by Will Wight
And now Calder couldn’t even sacrifice himself. Kelarac had taken a host. Their final trump card had been taken away.
He realized he could see the bronze statue clearly. Bastion’s Veil had thinned almost to nothing. Either something had happened to Shera or the mist couldn’t stand up to the full power of the Great Elder.
The game was over. They’d lost.
But that was no reason to give up.
He jammed his helmet back into place and readied his sword.
To our last breath.
With all the strength he could squeeze out, he ran into Kelarac, thrusting his blade. His armor could handle Jerri’s flame long enough for him to run her body through.
A jeweled dagger appeared in her hand. Kelarac turned Calder’s blow with ease.
Overhead, Alagaeus’ bronze staff swept through the mist and into Estyr. It smashed The Testament’s mast on the way, sending green-veined sails tumbling. Calder’s gut churned and his head shook with the blow.
A gunshot cracked and Calder looked back to see Foster pulling the trigger again. And again.
His weapon was a work of art more than a gun. It was covered in green hide that looked as though it had grown there, and the end of its barrel looked like the mouth of a hungry beast.
His Awakened gun, the one he didn’t even like to talk about.
Oath to Eternity.
Kelarac swatted each bullet from the air, then caught the last one between his teeth.
Petal screamed as she threw a glass bottle overhand. It contained a thick pink liquid…which splattered all over the deck at Kelarac’s feet.
His shark’s smile grew wider. “We always liked you, Petal. We’ll keep—”
The pink liquid erupted into a gel a thousand times bigger than the bottle could have possible contained. It swallowed half of Jerri’s body, locking Kelarac in place.
Calder was still dazed from the blow to his ship, but he stumbled forward to take the opportunity.
Green flame shone through pink as Kelarac burned his way out.
Andel stepped forward, white light projecting from his outstretched hand. It bathed the Great Elder, but Calder couldn’t tell if it was doing any good.
Calder reached down into the ship. Through the chains.
Get rid of him, Calder sent.
“Loyalty” meant something very different to Elders.
The Lyathatan burst from the Aion Sea, its six black eyes gleaming. It slammed one fist down onto Jerri’s body. Chunks of hardened pink gel skittered over the deck.
Half a second later, the Elder’s huge blue hand exploded into emerald flame.
The Lyathatan screamed, stumbling back. One of its shackles slid off its charred stump.
Kelarac drifted up. A glossy brown braid streamed behind him and his yellowed shark smile was untouched.
But Calder had never expected that to work. He was moving his strongest piece into place: himself.
The second Kelarac destroyed the Lyathatan’s hand, Calder was already there. He drove the orange-spotted sword through Jerri’s midsection.
He felt it pierce through flesh and emerge from the other side. For a second, he dared to hope.
Kelarac’s smiling face tilted down to the wound, then back up to Calder’s face.
“We both want you,” Kelarac said. He wrapped a thin caramel-skinned hand around the blade. “You will be our toy until time has worn you to dust.”
With one moment of effort, he crushed the Awakened sword to pieces.
Calder backed up. He let the hilt slip from his fingers.
Kelarac had gifted him that sword. He had even told Calder that it was made to use against Elderspawn. Calder should have known it would never work.
The clash between the Regents and their bronze effigies still raged, but the sound was muted. Silver mist surrounded them, so that Calder could believe the entire world was just him and the Great Elder.
Until Andel marched in.
A bright light emanated from the White Sun hanging against his chest. “I never liked you,” Andel said.
Kelarac tilted his head slightly.
“Either of you,” he clarified. He focused his light on Kelarac.
The Great Elder’s power wavered, his body dipping in the air.
Calder took the opportunity. Between Bastion’s Veil and the light of a Beacon, both of which had the Intent to suppress Elders, Kelarac might be weakened enough. In full armor, Calder leaped onto the Great Elder in the body of his wife. He seized her with both hands, wrestling her down.
Kelarac gave an annoyed huff. “That’s en—”
For the second time, he was cut off. This time by a gunshot.
Foster wore his shooting-glasses, holding a musket up to his shoulder. He tossed it aside, pulled Oath to Eternity, and fired once more into Kelarac’s chest. Calder felt the impact shudder through Jerri’s body, but he was in no danger. It wouldn’t penetrate the Emperor’s plate.
“Get away from my captain,” Foster snarled. He slid open the chamber, loaded more rounds in, and snapped it closed.
Then green fire exploded at his feet.
His body tumbled across the deck.
Andel dashed for him, but a worm opened a mouth full of teeth and bit a corner of Foster’s jacket. It dragged him over to the side and dropped his body into the ocean.
There would be no bringing Foster back.
Calder’s breath left him…but he couldn’t stop fighting.
He tightened his limbs, wrestling Kelarac down with every ounce of his strength, and this time he was able to knock one arm aside as the Great Elder unleashed fire at Andel. The emerald flame brushed Andel’s side, and the man screamed and stumbled backwards into the mist.
Leaving just Calder and Kelarac.
The Great Elder casually pried Calder off him, suddenly demonstrating strength many times greater than he had shown before.
