by Will Wight
Calder stood in what passed for a hole on this nightmare of an island: an ugly, gaping wound the size of a crater. It looked as though the Blackwatch had gouged a warehouse-sized scoop out of the dead Elder’s flesh, leaving the edges oozing red and an infected-looking green. Holes dotted the wall like empty veins, from small enough to hold a fist to openings bigger than a Capital sewer pipe. Tendons crossed from wall to wall like pinkish wires, and they’d had to duck and dodge in order to walk down to the crater’s center.
There, at the center of a taut network of veins and tendons, pulsed a gray-green heart.
Six Watchmen with their black coats worn loose stood around the heart, sweating. They held pickaxes and shovels, and their clothes were covered in sickly ichor. Each of them had a haunted, dead look that Calder could well understand: he couldn’t imagine the stomach it would take to dig out a mine by hand in a soil that looked like flesh.
Whatever his mother was paying them, it wasn’t enough.
Naberius fell to his knees in front of the heart, a picture of heroic awe. “Is this it?”
Alsa held out a hand as if to Read the heart, but she shuddered before she got anywhere close. “Check for yourself.”
Tristania had her back turned to Naberius, and she held the handle of her whip in one hand, though she kept the rest of it tucked into her coat. Her bandaged body was poised and alert, her eyes scanning the edges of the huge cauldron as though she expected to see a threat emerge at any second.
On instinct, Calder almost Read the crater wall to see if he could detect incoming threats, but he stopped himself before moving his hand. Alsa hadn’t moved within a foot of the heart, and she still looked vaguely sickened. He didn’t want to know what it would feel like if he directly Read the body of a Great Elder.
He’d seen men who were reduced to nothing more than drooling husks after Reading Elder artifacts. There were many ways he could imagine himself dying, but starving to death while lost in a hallucination was not one of them.
Naberius continued kneeling on the sticky ground as if heedless of the stains he was leaving on his knees. He cupped his hands around the heart, closing his eyes and inhaling deeply.
“It’s...vast and strange,” he said, in awe. “I can feel the unending life of the Dead Mother...”
Calder wondered if he noticed the contradiction. For his part, he didn’t want to be any closer to the heart than he had to. Immortality had its appeals, but if he had to shackle his soul to an Elder’s, he thought he would prefer death.
The white-haired Watchman had a quick, quiet word with Alsa. She turned sharply on Naberius, who was still kneeling over the heart in obvious ecstasy. “You’ve verified the Heart, then, Witness Clayborn. Our part here is done. Now, let’s cut this free and get to shelter.”
Calder eyed his mother and then Tristania, who had not relaxed her vigil. Alsa Grayweather was not prone to unjustified panic. If she wanted out of this crater, she had a good reason. “What’s the hurry, Mother?”
While the Watchmen went to work trying to sever the tendons—it must have been harder than it looked, as one man swung his pickaxe into the pinkish wire with no effect—Alsa walked over to her son.
She spoke in a low voice. “Ever since we set up camp on this island, we’ve been under constant attack from the Children of Nakothi. I’ve had twice as many men guarding as digging. But these past few days, it’s been slowing down. Hours before you got here, they all ran off. Vanished. We haven’t seen skull or claw of anything all day.”
That seemed like the opposite of a problem, to him. “When I land too close to an island in The Testament, we often find that the wildlife is too quiet. There are many things in the Aion that can sense the Lyathatan approaching.”
One of the Watchmen stood over an unbroken tendon, calling for a saw.
Alsa grimaced. “I hope that’s what it is. Your Lyathatan hails from Kelarac, and certain records indicate that he and Nakothi were anything but friendly. But if that’s not the case, then it means they’re gathering their strength.”
“They would need a leader for that.”
“Thus far, they haven’t shown any signs of one.” She shrugged. “But the more you learn about the Elders, you start to realize how little you actually know. One of the Elderspawn may have spontaneously developed the ability to command the others, or they may have established psychic contact with something higher up the ladder. Either way, I’d feel a lot safer if we were out of this crater.”
