by Will Wight
Meia frowned. “She’s been talking to Bareius about sponsoring us. I don’t think she’s happy.”
“Please stop. My heart.”
“She is loyal. She’s been working hard to support you as the Guild Head, even if she doesn’t always agree with you.”
Shera reached under her hood to scratch at the side of her head. “Is this what you came to talk about? I have a busy day today.”
“I know. That’s what I’m here about.” She met Shera’s gaze firmly. “I don’t want you to kill Calder Marten.”
Shera waited for the punchline.
“I’m serious. I don’t believe he was taken over by Kelarac, but we can hold him captive and find out for sure.”
When Shera had proposed her plan to the Gardeners, including Meia, there had been three phases. First, remove the Champions. They would be the biggest obstacles next to Bliss.
Phase one: success. Sixty percent of the Champions loyal to Calder had been removed, which was within acceptable margins.
The second phase was to separate Calder Marten from his guardians. The Consultants had started or subsidized petty crimes all over the Palace, straining the Imperial Guard to their limits. Calder Marten probably wouldn’t even notice.
As part of phase two, they had placed bait for Bliss. She would be away from Calder’s side at the critical moment.
Phase two: success.
Phase three was in process. It started with the Witness report of the peace meeting at the Imperial Palace, which included Estyr accusing Calder of being enthralled by Kelarac.
Calder had taken his own countermeasures against the report, but Shera knew all about them. He had formed a panel of Blackwatch, Magisters, Witnesses, and a lone Luminian they’d captured, with all signing an agreement that Kelarac had no influence over Calder’s thoughts.
If that persuaded enough people, he would stay in power. If not, he would be stripped of his title in the morning.
But that wouldn’t matter. By tomorrow morning, he would be dead.
Shera wasn’t wasting any more time with a potential Elder cultist on the throne. She would kill him, bring the rest of the Independents in after her, and take the Imperial Palace.
She didn’t know why Calder or the others with him hadn’t used the Optasia to free the Great Elders already, but the time was surely imminent.
“Why didn’t you say anything earlier?” Shera asked Meia.
Meia shifted in discomfort again. “I was looking for proof. I had time, while we were removing the Champions.”
“Did you find any?”
“…with me along, we can take him without killing him.”
Shera threw out her hands. “Why? And while we’re on that subject, why should I trust your judgment over Estyr Six?”
Meia chewed on her lip. Shera could read her thoughts: she didn’t have an answer.
“Act like a Gardener.” Shera tore open the door and marched out, now thoroughly annoyed.
The Masons were in place in the Imperial Palace. The Miners had confirmed the layout, Shera had picked her point of entry and she’d briefed her team in the primary plan, the backup plan, and the emergency plan.
If the Unknown God himself descended from the heavens and revealed that Calder Marten was a spirit of pure light in human form, it still wouldn’t matter at this point.
The plan was moving forward.
She was still irritated when she walked down to the sub-basement to meet Jorin.
Behind the twisted bars, Estyr lay on a miraculously intact cot. Her Vessels sat on a table next to her, and while she occasionally twitched like a puppet whose strings were randomly pulled by a child, at least she wasn’t floating in the air and destroying everything she could see.
Jorin sat at her side…although “at her side” might have been generous.
He had set up some kind of mobile alchemist laboratory in the corner. Three tables were set up next to each other, with a folding chair in between them and a chalkboard and a corkboard stuck up on the wall. Racks of flasks sat on the tables, holding plant and animal samples floating in alchemical preservatives, along with a pile of seemingly random objects.
That sight reminded her painfully of Lucan. He had always carried bits and pieces that looked like he’d scavenged them from the bottom of random cupboards. She associated the practice with Readers; if they found a stone or a wrench with unusual Intent, they would pick it up and take it home like a stray puppy.
The corkboard was covered in pinned notes and sketches and the chalkboard in cramped, hurried handwriting. The entire setup was lit by quicklamps of harsh white.
Jorin had his sleeves rolled up. He scribbled on the chalkboard, checked a note, and then scribbled again.
As she hurried down the stairs, Shera kept a careful eye on Estyr. The last thing she needed was for the Regent to wake up and slam Shera through the wall.
“You have answers for me?” she asked.
Jorin waved a free hand at her. “Sssh! Keep your tongue…I mean, be quiet. For the briefest moment. Please.”
No one had ever accused Shera of making too much noise, and she was already upset. When the Regent turned his attention back to the chalkboard, she slipped out of his peripheral vision.
Slowly and carefully, with smooth movements, she crept up behind him.
Estyr twitched as she passed, but she made no further sound. Finally, Shera stopped within arm’s reach of Jorin’s back.
He finished the last note and sighed, looking over his scribbles in apparent satisfaction. “Now, what were you…”
He trailed off as he looked to the bottom of the stairs and didn’t see Shera there.
If he concentrated for even a moment, he would sense her. He was one of the most powerful Readers in history, after all.
But that required him to look for her, so she spoke from behind him.
“You have my answers?”
