by Will Wight
The floor was a single block of polished stone bigger than a ballroom—he wondered if it had been Awakened. It was lacquered with a vast panorama, the image of a battle so detailed and complex you would have to fly up to the distant ceiling in order to take it in. He knelt on the image of a painted warrior in ancient armor, holding a bronze sword and locked in combat with a shadowy, shapeless creature.
Pillars sprouted from the floor in orderly rows, each designed with a unique spiral of flame that rose from the image of battle like the fires of war. Smoke from the painted flames gathered on the ceiling, capping the room with the visage of dark clouds.
At the top of the mural, in the center of the room, stood a single figure in white armor. He stood with the rising sun, holding a bronze sword in each hand and standing against a mountainous monster of grasping claws and flailing tentacles.
Above this image of the victorious Emperor rose the Imperial throne. And on that throne sat the Emperor himself.
He looked exactly as he did in the mural, as he had in Calder’s many visions: dark, tall, and hairless, with a gaze that suggested he knew your mind better than you did. He lounged on his throne wrapped in layers of pink and purple and lavender, tossing a coin in his right hand.
A simple gold circlet rested on his bare head, and this detail alone seemed off. He supposed it was natural for the Emperor to be wearing a crown in his own throne room, but none of Calder’s visions had included the man with a crown. Maybe he rarely wore it, or perhaps it just didn’t make much of an impression on the invested items around him. It didn’t matter, in any case.
The Emperor’s voice effortlessly filled the spacious room. “You found one artifact of mine. A pen. You must have found another.”
Calder widened his eyes, looking innocent and frightened. The frightened part wasn’t much of an exaggeration. “I’m sorry, Lord Emperor Most High! That was the only fragment of your greatness we ever found, though we did try. I am overcome with grief—”
“A key, was it?” the Emperor mused. He tossed a silver coin marked with his own face, snatching it out of the air. “There have not been many keys I carried personally. I can recall only a few.”
Sweat rolled into Calder’s eyes, but he didn’t dare to blink. “A key? I don’t have a key of any significance, O Lord of the Empire.”
The Emperor rolled the coin across the backs of his fingers. “Was it silver? Bone? Was the key made of living flesh?”
“Ah, I’m not—”
“You weren’t surprised by it, nor did you sell it. It must have been the copper key to my dungeon. I can see how you may have used it to open the cells in Candle Bay.” The Emperor closed one eye, examining the coin as though he expected to find some flaw. “I sense Kelarac upon you. Why did you trade him the key?”
Panic tightened Calder’s skin, froze his insides. How did the Emperor know? How did he always know? No one could Read minds.
“I see...with a Lyathatan to pull your ship, you could complete the binding and Awaken The Testament. A good bargain, for such a cheap price. Be wary of deals that seem too favorable, Calder.”
Jarelys Teach stood behind the throne, arms folded, eyes forever moving around the chamber. A few more squads of Imperial Guards waited in the distant corners of the room, ready to help should the Emperor require their assistance. Something stirred behind the throne itself; perhaps a hidden guard, wearing black.
They hadn’t even bothered to bind Calder’s hands. He couldn’t pose a danger to the Emperor with a saber in one hand and a gun in the other, even if the man had been completely unguarded.
What he didn’t understand was why they needed to try him at all. The Emperor could Read everything he wanted to know; Calder didn’t even need to be conscious. They could simply have taken him, put him to sleep, Read his guilt, and executed him before he woke up.
The absolute hopelessness of his situation made him bold. “My current situation seems a little too favorable, if I’m honest. I’m still alive.”
The Emperor gave a faint smile. “I do prefer honesty.”
“Why? It seems that you can hear the truth in any words of mine, honest or not.”
“Your honesty does not help me learn the truth,” the Emperor said. “The degree of your honesty, and your dishonesty, helps me to understand what kind of man you are.”
Calder switched tactics. “I am hardly a man at all, my Emperor. This endeavor was a crime of passion and youth, nothing more.”