Calder looked up to the bleeding edge, toward the camp where he’d left his crew. They would be safer together than he would be down here, but he couldn’t help but worry. They were understaffed here, in the case of any attack. Just him, his mother, the two Witnesses, and half a dozen Watchmen with tools.
The workers cheered as the saw broke through a tendon, and the man holding it got to work on the next pink wire as the others started digging at the flesh around the heart. One man leaned, panting, on his pickaxe. Two women dug, where another man worked the saw. The white-haired Watchman leaned over toward Alsa as though to whisper in her ear again.
Calder counted one more time before he realized what was bothering him.
That was five Watchmen accounted for, not counting his mother.
Five.
He pulled his gun from its holster, though he kept it pointed low and to the side. “Mother,” he whispered, “how many men did you bring down here?”
“Three men, three women,” she said. She paused for a moment, and then whipped her saber out of its sheath.
“We’re under attack!” she shouted, and blood sprayed all over her black coat. The white-haired Watchman collapsed, missing a chunk of his head.
The musket-crack arrived a second later.
Heart pounding, muscles running with lightning, Calder grabbed his mother by the shoulder and shoved her into the sticky wall as another bullet passed through the space where her ribs used to be.
“They’re aiming for you,” he yelled. If the Watchman hadn’t stood so close to Alsa, she would have taken the first bullet herself.
Alsa pushed him off, diving for something the old man had dropped: a musket. “Not just me,” she said, taking aim at the edge of the crater.
Tristania stood over Naberius, brown coat spread like a pair of wings. Something smacked into the fabric and then fell to the ground—a musket-ball. It must be invested against bullets, though Calder had never been able to make bulletproof clothing work. Fabric wasn’t a sturdy enough medium; the material pulled itself apart after taking a couple of shots.
The Silent One stood as though she never meant to move again, whip falling from her hand and coiled on the ground. Naberius took his time, walking over and scooping up the abandoned saw.
“Excellent work, Tristania,” he said, and then he leaned over and continued sawing the heart free.
Alsa took a shot up the crater, wreathed in gun smoke, and for the first time Calder got a look at the enemy.
They, too, wore black.
But instead of coats, these were dressed in form-fitting suits of pure black. Many of them wore strips of cloth over their mouths, and others wore completely black masks. He tried to count them, but he found it more difficult than he’d expected—he only caught glimpses of them here and there. A black-clad elbow, the flash of a knife, the spray of blood, a half-shrouded face as one of the Consultants shoved a body into the crater.
All the bodies he saw belonged to Watchmen. Seconds into the battle, all five of the workers were down, and Naberius would have been dead ten times over if not for Tristania and her bulletproof coat. Alsa stood behind the shelter of a gash, poking her head out to fire her musket every once in a while, then ducking behind cover to reload.
She didn’t seem to be doing any good.
The familiar thrill of danger charged him, and he grinned. The Consultants were here in force. At last.
He had business with one Consultant in particular.
Calder straightened his h
at, keeping his pistol in one hand and drawing his cutlass with another. He drew in a deep breath, then bellowed a single word: “URZAIA!”
An animal roar answered him from the edge of the crater. A single black-clad body launched from that point, flying entirely over the bowl, landing on the other side with an audible crunch.
“Ah,” Calder said, straightening his hat. “There you are.”
Then he started running for the side. The crater was gently sloped, so he could climb his way out if he had to, but the workers had left knotted ropes dangling down to assist his ascent.
He had to sheathe his cutlass to climb up, which made him regret drawing it in the first place. A bullet struck next to his shoulder when he was about halfway up, sending up a splatter of fluid.
Calder dug his feet into the wall, pulling himself up faster.
A black-wrapped figure rose above him, pulling out a long steel knife. Calder hung on the rope, raising his pistol, desperately hoping he’d be fast enough.
But there was one other move he could try.
“Clear the way, please!” Calder shouted.