He stumbled forward, catching himself on the desk, almost upending a flask containing a twisted animal that looked like a mummified rabbit floating in amber liquid. He scrambled with both hands, catching it before it spilled.
That was more satisfying than she had hoped.
He took a deep breath before turning to face her. “Oath to eternity, girl, don’t you know you’re playing with Shades?”
“Playing with fire.”
“I know you’re not responsible for the way language evolved before your birth, but I must protest that the Crawling Shades of Urg’naut are far more dangerous than fire.”
Shera held out a hand. “I need my knife back.”
He brightened, adjusting his shadeglasses. “Aha! That is a tune to dance to. Look here.” He turned to a wooden box, which he flipped open with a flourish.
Syphren lay inside, just as she remembered last seeing it: Bliss’ black iron spike pierced it through the middle, causing no apparent damage to the material but killing the Vessel’s power.
Where her left-hand shear had once looked like a window onto an underworld in which tiny, bright green hands pressed out and tried to escape, now the blade resembled dead green bottle-glass.
With the air of a street performer about to do a trick, he pinched the spike between two fingers and pulled it out.
Shera braced herself. She’d thought she was prepared for Syphren’s return, but now that she was faced with it, she found that she was afraid. She might not know her own thoughts anymore, as her Vessels ran away with her…
But Jorin stopped before removing the spike entirely. The iron had slid out of the glassy surface of her shear as though he’d pulled it from a pool of liquid. When he pushed it back the other way, it was once again as though Syphren had no more substance than the surface of a lake.
“It was all a question of finding the proper layer of Intent,” he said proudly. “I labored to convince the spike that it was preserving a subject for examination, and that it needed to be released for only a breath.”
That had been surprisingly coherent.
“So is it ready to use?”
“Keep your dogs leashed, I haven’t finished. One…unique…feature of this dandy hand-in-hand relationship is that you can do this.” He flipped the spike around so that it pierced her Vessel along its length rather than across. The spike slid mostly into the hilt, leaving only about a half-inch of iron sticking out of the blade on either side.
“You should have your sheath adjusted. Or find a bag. But now you can decide for yourself when to pull the lid off this hell-pot!”
Shera had been wrapping it in bandages, and something that she could remove and replace easily would be far more convenient. “So I can pull it out and put it back? To keep it from…running away with me?”
“Do you have a word for both yes and no? Yes, you can pull it out. No, you can’t put it back.”
“…our word for that is ‘no.’”
“I left it inside so that you can have a long think before you let this stallion loose.” He gazed at her seriously from behind his dark glasses, but she was having a hard time taking her focus off of Syphren.
If she listened hard enough, it was almost as though she could hear it whispering to her. Its song was so similar to the Heart of Nakothi…
“Multiple Vessels are rare for a solid reason,” Jorin went on. “It’s all gambles and guesses as to how they’ll interact. Will they grow stronger than the sum of their parts? Will they squabble like siblings on Sea Day? Those shears were forged and invested as a pair, so they should get along, but it’s all…”
He mimed flipping a coin. “Ah, this is when we would use our thumbs to flip coins into the air so that we could guess where they would land. It represents a fifty percent—”
“We still flip coins.” Shera looked from the sealed Syphren to Estyr’s scar-ravaged body. The Regent’s ankle jerked up an inch and then fell back down to the table.
“So if my Vessels are too much for me, I’ll end up like her?”
“They’re your Vessels. If that gets all topsy-turvy, and you become their Vessel, then you’ll be nothing more than the pair of boots that carries them from victim to victim.”
She braced herself as she picked up the sealed Syphren. She had thought physical contact might return its voice to her mind, but it remained silent.
She couldn’t fit it into her current sheath with the sides of the nail still jutting out from the flat of the blade, so she held the shear bare. “Should I free it now?”
“Now, when our fates teeter on the cliff’s edge? Were I you, I would leave it in my quarters and scrub it from my mind until our battle is done. This blade in particular, if it fed until it was fat and content, it would make you too strong to conquer. We’d need a team of Champions to rein you in without killing you.”
At first, Shera thought she understood: a Soulbound with two powers was a terrible force. But he hadn’t said anything about her being too strong when she released her second blade, just when it was fed.
“Fed until it was fat and content,” she repeated. “What do you mean?”
He gave her an astonished look. “I know you know what that means.”
“I mean why would that make me stronger?”
Jorin gestured between her and the blade. “The light you steal from others, it strengthens you. You know this, you used its power to heal yourself.”
“It heals me. It sharpens my senses. It doesn’t make me any stronger or faster.”
“Then you’re steering with the wrong wheel. Intent has many layers beneath the surface, as human intentions do. The challenge of a Soulbound is not to gain power, but to uncover those layers and plumb the depths of their Vessel to its fullest extent.”
Shera tucked Syphren into her belt, putting it out of her mind for the moment.
“And what about the other question I asked you?”
“Aha!” He tapped the chalkboard. “The Great Elders are indeed waiting.”
Shera waited for more, but apparently he considered that a complete explanation. “For what?”
Jorin shrugged.
“If they’re waiting, why did they crack open the sky when they did?”
