nauseous power had lessened, Calder put his back into the work, swinging his own Awakened blade.
He was pleasantly surprised at how much his addition to the team actually helped. They soon fell into a rhythm: Teach slashed the wall, blackening the flesh for yards around. Then Calder impaled it with his glowing-ember blade, melting it to black sludge. Bliss finished by cleaning up, sweeping the dead matter away with the Spear of Tharlos.
They were through the Elder wall in minutes.
When they stumbled through a sudden hole and onto carpeted floor, it was all Calder could do to focus on catching his breath. He’d assumed there would be...more to it, somehow. They had gone from making slow progress to piercing through so quickly that he could hardly believe it.
He held his gore-caked blade over his head. “Victory!” he shouted, like an idiot. A few of the Guards outside took up a cheer.
“Not quite,” Bliss said. She squinted up the hallway, to a room that looked just like half a dozen others. “There’s someone waiting for us.”
Calder couldn’t sense anything other than Elders through Kelarac’s mark, but he took Bliss’ word for it.
Besides the sunlight spilling in from behind them, the hall was lit by dim organic bulbs hanging down from the ceiling. They cast a dirty, grayish light on their surroundings, like an Elder’s attempt to devour all color.
“Here,” General Teach said, striding up to a door and drawing her sword back, preparing to drive it completely into the room.
She didn’t even try the doorknob, Calder thought, before Teach blasted her way inside. The doors blew inward as though she’d charged in with a sledgehammer.
A ball of green fire met her on the other side.
Teach jerked down and to the right, spinning to put her back against the wall to the right of the doorframe. She held Tyrfang up in both hands. She must have started to lose her grip on its Intent, because dirty white paint began to peel away from her as she knelt there.
Ordinarily, Calder would have felt the corruption of that murderous blade, but at the moment...he realized he was holding his breath again.
Green fire. It couldn’t be. It couldn’t be. That was a coincidence that strained all credibility; if he’d seen it in a play, he wouldn’t have believed it.
“What we call coincidence is but the work of plans unknown.” The philosopher Hestor’s words struck dangerously close to home. If anything was the result of an Elder’s plan, it would be Jerri’s presence here.
But his wife hadn’t died on that island after all.
Calder moved into the doorway and saw her, in the same red prison clothes she’d been wearing the last time. When he’d abandoned her to her fate. She’d launched a ball of flame even before he’d turned the corner, but he slapped it out of the air contemptuously with the flat of his sword.
That was something he would have never attempted, under other conditions; he didn’t understand the Intent in those green fireballs, nor did he fully understand the power in his own sword. Instead of canceling each other out, the effects could just as easily have fed on one another and burned him alive. Besides, Soulbound blasts of fire were invariably fast. It was a stupid, unnecessary risk to try swatting one in midair.
This time, he hardly noticed. Jerri stood before him, fire gathering unnoticed in her left hand, eyes as wide as he knew his must be.
“Calder, what are you...what are you doing with the Imperial Guard?”
That actually made him smile, though he wasn’t entirely sure he felt like smiling. “I thought you would have guessed. They’re with me. I’m the Emperor now.”
Jerri’s right hand, the one not wreathed in emerald fire, came up to her mouth. Her eyes filled with tears. “You see? He told you the truth!”
Calder’s feelings turned sour. Why had she brought that up? Now he was lost in the memory of slithering eyes on stalks, and the knowledge that he danced in the palm of an Elder’s hand.
Bliss popped out from behind Calder. “Technically, he’s the Imperial Steward. Sitting on the throne until someone, probably him, can be declared the true Emperor. For that, though, we’re going to need the throne.”
Everything seemed to happen at once.
Jerri focused her gaze on Bliss, anger burning through the lens of her unshed tears. Green fire glowed brighter.
The Head of the Blackwatch rolled out, extending the Spear of Tharlos to its full length. The spear of ancient yellowed bone radiated an Intent that swallowed the room, plucking at Calder with invisible fingers and urging him to change. He had to concentrate on Kelarac’s mark, filling his mind with the borrowed authority of the Soul Collector, to face even that much Elder Intent without losing himself.
Armor clanked as General Teach launched herself into the room. Tyrfang’s red-and-black blade rippled with dark power, and Calder found the breath snatched from his lungs. Utter despair rolled over him like a tide, as though he’d come face-to-face with his own executioner.
Whatever happened next, it happened so quickly that he saw it only in flashes.
Jerri released a flash of green fire and dove to the side, while the Spear of Tharlos struck straight at her. It would have missed the fire entirely, except it seemed to twist of its own accord, bending in violation of everything Calder knew about physical mass. It hit the fire straight on...just as Tyrfang’s black edge arrived.
Soon after, when Calder tried to piece the moment together, he couldn’t make it all fit. By rights, Teach should have been five steps farther away than Bliss. They should have been aiming at different points. The fireball should have passed both of them, and they all should have hit only air.
Instead, the power of Jerri’s Vessel met Tyrfang, the Executioner’s Blade and Bliss’ Spear of Tharlos at the same time.
Inches above the flesh-shrouded cage of steel bars that men called the Optasia.
The Intent burned away the Elder flesh surrounding the Emperor’s throne instantly; the heart-like muscle that had kept a grip on the metal dissolved into black powder. The force continued, tearing up floorboards and wall panels, rearranging and shattering furniture.
But the Optasia caught that blend of deadly Intent, accepted it, and sent it out to a thousand relays all around the world.
That was about as much as Calder’s Reader senses caught before they were overwhelmed, and he collapsed on the floor of the Emperor’s bedroom.
~~~
After the strange reaction of the Optasia, Bliss ran for the exit. She didn’t prefer to run—running wasn’t dignified—but sometimes the speed was worth it. Especially in cases of grave dan
ger or medical injury.
There had been an injury here, she knew it. And very possibly some grave danger as well. Tharlos’ spear was contorting in the pocket of her coat, twisting and writhing in silent laughter.
When she pushed open the bronze doors leading from the Emperor’s chambers, she remembered that she didn’t know what she was looking for. The courtyard was a scene from an Elderspawn slaughterhouse, with chunks of rotten grayish flesh lying everywhere. Wounded Imperial Guards limped here and there, gathering up the pieces and dumping them into buckets in case the creature pulled itself together again. She could have told them it wasn’t necessary, but she approved of their cleaning efforts. Hygiene was important.
At first, she saw nothing wrong, and her heart sank even further. If she couldn’t see the damage, that meant the Optasia’s network had carried it somewhere else in the world. She might never discover what the Elders had done until it was too late.
One Guard, a woman with a tail like a peacock, was staring up at the clouds. Her bucket fell from a limp hand, spilling Elderspawn gore onto the ground.
This was what a mystery novel might call a clue. Bliss followed the woman’s gaze up, expecting a six-winged Elder with a mouth like a shark’s.
Instead, the sky itself was distorted. A long, winding stripe of twisted wrongness, like a river of heat haze or a transparent worm. The air fuzzed and twisted, high overhead, and Bliss almost thought she could hear a distant crackle.
She’d seen corruption like this before. This would only be visible from a certain angle; even as high as it was, no one outside the palace would notice anything wrong. And it would get much worse, very soon.
The sky was going to break.
~~~
When Calder came to, he had a moment of panic. The world was frozen around him, too still and too quiet. Something was wrong.
