by Will Wight
There was nothing she could do for a dead man, so she wasted no more thought on him. But it did spark her attention for a different reason: how had the Elders moved so fast? She'd only spent the better part of an hour with General Teach, and there had been no hint of an alarm. Now the Inquisitors were swarming on the walls, openly dismantling servants.
Myths were filled with stories of cultists “summoning” Elders, though Shera wasn't clear on how that worked, precisely. Was that what had happened here? Had these spawn of Ach'magut been summoned into place? Or had they been waiting here, laying traps and spinning webs?
She ran on regardless, and if she had only encountered Inquisitors engaged in violence, the way would have been easy. But some had begun to alter the very architecture of the Imperial Palace. A group of Inquisitors had boarded up a hallway with dismantled bookshelves, forcing humans to turn right where they would have normally run straight. This caused the panicked palace inhabitants to fall into a closed-off room, which the Inquisitors subsequently doused in flame. They watched, impassive, as burning humans failed to break the doors down.
Shera caught this story in pieces, the barest glimpses, as she leaped over the blockade and cut her way through Elderspawn. Their blood was a sickening purple, their death-screams a disturbing blend of a screaming horse and a whistling teakettle.
She found herself wishing for the relative comfort of human victims. At least when she stabbed someone, events followed a predictable and natural course. Some of these Elders curled up and died when she pierced their heads, but others bled acidic blood or popped like inflated bladders. Still others tried to curl around her body, locking her in place.
It took her twenty minutes to reach the central courtyard, and when she arrived her chest was heaving for breath. She had to scrape violet gunk away from her mouth to breathe. Ordinarily the trip would have taken her ten minutes at half this speed, but she'd gotten sidetracked four times—twice when the Inquisitors had camouflaged a hallway, once to avoid a trap, and once to win a fight.
If the Elderspawn had been focused on stopping her, she would never have made it here. She was keenly aware of the fact. But the spawn of Ach'magut didn't seem to be operating by a particular plan, but rather according to a specific instinct: they were here to learn.
This was consistent with what Shera had learned about the Overseer and his pet Inquisitors, but it was still disturbing to watch in action. The creature was digging around in the servant's corpse to better understand human biology, and they locked people in burning rooms in order to observe their reaction to a crisis. Even here, in the central courtyard where the Inquisitor presence had lightened, Shera spotted unnatural shadows clinging to corners, waving stalks around. Watching her. Their purplish skin seemed to change shades slightly to blend in with their surroundings, making them darker and harder to see in the shadows.
They could have been watching us for weeks, Shera thought with a slight shudder, but she discounted the idea a moment later. In another city, it was possible that the Inquisitors could indeed observe for weeks or months before taking action; even in the rest of the Capital, most people wouldn't know what to look for.
But the Emperor was here, and many Magisters, and the Guild Heads visited on a regular basis. There were a few Luminian Pilgrims, a contingent of knights, and a handful of Watchmen. Even a Champion or two, on occasion, and those members of the Imperial Guard with enhanced senses.
No Elder could have escaped that collection of wits, powers, and eyes for very long. Which meant that the Inquisitors must have been summoned in.
Not that it helps me. However the Elders had arrived, they were here now. And they had to know that they had no chance of defeating the Emperor in an attack; he was the man who had opposed their Great Elder creator in a frontal contest and walked away. They had a different objective.
She was afraid she knew what it was. They were trying to drive the Emperor to the brink, to force him to fall to the Heart's influence before he was ready.
But how? That was the question. How did they mean to do it?
She didn't know enough to speculate. Fortunately, she had friends.
A flash of steel caught the Elderspawn in the shadowed corner, and it scuttled away, wounded. It was hard to watch, even in motion. Lucan emerged a moment later, breathing hard behind the shroud over his mouth and nose, eyes scanning the courtyard for further threats.
Shera's chest loosened on seeing that he'd survived, and she took a deeper breath. Until she saw his face, she hadn't realized she'd been so worried.
