Of Killers and Kings

by Will Wight

  Estyr had drifted over to the chalkboards, which caused the young Architects to immediately break into sweat. The skulls drifting around her head almost scraped their boards.

  “Jorin would just love this,” she muttered.

  That sparked another piece of trivia in Shera’s mind. “I can find out for sure, but I think he was the one who created the first set.”

  Estyr gave a wry smile. “Of course he was.”

  While Shera was being forced to act as a Guild Head, she may as well do her best. She continued showing off the various assets of the exiled Consultants as she worked their way to the back of the room. The more she demonstrated their value to the Regents without giving away too many Guild secrets, the better.

  Finally, they reached a door set into the wall. This had once been a food storage closet, but the High Council had emptied and refitted it for secure meetings.

  Shera opened the door and gestured the two Regents inside. “After you.”

  The round table within had been set with three chairs, with a selection of snacks in front of two of them. Loreli’s seat had a pitcher of chilled water and a selection of fruits, Estyr’s an aged bottle of wine and some smoked meats and cheeses.

  The table in front of Shera’s chair was bare. Of course.

  Estyr sat eagerly, letting her three Vessels float to a gentle halt lined up on the table next to her. “You can never fault Consultant hospitality,” she said.

  Loreli murmured thanks and began sipping her water.

  Shera looked at the empty setting in front of her and sighed. “The room is both invested and alchemically sealed against eavesdropping,” Shera said. “Although you may want to make your own preparations.”

  Estyr leaned back into her chair, tearing off a piece of a grilled chicken drumstick. “We are.”

  Shera tried not to look at the food as her mouth watered.

  Loreli swallowed a grape and explained: “By using the room for a conversation we don’t wish to be overheard, we are investing it. It would take considerable power to break through our Intent, and I doubt anyone could do so without us noticing.”

  “So we’ll just dive right into it,” Estyr said with her mouth full. “They’ve made us a deal.”

  Shera didn’t see why Yala had needed to tell her the Regents’ message before they could, but she still played the part of the omniscient Consultant. “Peace between the Guilds. Allbright and Stillwell are onboard, but Bareius is hesitant. He has invested too much of his fortune not to end up on top.”

  Loreli tilted her glass in Shera’s direction. “As expected of the Am’haranai.”

  “You intend to accept an agreement under their terms,” Shera went on. “We agree.”

  “Why?” For no reason that Shera could discern, Estyr closed one eye and watched Shera’s reaction through the lens of her golden wine.

  “Conflict between Guilds costs too much, and it’s stupid to worry about each other when the Elders have cracked open the sky.”

  Loreli looked deeply grieved by the mention of the fracture, and a brief expression of anger crossed Estyr’s face. So they hadn’t made progress on healing the sky. Shera would have to tell…

  She had almost thought “tell Lucan.”

  I’ll have to tell the Guild, she thought, gripping her thoughts firmly.

  Estyr set down her glass without drinking. “What about you, Shera? What do you think?”

  For just a second, Shera dropped all pretense. “I think we should stay close in case we need to stab them in the back.”

  The first Champion nodded once, understanding, and then drained her glass of wine.

  Shera had expected Loreli to react like a Luminian Pilgrim: righteous and disapproving. Instead, she cupped her chin in her hand, considering. “If we intend to strike at their leadership, we don’t need any sort of treaty. If that is our plan, let’s act now. Land Estyr on the roof of the Imperial Palace while a squad of Am’haranai infiltrate the servants.”

  That was a viable plan. Shera had looked into it.

  Loreli continued, “However, I see little advantage there. Our true enemies are not the Guild Heads. Our enemies are, as they have ever been, the Great Elders.”

  “So what does Ach’magut not want us to do?” Estyr rested her head in her hands. “That question has always given me a headache.”

  Shera was sure the Regents had already looked into the Elder cultists, but she shared their information anyway. “The Sleepless have been instructed to deepen the divide between Guilds. That suggests the Great Elders don’t want us to unify.”

