by Wight, Will
Shera nodded and walked to the edge of the woods. She was starting to understand why Kerian had taken her here.
Grass stretched from the treeline to the cell door. It looked strange without a guard in front, but of course there was no guard; there was no prisoner. The door was slightly ajar.
“Guild procedure requires that I confine you until the Architects have had a chance to meet,” Kerian went on, matching her pace. The Shepherds behind her kept up, though they maintained a respectful distance. “I thought you might prefer it here.”
The interior was washed in shadows, the door cracked. She pushed it open and stepped inside.
Shera wasn't sure why staying in this particular cell was supposed to make her feel...anything. Everything that had made it Lucan's space was cleared out, and now it looked the same as a thousand others on the Island. The walls were bare stone, the floor clear, the bed made. Everything exactly as if no one had ever been here.
“I've arranged to have the body brought here before it's interred,” Kerian said softly. “So you can see for yourself. I know it's hard to accept secondhand, especially for someone like Lucan.”
Because Lucan was powerful and resourceful enough to survive, even when another Gardener might have been killed. The thought was tempting, but she knew better. A Consultant wouldn’t have failed to check a pulse. She stared at the bare walls; there, Lucan had kept a wardrobe. Over there, he'd placed a map.
“May his soul fly free,” Kerian added, and softly shut the door.
Five minutes later, Shera lay back on the cot, staring up at the ceiling. Ordinarily, she should sleep at a time like this.
At a time like what?
Her emotions were too cold and sharp to touch, but she was sure she'd never felt like this. There had never been a time like this before. She slept when there was something she wanted to forget, or to ignore, and surely this qualified. Memories of Lucan kept bubbling to the surface.
She kept coming back to one thing: she would never hear what he thought about her losing control and attacking Mekendi Maxeus. That didn't seem fair, somehow. She needed him to be mad at her, and to listen to her explanation before ultimately forgiving her.
As an assassin, he had always been missing some quality that she had. He had never quite grasped the concept of killing someone for no reason other than the whim of a client. But there was something he had that she didn't, and now it was gone. He was gone. She didn't even know what she was supposed to feel.
People grieved at times like this, didn't they? What did that mean? Did they cry?
If so, did it make them feel better?
She stood up from the bed, restless, and paced as Lucan once had. That had been one of her first arguments, as she tried to convince him to break out: he needed more room to pace.
Five steps, turn. Five steps, turn. In a way, it was a good thing that they had removed all of Lucan's belongings; now she had a little more space. But it was too bad they’d taken the books as well, or she would have something to read. Something to distract her thoughts.
Shera felt the procession long before she saw it; they were bringing Syphren along with them. There was no way they were handing it back to her, not if they intended to keep her confined, but they might bring her the rest of her belongings. She was no Reader, after all. Just a Soulbound without her Vessel.
As the blade got closer, she began to sense the presence of those in the procession. A dozen men and women in prime physical condition, though Kerian's was slightly flawed because of her injury.
Shera's extra senses sharpened, and she picked up on little details around her cell. It was as though Lucan's Intent radiated from everything; not visibly, but palpably, like body heat from the walls, the bedframe, the door, the book, the floors.
Almost as though he was here, invisible, with her.
When the Architects arrived with Lucan's body in tow, Shera took fifteen minutes to assess his cold and waxy face. It was him, there could be no doubt, but she kept staring as though searching for a flaw.
Kerian spoke to her, but Shera heard none of it. Somehow she realized she was back in her cell, and the sun had fallen into darkness.
Inside, she grew only colder.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Five years ago
The world around her vanished—Lucan to her left, Meia to her right, the Emperor lounging in his cage-like throne. Everything washed away, as though her sight had been painted over.
Instead of the Emperor's living chambers, she now stood in the heart of a dense jungle. Broad leaves dripped moisture, birds called in unceasing chorus, and a bright red snake slid around a nearby branch.
She tried to run her fingers along the edge of a leaf, only to find that she had no fingers. And no arm. She looked down at her body and saw nothing.
Well, that's strange.
“What is this?” Meia demanded. Her voice seemed to come from miles away, as though a thick wall separated them. But even muffled, she sounded panicked.
Lucan's voice came from even further away, so that Shera missed all of his words until “...Reader's vision.”
That explained it. They had been swallowed up in the Emperor's vision as soon as he'd sat on the throne. But Readers always complained about a lack of detail in their Reading, and there were certainly plenty of details here. A bead of water caught the morning light in a prism, and the snake slid off its branch and to the ground. It slithered over a nearby boulder.
As it drew her gaze to the rock, she realized it wasn't a natural formation. The Emperor's head, chiseled out of ancient stone and weathered until it was barely recognizable, rested with its chin on the jungle loam. Nothing of the rest of his body was visible.
Had the statue crumbled, or was its body buried in the dirt?
“The loser panics. The victor makes calm decisions.”
She wasn't sure whether it was Maxwell or Ayana who had first given her that piece of advice, but it applied now. Even she had started to feel trapped and powerless inside the Emperor's Reading, but she took a deep breath—even though she couldn't feel her lungs—and let it go.