He smiled at her behind his mask, and asked, “Meia?”
“Give her time,” she said. Now there was someone she wasn't worried about. If Ach'magut himself rose and devoured the palace, Meia would find a way to survive.
“You might try worrying about me a little more,” Meia said, dropping down next to them from the roof of a nearby building. Unlike Lucan, who was relatively clean, Meia was wet to the elbows in purple gore. It seemed that she'd used some of the Elder blood to slick her blond hair back, which gave it an inhuman appearance, and her eyes shone orange in the twilight.
There was no need for a discussion. Standard Consultant procedure was to group up and share information, and it was a discipline they now followed without thinking.
“I was with Teach,” Shera reported. “She's going to meet the Emperor herself, but I don't know where.”
“I do,” Meia said, still tying her hair back. “Secondhand report says the Emperor was fighting his way toward his personal chamber, and the fighting seems thicker there than anywhere else in the palace.”
Lucan stared past the other two, toward the wall of a surrounding building. “It's not just the palace. The city is swarming. It was too dangerous to look for too many details, but Ach'magut isn't the only Great Elder involved.”
Shera gripped the hilts of her shears to stop her hands from shaking. Death didn't scare her, but Elders were something else entirely.
It may have been her imagination, but she thought she felt her left-hand shear shaking of its own volition. That was the weapon that Teach had taken aside before they'd gotten interrupted. Had her Intent really had so much of an effect?
“What I don't understand,” Lucan continued, “is what they want. The Luminians and the Watchmen will have this in hand, and there's no way they'll get through to the Emperor.”
Lucan had never fully appreciated the real possibility of the Emperor's corruption, but Shera did. “They want to push him,” she said. “The weaker he gets, the closer he gets to losing it all.”
Meia's orange eyes tracked a shadow clinging to the wall. “That's not a plan. A plan has a specific objective.”
“She's right,” Lucan said. “An Elder like Ach'magut doesn't throw minions at an enemy and hope.”
If he was so smart, how did the Emperor kill him in the first place? But it wasn’t worth a debate. “Other relevant information?”
“They don't appreciate it when you help people escape,” Meia said. With one blurring motion, she hurled a spade at the crawling shadow. The Inquisitor squealed once, scrabbling at the wall with its ten mismatched legs, but the force of Meia's throw had driven her razor-sharp steel straight through its body. The monster’s body hit the ground with a heavy splat.
Lucan's eyes were still distant. “They're learning. Ach'magut has an endless appetite for new information. In their eyes, you were disrupting an experiment.”
“And I'd quite like to do it again,” Meia said. She jogged into a running start and leaped up onto a nearby roof.
Shera and Lucan followed from below, passing under her and into a hallway.
The whole building was in shambles. Many Inquisitors lay dead amid the bodies of their opposition, servants in livery and Imperial Guards in uniform. Many of the Guards were missing their Kameira parts, presumably lost to curious Elderspawn. The carpet had been shredded in long rows, tables and decorations smashed. A half-built machine stood abandoned against the
side wall, apparently made of twisted copper piping and clock parts.
But the hall was not empty of Inquisitors. Only a few seconds in, Shera rounded a corner to see a mother and her young daughter—perhaps three or four years old—stumbling through the halls ahead of them. The daughter was whimpering through heavy breaths, the mother screaming.
All around, on the walls and ceiling, Inquisitors watched them through a forest of waving stalks. They skittered on their spider-like legs, keeping up with the humans.
The people were unharmed. In the first instant, as Shera absorbed the sight, one of the Elderspawn slid forward, snatching the child away from the woman’s grasp.
Beside her, Lucan drew a shear in one hand. He raised something that looked like a lump of coal in the other.
The mother shouted, kicking out at an Inquisitor, stretching her fingers as far as they would go to try and reach her child. The Elderspawn tugged a little farther, keeping the girl just out of reach. The rest looked on, impartial.