  “Does it?” Loreli asked sadly. “Or are they trying to give us no choice but to unify? Under one banner, we once again have a single point of vulnerability.”

  That thought hung heavy over the room for a long moment as Estyr dove into her pile of cheese.

  Shera didn’t understand why they were asking her opinion at all. She guessed they wanted all the Independent Guilds to speak with one voice voluntarily, not because they were coerced by the Regents.

  But as long as they were asking her, she would continue playing the part. “You’re the experts on the tactics of the Great Elders. If you detect any Elder influence, let us know, and we can draw blood for real. Until you do, I think we should stay close.”

  She quoted Maxwell. “‘There’s no one more honest than a man with a dagger to his throat.’”

  Loreli and Estyr traded glances, and Shera was reminded that while they had slept for hundreds of years, they had also lived for at least two hundred years awake. Their bodies were maintained by alchemy and ancient Intent.

  Finally, they both lifted their glasses to her in silent accord.

  Shera didn’t have a glass to lift, so she drew her shear, which filled the room with the silver-blue light of Bastion’s Veil.

  “I’m going to find some food,” Shera said.

  Chapter Two

  seventeen hundred and eighty years ago

  He finally thought of himself as the Emperor.

  The people he saved had named him years ago. First, they called him Liberator, then Emperor in the hopes that he would lead them. And he would, because he was a different man now. One who could do what was necessary.

  The man he had once been could never have destroyed the world.

  He hovered in the thin air above the clouds, clutching a still-beating heart in his right hand. He took a moment to survey his injuries: he was surprisingly unscathed. Only a rib that might be cracked, a few minor cuts and bruises, and a broken foot. Most humans who opposed a Great Elder left insane or in pieces.

  His partner in rebellion drifted on the wind a few feet away. Estyr Six stared down through the fluffy white islands that were the clouds, a trio of hydra skulls orbiting her head like a macabre halo. It was her power that kept them aloft now, high above the churning devastation below.

  A jet of steam blasted into the sky, missing Estyr by only a few yards. She didn't seem to notice. “Did Loreli make it out?”

  The last the Emperor had seen of his daughter, Nakothi’s dread Handmaidens were devouring her army piece by piece. He couldn’t imagine her—or anyone—making it out alive. “If she did not, then we must shoulder her responsibilities as well.”

  And may her soul fly free.

  The sheer scope of the destruction made him wonder if he and Estyr were the only living humans left for a thousand miles. The earth shook and rolled like the sea in storm, fire boiling up from below. The ocean rushed in from all sides, meeting magma in explosions of steam. Towering cathedrals toppled, crashing into fortresses and smashing homes to dust.

  The death throes of Nakothi, the Dead Mother, had destroyed this land. Were still destroying it, in fact—the Great Elders did not die easily. Miles to the west, her great body heaved, breaking mountains. A single hand big enough to blot out the sun thrust into the sky, reaching up as if for salvation. Her pained screams cut through even the cracking of a shattering continent.

  Estyr swept a c
hunk of charred blond hair out of her eyes, watching Nakothi die. Her clothes and hair were singed, her skin almost invisible beneath a layer of scrapes and slices. Toward the end, she had fought on the front lines against the Mother's dead legions. The Emperor had been more concerned with Nakothi herself.

  “What are we going to do when they’re gone?” Estyr asked.

  “The war is not won yet,” he replied. “Her kind still rule.”

  Through a break in the clouds, he watched a clutch of lesser Elders gather on a rooftop. They clacked their mandibles together or waved luminous tentacles at the sky. Begging for help or for vengeance, he didn't care. They would find no satisfaction. He smiled to himself as a wave of steam washed over them, cooking them alive.

  “When it is over,” Estyr continued, “what do you have planned? You want to pick up the whip yourself?”