“That, as far as I can track down, was an act of opportunity. It’s a door they hold open even now, as they gather their strength. Something will trigger them, and I don’t know what, but their ultimate goal remains the same as it ever was.”
The ultimate goal for the Great Elders, as Shera had always heard it, was destroying the Empire and re-conquering the world. “When we get rid of Calder Marten, they won’t control the world anymore.”
He looked to her in evident surprise. “They don’t want to control the world. They want to escape it.”
The break in the sky took on a whole new significance.
“Then we let them leave.”
“Simple and sweet as pie. As long as their leaving doesn’t tear our reality asunder.”
The discussion was getting away from Shera, so she re-focused: “Calder Marten. If we kill him, we set the Elders back?”
“Removing a pawn of Kelarac from the throne is a prize above all. And we need to empower the regional governors so they can keep the door tight-shut on all the Elder tombs.”
“Great.” She walked toward the stairs, cradling Syphren in her left hand. “You’re with Meia in the backup team?”
“I’ll be there and a half.”
She had more to worry about with her shears, but at least the situation with the Great Elders was simple enough.
All she had to do was win.
As the sun set, Shera flattened herself against the dull red tiles of an Imperial Palace roof.
A crowd filled the streets below, some clutching lanterns and quicklamps. Fully half of them waved news-sheets, and while she couldn’t read them from so far away, she already knew the headline.
ESTYR ACCUSES STEWARD OF ELDER WORSHIP!
That wasn’t technically accurate. Estyr had accused Calder Marten of selling his soul to Kelarac, which wasn’t the same as worshiping a Great Elder.
Shera had seen the report the Farstriders had written, and it had repeated Estyr’s words accurately, as well as providing context behind them obtained from separate research. But Bareius’ printing-houses knew what would grab the attention of the masses.
Many people didn’t even believe in Elders as real entities, just as bogeymen or mythical spirits to blame problems on. Maybe Elders did exist, but they were sleeping and had no impact on real life. Or maybe they once existed, but the Emperor and the Regents had driven them to extinction.
Even after the uprising of Elderspawn around the world on the night of the Emperor’s death, most ordinary people had seen nothing that couldn’t be explained by Kameira or Awakened objects.
But while the existence of Elders themselves might have been in doubt, everyone knew that Elder cultists were real.
And they were hated.
The crowd—mostly the population of the Imperial Palace itself, but a good twenty or thirty percent from the city outside—pushed through the gates of the Palace, demanding answers.
Behind the main gate to the Palace was the Emperor’s Stage, a three-story building with a broad balcony overlooking a courtyard big enough to hold ten thousand people.
Depending on the severity or nature of his message, the Emperor would address the Capital from one place or another. The Hall of Address was one while the Emperor’s Stage was another.
The courtyard wasn’t exactly full, but Shera suspected there were between four and five thousand people milling about, shouting for answers. The noise was overwhelming, even from her perch atop the roof of the Stage.
Days ago, Calder Marten had released a statement saying that he would address the Capital tonight. It would have been a packed house as a public address from the new Steward, but after the release of the news-sheets, the people wanted an explanation.
Which hadn’t entirely been their idea.
Masons and out-of-uniform Shepherds and Guild hirelings had been po
sitioned to spread discontent with the news-sheet copies, turning real anger into a suggestion that they march on the Emperor’s Stage and demand answers.
Soon, Calder Marten would appear onstage and address the citizens. Or rather, his body double would.
A red blanket, both painted and invested to serve as camouflage, hid her from Imperial Guards searching overhead. They would look down and see her as a stretch of uninterrupted roof tiles.
Shera waited four hours, motionless as darkness crept over the Capital and the crowd grew larger. By the sudden outpouring of noise from the crowd, she knew Calder Marten had appeared on the balcony beneath her.
Beneath the camouflaged blanket, she flipped onto her back, peeking down past the lip of the roof with a hand-mirror. She saw a silver crown in his red hair and the wide sleeves of the Emperor’s clothes—the body double wouldn’t be allowed to wear Calder’s white armor. That would be required to protect the Imperial Steward’s person.
He had a saber belted on, which looked incongruous with the Emperor’s clothes, but the Masons in the Imperial Palace had reported that it wasn’t Calder’s Awakened blade. Just an ordinary saber to use as a prop, to remind the people of his background as a Navigator.
He began to address the crowd, and Shera had to admit that the double had gotten his voice down. The double was a professional actor of Calder’s approximate description treated with alchemical putty to complete the disguise.
The Consultant Miners told her that the Empire had once registered a Soulbound with the ability to change a person’s appearance, even down to their voice, and when she had aged into her eighties she had been retired into the Imperial Palace.
But no one could confirm whether this woman was alive or dead, after the chaos following the Emperor’s death and the further devastation of the recent battle inside the Palace itself.
Shera wasn’t sure if the woman was still alive, and she couldn’t see Calder’s face from her angle, but the voice of his double was very close. Not perfect—he was a little too impassioned during the speech, playing up the cadence of an orator a little too strongly—but very close.