Not teasing, not tormenting. Testing. They wanted to see the nature and the duration of the mother's reaction to her child's captivity. Or maybe they were looking for something else; it didn’t change the reality.
Shera couldn't save them.
She didn't have the time, the weapons, or the strength to fight so many Elderspawn. Even if she cut her way through, she would never be able to grab the woman and escape. She didn't know the woman.
And she had a job to do.
Shera started to turn another corner, but Lucan slowed to a stop. He still held a shear in one hand and the black stone in the other. His face was rock-hard agony.
“Equipment?” Lucan asked her, without looking her in the face.
“Nothing that will help,” she said quietly. She hurt for him, even if she didn't feel the same pain he did. If she could have helped the strange woman and her child, she would have. But she couldn't.
Lucan ground his teeth for an instant more, but he was still a Gardener. He shoved the knife into its sheath behind him, holding onto the black rock as though he was afraid to let it go.
After a count of three, he hurled the stone into the crowd of Elderspawn, almost on top of the mother and daughter, and kept running down the hallway to the side. Shera followed him.
When a flash of light and a rumble of thunder rang out from behind them, neither turned around.
They found the Emperor sooner than they expected, only a few buildings away from his personal chambers. He wore the simple white robe that meant he had been relaxing, unprepared for a battle or a public appearance.
But he didn't look unprepared.
He held what looked like a pair of full-sized Magister's staves, one in each hand. In his right hand he carried a smooth ash-gray staff about six feet long, capped in gleaming silver. In his left hand, he gripped a shorter branch that might have been simple driftwood if not for the tiny objects embedded in it. Shera noticed seashells, gemstones, bones, even fragments of glass all somehow melded with the wood.
When he waved that staff, Elderspawn were shredded by invisible blades. Inquisitors started as arachnid monsters and ended in piles of purple gore and severed eye-stalks. Other, stranger creatures opposed him as well: gilled humanoids with crocodile mouths, shambling dead Children shaped to look like giant animals, even an Elder’s rendition of a twisted, animated thornbush.
He sliced them to pieces with the staff in his left hand, and when they got too close, he slammed his right-handed staff down. The stone tiles of the courtyard rippled like struck water, and the Elderspawn stumbled backwards.
Behind the Emperor, clustering as close to his shadow as they dared, was a crowd of terrified humans. Servants, cooks, visitors, children—even one wounded Imperial Guard with wide owl's eyes—all huddled together, staring at their Emperor in awe.
No sooner had the Gardeners arrived than the Emperor looked straight at them, as though he had expected them. He raised both staves, took in a deep breath, and smote the ground.
Force blasted away from the humans in a ring. This time, everything caught in the ripple of power was shredded—stone, decorative plants, and Elder flesh alike. A few of them let out hideous shrieks as they died, but most never got the chance.
Lucan stumbled back and Meia froze on the nearby roof, but Shera didn't move as the wave of devastation swept closer to them. It was moving too fast to outrun. If the Emperor had the degree of control she thought he did, he would stop the destruction before it hit them. If he didn't...well, she'd never know her mistake.
The wall of force carried debris up to the Gardeners' feet, where the garbage landed like a collapsing wave.
In the ensuing silence, even the children did not dare to cry.
“Lucan, Meia,” the Emperor said, “please escort these few to the southern gates. General Teach has a foothold there.” His voice was soft and absolutely smooth, untroubled by the violence around him.
Lucan and Meia complied immediately, but Shera couldn't help but notice she wasn't included in the order.
Not that she would complain. Less work was less work.
When the two Gardeners left the courtyard, Lucan shooting a glance back at Shera on his way out, the Emperor spoke to her.
“I hope your meeting with General Teach was educational.”
“I thought she was planning to kill me.”
The Emperor brushed some dust from his arms, cleaning himself of the smallest bits of debris. “Let me relieve you on that count. If she wanted to kill you, she wouldn't need a plan.”