The Emperor flipped his coin again. “Who is more than an infant in my presence? Should I rule with leniency on the basis of youth, even the wisest graybeard would receive clemency from me.” He gripped the silver coin in one fist, staring Calder straight in the eyes.
“Five prison guards were killed by your chained Elderspawn. Ten more were injured. From the wreckage of the Candle Bay facility, we pulled a further fifteen corpses. Guards, alchemists, prisoners, clerical staff. Prisoners escaped by the score, and many of them had been imprisoned for crimes greater than your fathers. Now we have murderers, rapists, dangerous Soulbound, and black alchemists walking the streets of the Capital thanks to your reckless actions.”
There was no anger in the Emperor’s voice, but there was enough sheer force to drive Calder down into the ground. His ancient Intent filled the air so thick that Calder was sure he would feel it even without his abilities as a Reader.
Under normal circumstances, Calder would have done whatever the Emperor commanded him, bound by such pressure. He would have likely wet himself.
But today, he carried some anger of his own. “I witnessed five men and women gladly fall to their deaths on the rocks of Candle Bay. I don’t know what experiments your alchemists ran on my father, but he begged me to push him out of a window. My father, Rojric Marten. He carried such pain with him that I could feel it pouring from him like heat from a bonfire. He had tried to strangle himself with his bed sheets, to shatter the window with his chair so that he could leap from his cell. And he was imprisoned for stealing a pen.”
By the end of the speech, Calder was on his feet and shouting at the ruler of the Aurelian Empire. A ruler who seemed more interested in idly flipping his coin than in the fate of Calder’s father.
“He did not just steal a pen, Calder, as you know better than most. He stole my pen. I once knew a man who killed thirty-two innocent people with a knife that I had used to spread butter. When I use an object, even for the briefest period, it is cleansed by the Luminians and then incinerated. But every once in a while, some fragment of refuse evades my notice and escapes.”
The Emperor waved his hand. “But we are not here to discuss your father’s crimes. We’re here to discuss yours.”
Standing was awkward, in this room of featureless stone, but Calder refused to kneel again. He walked over to a pillar and sat, leaning his back against the base of the stone column. “Candle Bay was a house of torture,” he said. “It was better off destroyed.”
He believed that. He had to believe that, or else confront the fact that he had been responsible for the deaths of twenty real, live, breathing men and women.
“Despite what you may believe, my Guild of Alchemists is not on trial today either. However, there is another Guild involved.” He tossed the coin from one hand to the other. “Tell me, Calder, what do you know about the Navigators?”
This abrupt shift in subject took Calder by surprise. He had only ever met one Navigator, and he suspected Cheska Bennett was not a representative sample of her Guild. “Very little.”
“You know that they are the only ones who can safely cross the Aion. I founded them for that purpose. What do you think makes their ships able to navigate those waters? Superior carpentry?”
“I don’t—”
“Think, Calder!”
The Intent behind the command was enough to make the room seem to shake, and Calder rattled his brain, trying to shake something loose. “It...must have to do with Reading, somehow. The ships are invested in a particul
ar way? Treated with a blend of alchemy?”
The Emperor tapped the edge of his coin against the throne, waiting for him to continue.
“Ah, they must navigate differently from ordinary sailors in some way. Hence the name. Invested navigational equipment?”
The Emperor leaned forward. “They have guides, Calder.”
The puzzle came apart in Calder’s mind. Sure, the Navigators had to be guided through the threats of the Aion, which were often caused by Elders. That was what the Blackwatch had been trying to do with The Testament: summon a bigger, stronger guide.
“Elders,” he said. “They all have Elders bound to their ships.”
“Only one ship has that distinction. The others simply have the power of an Elder bound into their ship, through bone or blood or a particular artifact. Then the ships themselves are Awakened, bound to their captains. Soulbound.”