A blond cannonball slammed into the Consultant, sending the smaller man tumbling over Calder and into the pit.
Urzaia Woodsman leaned over the edge, blood splattering his scarred face. He showed a gap-toothed smile and reached one hand down. Calder took it, and the gladiator pulled him effortlessly to the top.
“I have not found the assassin woman, but there are many other Consultants,” Urzaia reported. “I have killed three, but it is hard to find them, sometimes.”
“I can tell,” Calder muttered. A group of three Watchmen filed past a clutch of the waving seaweed, and a Consultant leaped out of hiding, killed two of them, and ducked behind one of the Blackwatch shelters before the third man noticed his companions were missing.
Calder raised his weapon as soon as he saw the disturbance, but he didn’t even have enough time to pull the trigger. The Consultant was gone.
Urzaia growled, tightening his grip on his hatchets. “They will not fight me. They only hide.”
It was true. After the initial attack on Alsa, the Consultants had fallen back to guerilla tactics. Urzaia and Calder were standing out in the open, but they were far enough away from any hiding-places that they remained unharmed. Watchmen were clustered together, holding guns, swords, or spikes, keeping their backs to one another in case of ambush.
Another woman in a black coat strayed too close to the back of their shelter, and she pitched over with three inches of steel sticking out of her back.
“They’re stalling,” Calder realized. He spun back to the crater, where Tristania was still covering Naberius. A single body in black lay near the Silent One, its chest burned and smoking, but other than that they seemed absolutely unharmed.
“Follow me,” Calder ordered, and then he began to march in a loop around the edge of the crater. Urzaia followed him, looming like the world’s most intimidating shadow.
If Shera wanted Naberius, she would have to strike at him from above, or else run down into the cauldron herself. Either way, Calder would be able to catch sight of her up here.
He saw a black-clad ankle sticking out from behind a seaweed frond and fired. The Consultant—a man—staggered out of cover, allowing Urzaia to finish him off. The Blackwatch shelter, little more than a hastily constructed driftwood shed, held three more Consultants that struck as soon as Calder and his cook strayed within range.
First, a tiny blade spun out from behind the shelter.
Calder swatted it out of the air with the edge of his cutlass, a little disappointed. He had been trained better than that. Surely the Consultants had more.
A black-clad woman leaped from the top of the shelter, a knife in each hand. Not Shera—she was taller, thinner, and her knives were well-worn steel instead of bronze.
Urzaia caught her, slamming her into the ground. Her bones snapped, and she fell limp.
The other two struck at the same time, hurling a knife and moving to flank Calder.
If he’d been alone, it might have worked.
Urzaia snatched the knife out of the air, laughed, and threw it back. The Consultant dodged, but it threw the man off-balance, and Calder slashed a line across the man’s arm. With one arm and nothing more than a dagger, he managed to turn three of Calder’s cutlass-strikes in as many seconds.
Calder couldn’t help but be impressed as he ran the other man through.
The Consultant’s death echoed through the blade, focusing the weapon’s Intent. The more Calder accomplished with this sword, the stronger it would become. Like all tools, it was invested with each use.
He turned back to Urzaia only to find the man lowering his arms. A long scream, followed by the sound of impact, suggested that his opponent had just landed somewhere far away.
The Woodsman laughed, and Calder couldn’t help but ask a question that had bothered him for some time. “Do you enjoy this? Or does it remind you of the arena?”
Urzaia shrugged, continuing his march around the crater and forcing Calder to catch up. “The arena was not so bad. I thought I would die many times, but that has a special kind of fun to it, you understand?”
He did. Combat terrified Calder, and he would avoid it for the rest of his life if he could, but there was something about a straight-up fight that set the blood on fire. His wife had felt that thrill, even more than he did.
Jerri will be sorry she missed this. The thought was followed by a shock of pain and anger that sobered Calder up.
He wasn’t fighting for the thrill of it. He had work to do.