  She knew the answers. They had discussed this often enough. She looked to him for reassurance. He could have given her what she wanted, repeating the comforting half-truths and the slogans they had practiced together for years.

  Instead of assurance, he decided to give her the truth. Truth that he alone had discovered.

  “The Great Elders do not die, Estyr.”

  She waved to the flailing giant in the distance. “She's making a big show for nothing, then.”

  “I know you must have suspected,” he continued. “They do not live as we understand it. Destroying them will give us some time in which to rebuild, but destruction alone will not save us. In one century or a hundred, the Great Elders will rise again.”

  Estyr turned back to him, and the skulls around her head spun with such ferocity that they blended together into one off-white circle. “Then we will destroy them again. And again and again and again, until it sticks. Or until they learn who owns this world.”

  The fire in her voice raised his spirits. If he could inspire all of humanity with one-tenth of her resolve, they could scour this world clean of Elder-spawn inside a year.

  But that would never happen. Estyr Six was one in ten million, and the common man could never rise to her level. Which was why he had devised a plan.

  He lifted the heart in his right hand.

  She seemed to notice it for the first time. “Is that your solution? What is it?”

  He answered her simply. “A heart of the Dead Mother.”

  “Is that why you fought alone? You wanted to…keep a piece?” The fury in Estyr's voice burned hotter than the magma below.

  “I have Read it, Estyr,” the Emperor said.

  The reptilian skulls spinning above her froze. Her eyes widened. “How? The others lost their minds.”

  “Indirectly. I Read the ground on which it sat, the wind that surrounded it, the men and women it had driven insane. Finally, when I had acclimated myself to its nature, I was able to Read Nakothi's heart.”

  It had taken him days, during which the injured Mother had raged, her armies spilling out over the land like a plague. All of his concentration had to go into preserving his mind; he had to forget the thousands dying in his name all over the continent.

  Until, at last, he found the secret.

  “One question haunted me. How can we oppose the Great Ones as mortals? Do we leave the truth to our children? To our children's children? When the terror of the Elders fades to myth, and our enslavement is nothing but a legend?”

  The gray-green heart pulsed in his fist, slowly weakening.

  “With this, I will become timeless as they are timeless. I will rule over an undying Empire. And when the Elders return, they will find that the children they once bound have grown into warriors.”

  Estyr slipped her hands into the pockets of her jacket. She was careful to keep her expression from her face, but he could read her Intent radiating into the air: shock, exhaustion, awe, and horror bled off of her in waves.

  “How?” she asked.

  “I will bind myself to the heart,” he said. “When it is my Soulbound Vessel, Nakothi's life will be my own.”

  She waved that answer away. “No, that I understand. I mean your Empire. If you want to build an eternal Empire, then it has to be stronger than what we had. How will you outdo the Elders?”

  His vision burned inside of him, desperate to be spoken.

  Until now, he had never understood how much he had yearned to tell Estyr his plans. To share the Empire with her.

  “The greatest weapon of the Elders is human ignorance. When we first began to observe the world around us, we discovered Reading. We created the Soulbound. We crafted instruments of deadly Intent that can bring down even the Dead Mother herself. To know the universe is to control it, and by the time Nakothi and her brood awaken, they will discover that humanity rules even them.”

  “You sound like Jorin,” she said wryly. “He always believed books would save us all.”

  “He is a wise man,” the Emperor replied. Then he gave her time to think.

  Estyr Six bobbed up and down in midair as she thought, letting her power take her in circles like a kite on a string. The Emperor waited in anticipation, Reading her feelings through her Intent. No other Reader was capable of working so subtly, of picking up such tenuous signals through such an unreliable medium as air.

  But he was not like any other Reader.