Or maybe Calder was getting weaker…his hands were definitely growing numb.
“It’s harder than you think, capturing a prize without breaking it,” Kelarac mused. “It has to be preserved so that you can break it slowly. One piece at a time. For years.”
Green fire erupted in the joints of Calder’s armor, and he screamed as skin was seared all over his body. Smoke rose into his nose as his clothes and flesh were burned through.
One plate at a time, the Emperor’s armor crashed down to the deck. Finally, Kelarac pulled the helmet away from Calder’s face.
Calder glared into Jerri’s eyes, hidden behind a steel blindfold. Tears of anger, and grief, and pain clouded his vision.
“I will see you dead,” Calder spat. “I will look on your body and I will laugh. I will laugh because you could have escaped your prison, but you decided to stay and die among your toys.”
Jerri’s head tilted quizzically, and then Kelarac laughed. It was a horrible, layered abomination that fused his voice and hers.
“You think you will be the one to bring me to my end, fallen King?”
Calder forced the biggest smile he could.
“Not me.”
How long had it been since Calder had been able to see the bronze statues fighting the Regents? He couldn’t be sure.
They were hidden by Bastion’s Veil.
A green dagger plunged into Kelarac’s back.
The mist resolved into a gray figure. Shera, hooded and masked, held her silver-blue dagger in her right hand. Her left-hand dagger was plunged into Jerri’s heart from behind.
Kelarac stiffened. His mouth fell open.
And a blinding green light spilled from him like blood.
The impact of that geyser of exploding power blinded Calder’s Reader senses, overwhelming him with Intent. He blanked out for a moment.
Energy erupted from Kelarac like an endless volcano. Calder was battered, blinded, confused.
When his vision finally cleared, he saw Shera standing over him.
She looked the same, but she felt like…more. As though she
had crammed a thousand people’s worth of Intent into herself and now her skin was straining to contain it.
She even shivered.
Through clenched teeth, she said, “Why did you have to warn him?”
“If he had turned to look at you, I would have done something.”
“What?”
It was a good question. He could barely move his limbs.
“…something.”
They met each other’s eyes for a moment, and Calder wasn’t sure what to say. Considering the circumstances, he wasn’t sure there was anything he could say.
But he didn’t expect her to break the silence.
“I’m sorry,” Shera said at last. Her eyes still reminded him of a shark’s, and the words were blunt, but they caught him off guard.
“For what?” he asked. Surely not for killing Kelarac.
“For failing to kill Naberius Clayborn.”
Calder was sorry for that too. Sorry that he had ever taken on the contract and sorry that he hadn’t just let Shera kill the man.
But he couldn’t let Shera out-do him, not even in apologies. He forced himself up into a sitting position. “I’m sorry I let Lucan die. I didn’t want that to happen.”
Shera nodded once. “That account is settled.”
That it was.
Whether Kelarac had truly been erased or not, Jerri was certainly dead.
A dwindling green light still raged in the mist and the clouds overhead, but the body was gone. He didn’t know what happened when a Great Elder was killed, but from the feel of it, that Intent would slowly dissipate over a long time.
The mist, by contrast, blew away in an instant.
He supposed that was Shera’s doing.
It took a moment for everyone among the Navigator fleet to spot each other and comprehend what had happened. The water was littered with burning wreckage and corpses. The Lyathatan was still snarling and cupping its missing hand, and screams came from wounded everywhere.
But the Regents were all still floating in the air and the four bronze statues were gone. Since no one could see them or Kelarac, a ragged cheer went up from all the ships at once. It was weak, but it cut through the lapping waves and the silent world.
The cheer died out when everyone seemed to realize at once: the silence.
There was no battle overhead.
The cracks in the sky, which had once shone onto a void filled with multi-colored lights, now showed pure darkness.
With trembling fear in his heart, Calder extended his Reader’s senses.
“Urg’naut won,” Shera said, looking into the sky.
Calder shook his head. This was not the pure nonexistence Urg’naut sought. It was ocean-deep, all-consuming Intent to destroy.
The will of an executioner.
“No,” Calder said. “He lost. And now it’s over anyway.”
In the wake of his words, a song began to drift over the battlefield.
Come, my children…come to me…rise once more and taste perfection.
The pieces of worm scattered over the deck began to scoot together. Their flesh knotted back into one. The water boiled as pieces of Elderspawn and human corpses started stitching themselves together in horrific configurations.
Shera waved to the pieces, and orbs of green light drifted up to hang in midair over them. The same thing that had happened when she’d killed Urzaia.
At least the pieces were still.
Calder swallowed his nausea at the sight. “Thank you.”
“Don’t…thank me…yet…”
Shera spoke through a tight jaw, and Calder thought he saw lime-green light leaking through her teeth.
Nakothi was wading toward them, looking even more gruesome than she had through the spyglass. “Can you help with her?” Calder asked.
Shera nodded.
“Then I think…” He looked up, tasting the deadly Intent in the air. If no one did anything, all of existence was going to be erased. “…I think there’s one last thing I can do.”
Though it was clearly difficult for her, Shera spoke again. “One…last…thing.”