They circled the whole crater without running into anyone else. The afternoon had settled into a tense, quiet standoff: Alsa kneeling at the bottom, musket locked on her shoulder; Naberius sawing away at the tendons with Tristania standing over him; Watchmen huddling in clusters, watching each other, eyes pointed outward. The Consultants were invisible, but a noise here and there suggested that they hadn’t yet left.
Where was Shera? She had to be here, if she was after Naberius. Why hadn’t she…
The Chronicler’s saw snapped through the tendon, and he clutched the heart to his chest like an Anthem addict with his stash.
And everything became clear.
They weren’t after Naberius at all. Not anymore.
“Naberius!” Calder shouted. “They’re after the Heart!”
And the stillness shattered like dropped glass.
Shera appeared in the center of the crater as though she had simply appeared there. For a moment he refused to believe the sight; there was no way she could possibly have gotten down there without him seeing. And yet there she was, black hair falling around her face like a hood, mouth covered by black cloth, holding a bronze knife in her right hand as she ran straight at Tristania’s back.
But that wasn’t all.
At the exact instant Shera appeared, a mournful howl rose through the air, like a mother mourning the death of her child. Hideous creatures boiled up all around, rising from suddenly-opening gashes in the ground like drops of blood from a wound. Spiders the size of a man, made entirely out of bone, their heads like oversized skulls. Hairless dogs with blue-gray flesh and long, bladed tails. Four-armed giants standing head and shoulders over Urzaia, its skin pale and blue like a drowned victim.
The Children of the Dead Mother.
~~~
One more time, Andel cursed himself for straying so far from the crater. He had stayed with Petal and Foster when they visited the main base of the Blackwatch: a cluster of tents, lean-tos, and temporary wooden shelters far down the beach from The Testament. He’d let Calder go visit his mother, reasoning that the Captain would be safe among so many Blackwatch. And only the Emperor himself could have stopped Urzaia from wandering off.
Naively, Andel had expected them to come back quickly. He wouldn’t have thought the attack would come on the very first day they arrived.
Not to mention the second attack.
&
nbsp; He stood back-to-back with a Consultant who had tried to kill him a minute before, using his saber to parry the attacks of something that looked like a living vulture skeleton. Its bones were held together by nothing more than rotting strips of muscle and skin, and it struck with the needle-sharp tips of its bony wings.
Andel knocked one wing aside and hammered at the bird’s skull with the edge of his sword until he heard a crack. Something glistened inside—did this thing still have a brain?
He wasn’t sure, but he pulled his pistol and blew its skull off anyway.
The skeleton fell, lifeless, so he spun to help the black-clad man behind him. The Consultant had surrendered after Andel stabbed him in the leg, so Andel had embraced one of the Unknown God’s tenets—Mercy for the undeserving—and accepted the surrender. He had just finished bandaging the man’s leg when these hideous dead creatures of Nakothi had come crawling up from the ground inside their tent.
Well, he’d let Kelarac take him before he let a patient die right in front of him.
The Consultant slammed the blunt end of one knife down on the head of his enemy, which looked hideously like a deformed child. Its bruise-purple skin writhed over its skeletally thin body, and it hissed through a mouth of jagged teeth. It opened its jaws to take a bite out of the man’s wounded leg.
Andel skewered it through the chest, pinning it to the ground like an insect to a board. He left it there, squirming, and picked up a saber from the corpse of a Watchman.
Panting, the Consultant dropped into a chair. He gestured to the child-creature. “Are you just going to leave it there?”
“I find that I no longer have a use for that sword,” Andel said. He was no Reader, but he still didn’t want a blade that remembered being inside an Elderspawn. Who knew what horrible Intent the weapon would carry with it?
Foster fired his musket, shouted, and handed the gun to Petal. She poured the powder with shaking hands, spilling as much on the ground as she got in the weapon.
The gunner pulled a pistol, fired, and a splatter of liquid hit the outside of the tent. He fired again, and a third time, all without reloading.