There was nothing she could do about this, so she might as well enjoy the ride. If it grew dangerous, Lucan would have to break them free.
The vision shifted without her consent, lurching away from the clearing with the statue. It sped through the jungle, moving through trees and underbrush and startled animals alike.
Seconds later, she heard the first explosion.
Trees ripped away from the soil, blasted away. A man crouched in the resulting crater, his back covered in a giant turtle shell. A loose-fitting helmet surrounded his face, and when he turned his head to look deeper into the jungle, she saw that it was actually an inhuman skull.
From the trees that he'd scattered, an Elderspawn crawled out. It had to be an Elderspawn; not only was it more hideous than any Kameira, it came with a skin-crawling feeling, a distant sense of wrongness. Shera supposed this was how her mind interpreted a Reader's detection of Intent.
Then again, maybe it wasn't Elder Intent at all. Maybe it was the power of her own disgust at the sight of this horrific abomination.
It looked vaguely like a giant frog, if a common tree frog had been squished down and stretched out as if to resemble a snake. It had the sticky, pliable legs of a frog...but hundreds of them, in pairs, all the way down its long body. Its skin was mottled green and blue, but the spots shifted, and merely looking at them made her somewhat queasy. Its tail was finned, like that of a fish, but the fin broke into a thousand spines as she watched, quivering and rattling of their own accord.
The creature's head swiveled, and she saw that it had three eyes. They all focused on the man in the turtle shell.
Othaghor.
The thought wasn't hers, but she didn't quite hear it as a voice. Either way, she knew it for the Emperor's thought. Othaghor was behind this, the frog-faced Great Elder who played with life as Nakothi toyed with death.
The frog
Elderspawn whipped its tongue forward, and it looked like nothing that belonged on or in an animal. It was almost like a frond of a predatory jungle plant, surrounded by folds of purple and violet. In their center, the “petals” concealed a single needle at the tip that dripped with poison.
The turtle-shelled man raised his forearm to block, and Shera saw that he had smaller turtle shells strapped to his arms.
Against her will, her eyes were shoved into the skin of the Elderspawn. In an instant, she went from watching the fight from a distance to having her face filled with hideously spotted skin. Meia shouted, and even Lucan yelled something. Shera tried to jump back, to draw her shears, to put some distance between herself and the spawn of Othaghor, but nothing changed.
It was as though someone else had focused her eyes without her permission. She could see every inch of the hideous creature, could feel the outline of its body as though she had run her hands along its sticky skin. The feel of it grew stronger as well, the nauseating sense of perversion that came along with her first sight of the creature. Its Intent, she supposed.
The Emperor had honed his own Intent on the Elderspawn, and for a moment Shera stayed locked in that state of unnatural focus.
The world warped around the Elder. A transparent globe of force formed around its body, sucking it into the center of the bubble.
It struggled as it was pulled through the air, but the Emperor's power had an irresistible gravity. The creature twisted and folded as it was caught, as though the force of the Emperor's will was crumpling it into a ball like a discarded piece of paper.
But its resistance only lasted a half a second before it imploded with a wet crunch.
She had no time to see the turtle-man's reaction, because the vision was already racing off across the jungle. A second and third frog-spawn creature were engaged in combat with a woman. She wore a bright red lizard's skin wrapped around her body like a shawl, her hair once again shaded by a helmet made from an alligator-shaped skull. She raised a club studded with teeth and shouted something in another language.
Which was itself probably the strangest part of the whole vision. There were no other languages. One of the Emperor's first accomplishments in establishing the Aurelian Empire was the standardization of language. Everyone spoke Imperial.
Could this be a vision of the distant past?
For some reason, she couldn't bring herself to believe it. Though she didn't know where they were, she felt that these events were happening right now. There was a terrifying sense of immediacy, even desperation, that pervaded the scene. She suspected it came from the Emperor. He was forcing himself to act as fast as possible, racing against a hidden clock.
And there was no reason to feel that rushed unless he was solving problems in the present.
The two frog-creatures struck as one, moving as though to wrap the woman in their long bodies. But once again the vision focused, this time locking on both frogs at once. It came as a wrenching sensation, and wherever Shera's body was, her head suddenly felt as though it would split open. It was like staring into two separate suns, except they were in different places, and it was all impossible, a contradiction that her brain wasn't built to handle...
A second later, the Elderspawn popped like gory bubbles, and the headache vanished. So did the jungle.
They were surrounded by deep blue, with only the faintest light filtering down to show them their surroundings. Dirt and rocks stretched off in an uneven plane as far as she could see, and a fish flitted right in front of her.
Underwater. They were under the ocean.
This inspired a different sort of pure, biological panic. Her breath seized up. She knew, logically, that she wasn't really there, that this was the same as being in a dream...but she still had to take in a little, shallow breath first, to prove to herself she wouldn't suck in a mouthful of water.
A statue rested nearby, on the seabed, covered in mud, algae, and barnacles. But this one wasn't buried. She could see the pedestal at its base, and could even make out the details—it was one of the simpler statues of the Emperor she'd ever seen, merely depicting him standing with his arms clasped before him, multi-layered robes waving.
