by Will Wight
Finally, she threw an arm around his neck and asked him how he’d like to spend a night with a Champion.
She didn’t even hear his answer over the roar of laughter from the rest of the room.
It felt like the whole building was applauding her as the workers cheered and shouted jokes while she dragged the man upstairs. He protested, saying that he had to get back to work, but she laughed and shoved him through the open door into her room.
“No need to be nervous,” she said, peeling off her gloves. “You’ll—”
He threw a dart at her.
Oleana pulled it out from the base of her throat and held it up between two fingers. It was just a needle, and she laughed again as she let it fall. “You’ll have to do better than that.”
Four more needles pricked her neck and shoulders from the open door behind her. Was someone messing with her on her time off?
She was about to get annoyed.
Blindly, she reached out with one hand and groped for the nearest thing she could use as a weapon, which turned out to be a huge mirror bolted to the wall. She only found out that it had been bolted down when she pulled it free and chunks of wood and plaster came with it.
She spun, ready to break the mirror into the face of the first person she saw…but the mirror suddenly felt heavier. Too heavy.
Her limbs wouldn’t listen to her. She was ordering herself forward, but her body felt like it was turning to stone. She fell to her hands and knees, the mirror cracking against the floor beside her.
Her veins burned, already counteracting the poison, and she forced her head up. She glared up at her attackers in hate.
They wore all black, their faces half-covered, and all of them—including the pretty server—pulled out gleaming bronze knives.
Oleana tried to choke out a challenge, but her voice wouldn’t listen to her either.
Trip had always wondered why no one made Champions for any purpose other than combat. Tradition, he supposed. But he could brace the entire frame of a house by himself, carry whole logs back for timber, and push nails through boards with his thumb.
Besides, when he sat back with his crew and looked at the house they’d rebuilt from the rubble of one destroyed in battle, he felt better than he ever had at the end of a fight. The rest of the crew slapped him on the back, congratulating him, making good-natured jibes about his size, and invited him to drinks.
He had never been part of the Imperial army, so maybe it was different for soldiers, but no one had ever joked with him after a battle. Mostly, they ran away.
He hated to turn them down, but he had a date.
Deanne, a girl from the Blackwatch, waited for Trip in a teahouse near the Palace gates. She had a beautiful laugh.
During the meal, a group of his friends from the Imperial Guard spotted him. They insisted on paying the bill for the both of them; Trip had saved their lives after the battle, pulling them one by one from burning wreckage.
Many of the others were full of rage and hate after the battle of the Imperial Palace, but Trip wanted these days to continue forever. No one had ever appreciated him so much, to the point that he almost suspected a trick.
For the first time, he felt like a hero.
He bid Deanne a good evening and walked back home. His inn had been destroyed in the fighting, so a family of Palace servants had allowed him to stay in their home above a bakery for the last several weeks. He had his hand on the doorknob when an Imperial Guard stepped out of the shadows nearby.
He didn’t recognize her, and he would have remembered, with her long fingernails that seemed to be made of iron, her long white hair, and her pale pink eyes.
Still, thousands of people wore that Imperial Guard uniform, so he couldn’t have met them all.
“Why are you fighting with us?” she asked, and her voice matched her appearance: raspy and disturbing, as though the words were spoken by an ancient spirit.
He smiled at her. “We’re the Aurelian Empire. Isn’t it the same for you?”
She grunted and walked away, but he didn’t take it personally. Since the battle, there had been many like her.
Doubt was an insidious enemy.
He walked in and greeted his host family, played with their children for a while, and then headed off to sleep. Trip tried not to think about the battles that would come, battles that he would surely win. After all, he was a Champion.
But the longer these peaceful days continued, the better for him.
Trip never woke up.
The family discovered his body the next morning, not bearing a single apparent injury. It looked as though he had passed peacefully in his sleep.
Yzara hauled another crate up the ramp and onto the deck of the ship.
This vessel was made of ordinary wood, and she was used to traveling by Navigator, but she didn’t want to get tied up in any more Guild trouble. Even with the best medicine the Imperialists had to offer, her injuries hadn’t fully recovered yet. Digesting food was painful, and she had to watch how quickly she moved lest she shatter her own ribs.
Even through the blindfold over her eyes, she had to squint in the bright sunlight, but that had nothing to do with her wounds. There were differences between Champions, their bodies adapting differently to the alchemical augmentations and Kameira grafts that made them superhuman. Her eyesight was a bit too sensitive, so she wore a blindfold.
The sailors protested every time she loaded one of their crates, barrels, bags, or boxes, but she ignored their complaints and asked only for more. The faster they were loaded, the faster they could leave.
She was eager to put the Guilds behind her.
When she returned for a barrel, there was a girl sitting on it. The girl seemed to be seventeen or eighteen and was skinny as a rail, her eyes and skin and hair all equally dark. She wore tattered clothes that looked as though she had scavenged them from a dumpster, and she picked her teeth with a fishbone.