Calder’s breath caught. Soulbound were the greatest warriors of the Empire, possessing powers that came from the pinnacle of Reading. It was from them that the truly miraculous feats of history had come: Estyr Six flying over the ranks of a thousand Elderspawn to reach Othaghor, Baldezar Kern destroying the armies of the South Sea Revolution. They could call on the seemingly magical powers of Kameira, as long as they held their Vessel.
“Me? Is that what I did?”
“The Blackwatch ship known as The Testament is now your Soulbound Vessel, Calder. We didn’t need to tow it back; the Lyathatan dragged it into the nearby harbor on its own.” The Emperor leaned back in his throne. “That’s why you haven’t been executed.”
Involuntarily, Calder’s hand went to his throat.
“You’re surprised. How else did you think I would deal with someone who committed thousands of goldmarks of property damage, murdered twenty citizens, and stole a ten-thousand-mark ship? You deserve execution, Calder, if anyone in my Empire does.”
A small candle-flame of hope lit in Calder’s chest. “But you won’t execute me?”
“I will turn you over to the custody of the Navigator’s Guild, who will put you to work in my service until your debt to me is cleared. Your bonds and responsibilities to the Blackwatch are hereby abolished.”
Calder couldn’t help the smile that started to spread across his face. “Your mercy is as limitless as the breadth of your rule, my Emperor.”
The Emperor did not smile. “Bring in the prisoner.”
Doors opened at the end of the hall, and two Imperial Guards marched Rojric Marten inside. He was gagged, his prison jumpsuit rumpled, his hair matted with sweat. When he caught sight of Calder, he struggled forward to try and reach his son.
But one of the Guards had an arm that looked as though it was sheathed in steel. Rojric might as well have been anchored in place. The other, whose eyes glowed a solid red, bowed before the Emperor.
From his throne, the ruler of the Aurelian Empire looked at no one but Calder. “I told you: beware of deals that seem too favorable. I do not reward criminals, Calder, not even when circumstances force me to.”
The Emperor tossed something at Calder’s feet, something that clinked and rang like a tiny bell. The silver coin. But now it was warped and deformed, as if under great pressure.
“Jarelys,” the Emperor said.
The General stepped forward, pulling her sword out from behind her back.
Its blade was rough-forged black iron, with a core of some substance that flowed a bright, glowing red down the center of the metal. But Calder hardly saw it. His senses were overwhelmed: the smell of ash and rot, the taste of blood in his mouth, the screams of the dying, the desperately lonely fear that comes from a nightmare. All of it blasted out from the sword in a silent wind.
The Emperor stood. “Rojric Marten, citizen of my Empire, I hereby sentence you to die.”
Rojric strained against his captors, pushing away, trying to escape. His eyes locked with Calder’s.
Then Jarelys Teach brushed Rojric’s shoulder with the flat of her blade. That done, she returned her weapon to its sheath.
With an audible shriek that emanated from nowhere and seemed to tear the world in half, the life left Rojric Marten’s body. He simply sagged, his eyes suddenly glassy.
The two Imperial Guards withdrew, dragging Rojric’s body behind them.
Through his tears, Calder screamed. He shouted at the Emperor, at Jarelys Teach, at his own ridiculously naive idea to break a man out of prison.
He surged forward, focused on tearing the Emperor’s flesh with his bare hands.
He’s a man! Calder shouted to himself. Just a man! Like me, like my father! He will die like one!
Jarelys Teach didn’t bother with him, returning to her post behind the throne.
Instead, he was tackled by three black-clad shadows.
A blond girl held a bronze knife to Calder’s throat, while a Heartlander boy about his age held his arms locked behind his back. A pale, black-haired girl—perhaps a year or two younger than he—stood in front of him, hands empty and spread in front of her.
“Relax,” she said soothingly.
The boy spoke over his shoulder. “Release your Intent.”
And Calder could feel the other boy’s Intent smothering his own, countering the rage and lethal Intent that Calder was pouring into everything: into the stone at his feet, into every fiber of his clothes, into the weapons of these three children who dared to stop him.
But the other boy, the other Reader, was canceling it all out, smoothing the hostility like a maid smoothing sheets.