  Finally, Estyr gathered her resolve: her Intent sharpened like a well-honed knife. “I’ll trust you,” she said. “I decided that ten years ago, in the mines. I’ll fight for you, I’ll help you gather the others, and I’ll bring them under your banner.” She smiled, crooked and playful, a remnant of the Estyr before years of rebellion. “And on the day I die in battle, I hope to see you young, healthy, and wearing a crown. I don't believe in this plan of yours...but I believe in you.”

  Dropping down to one knee on top of a cloud, Estyr Six knelt before her Emperor.

  Never had the Emperor felt such relief. He had made himself more vulnerable here than he had before any other human, and she had not turned aside.

  But there was one more thing he had yet to share.

  “I can offer you more than that,” he said. He shook his fist, letting drops of Nakothi's greenish blood dribble down into the burning sea. “This is not the Dead Mother's only heart.”

  Estyr looked up, a shadow growing over her face.

  “I am the Emperor now, but I need not rule alone. You can stand with me, and Jorin, and Alagaeus, and Loreli if she still lives. And any others we choose, throughout the centuries. We can unlock the secrets of the Elders together!”

  To his surprise, her Intent softened. He had expected an aura of excitement, or even anger and disgust. But she laughed.

  “What would I do without a war? Can you picture me lifting crates of food? Building houses? I wouldn't even know what to do with myself. And Alagaeus is more likely to burn everything you build to the ground. No. Maybe Jorin will take you up on this, but I’ll live out my days and be done.”

  She flew off to the east, in the opposite direction of Nakothi's mountainous death, away from the Elder’s grievous howls. Caught up as he was in her power, the Emperor was dragged along behind Estyr like a raft behind a ship.

  For an instant, irritation and rejection seared him like he’d swallowed acid. He could break the binding of her Intent with his own and snap her power's hold on him. That might rob her of her powers entirely, turning her Vessel into a trio of ordinary skulls.

  He shook the thought away, sickened that it had occurred to him for even a moment. Not only would he instantly plummet to his death if he tried anything of the sort, but Estyr had remained loyal for years. She was as much a part of this rebellion as he was; some would say more so.

  No, he would stay quiet on this heart business for now, but he had no intention of allowing her to remain mortal. There were other Elders. Other opportunities to change her mind. Other secrets of the universe that might yield new and exciting possibilities that she would open up to. He could wait until she agreed.

  After all, he had pl
enty of time.

  Chapter Three

  I have never met anyone more paranoid than the Head of the Alchemist’s Guild. We should learn from him.

  —Kerian, High Gardener

  present day

  In the southeastern corner of the Rainworth Imperial Library, inside a room that had been built as a reading nook, Shera found Darius Allbright and Meia playing with blocks.

  Meia sat at a desk, twirling a block in her fingers, frowning at the model of the tower that stood two feet tall on the desk. Her hair was pulled back, and with a tightly pinched frown on her face, she resembled her mother Yala.

  She wore her Consultant blacks, but her shroud was pulled down to hang around her neck, leaving her lips and nose bare. At the moment, her eyes were human blue instead of Kameira orange, and she wasn’t flexing her fingers to prevent her nails from sharpening into claws, so she wasn’t angry. Just focused.

  Darius wore a relaxed suit, with his white jacket tossed over the back of his chair. He leaned against the wall, regarding the tower as well.

  She couldn’t make out his expression because he didn’t have one. The entire front of his face was replaced by a black circle of nothingness.

  Normally he wore a hood, so he could pretend that the darkness covering his face was just a shadow. It was more disconcerting to see him without one. His ears were normal, his hair a messy human brown, but his neck disappeared into a flat circle of pure darkness.

  That circle turned toward her, and Darius’ voice emerged from it, not muffled at all by the Elder curse hiding his mouth. “Shera! Have you come to solve all our problems?”

  Shera looked to the tower they’d built with tiny wooden bricks, taking in the shape, the relative height, and the surrounding structures. “The Lilac Tower?”

  “Rose Tower,” Meia grunted. “They won’t use Lilac because the meeting’s in the morning. It will be in shadow.”