“Where you bound?” the girl asked.
Yzara raised an eyebrow behind her blindfold. People didn’t usually ask questions of a six-and-a-half-foot-tall blindfolded woman with a two-handed claymore on her back and a golden Champion badge on her chest.
“Back home,” Yzara said, picking up a different barrel. “To Izyria.”
The girl kicked her feet idly. “Axciss?”
“Never even seen Axciss. The town I’m from is called Nyala.” Yzara headed up the ramp, following the crew.
“So you’re not going to stay?” the girl called. “Fight Estyr and all them?”
Yzara winced in remembered pain, setting the barrel down delicately. “That’s given me more trouble then I need.”
“Oh, really?” The girl flicked her fishbone into the ocean and hopped off the barrel. “Safe trip, then, Miss.”
Yzara glanced around, looking for a crew member to direct her. When she looked back down the ramp, the girl was gone.
Her trip back home would take two months longer than it would have if she had booked a Navigator, but she didn’t mind.
She had plenty of time.
Chapter Twelve
two years ago
Lucan rowed the two-person rowboat away from the dock and up to the silver mist of Bastion’s Veil. The main dock was a massive stone affair, extending through the Veil, but there were many smaller docks for clandestine departure all around the Gray Island.
Shera leaned back, making no offer to take over the oars, leaning on her crossed arms as a pillow. She wasn’t sleeping; she seemed to enjoy watching him row.
“If we fall in, I’m making you swim me back to shore,” she said.
Lucan puffed out a breath. He kept himself in shape with regular training, but it wasn’t as though he made a habit of rowing boats. “You can’t swim yourself?”
“Not this time. It’s your fault I’m out here, so you deal with it. I’ll just let myself sink.”
Lucan glanced over his shoulder to see how close they were to the wall of fog, but no soon
er had he done so than they were swallowed up by gray.
Shera gave an exaggerated yawn as she disappeared from his view, hidden by the thick Veil.
“We’ll talk as soon as we’re through,” Lucan assured her.
“I guarantee you we could talk on the island without being overheard.”
Lucan didn’t respond until he had cleared the mist, when he folded up the oars. The Aion Sea stretched out before them, the water gently rolling, the stars stretching endlessly overhead.
Bastion’s Veil tended to eat sounds from the other side unless they were excessively loud. And since Elderspawn couldn’t pass through the mist, they should be as alone as possible. This was the shallow Aion anyway, where Elder activity was rare.
He did notice that Shera had sat up and was eyeing the water around her.
While stretching his weary shoulders, Lucan began filling her in. “Yala proved to me why they can’t trust the Regents.”
For fifteen minutes, he described his Readings to her, filling in the gaps in his explanation with what he’d learned from his research. The Regents would depose the Guilds in general, the Consultants specifically, and they could still be used to oppose the Great Elders in times of emergency.
“And what stops them from taking over later, when we let them out for a fistfight with Othaghor?” Shera asked.
He couldn’t read her expression, which might mean she was taking the topic seriously. Though it could also mean that she was thinking about killing someone.
Those two tended to overlap more often than not, in Shera’s case.
“At least two of them don’t want to rule.” Loreli had always delegated, appointing other rulers as she acted as more of a guide and resource, and Jorin spoke of governing only in horrified tones. “Alagaeus and Estyr are the exceptions, and Estyr has always prioritized combating the Elders over politics. The bigger threat is that they will appoint their own Emperor candidate, rather than allowing the Guilds to do it.”
“The Guilds haven’t done it so far.” Still no expression.
“Every one of them have issued a public statement saying that they want the Empire to return to a place of peace and stability before they endorse a candidate. Except the Champions. As far as I know, they haven’t taken any official Guild actions since shortly after the Emperor’s death.”
He reached the end of his explanation and realized that his heart was pounding harder than it should.
How would Shera respond? If she didn’t come to the same conclusion as he had, then…what?
What would she do? She was capable of assassinating Yala and freeing the Regents herself, if she felt like it.
Or she could decide she didn’t care and drop off to sleep at any second.
She rubbed at her temple, and her expressionless mask cracked into the face of someone faced with days of unexpected, unwelcome labor. “…so how do we open the coffins?”
Lucan spoke very carefully. “Shera, I agree with Yala.”
Shera moved her hand from her temple to cover her face. “Why?”
“The Emperor wanted the world to grow up without him, to make our own decisions.” He had spoken of it often enough with his three Gardeners. “This is our first major decision without him, and we have no indication that the Regents would be good for the Guilds. Or for the people. There are some questionable records about Alagaeus’ rule.”
Shera took in a deliberate breath and looked up at him. “This is our job.”
“It’s our job to take on assignments for the Guild. You really want more work?”
“I don’t mean our job as Gardeners,” Shera said, and she sounded weary. Resigned. “I mean our job, yours and mine and Meia’s. The Emperor left his death to us. He trusted us to deal with this.”
Is Shera really making an argument based on her principles? It was like looking into a canyon and finding himself staring into the sky.