“She held my knife for a while and gave me a few tips.” He likely knew exactly what Teach had said, but on the distant chance that secrecy would give her some advantage, she kept specifics to herself.
“Yes, your left-hand shear. Would you hand it to me, please?”
Even if it wasn't really a request, Shera wasn't sure she'd ever heard the Emperor ask for anything. She pulled out the knife and reversed it, handing it to him hilt-first.
He set both staves aside to grip the shear, running his fingers lightly over the blade.
“I need you to remember one thing tonight, Shera,” he said, still watching the knife. Behind him, smoke and screams drifted up from one of the palace buildings. “The Great Elders will do anything to be free again. Don’t give them that. Don’t give them anything. You cannot let them win.”
She focused on her breathing, evening it out, trying to still her racing heart. If he was telling her this, it meant that he expected her to make a decision tonight that would impact the Great Elders. There was only one decision that might be.
An unfamiliar flutter of anxiety twisted her belly, but she pushed it down. Either she would be ready when the time came, or she would die. Worrying would help her in neither case.
He met her eyes, and the weight of millennia pressed down on her. “That’s an Imperial command,” he reminded her.
“Yes, Your Imperial Highness,” she said, bowing.
Now that she thought of it, she may not have ever said those words to him before. Strange.
He handed her weapon back a second later. This time she was sure it wasn’t her imagination: the hilt buzzed at the touch of her hand. Or maybe it was reacting to her Intent; she would never be able to tell.
The Emperor strode inside the nearest building, trusting her to follow. He gathered his staves up as he walked, both in one hand. The doors opened without anyone touching them.
“The other two will join us when they return, I’m certain,” he said. “I have much to tell you, and we have the whole night still in front of us.”
She was already longing for a nap.
~~~
“It's been almost fifteen hundred years since we defeated the Great Elders. In those first days, after the rule of the Elders but before the Empire, the world was in chaos. The earth itself rolled and heaved in the aftermath of the Great Elders' destruction, and the people feared nothing more than the wrath of the Elders. Many refused to believe that the likes
of Othaghor or Kelarac could be overthrown at all, and that all humans would soon be punished for the transgressions of a few.”
The Emperor stood in his personal chambers, surrounded by all the trappings of vast wealth. His bed practically had a room to itself, big enough for ten people lying elbow to elbow. The room was lit by quicklamps artistically shaped to look like serpentine dragons, the walls made of polished wood. It looked like expensive, imported wood, but it was hard to tell—she could see only a sliver of it through the paintings clustered so thickly together. She'd seen replicas of some of the paintings in museums or textbooks, not that she spent much time with either one, and they had to date back hundreds of years. She had no doubt that these were the originals.
Only one wall was plain and bare, and she knew why. Years ago, he’d pressed a hand against it and opened a hidden door, inside of which he hid his weapons and armor.
Shera saw the Emperor's rooms only rarely, and the last time all three Gardeners had stood here together, he had revealed the Heart of Nakothi. She hadn't enjoyed the aftermath of that conversation, and she doubted she would like the results of this one either.
Still dressed in a simple, single-layered robe of white, the Emperor paced in front of the bare wall. Even walking back and forth with his palace under attack, he didn't look or sound nervous; he sounded more like Ayana lecturing her students.
“The people were ignorant,” he continued, “but they were right nonetheless. The Great Elders do not die as we do. Death holds them for a while, but given enough time, we knew they could gather themselves. And potentially wake from death itself. At the time, we didn't know when: we may have had thousands of years, or only months. There was no way to tell.”
Meia and Lucan stood on either side of Shera. None of them sat, and none of them spoke. The Emperor had made it clear that their services would be required soon.
“We needed an early warning system, but the Great Elders died thousands of miles apart. It took us decades to finally track down and kill them all. If they started to stir, I could never act in time, no matter how early the warning. I needed a way to respond to all the Great Elders from a single location.