The black-haired girl yawned and scratched the back of her neck with a dagger. “Did you know that man?”
“He was my father!” Calder shouted.
She shrugged. “Then he’d probably tell you to be quiet, so that we don’t kill you.”
Calder glared at the Emperor, desperate to hurt the man somehow, even in the smallest way. “You keep children around to protect you?”
“As I said before, you’re all children to me.” The Emperor rummaged through his pockets, pulled out a gold coin, and flipped it. “Besides, they need their exercise. Return to your ship, Calder. You and your Vessel are now property of the Aurelian Empire.”
The three black-clad children vanished, the dark-haired girl yawning as she scurried off. How did they disappear so quickly? Except for the occasional pillar, the chamber was nothing but empty, open space.
As Calder was dragged away by the Guard with the metal arm, he took one last look at the Emperor, sitting on his throne and idly toying with his gold coin.
The only one who can change the Empire is sitting right there, he thought. So far removed from humanity that he might as well be Elderspawn himself.
The solution hit him like a shaft of blinding light.
As Sadesthenes once said: nothing lasts forever.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
The dome of earth rose away from the vast underground chamber, lifted by the bony hands and swarming tentacles of Nakothi’s Handmaiden. The roof over the arena was hundreds of yards across, and when the titanic Elderspawn tore it away, it looked like she was tearing an island in half. Clods of dirt and chunks of rock big enough to crush horses rained down all over the arena.
The three Consultants scrambled out of the way, helping each other to shelter. Calder’s first instinct told him to join them, but he had a more important task.
Urzaia. The Soulbound warrior still lay on his back only feet away, staring up at the suddenly bare sky. Calder edged closer, ignoring the ground shuddering under repeated impacts.
His first view of Urzaia told him that the situation was hopeless. He was covered in injuries, but none compared to the hole in his chest, which oozed and throbbed with blood as though his heart were trying to escape. He stared sightlessly without blinking, even as clouds of dirt fell into his open eyes.
“Captain,” he said, just as Calder had convinced himself the man was already dead.
Calder fell to his knees, ignoring the pain in his leg and fig
hting down a sudden hope. Maybe he could still be saved…
But no, he could sense the residual Intent that Shera’s Awakened blade had left behind. It stole the power Urzaia had drawn from his Vessel, turning it against his body.
Calder couldn’t imagine how the man had held on this long.
“I’m with you, Urzaia. We’ll see you fixed up and back on duty before next week.”
The gladiator choked out a laugh. “Still undefeated.”
He wanted to let it go, just to comfort the man until the end, but these were the last words of a friend. He owed it to Urzaia to understand them. “What do you mean?”
“I got her, Captain. They took Jerri, so I took…” He gasped in pain, then set his mouth into a grin. “…one of them. Meia. Her name was Meia. I took her with me.”
Calder looked over to the shelter where the three Consultants huddled together. Shera kept an eye on him, working her Awakened knife in her hands, but Lucan was binding the blind Consultant’s—Meia’s—shoulder. She didn’t look like a woman about to die; she looked angry.
“They won’t be able to replace her,” Calder said. “The Consultants won’t recover from this so easily. You’ve done me proud, Urzaia Woodsman.”
Urzaia laughed again, more weakly. “I told you. Never lost a fight in the arena. Not one.”
Calder knelt at his cook’s side, listening to the Handmaiden howling above him. Kelarac’s gift, the mark on his arm, let him feel the Intent behind her fury: she sought the presence of something new, something deadly, something that posed a threat to her.
And she was waiting for reinforcements before she faced it.
He remained absolutely still until Urzaia stopped breathing. It didn’t take long.
Then he scooped up Urzaia’s Awakened hatchets, shoving them into his belt. He tried to minimize contact with the weapons, but a vision bubbled up unbidden.
Urzaia hefts his hatchets, watching the five enemies surround him. Not a Soulbound among them; this is just a warm-up match, to get the crowd in the mood. He mourns them already, but he can’t allow himself to die here.