He gathered up one of her hands in both of his, meeting her gaze earnestly. “Shera. If we could abandon the Guild right now, just you and me, and no one would follow us, would you do it?”
Shera’s eyes lit up, and she glanced from side to side. “We don’t have any supplies. Let’s raid the kitchen first. I know they have rations. We can be gone in two hours.”
He released her hand and spread his own, as though presenting his point. “I know you would never betray me or Meia—”
“Or a few others,” Shera interjected. “Maybe…six others.”
“—okay, you would never betray the eight of us, but I can’t help but think you don’t have much Guild loyalty at all.”
Shera nodded along with his words. “Yeah, that sounds about right.”
“So can you just…trust me when I say that you should?”
Her eyebrows furrowed and she stared out at the waves as the boat rocked. She didn’t get that icy glare that meant she was angry or absolutely focused, but she did seem to be turning his words over in her head.
“No,” she said at last, “I think this is where you should trust me.”
She sat up straight, hands by her shears, as serious as he had ever seen her outside of combat. “There are some things I see more clearly than you. Your loyalty to the Guild gets in your way, so you can’t see the truth. This is simple.”
“This is an extraordinarily complicated situation—” he started to say, but she cut him off.
“Who do you trust more: Yala or the Emperor?”
That brought him up short.
“I’m not saying I always listened to him. I…” She glanced from side to side, taking in the featureless water and the wall of mist. “…surprised him at the end, too.”
With a knife to the heart, Lucan thought.
“But that was in a job he gave me, where he trusted me to use my best judgment. His job was to rule the world. If his best judgment was to put the Regents in charge, we should make that happen.”
“We can’t live in his shadow forever. We have to make our own decisions.”
“We don’t have to make any decisions about ruling the world at all, thank the Unknown God.”
Did she not see the hypocrisy? “You’re trying to decide who rules the world right now!”
“There’s no decision to make.” She shrugged one shoulder. “The Emperor already made it.”
“They will ruin us,” Lucan said, frustration growing. “What if they start fighting among themselves for rule? What if they shut down the Consultant’s Guild? Jorin built this island; what if he claims it for his own?”
This time, Shera was the one to reach out and take one of his hands in both of hers.
“Do you trust Yala and the High Council to make better decisions about the fate of the world than the Emperor?”
“That’s not—”
“What about you?” she asked, and she sounded genuinely curious. “Do you think you know better than he did?”
A dozen questions, excuses, and arguments passed through Lucan’s mind before he let out a heavy breath. “No.”
She patted his hand and lay back down. “Neither do I. So…how do we open the coffins?”
He still wanted to argue. The situation was infinitely more complex than she suggested, but for some reason he kept coming back to the central question: did he trust himself to know better than the Emperor?
And he didn’t.
Even if you set aside his two millennia of experience ruling the world, the Emperor knew both the Regents and the Guild Heads personally.
If he thought the Regents would be better rulers, he was likely to be correct. Lucan could try and tell himself that it was the Heart of Nakothi speaking through the Emperor, but he had no reason to think so.
In the end, he just didn’t want to see his Guild fall.
Stomach sinking, terrified of the future, Lucan still had to admit that Shera was right. “I never thought you’d be lecturing me on Imperial loyalty.”
She patted his hands and let him go, giving him a lopsided smile. “Why not?”
“What do you care about the Empire?”
She looked at him quizzically. “Haven’t I served the Empire all this time?”
He had to force his jaw closed.
Yes, he admitted to himself. She really had.
Chapter Thirteen
“The Consultants don’t know what they’re getting themselves into. I have them dancing on my strings.”
“I don’t know why you bothered hiring them. Aren’t they just servants?”
—transcript of a conversation between two clients under observation by the Consultant’s Guild
present day
Shera wrapped the gray cloth around her face and flipped up her hood. For the first time since the Champion potion had worn off, she could breathe easily.
Just in time. Later that night, the Farstriders’ report of the peace meeting between Independents and Imperialists would be distributed. The entire world would know that Calder Marten was in the thrall of Kelarac.
Then he would die for it.
She adjusted Bastion in its sheath. It murmured in her mind, calming her, reminding her that she worked to protect the Consultants. She wasn’t sure if that was quite her motivation or if it was just Bastion’s purpose bleeding into her mind, but either way, it comforted her.
She had finished her morning stretches already, but she continued stretching her shoulder as she walked out of her room. She needed to be at her best.
“You’re here early,” Shera said to the room.
Meia dropped from the ceiling, landing as softly as a cat. “Just testing you.”
“Did I pass?” Shera put her hand on the door, but Meia stopped her with a gesture.
“Just…just a second.”
It wasn’t like Meia to hesitate, but she was shifting uncomfortably now, like she had as a girl when she had to face Ayana after breaking some rule.
“Is this about your mother?” Yala had been openly critical of Shera’s decision to send the Gardeners after the Champions, suggesting that the Council of Architects should have been informed first.