She'd only seen the head last time, but this statue seemed identical.
In the distant, blue-tinged darkness, something moved.
Something massive. It looked like a stormcloud passing over the horizon, but it flexed and undulated its way forward like an incomprehensibly vast fish.
Lucan took in a breath, and she heard the familiar sounds of him asking questions out loud. He had to know he wouldn't get any answers, but that had never stopped him before.
With or without lips, Shera smiled.
The vision raced forward, through the water, and the shadows of distance peeled away. She wished they hadn't.
It was a shark big enough to swallow a clock tower. Its skin was nothing more than a layer of grit and rough stone, as though it had been chiseled out from deep within the earth, and she could have built a house on the broad sweep of its fins.
The vision shifted, nauseating and overpowering, swerving around to its head. She stared straight into its mouth, which opened and closed as it swam forward. She could have hidden behind any of its teeth, and they were arranged in thousands of tight rows, like fields of serrated yellow bone.
Its black eyes, each of which was the size of her torso, were set in two rows of three. A vast, six-eyed fish. Which Great Elder was that?
Kelarac. The thought came accompanied by a disgust not her own, as the Emperor recalled memories that she couldn’t comprehend.
So this was a spawn of Kelarac? No, Elderspawn were usually the least of a Great Elder's servants. This would be a servant of Kelarac, an Elder in its own right, and it was likely older than the Empire and more intelligent than Shera could grasp.
The thought was particularly disturbing as she stared into its vast, predatory mouth.
The shark-creature shifted its course, moving aside a current's worth of water as it angled itself for the surface. At the distance of Shera's perception, she saw a shadow sitting on the surface above.
With another lurch, the focus of the vision shifted for an instant, and she got a quick peek at the source of the shadow. It was a ship. A Navigator's ship, judging by the strange blue fins that rose from every surface—Navigators always had the strangest-looking vessels.
This Elder servant of Kelarac was going to swallow them whole.
Her view rushed in again, but she didn't focus on the whole creature this time. Perhaps the shark was too big for that. Instead, her attention was focused on its tail.
Another transparent force-bubble appeared on the end of the shark's body, at the base of its tail. Dust swirled as the water was shoved aside by the force of the Emperor's Intent, and the Elder was forcibly halted. It growled, a sound that tore the ocean, and twisted to snap a monumental bite at its own tail.
The bubble began moving backwards, dragging the massive body with it.
It continued to thrash as the Emperor hauled it upward by the tail, cresting the surface and pulling it out of the ocean at unbelievable speed. The vision sped forward so fast that the waves blurred, towing the Elder shark along behind.
Shera couldn't help but wonder what the sailors on the Navigator ship thought, seeing an impossibly huge shark pulled out of the water under their boat and pulled away by an invisible hand. It had to be a startling sight, to say the least.
Or maybe this was no stranger than a passing cloud, for sailors on the Aion.
With a last flex of Intent, the shark was beached on an island that was really nothing more than a ridge of stone. The Elder's body was as big as the entire island, but no matter how it thrashed, it couldn't free itself. It snapped helplessly at the wind.
And the scene changed again.
It was the hazy dark of a moonlit night this time, and the silhouette of a broken city filled her vision. Towers reached for the heavens, but some had been snapped in half,
and other buildings had chunks taken out of them as though something had bitten pieces free.
The sudden shift to darkness startled her until she realized it made sense—they were seeing events all over the world. It was common knowledge that people in Izyria saw the moon while the Aurelian continent enjoyed daylight, but it was disquieting to see the truth of it before her.
More shocking were the people running from the city, scrambling up a grassy hill like sheep fleeing wolves. There were five of them, dressed as though they had come from a party. The women wore long, elaborate dresses, and the men wore suits decorated with flowers.
They came from an Erinin social. She was surprised at her own realization. It seemed some of her Mason training had stuck. She'd seen a few of these dresses in the racks beneath Zhen's house.
One of the men was older than the others, his hair a ring of white around a prominent bald spot. He struggled his way up the hill, knees shaking, supported by a younger man who might have been his son.
The young man kept darting glances behind, and soon Shera saw why.
Three shadows sped across the grasslands, dark as spots of ink. There was nothing above to cast them—the sky above was open and cloudless. But the shadows rushed forward nonetheless, and the humans fled.
The Emperor's thought came once again: Urg'naut.
Lucan shouted something she couldn't catch, and even Shera strained against the restrictions of the vision, trying to return her nonexistent body to safety. It did nothing, of course; the Reading stayed locked in place, guided by the Emperor's will.
All of the Great Elders were terrifying and incomprehensible, beings that could and would scour the earth of humanity given the slightest excuse. But you could wrap your mind around most of them. Kthanikahr had his worms, Othaghor his bizarre amphibian creatures, Nakothi her dead monstrosities. They were no less frightening, but they could be fought. A man with an invested sword, given strength and luck, could stand against one of the Children of Nakothi.