Reaching deep into the ship, Calder asked the Lyathatan for a final favor.
Candle Bay was close. They reached it in minutes.
The Elder practically flung them into the docks, then tore the shackles from its wrists. It did not wait around or waste a second; it was free. It swam out to sea without delay, and Calder found himself reaching through the mark of Kelarac, feeling it leave.
He had hoped to sense something like fondness or regret, but all he felt was the Elder equivalent of joy. Satisfaction, fading rage, and a resolve to follow its own instincts. By the time its fin disappeared beneath the waves, it never looked back.
Once on the dock, Calder gave The Testament a once-over.
The ship was, charitably, half a wreck. Its mast was destroyed, its sales missing, much of its hull splintered. The words on the side were closer to spelling “The Test,” which he supposed might have been an even more accurate name.
With love and care and attention, he’d be able to repair his Soulbound Vessel.
But he would never get the chance.
“Do you think there’s a world out there where everything worked out perfectly?” Calder asked. Petal and Andel stood at his sides; the last of his crew. “Where we just…kept sailing. All seven of us.”
Petal nodded furiously, her cheeks tracked with tears.
“Seven?” Andel asked.
Shuffles hopped up onto Calder’s shoulder. “SEVEN!” he shouted into Calder’s ear.
Andel nodded and returned his gaze to The Testament. “My mistake.”
Calder wanted to stay a little longer. He didn’t want to move at all.
But the darkness above was crackling with sapphire lightning. He knew nothing about the lives of worlds or what their ends looked like, but he knew blue lightning in a broken sky couldn’t be good.
“Let’s go,” he ordered.
The march to the Imperial Palace had never passed so quickly.
The people all cowered inside. Some of them huddled under boxes in the middle of the street.
No one recognized him on the street, with his charred clothes and his wounds. Or if they did, they said nothing.
Most of the Imperial Guards would be on one of the Navigator vessels out there fighting, but the gate was still guarded. At least they recognized him, saluting on sight.
Now came the moment he had been dreading the most. Even more than the end.
“Guards,” Calder said, “one last request from me: take these two into custody.”
Petal gasped, but Andel showed as little reaction on his face as ever. He held out a hand.
“It’s been an honor sailing with you, Captain.”
Calder shook his hand firmly and then turned to Petal. She threw her arms around him.
“I worked…really hard to keep you alive,” she said into his chest.
“Yes, you did.” She had gone further than he had any right to expect.
“Now it’s my turn,” he said.
Then he pried Petal off and walked deeper into the Palace, Shuffles on his shoulder.
He had prepared all sorts of excuses to talk him past the Guards and to the Optasia, but none were necessary. The battle with Kelarac and the end of the world had suspended all sorts of security protocols.
Some had wanted to take Shuffles, but the Horror bellowed at them until Calder convinced them he was harmless.
Sooner than he wanted, Calder stood once again in front of the Optasia.
The twisted mesh of silver bars and wires filled him with nausea. His memory of seeing Urg’naut was too fresh. When he tried to reach out and touch it, his fingertips rebelled.
In Reading, there was a much-debated concept called “significance.” It was more difficult to quantify than Intent, and many scholars believed they were related or subsets of the same thing, but significance was one of the primary factors in whether something cou
ld be Awakened or not.
If the object was significant to both the Reader and the owner of the object, Awakening would be much more likely to succeed.
Any Reader could try to Read an Imperial relic only to be overwhelmed by the Emperor’s Intent.
But Calder had been the owner of the Emperor’s crown.
He had been the second human being to sit on the throne of the Aurelian Empire.
So he placed the golden crown on his head, opening himself to the Emperor’s Intent. And instead of using the Optasia to magnify his Reading, he Read the Optasia itself.
The Emperor swallowed him in a vision…but it didn’t fight him for control, as it had before.
Instead, he felt the Emperor’s personality blow over him like a cool breeze. Confidence, grief, triumph, arrogance, and pure willpower moved over Calder in a powerful and familiar wave.
When it passed, the Emperor stood before him.
This was no accident. The Emperor had left such a clear, comprehensive Intent in this device in order to create an echo of his personality. A pure, unstained version of him that could bolster his will when Nakothi tried to corrupt him.
Calder had never heard of such a technique and wouldn’t have been able to identify it, but the Emperor knew, and therefore so did Calder. Their knowledge bled all over one another like two colors of spilled paint.
The Emperor, clothed in voluminous purple, looked him up and down. Calder got the impression that he was looking inside him too.
“So, child.” Absolute certainty billowed off the Emperor like waves of heat off a sand dune. “You thought you could do better than I did.”
“I was naïve,” Calder confessed. “And I was young. But I was right about one thing: you are as arrogant as I thought you were.”
The Emperor nodded as though conceding the point. “And what about you?”
Suddenly Calder could feel his own Intent as though from the outside. Arrogance threaded through him as surely as through the Emperor.
Calder stopped arguing and thought.
He had always considered himself motivated by a desire to make the Empire better.
But that wasn’t really it, was it?
It was much easier to see himself now, in a quiet space to do so. Especially when he could borrow the perspective of an outsider. It was like a mirror to the soul.
